The Deadly Link Between San Bernardino and Pakistan. By Arif Jamal.

The deadly link between San Bernardino and Pakistan. By Arif Jamal. DW, December 5, 2015.

DW and Jamal:

The link between California shooters and Pakistan has once again highlighted the danger the country poses as a terror exporter. US-based Islamism expert Arif Jamal tells DW why Washington can no longer ignore the threat.

DW: What sort of links did San Bernardino shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook have with radical Islamist groups in Pakistan, and how much did they influence the killings?

Arif Jamal: We still do not have authentic information on the links between the San Bernardino mass shooters and radical Islamist groups in Pakistan or elsewhere. Tashfeen Malik was a relatively liberal and modern woman for her family in Pakistan’s Punjab province until a couple of years ago. Several members of her family reportedly belong to the terrorist outfit Ahlay Sunnat Wal Jamaat – formerly known as Sipah-e-Sahaba (the Army of the Prophet’s Companions) – but there is so far no evidence that she was also an ASWJ member.

Also, the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the city of Multan, where Malik had studied, is a hub of Islamist groups. Although indoctrination must have started much earlier, we see a radical change in her a few years ago, particularly after she moved to the United States. It seems the couple was actually indoctrinated by American Islamic organizations. Islamic organizations conveniently blame Western foreign policies for the rise of jihadism.

How do you analyze the claim by the “Islamic State” (IS) that its “supporters” carried out the attack in the US? What does IS mean by “supporters”?

It is highly plausible that the San Bernardino shooters were influenced by the IS call to take up arms against the infidel West without the practical support from the Middle Eastern militant group. In fact, the available evidence is clearly leading to this conclusion. The IS call for jihad against the West is actually directed at people who are already indoctrinated and need a push to carry out violence. The IS seems to be succeeding in its strategy to destabilize the Western countries.

It’s been reported that Tashfeen Malik had met with IS supporter and cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz in Islamabad. Why do Pakistani authorities continue to ignore the threat posed by pro-IS clerics and organizations in the country?

The reports of her links with Aziz of Islamabad’s Red Mosque, which is affiliated with the IS, do not seem to be authentic. They are attributed to nameless sources in London and appear to be mere speculation. US officials do not seem to have any such knowledge. As we know that the shooters were influenced by IS and its ideology, it is quite possible that they had had some links with the Red Mosque clerics. If there were any links between the shooters and the Red Mosque, they were more likely ideological.

What is driving Muslims living in the US toward groups like IS?

The most important reason behind the Muslims’ fascination with jihadism in the US and elsewhere is their victimhood syndrome. Jihadism teaches them that the failures of Muslims as individuals and as an ummah (community) are caused by the infidels, who must be fought against, as Islamic scriptures order them.

To what extent is Saudi Wahhabism, which many experts believe provides ideological impetus to global jihadi groups, influencing American Muslims?

The Wahhabist and Salafist interpretations of the Quran and hadith are at the root of the rise of modern global jihadism. Unlike other Islamic denominations, Wahhabism and Salafism teach the literal interpretation of the Islamic scriptures. Salafism aims at establishing a caliphate similar to the earliest time in the Islamic history, when the Muslims were constantly at war with the rest of the world. The three biggest jihadist organizations – IS, Jamaat ud-Dawa (or Lashkar-e-Taiba) and Boko Haram – are Salafist.

What, in your opinion, would be the repercussions of the San Bernardino killings on Pakistanis and Muslims living in the US?

Muslims in America have come under severe pressure from the society. There have been some attacks on mosques and Islamic centers. Muslim Americans have reported that the atmosphere in their offices has become tense. Some have told me that they never faced such backlash since the 9/11 attacks. Since one of the two shooters was a woman, Muslim women have also become suspect in the eyes of non-Muslim Americans. Muslim women were not subject to such hateful treatment before.

Will the Obama administration pressure Islamabad to crack down on Islamist radical groups or will it continue with its softer approach toward its ally?

The Obama administration is likely to increase pressure on Pakistan to rein in jihadist groups and close the jihadist factories, but it is highly unlikely it will work in the absence of some sort of economic and military sanctions. The verbal pressure has not worked in the last 15 to 25 years. We may see some halfhearted action by Pakistani authorities against the Red Mosque group if there is enough evidence of their involvement in this shooting. Nothing more.

Arif Jamal is an independent US-based journalist and author of several books, including “Call For Transnational Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1985-2014.”

The interview was conducted by Shamil Shams.

California Killings: What Kind of Mother Would Do This? By Margaret Wente.

California killings: What kind of mother would do this? By Margaret Wente. The Globe and Mail, December 7, 2015.

Wente:

What kind of mother would say goodbye to her six-month-old daughter, then drive with her husband to his workplace one morning to calmly, deliberately slaughter as many of his co-workers as possible?

Tashfeen Malik was that kind of mother. It was she who evidently radicalized her husband. It was she who was first to open fire. It was she who declared her loyalty to Islamic State in a Facebook post, and fired back at the police before the couple were mowed down in a hail of bullets.

The slaughter in San Bernardino introduced a new face – and phase – of terrorism. It was the first IS-inspired attack on American soil, committed not on military targets but, as in Paris, on ordinary civilians. Yet the immediate knee-jerk responses were entirely predictable. Guns are the problem! No, refugees are the problem! Just get rid of guns (or refugees) and we won’t have to worry.

Tighter gun control and better border screening would both, no doubt, be good things. But neither of them would solve the terrorism problem. And both liberals and conservatives are evading the central issue: What kind of new mother would do this?

Up here in Canada, we like to think that America’s gun culture is the source of all its social ills. So here are just a few quick facts. The San Bernardino couple’s arsenal of guns and ammo was, as a writer for The Nation put it, “as American as apple pie.” They purchased their guns legally and passed all the background checks. Such arsenals are common, and most are owned by Republicans. People are not going to give them up. Serious gun reform is impossible in the U.S. without repealing the Second Amendment, and that’s not going to happen. Nor would gun reform be likely to deter terrorists. France’s strict gun laws didn’t stop the carnage in Paris.

Conservatives don’t want to ban guns. They want to ban refugees, along with immigrants from suspicious countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia. That won’t stop terrorist attacks either. Most terrorists in Europe and North America – including Ms. Malik’s husband, Syed Farook – are of the home-grown variety. They’re the offspring of people (often secular, educated, and horrified by their children’s deeds) who came here years ago. Ms. Malik, who was an immigrant from Pakistan, passed all the usual background checks.

There are more than seven million Pakistani emigrants around the world. Most are good guys. Pakistan’s radical Muslim groups were a problem long before Islamic State came along, but the West is powerless to rein them in. The West has pressured Pakistan for years to move against them, but it hasn’t worked.

Barack Obama doesn’t have the answers either. On Sunday night he addressed the country in an effort to look as if he’s on top of things. I’m not sure he convinced people. Iraq and Syria are in ruins, and Libya is an outlaw non-state. Afghanistan has reverted to its former chaos. A monumental U.S. effort to train and arm some good guys to fight in Syria produced exactly nothing. Butcher Bashar al-Assad is still in power, IS is still on the rampage, and the refugees are still fleeing. No wonder he sounded a bit defensive.

Unfortunately, attacks like the one in San Bernardino cannot be prevented by stricter gun control, or better refugee screening, or even stepped-up integration efforts. Islamism expert Arif Jamal, who’s based in Washington, D.C., explains why. The rise of modern global jihadism is rooted in extremist interpretations of Islam. Islamic organizations conveniently blame Western foreign policies for the rise of jihadism. “The most important reason behind the Muslims’ fascination with jihadism in the U.S. and elsewhere is their victimhood syndrome,” he said in an interview with Deutsche Welle. “Jihadism teaches them that the failures of Muslims as individuals and as an ummah (community) are caused by the infidels who must be fought against, as Islamic scriptures order them.”

And that’s the answer, more or less, to what kind of mother would do this. A mother who didn’t care that their baby would be an orphan, or that the people she set out to kill had chipped in for baby presents. A mother who wanted revenge on the West, and whose only regret, I suspect, was that she hadn’t killed even more.

Farook Was Obsessed with Israel — What Else Do We Need to Know? By Dennis Prager.

Farook Was Obsessed with Israel — What Else Do We Need to Know? By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, December 8, 2015. Also at DennisPrager.com.

Prager:

According to the father of the San Bernardino terrorist, Syed Farook, his son was “obsessed with Israel.”

In an interview in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the senior Syed Farook said, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

Likewise, the Los Angeles Times reported, “As the investigation unfolded, friends and family of the shooters came forward to offer snapshots that may point to what motivated Wednesday’s attack, including Farook’s apparent fixation on Israel and Malik’s devotion to a fundamentalist strain of Islam.”

There is no greater predictor of violence than Jew-hatred. It predicts violence as accurately as animal torture does.

But while it is universally acknowledged that childhood torture of animals predicts violence, relatively few people understand that the same holds true of Jew-hatred.

Given that there has been no exception to this rule, one would think that non-Jews would learn from it and immediately oppose Jew-haters. But, incredibly, that is not the case. Most non-Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as the Jews’ problem — or as in the case of Israel-hatred — the Jews’ fault.

In the 1930s, when the Western democracies had a chance to crush the Nazis, they did nothing despite the fact that Hitler and Nazism were as obsessed with the Jews as Syed Farook was with the Jewish state. The West regarded Hitler’s anti-Semitism as essentially the Jews’ problem. Eventually, about 50 million people were killed, 44 million of them non-Jews.

So, too, when Israelis were being murdered by Palestinian Muslim suicide bombers in the so-called Intifada, the murders were largely ignored, or worse, “explained” by Western liberals as the understandable Palestinian reaction to Israeli occupation.

Then came 9/11, and America and the world began to appreciate — though the Left still doesn’t — that Palestinian terror was about Islamists killing Jews with the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel, not about “asymmetrical warfare,” or use of the “poor man’s atom bomb,” or “a reaction to occupation.”

Of course, some will object that it is neither fair nor accurate to lump Israel-hatred with Jew-hatred. So, let me briefly explain why Israel-hatred is just another form of Jew-hatred, or anti-Semitism.

First, we are talking about Israel-hatred, not Israel-criticism. No prominent defender of Israel — not one — has ever equated criticism of Israel with Israel-hatred or with anti-Semitism. It is a common charge made by anti-Zionists that defenders of Israel equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but it has no truth.

What is equatable with anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, the belief that the Jewish state has no right to exist.

Why is that the same as anti-Semitism?

Because when one argues that the only country of the world’s more than 200 countries that has no right to exist is the one Jewish country in the world, there is no other possible explanation. There are 22 Arab countries, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, and they all have a perfect right to exist, but somehow there is no room for one Jewish country the size of New Jersey.

When the Presbyterian Church USA or the American Anthropology Association votes to boycott one country on earth, and that country is the only Jewish country on earth, it strains credulity to argue that Israel’s being Jewish is irrelevant.

Israel is probably the oldest country in the world with an indigenous language and culture going back 3,000 years. Yet, much of the world denies these roots and favors the claim to the land made by Palestinians, a group that had no distinct identity before the mid-20th century.

The Jewish state plays the same role among the world’s nations as individual Jews played within the world’s nations: a superbly accurate way to assess a group’s moral compass. As George Gilder calls it, it is the Israel Test.

Those obsessed with the Jews in a negative way have a moral compass whose pointer points south. That’s why Syed Farook mass-murdered innocent Americans.

Farook and all the Islamist terrorists are ultimately Yasser Arafat’s and the Palestinians’ legacy to mankind — and especially to fellow Muslims, the greatest victims of the suicide terror introduced by the Palestinians.

Or, to put it in a positive way, show me Muslims who accept the right of the Jewish state to exist and I will guarantee you that they will never support ISIS or engage in terror.

When will the world learn this simple lesson?

Point Deer, Make Horse. By John C. Wright.

Point Deer, Make Horse. By John C. Wright. John C. Wright’s Journal, December 3, 2015.

The President as Pangloss. By Walter Russell Mead.

The President As Pangloss. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 7, 2015.

Mead:

Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on national security. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people.

With public approval of his anti-ISIS efforts at 33 percent, President Obama took to the airwaves last night to bolster support for his counterterrorism strategy. Judging by the reaction in the national press, the speech fell flat. We shall see what the polls say, but it seems safe at this point to rule out a dramatic surge in the President’s support as a grateful nation responds to his dramatic appeal. A president once compared to Lincoln as an orator and Eisenhower as a strategist by his adoring supporters no longer seems credible or even interesting on the terror threat that many voters now think is the biggest concern facing the nation.

Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on this topic; it is waiting for 2017 and the decisive repudiation of a global strategy that many of the President’s closest advisors and senior aides believe has failed. One thinks of the famous Boston Globe headline about a Jimmy Carter speech, added by a printer as a placeholder that somehow survived to the first morning edition: “More Mush From the Wimp.” Fairly or not, that is what more and more Americans hear when Obama speaks about terror.

The political consequences of the perceived failure of Obama’s national security approach are already on display. Secretary Clinton is running against the foreign policy of the man she served for four years. The neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party has subsided into irrelevance. Donald Trump’s support surges on a wave of voter anger at a government and establishment many believe to be failing the threshold test on national security. President Obama’s legacy begins to look tragic; the primary goal of his presidency was to banish the specter of Andrew Jackson from American politics. Jacksonian foreign policy and Jacksonian populism at home are the forces Obama sees as embodying all that he fears and dislikes in America. Disappointed in Bush, bitter about the Iraq war, shocked by the Great Recession, Jacksonianism was on the retreat in the America of 2008. Obama and liberal Democrats hoped that as the “new FDR” and the “Democratic Reagan,” Obama would give Jacksonian America the coup de grace. The “bitter clingers” would fade away.

This clearly won’t be happening anytime soon. Jacksonian America has been energized rather than euthanized by the Obama presidency; in 2016 the Republican Party is looking to ride a Jacksonian wave into the White House, while the Democrats will do their best to deflect that wave by adapting to it. Hillary Clinton is going back to her roots as a “liberal hawk” in the hopes that she can assuage enough Jacksonian concerns about national security to ride out the storm.

The President’s defenders at this point are reduced to a single contention: For all its faults and flaws, no better strategy can be designed than the one the President has adopted. This is what you say when there is nothing else to be said. It is the argument of Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss: No matter how ugly the world may appear, President Obama has adopted the best of all possible strategies and so, given where the world stood in 2009, we now live in the best of all possible worlds. As each new disaster unfolds across the Middle East, the Panglossian chorus repeats the refrain: No better strategy exists; as bad as the consequences of the President’s policies appear to be, no better choices exist. It is one of those little ironies of history that President Obama has now adopted Margaret Thatcher’s response to her critics: There Is No Alternative.

Meanwhile, the President resolutely refrains from acknowledging the failures of conception, execution, and explication that have sapped the world’s confidence in his leadership. He does not speak about “lessons learned,” which leads people to believe that he hasn’t learned any. He does not acknowledge the corrosive consequences of unforced Presidential errors that have made the world worse (Libya, for example). He says nothing about the ruin of his strategy to heal the Middle East by building alliances with moderate Islamists. He does not address public concerns that he misjudged Putin’s Russia. He does not attempt to repair the damage that ill-chosen remarks (ISIS as the “junior varsity”) have done to public confidence in his judgment. He speaks about the “evolution” of the terror threat without acknowledging his earlier pronouncements that terror was devolving and becoming less dangerous.

The President and his defenders do not seem to understand that the track record of missteps undercuts the Panglossian defense. Does the best of all possible foreign policy strategies by the best of all possible leaders really involve a pointless invasion of Libya that turns the country into a haven for ISIS? Does it really involve hapless “red line” kerfluffles in Syria? Was there really nothing better anyone could have done in Afghanistan? Is the disaster in Syria now really something that no American President could have done anything to prevent or to mitigate? Is the growing chorus of ex-officials from his own staff completely misguided when so many of them point to errors and omissions that have cost the United States dearly on his watch? Is this really the best of all possible foreign policy track records in the best of all possible worlds?

The President remains wedded to the idea that he can enhance his prestige by ignoring his failures. And so his speeches fall flat. He lectures the public, still de haut en bas, still condescending to the fears of many Americans, still warning them against indulging their base Jacksonian instincts, still calling them to join him on the higher plane of a more sophisticated understanding of world affairs. At this point, the more the President speaks, the more he feeds the fears of the American people. The contrast between his smug self-assurance and what to so many Americans looks like a massive collapse in both our foreign and our counter-terror policies frightens and angers people and turbocharges Jacksonian reaction.

The President doesn’t just need a better strategy for coping with America’s enemies in the Middle East and at home. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people. When prime time presidential speeches on matters of the highest importance leave no positive imprint on the public mind, it is a sign that the public is tuning a president out and writing him off.

OKWU President Everett Piper: “Challenging Ideas Are What Produce Adults.”

University Pres: “Challenging Ideas Are What Produce Adults.” By Bill O’Reilly and Everett Piper. Video. Fox News Insider, December 7, 2015. YouTube.

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University! By Everett Piper. Oklahoma Wesleyan University, November 23, 2015.





Fox News Insider:

Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Dr. Everett Piper is fed up with students who cry victim when their views are challenged.

Piper joined Bill O’Reilly tonight to explain why he was moved to write an open letter after one student allegedly claimed he felt “victimized” by a university chapel service about love.

“Our culture has actually taught kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic,” Piper wrote. “Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them ‘feel bad’ about themselves, is a ‘hater,’ a ‘bigot,’ an ‘oppressor,’ and a ‘victimizer’ ... This is not a day care. This is a university!”

Piper explained to O’Reilly that our culture is more interested in graduating students who are more self-absorbed than selfless.

He said that he wanted to encourage students to follow the classic liberal arts model of pursuing truth and identifying what’s false, rather than nurture a self-centered “us vs. them” mentality.

“I’m not interested in coddling you in your selfishness,” Piper stated. “I’m interested in challenging you to have a higher degree of character. Those challenging ideas are what produce adults.”

Why the Obama Administration Is Losing the War on Terror. By Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer.

Why the Obama administration is losing the war on terror. By Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, December 7, 2015. YouTube.

Krauthammer Blasts Obama’s “Insane” View of the World, Terrorism. Video. Fox News Insider, December 7, 2015. YouTube. Also at Real Clear Politics.









RCP Transcript:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think the reason Obama had to give that speech, and you really have to ask yourself what did he achieve, that he was told he had to show that he thinks this is a problem. His problem since the day he took office, he never wanted to fight the war on terror. He abolished the term. I think deep down he believes the war on terror was a gross overreach.

He said that in his speeches when he went abroad in 2009. He talked about America overreacting. And in a sense that we have provoked this. He says, if you talk about the Muslims in a bad way, that recruits for ISIS. Guantanamo is a recruiter for ISIS. When the fact is that the cruelty and the savagery and the ideology is a recruiter for ISIS. But he locates the origin of all that recruiting in what we do and he thinks, therefore, the cure is to do as little as possible. It’s an insane strategic view of the world, but he actually holds it. And I think that’s why the American people are so scared. He’s our leader and he believes that?

Ralph Peters; President Obama Is a “Total Pussy.”

Fox News Analyst Ralph Peters Calls President Obama a “Total Pussy.” Video. Real Clear Politics, December 7, 2015. YouTube. See also Salon.

Transcript Excerpt:

RALPH PETERS: He keeps talking about don’t be afraid, don’t give in to your fears.

Mr. President, we’re not afraid, we’re angry. We’re pissed off, we’re furious. We want you to react, we want you to do something. He’s afraid. He’s a total pussy, it’s stunning.

We, the American people, who he does not know in any intimate sort of manner, we want action. We want action against Islamic State.

This is a president who doesn’t want to hurt our enemies.

This is a president who cares more about thugs in Guantanamo or thugs in Ferguson, MO, than he does about law-abiding American citizens and their right to live in safety and peace.

Bonobos: The Apes Who Make Love, Not War.

Bonobos: What We Can Learn From Our Primate Cousin. Video. 60 Minutes. CBS News, December 6, 2015.

View More: U.S. News|Live News|More News Videos

Transcript Excerpt:

AC Narrator: Bonobos are unique among great apes because they are not dominated by males. And according to Brian Hare, a Duke University evolutionary anthropologist who studies them at Lola, it’s the females who run the show.

Brian Hare: Here if you try to be in – an alpha male, you will be, as the Congolese say, “corrected” by the females.

Anderson Cooper: Not just by one female, but by a sort of alliance of females?

Brian Hare: That’s right. That’s right. And one of the – they – they – bonobos really violate a rule of nature where usually if you’re bigger, you're going to be dominant. But here, females are actually smaller. But they’re still not dominated by males because they work together.

AC Narrator: What’s more, bonobos have never been observed to kill each other. The same can’t be said of chimpanzees, or of humans for that matter.

Brian Hare: Bonobos, on the other hand, they don’t really have that darker side. So that’s where they could really help us is how could it be that a species that has a brain a third of the size of ours can do something that with all our technological prowess we can’t accomplish? Which is to not kill each other.

AC Narrator: The answer might be found in bonobos’ favorite pastime. These apes have more sex, more often, in more ways than any other primate on the planet. Their sexual contact is so frequent, Brian Hare refers to it as the “Bonobo Handshake”...

Anderson Cooper: It’s not that they want to procreate or have kids, it’s not that they even find each other attractive?

Brian Hare: No.

Anderson Cooper: It’s – it’s just –

Brian Hare: No, it’s a negotiation.

AC Narrator: And it’s hardly surprising that many of these negotiations take place over food.

Anderson Cooper: Chimpanzees will fight each other over food.

Brian Hare: That’s right. They—

Anderson Cooper: Bonobos won’t necessarily fight each other—

Brian Hare: That’s right. So they – so, basically, chimpanzees get primed for competition, testosterone increases. Bonobos, they get really stressed out. And if they feel like they’re not going to be able to share, they get really anxious, and then that drives them to want to be reassured. And they then happen to have a bonobo handshake to feel better.

Anderson Cooper: And males do that with females, males will do that with males, females will do that with females, doesn’t matter, even the ages?

Brian Hare: Any combination. Any age.

Jihadists Using Refugee Flows and Clueless Elites. By Walter Russell Mead.

Jihadists Using Refugee Flows? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 6, 2015.

Mead:

Evidence accumulating that jihadi groups, including the one that planned the Paris attacks, are using the migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees to cover their own movements. The New York Times reports:

The investigation into the Paris terrorist attacks, previously focused on jihadist networks in France and Belgium, has widened to Eastern Europe, with a Belgian federal prosecutor announcing Friday that one of the people suspected of terrorism traveled in September by car to Hungary, where he picked up two men now believed to have links to the carnage of Nov. 13. 

The disclosure of a Hungarian connection has not only dramatically expanded the scope of the investigation but has also put a spotlight on the question of whether jihadist militants have concealed themselves in a huge flow of asylum seekers passing through Eastern Europe. 

A statement issued by the Belgian federal prosecutor on Friday said that Salah Abdeslam, a former Brussels resident who is the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that killed 130 people in Paris, had made two trips to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in a rented Mercedes-Benz a few weeks before the Paris attacks. 

On a drive back to Western Europe on Sept. 9, he was stopped during a routine check at Hungary’s border with Austria and found to be transporting two men using what have since turned out to be “fake Belgian identity cards.”

Europe, which just a few years ago thought that it inhabited a post-historical universe in which nothing could ever go seriously wrong, is painfully waking up from the dream. It’s now crystal clear that one can’t combine a passive foreign policy with a legalistic adherence to absolutist ideals—that, for example, one can turn a blind eye to a disintegrating Middle East and North Africa while opening the gates to every refugee and migrant that the meltdown creates.

Not far behind this lurks the realization that a cosmopolitan and tolerant society can’t thrive if it admits millions of migrants who hate and despise cosmopolitan values. Still obscure to most European elites (and to their American counterparts) is the understanding that neither the values nor the liberties of liberal civilization can long flourish if the religious and spiritual foundations of that civilization are allowed to decay, and are treated with scorn and neglect by society’s leaders.

Today’s Western elites, in the U.S. as much as in Europe, have never been so self-confident. Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post historical groupthink.

And while the meritocratic priesthood isn’t wrong about everything—and the knuckle-draggers aren’t right about everything—there are a few big issues on which the priests are dead wrong and the knuckle-draggers know it. Worse, as the mass of the people become more aware that the elites are too blind and too wrapped up in the coils of elite ideology to deal effectively with society’s most urgent problems, an age of demagogues is opening up around us. People need leaders; when the meritocratic priesthood seems incapable of providing leadership, people start looking elsewhere.

Anti-Muslim Rhetoric Isn’t Brave. By Fareed Zakaria.

Anti-Muslim rhetoric isn’t brave. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, December 3, 2015.

Zakaria:

The most recent act of horrific violence in the United States — in San Bernardino, Calif. — was reportedly perpetrated by a Muslim man and woman. There are about 3 million Muslims in the United States, almost all of whom are law-abiding citizens. How should they react to the actions of the couple who killed 14 people on Wednesday?

The most commonly heard response is that Muslims must immediately and loudly condemn these acts of barbarity. But Dalia Mogahed, a Muslim American leader, argues eloquently that this is unfair. She made her case to NBC’s Chuck Todd.

“According to the FBI, the majority of domestic terrorist attacks are actually committed by white, male Christians. . . . When those things occur, we don’t suspect other people who share their faith and ethnicity of condoning them. We assume that these things outrage them just as much as they do anyone else. And we have to afford that same assumption of innocence to Muslims.”

Muslims face a double standard, but I understand why. Muslim terrorists don’t just happen to be Muslim. They claim to be motivated by religion, cite religious justifications for their actions and tell their fellow Muslims to follow in their bloody path. There are groups around the world spreading this religiously infused ideology and trying to seduce Muslims to become terrorists. In these circumstances, it is important for the majority of Muslims who profoundly disagree with jihad to speak up.

But it is also important to remember that there are 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet. If you took the total number of deaths from terrorism last year — about 30,000 — and assumed that 50 people were involved in planning each one (a vastly exaggerated estimate), it would still add up to less than 0.1 percent of the world’s Muslims.

The writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a tough critic of Islam. She divides the Muslim world into two groups: Mecca Muslims and Medina Muslims. (The Koranic revelations to Muhammad made in Mecca are mostly about brotherhood and love; the ones in Medina have the fire and brimstone.) She estimates that 3 percent of the worldwide community are radical Medina Muslims, the other 97 percent being mainstream Mecca Muslims. Now, 3 percent works out to a large number, 48 million, and that’s why we spend lots of time, money and effort dealing with the threats that might emanate from them. But that still leaves the other 97 percent — the more than 1.55 billion — who are not jihadists. They may be reactionary and backward in many ways. But that is not the same as being terrorists.

While I believe that Muslims do bear a responsibility to speak up, non-Muslims also have a responsibility not to make assumptions about them based on such a small minority. Individuals should be judged as individuals and not placed under suspicion for some “group characteristic.” It is dehumanizing and un-American to do otherwise.

It also misunderstands how religion works in people’s lives. Imagine a Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York. He has not, in any meaningful sense, chosen to be Muslim. He was born into a religion, grew up with it, and like hundreds of millions of people around the world in every religion, follows it out of a mixture of faith, respect for his parents and family, camaraderie with his community and inertia. His knowledge of the sacred texts is limited. He is trying to make a living and provide for his family. For him, Islam provides identity and psychological support in a hard life. This is what religion looks like for the vast majority of Muslims.

But increasingly, Americans seem to view Muslims as actively propagating a dangerous ideology, like communist activists. It’s not just Donald Trump. Republican candidates are vying with each other to make insinuations and declarations about Islam and all Muslims. And it’s not just on the right. The television personality and outspoken liberal Bill Maher made the expansive generalization recently that “If you are in this religion, you probably do have values that are at odds [with American values].”

What is most bizarre is to hear this anti-Muslim rhetoric described as brave truth-telling. Trump insists that he will not be silenced on this issue. Chris Christie says that he will not follow a “politically correct” national security policy. They are simply feeding a prejudice. The reality is that Muslims are today the most despised minority in America. Their faith is constantly criticized, and they face insults, discrimination and a dramatic rise in acts of violence against them, as Max Fisher of Vox has detailed superbly. And the leading Republican candidate has flirted with the idea of registering Muslims, a form of collective punishment that has not been seen since the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

This is the first time that I can recall watching politicians pander to mobs — and then congratulate themselves for their political courage.

Blinded By ISIS. By Shlomo Ben-Ami.

Blinded By ISIS. By Shlomo Ben-Ami. Project Syndicate, December 4, 2015.

Ben-Ami:

MADRID – The general consensus emerging since last month’s carnage in Paris seems to be that the Islamic State (ISIS) can be defeated only by a ground invasion of its “state.” This is a delusion. Even if the West and its local allies (the Kurds, the Syrian opposition, Jordan, and other Sunni Arab countries) could agree about who would provide the bulk of ground troops, ISIS has already reshaped its strategy. It is now a global organization with local franchised groups capable of wreaking havoc in Western capitals.

In fact, ISIS has always been a symptom of a deeper malady. Disintegration in the Arab Middle East reflects the region’s failure to find a path between the bankrupt, secular nationalism that has dominated its state system since independence and a radical brand of Islam at war with modernity. The fundamental problem consists in an existential struggle between utterly dysfunctional states and an obscenely savage brand of theocratic fanaticism.

With that struggle, in which most of the region’s regimes have exhausted their already-limited stores of legitimacy, a century-old regional order is collapsing. Indeed, Israel, Iran, and Turkey – all non-Arab-majority countries – are probably the region’s only genuinely cohesive nation-states.

For years, key states in the region – some of them, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, darlings of the West – have essentially paid protection money to jihadists. Yes, America’s wars in the region – as destructive as they were stupid – bear a substantial part of the blame for the mayhem now engulfing the Fertile Crescent. But that does not exculpate the Arab fundamentalist monarchies for their role in reviving the seventh-century vision that ISIS (and others) seek to realize.

ISIS’s army of psychopaths and adventurers was launched as a “startup” by Sunni magnates in the Gulf who envied Iran’s success with its Lebanese Shia proxy, Hezbollah. It was the combination of an idea and the money to propagate it that created this monster and nurtured its ambition to forge a totalitarian caliphate.

For years, the Wahhabis of Arabia have been the fountainhead of Islamist radicalism and the primary backer and facilitator of extremist groups throughout the region. As former US Senator Bob Graham, the lead author of the classified Senate report on the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, put it earlier this year, “ISIS is a product of Saudi ideals” and “Saudi money.” Indeed, Wikileaks quotes former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accusing Qatar and Saudi Arabia of collusion “with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups.”

That raises an obvious question: When regimes in the region collaborate with terrorist groups, how can intelligence cooperation with them, let alone a coalition to fight Islamic extremism, be credible? The so-called pro-Western regimes in the Arab Middle East simply do not see eye to eye with the West about the meaning and implications of the war on terror, or even about what violent radicalism is.

That is just one reason why an invasion of the caliphate, with local armies supported by Western airstrikes, could have devastating unintended consequences – think of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Indeed, even if such a division of labor could be agreed, a ground invasion that denies ISIS its territorial base in Iraq and Syria would merely push it to redeploy in a region that is collapsing into various no man’s lands.

At that point, “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or some future would-be caliph, would invariably fuse the region’s mounting governance chaos with a global jihadi campaign – a process that, as we have seen in Paris and elsewhere, has already started. The ideological and strategic rift between ISIS and Al Qaeda notwithstanding, an alliance against the common enemy – the incumbent Arab regimes and the West – cannot be entirely discounted. Osama Bin Laden himself never ruled out the idea of establishing a caliphate. Indeed, his terrorism was perceived as a prelude to it.

At the same time, Syria and Iran might exploit the inevitable chaos to expand their presence in Iraq, and all parties, including Turkey, would oppose a central role for the Kurds. The latter have proven themselves to be tremendously reliable and capable fighters, as the battles to liberate the cities of Kobani and Sinjar from ISIS control have shown. But no one should think that they can be the West’s tool for subduing the Sunni heartland of Iraq and Syria.

Nor is it clear that the West is capable of compensating the Kurds with full-fledged statehood. The geostrategic constraints that have prevented Kurdish independence for centuries are even more acute today.

Some of the consequences of a Western-backed Arab invasion of the caliphate are no less predictable for being “unintended.” It would eventually stir up mass sympathy for the caliphate throughout the region, thus providing ISIS with a propaganda victory and further inspiration for alienated young Muslims in Europe and elsewhere to fight the "Crusaders" and the Muslim "traitors" aligned with them.

The only realistic alternative is more – much more – of the same. That means a constant and resolute effort to stop the caliphate’s expansion, cut off its sources of finance, deepen and expand intelligence cooperation among credible allies, end the oil-rich monarchies’ collusion with terrorist groups, and encourage reform (without engaging in grand state-building projects).

The Arab Middle East is not susceptible to quick fixes. It requires profound indigenous change that might take the better part of this century to produce. For now, turning the caliphate into yet another failed state in the region seems to be the best possible outcome.