The University Gone Feral. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who called in the “muscle.”

The University Gone Feral. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, November 17, 2015.

“I Need Some Muscle”: Missouri Activists Block Journalists. By Austin Huguelet and Daniel Victor. New York Times, November 9, 2015.


Hanson:

On campus, social norms no longer apply.

The university, long exempted from social norms and rules, has gone wild in the 21st century — or rather, regressed to pre-puberty.

The University of Missouri campus police now request that students — a group not known for polite vocabulary — call law enforcement if someone disparages them with hurtful names.

On the same campus, a media professor shouts for students in the vicinity to strong-arm a student photographer to stop him from taking pictures in a way that she does not approve. Other staff members try to block and push away a journalist they find bothersome. Since when do thuggish faculty, in Michael Corleone fashion, call in muscle to intimidate students who are exercising their First Amendment rights?

Since when do quite privileged Yale students — in mini–Cultural Revolution style — surround and, teary-eyed, shout obscenities at their professor? Their target was declared to be guilty of some infraction against the people by an ad hoc court of whiny elites, poorly acting the role of the Committee of Public Safety. Apparently his offense was to suggest that students should not become hysterical when they see Halloween costumes they don’t like. Shouting down guest speakers, disrupting events, and mobbing individuals would not be tolerated at Disney World, so why on campus?

The assumed impoverished black student at the University of Missouri who went on a hunger strike to protest “white privilege” was raised in plentitude as the son of a multimillionaire corporate executive. The young woman who yelled obscenities at Yale over Halloween costumes is likewise a child of privilege. Campus outbursts reveal more about the anxieties and neuroses of the adolescent and pampered than about existential issues of hunger, violence, or bias.

Campus feminists demand new codes concerning sexual congress, largely as a result of an epidemic of rather callous campus hook-ups. They allege that one of four women on campus will inevitably be sexually assaulted. But if that were true, and parents believed it, then they would be unwise to send their children to Princeton or UCLA. Indeed, they would prefer that their kids party not at the University of Michigan but in the safer streets of Detroit. Apparently, the security concerns at USC involve not the nearby Watts neighborhood, but the student union on campus. Should frightened women at Stanford flee the quad for supposedly safer hangouts in East Palo Alto? Is there a “reign of terror” on campuses in Washington, D.C., similar to the one that is hitting neighborhoods around the Capitol?

The strangest campus derangement is the graft of Victorian prurience onto postmodern crudity. Students who are quite sexually active, and routinely use drugs and alcohol, nonetheless revert to virginal preteens who must be shielded from rough language or mere rudeness. They demand Victorian rules of sexual etiquette, but not commensurate 19th-century notions of abstinence, housing segregated by gender, dress codes that discourage randiness, or prohibitions against drug and alcohol use. Pick-and-choose campus feminists do not wish doors opened for them, but insist that sex codes delineate the stages of arousal, from foreplay to postcoital pleasantries. How strange that “adult” students want to dress up in little kids’ costumes on Halloween, and then act like children terrified of scary things in the night.

There is another common denominator to this epidemic of madness. Why are universities free from norms that apply to other American institutions? Is it the implied social contract that their educational mission is so sacred and so dutifully fulfilled that they simply cannot follow the rules or expectations that the rest of us do?

Free speech is guaranteed under the First Amendment, but not necessarily at universities. They assume that their own codes supersede the Bill of Rights and can limit any sort of expression that a minority of students arbitrarily defines as hurtful. Equal pay for equal work may be a national rallying cry. Yet for some reason, academia expects that it can pay a graduate-student teaching assistant or a PhD-holding part-time instructor a fraction of what it would pay a tenured full professor for teaching the identical class. The gulf between a full professor and a part-timer — in terms of money, power, and status — far exceeds that between the WalMart manager and his greeter at the door. And at least the latter pair have far different tasks. Is such disparity liberal?

Drug companies are sometimes rightly blasted as price-gougers. But rarely so colleges. Yet in lock-step fashion they consistently have raised their tuition charges at rates well above the annual rate of inflation. Strict rules govern how non-profit foundations spend their money; these rules usually include a set percentage of annual expenditure of total assets, which must be accompanied by reasonable overhead costs. Yet there are no commensurate rules for tax-free university endowments and budgets, which might explain why the numbers of non-teaching staff have soared, while administrative compensation has well outpaced faculty salaries.

Coal miners do not have tenure. Neither do carpenters. Wall Street CEOs have no guarantee of life-long employment. Nor do lawyers, doctors, or groundskeepers. Why do academics?

Does guaranteed job security ensure freedom of expression, diverse political views, and edgy theories? If so, why then do faculties donate overwhelmingly to the Democratic party, include few conservative voices, and conduct melodramatic witch-hunts against those who are skeptical of global warming? If tenure gave us all that, what might follow from no tenure — too much political diversity, too much free expression, too many divergent views?

Crony capitalism is a favorite charge against duplicitous corporations that use insider knowledge and friendships to leverage favors from government, both to profit inordinately and to stifle competition. But even the croniest of capitalists could not match the university Ponzi scheme of having the government guarantee student loans, which in turn guarantee that rising tuition will be paid in full without audit, even as the cost soars above the rate of inflation — all on the wink-and-nod expectation that millions of students will subsequently default and the government will cover the huge tab. How could a university admissions officer in good conscience extend a “package” of $100,000 to $200,000 in student loans over a four- or five-year stint on campus, with the full knowledge that it would be almost impossible for an unemployed or partly employed graduate to pay back what he had borrowed?

Consumer protection and truth in advertising are iconic in America. So how then do universities all but promise students well-paying jobs upon graduation, and instead turn out graduates who are neither educated nor — if employment statistics are accurate — especially employable? The Obama administration has a tendency to hunt down two-year for-profit tech schools that supposedly do not follow through on their big promises to find jobs for their federally indebted computer-technician or accounting graduates. But that is a small con compared to the gender-studies or environmental-studies major from Duke, Wellesley, or Swarthmore whose $250,000 college investment led to a low-paying internship or administrative-assistant billet — or a basement bedroom back home.

Diversity as defined by the Obama administration amounts to proportional representation: If a police force or DMV office does not have minority employees in the same ratio as their presence in the general population, then “disparate impact” is declared and remediation is required. There is no excuse that “merit” has led to a work force that does not look like America. Campuses agree, at least in terms of faculty and admissions, but why then is the football, basketball, or tennis team exempt? How can it be that there are almost no Asian linemen, no Latino basketball centers, no African-American swimmers?

Is that any more a ridiculous question than why there are not more African-American classics professors or Latino physicists? How can it be sinful that African-Americans are underrepresented in the library, while it is apparently admirable that in marquee football programs they are vastly overrepresented, at least by the metrics of the diversity industry? How Orwellian to see black scholarship football players threatening to boycott their next game unless the University of Missouri met their racial quotas for staff and faculty, when they inordinately represented 50 percent of the team — five times the proportion of African-Americans in the general population. Did they justify their “overrepresentation” on the politically incorrect doctrine that merit trumps the federal guidelines of “disparate impact”? Or was it more cynical: While less-important areas such as teaching, scholarship, and admissions must be subject to disparate-impact reasoning, existential activities such as football have to be exempt?

One-drop-of-blood racial paranoia characterized the Old South and became a linchpin of Jim Crow segregation. But as we saw in the Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, and Shaun King cases, under its new manifestations, we may have to issue DNA badges and dig up the old racial categories of antebellum Mississippi to express what defines minority status — one-16th, one-quarter, or one-half African-American, Native American, or Latino, but not three-quarters Arab or 100 percent Punjabi or Castilian? And how does one then prove one’s authenticity — a resort to Elizabeth Warren’s assertion of “high cheekbones,” or Ward Churchill’s headdress and buckskins?

Why does the country put up with these absurdities?

Of course, students are young, hormone-driven, immature, and impressionable, and must be given some slack. And, yes, many faculty members are delicate indoor orchids, who can pontificate only in the safety of the campus hothouse and would wilt if thrown outside to face the rat-race on the freeway or in the tire shop. But the reason for exemption is the argument that the university educates youth broadly to write well, read widely, have basic factual knowledge, think inductively, and master the elements of citizenship. Apparently, for that result, we were willing in the past to put up with a lot.

Unfortunately 21st-century American college graduates are the least educated in a century. Declining test scores illustrate this. Grade inflation and a therapeutic curriculum reflect it. The furor over implementation of BA exit exams suggests it. And employers lament it.

Universities went feral and broke their social contract. If campuses can no longer educate students, then why should they be exempt from the norms that the rest of the population must follow?

Campuses claim they are left-wing, but in fact they are no-wing: just fascist, authoritarian, infantile — and incompetent.

George W. Bush: Obama’s New Counterterrorism Guru. By Caroline B. Glick.

Obama’s new counter-terrorism guru. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, November 23, 2015. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Since the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November 13, we have seen the development of a new, and strange justification for the Obama administration’s insistent refusal to jettison its manifestly failed strategy of contending with IS specifically and with Islamic terrorism generally.

In broad terms, Obama’s strategy for dealing with radical Islamic terrorism and jihadist movements is to ignore their motivating ideologies, take minimal action to combat them, criticize other governments for failing to destroy IS and its jihadist brethren on their own, and attack Republicans for criticizing Obama’s strategy for defeating radical Islamic terrorism.

The new justification for Obama’s refusal to revise his strategy was first uttered by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton at the Democratic presidential debate on November 14. Five days later, the Democratic National Committee produced an ad attacking Republican presidential candidates based on this new rhetorical theme. Obama himself resonated the new message during his press conference in Malaysia on Sunday.

According to the new talking points, Republicans have no right to criticize Obama, or Clinton for their failure to contend with the nature of the enemy because in ignoring the enemy’s doctrine, ideology and strategic goals, they are merely following in former president George W. Bush’s footsteps.

During the Democratic presidential debate, Clinton argued that refusing to identify the radical Islamic nature of the enemy that attacked the US on September 11 and in the months and years that followed “was one of the real contributions — despite all the other problems — that George W. Bush made after 9/11, when he basically said — after going to a mosque in Washington — we are not at war with Islam or Muslims.”

In its new ad, the DNC attacks five Republican presidential candidates that have stated in recent days that radical Islam is the force that is warring against the US and its allies.

To prove that the candidates are “unpresidential,” for naming the enemy, the DNC ad includes a clip of Bush’s speeches in praise of Islam as “a religion of peace,” which he delivered in the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Democrats’ invocation Bush, as their counterterrorism authority and as a means to justify their refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” is more than a bit ironic, of course, since they have spent the past 14 years pillorying Bush’s counterterror policies.

But it is also extremely helpful. By aligning with Bush to justify their refusal to discuss the radical Islamic foundations of the terrorist scourge facing the free world and devouring large swathes of the Middle East, the Democrats have given us the opportunity to consider what that refusal has meant for the US’s ability to lead the free world in its war against the forces of radical Islam.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and for the first five years of Bush’s war on terrorism that followed them, Michael Gerson served as Bush’s chief speechwriter. Gerson authored Bush’s statements about Islam being a religion of peace.

In November 2014, Gerson participated in a debate about the nature of Islam and the war on terror. Gerson explained that Bush’s decision to ignore the nature of the enemy emanated from a strategic calculation.

Bush believed that radical Islam was but a marginal force in the Muslim world. By embracing Islam as a whole, and insisting that the terrorists from al Qaeda and other groups did not reflect the authentic nature of Islam, Bush hoped to draw the non-radical Muslims to America’s side against the jihadists.

In Gerson’s words, “Every religious tradition has forces of tribalism and violence in its history, background and theology; and, every religious tradition has sources of respect for the other. And you emphasize, as a political leader, one at the expense of the other in the cause of democracy.”

Gerson continued, “That is a great American tradition that we have done with every religious tradition that comes to the United States — include them as part of a natural enterprise and praise them for their strongly held religious views, and emphasize those portions that are most compatible with those ideals.”

The flaws in this reasoning began surfacing immediately. When Bush made his remarks about Islam after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was flanked by Muslim leaders who were in short order exposed as terrorism apologists and financiers.

On the battlefield, by failing to acknowledge, let alone discredit the enemy’s world view, Bush made it all but impossible for Muslims who oppose radical Islam to stand up against it. After all, if the Americans didn’t think it was a problem, why would they?

Since the Americans refused to admit the existence of radical Islam, the US refused to favor non-radical forces over radical ones. And so, in the 2005 Iraqi elections, while Iran spent a fortune financing the campaigns of its supporters, the US did nothing to support the Iraqi forces that shared the US’s goal of transforming Iraq into a multi-denominational, pluralistic democracy.

The results were preordained. The elected government took its cues from Iran, and as soon as US forces withdrew from Iraq, all of America’s hard won gains were squandered. The Iraqi government became an Iranian puppet. And in areas where Iran didn’t care to assert its control, al Qaeda-aligned forces that now comprise Islamic State rose once again.

Obama’s refusal to discuss radical Islam stems from a different source than Bush’s refusal to do so. Unlike Bush’s position, Obama’s insistence that IS, al Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and their brethren have nothing to do with Islam, does owe to a strategic calculation on how to win a war. Rather, it stems from an ideological conviction that the US and the rest of the Western world have no right to cast aspersions on jihadists.

As Obama sees things, the problems in the Middle East, and the Middle Eastern terrorism plaguing the rest of the world, are the result of past Western imperialism and chauvinism. All anti-Western movements – including jihadist movements – are legitimate responses to what Obama perceives as the crime of Western power.

Obama’s peevish response to the massacre in Paris and his assaults on Republicans who argue that the religious convictions of Syrians requesting asylum in the US are relevant for determining whether or not to let them in have brought his refusal to identify the enemy to the forefront of the US debate on how to defeat IS.

This debate is clearly uncomfortable for liberal US media outlets. So they have sought to change the subject.

As the Democratic Party adopted Bush as its new counterterrorism guru, the liberal media sought to end discussion of radical Islam by castigating as bigots Republicans who speak of it. The media attempt over the weekend to claim falsely that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump called for requiring American Muslims to be registered in a national Muslim database marked such an attempt to change the subject.

The common denominator between Bush’s strategic decision to lie about the nature of the enemy, Obama’s apologetics for IS, and the media’s attempt to claim that Republicans are anti-Islamic racists is that in all cases, an attempt is being made to assert that there is no pluralism in Islam – it’s either entirely good or entirely evil.

This absolutist position is counterproductive for two reasons. First, it gets you nowhere good in the war against radical Islam. The fact is that Islam per se it is none of the US president’s business. His business is to defeat those who attack the US and to stand with America’s allies against their common foes.

Radical Islam may be a small component of Islam or a large one. But it certainly is a component of Islam. Its adherents believe they are good Muslims and they base their actions on their Islamic beliefs.

American politicians, warfighters and policymakers need to identify that form of Islam, study it and base their strategies for fighting the radical Islamic forces on its teachings.

Bush was wrong to lie about the Islamic roots of radical Islam. And his mistake had devastating strategic consequences for the world as a whole. It is fortuitous that the Clinton and the Democratic party have embraced Bush’s failed strategy of ignoring the enemy for justifying their even more extreme position. Now that they have, they have given a green light to Republicans as well as Democrats who are appalled by Obama’s apologetics for radical Islam to learn from Bush’s mistakes and craft an honest, and effective strategic approach to the challenge of radical Islam.

Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate. By Rich Lowry.

Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate. By Rich Lowry. National Review Online, November 24, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Lowry:

After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would “bomb the [expletive] out of them.”

Not only has Donald Trump not been hurt by Paris, he has bumped up in the aftermath (Ben Carson, on the other hand, has indeed dropped). The cliché about Trump is that he’s defying the laws of political gravity. If Trump is cutting against the contemporary political grain — certainly, no one else could get away with being as routinely careless and insulting in his statements — he is also tapping into one of America’s deepest cultural and political wellsprings.

In large part, Donald Trump is a Jacksonian, the tradition originally associated with the Scotch-Irish heritage in America and best represented historically by the tough old bird himself, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory might be mystified that a celebrity New York billionaire is holding up his banner (but, then again, Jackson himself was a rich planter). Trump is nonetheless a powerful voice for Jacksonian attitudes.

Historian Walter Russell Mead once wrote a memorable essay on the Jacksonianism that, so many years later, serves as a very rough guide to the anti-PC and fiercely nationalistic populism of the 2016 Trump campaign.

Trump has trampled on almost every political piety, and gotten away with it, even when he has been factually wrong or had to backtrack. “The Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites,” Mead writes. “The hero may make mistakes, but he will command the unswerving loyalty of Jacksonian America so long as his heart is perceived to be in the right place.”

Trump condemns the political system, and everyone who has thrived in it. For Jacksonians, Mead writes: “Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy.”

Trump is obsessed with how other countries are taking advantage of us. He is tapping into the Jacksonian fear of, in Mead’s words, politicians “either by ineptitude or wickedness serving hostile foreign interests.”

Trump is hell on criminals and unwelcoming to illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, reflecting what Mead characterizes as the Jacksonian’s “absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders.”

Trump never sweats the details. Jacksonians, according to Mead, believe “that while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.” In fact, the side in a public debate that “is endlessly telling you that the popular view isn’t sufficiently ‘sophisticated’ or ‘nuanced’ — that is the side that doesn’t want you to know what it is doing, and it is not to be trusted.”

Trump doesn’t believe in limited government. “Jacksonians believe that the government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being — political, moral, economic — of the folk community,” Mead writes. “Any means are permissible in the service of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in their daily lives.”

Trump isn’t ideologically consistent. The Jacksonian philosophy, Mead notes, “is an instinct rather than an ideology — a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas.”

Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.

It is tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.

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

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

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

Hemingway:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Strange New Respect” For George W. Bush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to historian Will Durant:

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

The Cost Of Denialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graeme Wood: No Question ISIS Knows the Quran.

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

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

Beating the Islamist Death Cult. By David Horovitz.

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

Horovitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Davis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McFarland:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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