Attacking the “Enemies of Islam.” By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Attacking the “Enemies of Islam.” By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, August 21, 2013.

In Egypt, the Brotherhood is savaging Christians because . . . it works.

Increased Attacks on Christians in Egypt. NJBR, August 20, 2013.


McCarthy:

There is a reason why it is often said that there are no good choices for the United States in Egypt.

 

In my weekend column, I argued that there are only two realistic alternatives at the moment. The first is the self-defeating option popular with the Obama administration and the GOP’s erratic McCain wing: Call for a new round of popular elections. Ironically, proponents call this a “return to democracy,” although it would assure the return to power of anti-democratic Islamic supremacists who regard America, Israel, and Western Europe as enemies they are pledged to “conquer” — to borrow the word unabashedly used by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist.

 

On this score, it is crucial to grasp that, in Egypt, Islamic supremacists are not limited to the Brotherhood, not by a long shot. Let’s imagine the Brotherhood were banned, or Egyptians so soured on the Brothers that, if given the chance, they would decline to reelect Mohamed Morsi or some other Ikhwan majordomo. There would still be several other Islamic-supremacist factions in Egypt. The ones referred to as “Salafists” are even more zealous than the Brothers to impose totalitarian sharia.

 

Notwithstanding that it is a very powerful organization with widespread, entrenched Egyptian roots, the Brotherhood enjoys reliable support from no more (and probably less) than a third of the country. Islamic supremacists do not win election landslides in Egypt because of the Brotherhood; the Brothers win elections because they are the best-organized Islamic supremacists in a substantially Islamic-supremacist country. Egypt is what it is not because of the Brotherhood but because of its sharia culture, ingrained after more than a millennium’s dominance by Islamic scholars and imams.

 

In free elections, Islamic supremacists would still win control of parliament. After all, they won by an almost four-to-one landslide only two years ago. In a presidential election, moreover, an Islamic supremacist would be elected. Recall that just last year, the transitional military government resorted to disqualifying presidential candidates on bogus grounds to try to prevent that from happening . . . but they still ended up with Morsi. The Brotherhood is now unpopular enough that Morsi would not be reelected . . . probably. But some Islamic supremacist, whether from the Brotherhood or another Islamist faction, almost certainly would. The Brothers, furthermore, would do reasonably well in parliamentary elections, even if they failed to reach the 50 percent haul of the vote that they garnered just two years ago.

 

So the ill-conceived “democracy” option would be a catastrophe, setting in motion a reprise of what got Egypt to the brink of failed-state status. That leaves support of the military as the only plausible alternative. Military control is the only chance for a long-term positive outcome — defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood; a technocratic government that brings a measure of stability and confronts Egypt’s profound economic crisis; the drafting of a consensus constitution that guarantees minority rights and equality of opportunity; time for democratic institutions and secular parties to take root; and an eventual return to popular elections guided by that framework. As I contended in the weekend column, though, we should not be overconfident about this scenario. Just because it is the only sensible option does not mean it has a good chance of success. This is Egypt we’re talking about.

 

As I’ve argued several times, for instance here and in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, the Egyptian military is not dependable. It is our best friend out of a bad lot. Amid the dystopia, it is a comparatively stabilizing influence. But let’s not kid ourselves.

 

With tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past 30 years, the United States has purchased friendship at the highest echelons of Egypt’s armed forces. But that is just the highest echelons. Broadly speaking, Egypt’s military, in which a term of service by all able-bodied men is compulsory, is a reflection of Egyptian society. As we saw in polls taken while Mubarak was still in power, and as we’ve now seen in election after election after election, Egyptian society is substantially Islamic supremacist. The armed forces are thus rife with Brotherhood and Salafist operatives and sympathizers. Indeed, it is worth remembering that General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was chosen by Morsi to lead the armed forces because he is known to be a sharia-adherent Muslim who seemed in sync with much of the Brotherhood’s ideology — if not, as it turned out, with the Brothers themselves.

 

On the Corner, Nina Shea has written movingly about the ongoing pogrom against Egypt’s Christians. And in a powerful post, David French argues that America’s lavish aid for Egypt’s military ought to be contingent not only on defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood but also on the military’s protection of besieged religious minorities, particularly the Copts. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I would make all American policy in the Middle East contingent on the protection of minorities and the repeal of sharia’s other oppressive provisions — that would be more meaningful democracy promotion than the charade we’ve been pushing for the past decade.

 

But is it realistic in Egypt? To answer that question, I’d suggest remembering two things.

 

The first is that we should not idealize what life was like for Christians in Egypt before the Muslim Brotherhood came to power. Mubarak was, on balance, an American ally, but he made his own accommodations with Islamic supremacists — abiding their prominence in academe, their promotion of anti-Semitism in the media, and their more than occasional harassment of the Copts. The stubborn fact is that attacks on Egypt’s Christians long predate the Brotherhood’s now-aborted rise to political power. In fact, as Ray Ibrahim has recounted and I describe in Spring Fever, Egyptian troops participated in the massacre of Christian demonstrators in Maspero in 2011 — many months before Morsi’s mid-2012 election.

 

The second is to be mindful of how the Brotherhood won all the elections after Mubarak’s fall — from the first, a referendum on constitutional amendments, through the elections for parliament and the presidency, up to and including the last, a referendum on the sharia constitution. In each instance, in venues from thousands of mosques to Sheikh Qaradawi’s popular Al Jazeera television show, Islamic leaders portrayed every contest as a struggle between Islam and the perceived “enemies of Islam” — Christians and secularist Muslims who are supposedly the cat’s paw of the hated Americans and Zionists. Egyptians — millions of them poor, illiterate, resentful, and more than content to see elections in those terms — voted for Islamic supremacists every time, usually by landslide margins.

 

Why do you think the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are torching Christian churches throughout the country? To be sure, doing so is consistent with their supremacist ideology. But the main reason is tactical. In the Egyptian mind, attacking Christians converts the controversy over Morsi’s removal from a matter of the Brotherhood’s governmental incompetence and malevolence to another pitched battle between Islam and the “enemies of Islam.”

 

Obviously, millions of Egyptians do not see things this way. But if those Egyptians were a majority, Islamic supremacists would never have won control of the government in the first place. In Egypt, the Brotherhood is savaging Christians because . . . it works. General Sisi is not doing enough to protect besieged Christian communities because, even if he is privately inclined to do so, he knows that many of his rank-and-file soldiers are not.

Israel’s Army Is Too Powerful. By Zvi Bar’el.

Like in Egypt, Israel’s army takes on powers it shouldn’t have. By Zvi Bar’el. Haaretz, August 21, 2013.

Bar’el:

All of these pale, however, by comparison to the tender inviting bids for providing classes on the subject of Israeli-Jewish identity. The deadline for submission of bids, by the way, is September 9. It's doubtful, however, that there is an institution that can put together a detailed plan and submit it within three weeks about such an identity, but who am I to even suggest that the bidding process might have been rigged?

 

So Israeli-Jewish identity is a commodity available for purchase from the lowest bidder. What 12 years of school didn’t do will be accomplished in a course. Imparting Israeli-Jewish identity is not a new IDF perk. It has existed for years, but it repeatedly raises the issue of why the army is involved in shaping Israeli society. Just as the issue of who “bears the burden” in Israeli society is viewed only in military terms — meaning who serves in the army — and just as some rights and social welfare benefits accorded to citizens are conditioned on military service, so the army is accorded the authority to grant recognition to citizens’ Israeliness and even obscure the identity of non-Jewish soldiers.

 

The cultural and societal power that the army possesses prompts an immediate comparison with what is happening now in Egypt. The Egyptian army has revered status and by law it cannot be found at fault. Its budget is not a matter of public knowledge and is not subject to oversight. It manages its own independent financial system the size of which no one knows. And all of a sudden, and not for the first time, the Egyptian army has taken control, and in the name of “the people and democracy” is fighting a religious movement that was democratically elected. Egyptian liberals are kneeling before Egypt military leader Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, viewing him as the guardian of liberty and liberal values even when he kills hundreds of civilians.

 

But what the Egyptian army is doing, in brutal fashion, is not just a show of force to demonstrators meant to restore stability. It decides what the correct values are and what is out-of-bounds. It defines the boundaries of tolerable democracy and dictates when that democracy needs to protect itself and against whom. It is also overseeing the process of drafting a new constitution that will shape Egypt’s future values and reinvent the “will of the people.” There can be no better definition of dictatorship than the forceful takeover of public awareness.

 

One cannot help but wonder if there is a substantive difference between a military takeover of awareness the shaping of identity on one hand, and voluntary devotion to an army and a willingness to give it authority over these fundamental issues. In both cases, that in Egypt and that in Israel, an organization that is not democratic is taking or receiving powers unto itself that it is not supposed to have. In contrast with the Egyptian army, the Israeli army does not fire at its civilian population. It simply molds them into “shaped citizens.”

What China Fears. By Max Boot.

What China Fears. By Max Boot. Commentary, August 20, 2013.

Leaked “Document #9” Spotlights Xi’s Anti-Democratic Drive. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, August 21, 2013.

China Takes Aim at Western Ideas. By Chris Buckley. New York Times, August 19, 2013.

Ralph Peters on New Glory.

After Words with Ralph Peters. Video. Ralph Peters interviewed by Anatol Lieven. C-Span, August 18, 2005.

Middle East Genocide. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, June 3, 2013.

Increased Attacks on Christians in Egypt.

Increased Attacks on Christians in Egypt. Video. Shannon Bream with Ralph Peters, Lisa Daftari, and Joe Trippi. America Live. Fox News, August 20, 2013. Right Sightings. YouTube.

Egypt’s Christians Are Facing a Jihad. By Nina Shea. National Review Online, August 19, 2013.

Burning Churches in Egypt. By Rich Lowry. New York Post, August 19, 2013.

Islamists Step Up Attacks on Christians for Supporting Morsi’s Ouster. By Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh. New York Times, August 20, 2013.

2,700-Year-Old Hebrew Inscription Found in Jerusalem. By Gavriel Fiske.

2,700-year-old pottery fragment discovered in the City of David site in Jerusalem (photo credit: courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority).

2,700-year-old Hebrew inscription found in Jerusalem. By Gavriel Fiske. The Times of Israel, August 18, 2013.

Ancient Hebrew Inscription Dating to 7th Century BC Unearthed in Jerusalem. By Enrico de Lazaro. Sci-News.com, August 19, 2013.

Fiske:

Archaeologists working in Jerusalem have discovered what they say is a 2,700 year-old pottery fragment with an ancient Hebrew inscription possibly containing the name of a Biblical figure.

 

The fragment, discovered just outside the capital’s Old City at the City of David site, in what is now the Arab village of Silwan, was likely part of a large ceramic bowl dating from between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said Sunday.

 

The text fragment on the shard, roughly transliterated without vowels into English characters as “ryhu bn bnh,” is similar to the name of Zechariah son of Benaiah, the father of the prophet Jahaziel, whose name appears in 2 Chronicles 20:14 when Jahaziel spoke prophecy to King Jehoshaphat before the king went off to war.

 

“While not complete, the inscription presents us with the name of a seventh century BCE figure, which resembles other names known to us from both the Biblical and archaeological record… and provides us with a connection to the people living in Jerusalem at the end of the First Temple period,” the statement said.

 

The City of David, while today located outside the southern walls of the Old City, is understood by archaeologists to be the site of the ancient city of Jerusalem mentioned in the Bible.

 

The bowl fragment, along with a number of other small artifacts dating from the same period, was discovered by archaeologists Joe Uziel and Nahshon Zanton during an investigation of remains associated with the destruction of the First Temple, which occurred in 587 BCE at the hand of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

 

Uziel and Zanton said that the letters inscribed on the bowl shard likely date from “sometime between the reign of Hezekiah and the destruction of Jerusalem under King Zedekiah.” Based on their analysis, they noted, the inscription “was engraved on the bowl prior to firing, indicating that the inscription originally adorned the rim of the bowl in its entirety, and was not written on a shard after the vessel was broken.”

 

The bowl possibly contained an offering, given by the person whose name was inscribed on the vessel, they said.



Why the Peace Talks Are Private. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Why the Peace Talks Are Private. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, August 19, 2013.

Palestinians Accuse Peace Negotiators of Treason. By Khaled Abu Toameh. NJBR, August 20, 2013.


Tobin:

The resumption of the Middle East peace talks is a major victory for Secretary of State John Kerry, even if no one other than him thinks they have a chance of succeeding. But you may have noticed one curious element of this much-ballyhooed diplomatic event: it’s being conducted almost entirely in private. This might be explained by the need to keep the talks from being blown up by leaks from either the Israelis or the Palestinians that might be designed to embarrass the other side. But rather than the blackout being imposed by a State Department determined to push the uphill slog to peace without interruption from the press, the request for privacy came only from the Palestinians. The purpose of that desire for secrecy tells us a lot more about why the talks are fated not to succeed than they do about either side’s will to negotiate.

 

As Khaled Abu Toameh points out in an article written for the Gatestone Institute, the point of keeping the press away from the talks is not so that they can be conducted without interference so much as it is to save the negotiators–and the Palestinian Authority that sent them–from the outrage of a Palestinian public that wants no part of any measure that smacks of coexistence with the Jewish state. Whether or not PA leader Mahmoud Abbas and his lead negotiator Saeb Erekat are sincere about wanting an agreement that will end the conflict, after two decades of efforts to demonize the Israelis and make cooperation impossible, they fear that any publicity about the talks will create a devastating backlash. Far from anti-peace sentiment being the work solely of their Hamas rivals, the PLO council dominated by Abbas’s Fatah Party is making it clear it will oppose any agreement.

 

The reason for the widespread Palestinian opposition to any accord is rooted in a definition of Palestinian nationalism that is incompatible with compromise with Zionism. Since the Palestinian movement grew up primarily by opposing the return of the Jews to the country, the notion of a state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel is anathema under almost any conditions. Even if Israel’s maximum concessions increased to the point where they matched the Palestinians’ minimum terms for peace, that would still entail giving up the “right of return” for the descendants of the 1948 refugees and grant legitimacy to a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn. And that is something most Palestinians are still unwilling to do.

 

But more than that is the nature of the Palestinian political culture that has grown up in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords. As Abu Toameh rightly notes, most Palestinians are intolerant of any sort of cooperation with Israelis to the point where they oppose even competitions between youth soccer teams. Thus, the debate about the talks is not so much about the terms of peace as it is about the “crime” of talking with Israelis.

 

Unfortunately, even if the talks were to bring the two sides closer, this means that any tentative agreement is bound to be abandoned by the PA before it is brought before the people for the same reason that Yasir Arafat said no to a Palestinian state in 2000 and 2001 and Abbas fled the negotiations in 2008 when he was offered an even sweeter deal. Since not even a powerful leader like Arafat felt he could survive peace, there is no reason to think Abbas thinks differently and everything he has done in office confirms that supposition. Having not only failed to prepare the Palestinian people for peace but fomented more hatred for Jews and Israel, it is inconceivable that anything offered by the Netanyahu government would be enough to make Abbas think he could dare to sign on the dotted line.

 

Seen in this context the lack of cameras at the opening of the talks is not a sign of seriousness. It is an indication that the Palestinians are still not ready to make peace.

Israel’s Need for Defensible Borders. By Uzi Dayan.

The negotiator’s handbook. By Uzi Dayan. Israel Hayom, August 16, 2013.

Dayan:

So far, we have seen negotiations about negotiations. Negotiations about the very existence of negotiations. Only now do the real peace talks seem poised to begin.

 

After many years of dealing with Israeli issues, and armed with the experience – not to mention quite a few scars – as an official who served as the head of the security committee during talks with the Jordanians, the Syrians and the Palestinians, I’m ready to offer my services and recommend seven core principles for this round of new-old negotiations.

 

1) A speedy, decisive return to negotiations, without any preconditions:

 

We must stop acquiescing to preconditions such as the release of terrorists. Freeing these prisoners is problematic both from an ethical and tactical perspective. The U.S. set that precondition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has decisively and wisely pushed peace talks forward, accepted it, to the best of my understanding, to neutralize prospects of either a settlement freeze or an early discussion on the 1967 borders. Negotiators must now return to a position of “no preconditions” in all other matters.

 

2) Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital:

 

We do not need the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish nation’s historic right to a state in Israel. But failing to recognize the existence of a Jewish state draws a huge question mark over how ready the Palestinians truly are to agree to two states for two peoples.

 

3) Defensible borders:

 

Israel’s need for defensible borders is written in blood. But how will such borders look? The answer is that they will be drawn in a way that fulfills our three basic security needs:

 

The need for strategic depth: The average width of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is 64 kilometers (40 miles). The strategic depth here is of little importance. But the need increases in light of growing threats stemming from the age of nuclearization, ballistic missiles, and long-range rockets that mostly threaten population centers.

 

The need for defensive depth: The era of “slim chances for war” is over. The Middle East has become a realm of uncertainty. Civil wars and the lethal combination of terrorism and movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood make it necessary for us to remain vigilant over the possibility of an attack from the east.

 

The need to be able to combat terror: The only factor that will guarantee the demilitarization of the Palestinian entity is a permanent Israeli presence along the West Bank's eastern border. The disarmament of the Palestinian state is not only a condition that was guaranteed to Israel's when it signed the “two states for two nations” principle. It is also a condition that ensures the security and fulfillment of any agreement. The situation in Sinai is a testament to that. The Jordan Valley “envelopes the state of Israel.”

 

Holding onto the Jordan Valley is the only way to fulfill these three national security needs. Only through full Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley can the Jewish state manage its own arrangements for security – us, the IDF and Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley. Not foreign armies.

 

4) Zero compromise on the “right” of return:

 

Only Israel can be allowed to permit any individual who wants to immigrate to do so, and that is, of course, if the country wants to absorb the immigrant. Plain and simple.

 

5) Security arrangements:

 

Israel requires several security arrangements to provide protection to its citizens whose lives, and not the Palestinians’, are in constant danger, and whose existence is wrapped up in the dangerous and delicate fabric of the region. Control and prevention, hot pursuit, the authority to arrest, and so on. The fifth principle has one critical aspect, and that is the control over airspace. The territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is, on average, just 40 miles wide. A fighter jet covers that distance in a few minutes. If we factor in our concern over safe civilian air traffic, then we reach one inevitable conclusion: Israel must maintain exclusive control over the territory’s airspace.

 

6) A solution to Hamastan in Gaza:

 

Whom does Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas represent? He can’t enter Gaza, and he couldn’t include Gaza in the Palestinian state which he represents. There won’t be a “three-state solution.”

 

7) Bilateral negotiations:

 

How many times have we heard the (true) cliche that “it takes two to tango?” Have you ever tried to tango with a third partner?

 

The Americans did not participate whatsoever in peace negotiations with the Jordanians. During negotiations with the Palestinians, the Americans did not so much as enter the room. On the other hand, the Americans sat down to negotiations with the Syrians and the results were as expected: The parties stopped speaking altogether, communicating instead with the Americans alone. A modern variation on the famous non-dialogue skit by legendary actor Shaike Ophir.

 

The Palestinians need to reach agreements with Israel, not with the U.S., not with the United Nations, not with the Quartet. The U.S. must understand that its role is limited to bringing the two sides to the table and implementing agreements. Other pretensions won’t succeed and will only cause harm.

 

A few words on the U.N.’s strategy

 

While both parties chose to pursue peace talks for a permanent solution, they also knew such negotiations had scant chances for success. It was a choice they made based on the assessment that the political cost of various concessions on the road to an interim agreement would be intolerable. The two sides also understood that even if they could not reach a permanent arrangement, an interim agreement would always be a possible alternative.

 

Israel controls most of the territory in Judea and Samaria, and it does not lay claim to territories under the Palestinian Authority’s rule. Therefore, Israel must insist that territorial issues will only be settled at the end of negotiations. And if not, so be it. Deliberations over Jerusalem, the refugees and other core issues will end up depleting Israeli munitions.

 

These are the seven core principles. There is no need to introduce red lines or road maps to solutions. Experience has taught us that such proclamations only produce one-sided obligations. The Palestinians, with the help of the “useful Israeli idiots,” view them as Israeli points of no return and continue to gnaw away at them, bargaining for the next concession.

 

Can you recall how the “Beilin-Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] agreement,” the “Geneva initiative,” the “Clinton parameters,” or the “Olmert concessions” wound up? We cannot afford to walk into the same trap.

 

And the most important thing to remember? We have got a Jewish state to build.

Millions of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies that Keep Them There. By Maura Pennington.

Millions of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies that Keep Them There. By Maura Pennington. Forbes, August 19, 2013.

Millennials Are Losing Faith in the Country, Not Obama. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 20, 2013.

In the Face of Obama’s Malaise Economy, Seek Success – and When You Find It, Be Proud of It. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 20, 2013.


Pennington:

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the “existential vacuum.”  It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose.  In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured.  Without it, a person is lost.  Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto.

 

When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists.

 

Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves.  Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning.  The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums.

 

The lost ones are smart.  They pay attention to what goes on in the world.  They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs.  Yet what can they do?  They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours or deal with whining strangers.  They are fully adults and can’t boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication, which many are horrible at maintaining.

 

I hear my peers say, “I’m lost.”  I say, “Yes, of course.”  Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a “recovery” from a “recession” and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now.  I went to a party recently where someone was bashful to admit that he bought his own place.  A room full of renters were ready to give him grief for having the means to pay a mortgage or the certitude and resolve to put down roots in one place.

 

The lost ones went to college. They know about Sisyphus.  They could draw the connection between checking and rechecking social media feeds and pushing a rock endlessly up a hill.   Yet, perhaps they will not self-identify as lost.  That abyss they feel inside is maybe just “growing up.”  It’s not.  It’s a vacuum.  If you are scoffing at the achievements of others, if you neurotically mutter, “Meh, like it makes a difference”—you have a internal vacuum.   If you have picked up a random hobby recently in a last ditch effort to entertain yourself, you have an internal vacuum.  Allow yourself the excuse that it’s only because there was a coupon for that evening of wine and a painting lesson, but know that you are filling a void.

 

It’s not that this lost segment of a generation made themselves willfully nihilists.  Life is crowded and getting stricter.  Whereas other generations might have persevered, they enjoyed less traffic and fewer regulations. They could visit Disneyland without timed tickets for rides or climb Yosemite’s Half-Dome without a permit. They could smoke cigarettes on their college campuses without nanny classmates and university bureaucrats shaming them into special areas.  They lived in an era where vaccinations for lethal diseases weren’t up for debate and no one was allergic to bread.  We, on the other hand, exist in an age in which the state explains booster seats at www.safercar.gov and female bullying at www.girlshealth.gov.  In the face of so many noodges, who wouldn’t be a nihilist?

 

The question for the lost ones is what to do about the vacuum.  They could fall in love, if they still believe in love.  The countries with higher divorce rates than the United States are former Soviet Republics and Belgium, the seat of the sinking EU.  They could get a cat or a dog, if they feel ready to take on that kind of responsibility.  The average age of a first-time mother in America is about 26.  It was 21 in 1970.  The lost ones are skewing that statistic as much as the women who are mindfully waiting.

 

Perhaps people could find purpose on the day they stop buying multiple bicycles and instead own a car.  The problem then becomes parking, guilt about the environment, and deeper existential angst.  People could start an affinity group of some kind, since one in four Millenials has no religious affiliation, but that would mean managing to get people to respond to messages, which requires a refusal to accept “My inbox is a mess right now” as anything approaching an apology.

 

Aside from these personal fixes, there is a solution to put the country (including any wayward stragglers or stunted post-adolescents) back on the path of prosperity.  Americans could stop supporting anti-growth politicians pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and surreptitiously erode civil liberties, but let’s be serious.  60% of those ages 18-29 reelected President Obama.  So, what’s left?  Keep checking feeds, going on pointless dates, and buying more gadgets?  Frankl would tell the lost ones to find a will to meaning in this world, but finding purpose can be put off, even if the abyss persists and they pester the rest of the world as impotently self-involved non-starters, for lack of ever finding a self or a start.

 

You can say the deck is stacked against this generation and that I am making an audacious assessment of my peers who were hit by an unexpected external blow. To that I say: Be someone who solves the harder puzzle we’ve been given.  Consider that this isn’t the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy and then investigate what made growth possible in the past.  (I’ll give you a hint: There is something about the 1980s and 90s that makes us all look back to our magical childhoods.)  Instead of complaining about arbitrarily arranged wages, wonder how and why our talents are being wasted and who, with sweeping executive authority, has been setting the policies that make it so.  Question the persistence of this so-called “recovery.”  At least work on the puzzle and you won’t be lost.

Palestinians Accuse Peace Negotiators of Treason. By Khaled Abu Toameh.

Palestinians Accuse Peace Negotiators of Treason. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, August 19, 2013.

Activists inspired by ouster of Morsi launch campaign to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Jerusalem Post, August 19, 2013.

Our Egyptian Unrealpolitik. By Ross Douthat.

Our Egyptian Unrealpolitik. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, August 19, 2013.

A Policy on Egypt—Support Al Sisi. By Bret Stephens.

A Policy on Egypt—Support Al Sisi. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2013. Also here.

It’s Time to Hold Our Nose and Back Egypt’s Military. By Leslie H. Gelb. The Daily Beast, August 17, 2013.

Days of Rage in Egypt. By David Remnick.

Days of Rage. By David Remnick. The New Yorker, August 26, 2013.

Egypt’s war of attrition. By Ron Ben-Yishai. Ynet News, August 18, 2013.

Israel’s message on Egypt: Keep Cairo from falling, then worry about democracy. By Herb Keinon. Jerusalem Post, August 18, 2013.

The Islamic Insurgency That Could Soon Hit Egypt. By Eric Trager. The New Republic, August 19, 2013.

The Truth About Egypt. Interview with Eric Trager by Michael J. Totten. World Affairs, August 15, 2013.

Egypt’s Christians Are Facing a Jihad. By Nina Shea. National Review Online, August 19, 2013.

The Revenge of the Police State. By Wael Eskandar. Jadaliyya, August 17, 2013.

Obama’s Egypt Policy Makes Perfect Sense. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, August 19, 2013. Also here.

Thank God For Egypt’s Army. Video by Dick Morris. DickMorris.com, August 20, 2013. YouTube.

The Modern European Anti-Semitism. By Riccardo Dugulin.

The modern European anti-Semitism. By Riccardo Dugulin. Ynet News, August 19, 2013.

Bambi Meets Godzilla in the Middle East. By Walter Russell Mead.

Bambi Meets Godzilla in the Middle East. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, August 18, 2013.

Mead:

President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.

 

This vision, sadly, has turned out to be a mirage, and Washington is discovering that fact only after the administration followed the deceptive illusion out into the deep desert. The vultures are circling now as American policy crawls forlornly over the dunes; with both the NewYork Times and the Washington Post running “what went wrong” obituaries for the President’s efforts in Egypt, not even the MSM can avoid the harsh truth that President Obama’s Middle East policies have collapsed into an ugly and incoherent mess.

 

The President and his team have been taken in by two very old American mistakes about the rest of the world. One is to confuse the end of history with the morning news. The other is to exaggerate America’s importance to the rest of the world. The President is in good company here; most of our political and policy class is deeply steeped in these beguiling fantasies about how the world works, and most of his critics on both the left and the right are as deeply and fatally confused about the region as he and his advisors have been. I’ll get to the inveterate tendency of narcissistic American policy makers and commenters to exaggerate America’s influence in another essay; for now, it’s enough to look at how the deep set American tendency to think that democracy is sweeping the world, right now, has helped wreck the Obama administration’s Middle East policy.

 

The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians. In the end, almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world. Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and even Russia will some day become democratic societies with market economies softened by welfare states and social safety nets. As a nation, we believe that democracy is both morally better and more practical than other forms of government, and that a regulated market economy offers the only long term path to national prosperity. As democracy and capitalism spread their wonder-working wings across the world, peace will descend on suffering humanity and history as we’ve known it will be at an end.

 

If these ideas are correct, and you can’t have a career in American public life unless you are willing at least to pretend that you believe them, then over time it is inevitable that these ideas will triumph worldwide. After all, if democratic capitalist countries grow faster and enjoy greater political stability and effectiveness than their opponents, sooner or later the opponents will fail to keep pace with the power of the democratic world and will either be crushed in war (as happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) or will drop, exhausted, out of the competition for power like the Soviet Union.

 

I actually subscribe to this article of our civic faith; I believe that democratic capitalism works better than the alternatives (though it does not work perfectly) and that other things being equal over time the societies who embrace these ideas will outperform those who do not.

 

But this does not mean that I believe that the world will become liberal and democratic tomorrow or that the path to this future will be a smooth and steady ascent. As a Christian, I believe in the Second Coming and the Last Judgment; that does not mean I have maxed out my credit cards in the belief that Jesus is returning tomorrow.

 

Unfortunately, much of our political and policy class, both on the left and the right, shares an unfounded confidence that liberal capitalism is going to triumph tomorrow. They are the secular, liberal counterparts of Christian fundamentalists waiting for the Rapture, a near-magical translation to a better world. This is what most American policy makers believed about Russia in the heady years after the Soviet collapse. President George W. Bush bet the ranch on the imminent democratization of the Middle East. So did President Obama.

 

This is not a new mistake. Thomas Jefferson was sure that the French Revolution heralded the dawn of democracy in 18th century Europe. Henry Clay thought the Latin American revolutions against Spain would create stable democracies across South America. Many Americans thought the 1848 revolutions in Europe would establish true freedom in the Old World. Many Americans thought that Sun Yat Sen’s revolution in China would establish democracy there back in 1911. Alexander Kerensky’s Russia was hailed as an ‘emerging democracy’ in 1917. Woodrow Wilson thought he could kill history with Fourteen Points and a League. It was a thought crime among liberal and progressive people to doubt that Africa would race ahead to democratic capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s as colonialism ended.

 

We are not always wrong. Germany, Japan and, in its own eccentric way, Italy all became liberal capitalist states after World War Two. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries signed up to the program in the 1990s. Much of East Asia has been moving in a liberal direction as its prosperity has grown. Mexico, Chile and Brazil, among other Latin states, are looking more like Henry Clay once hoped they would.

 

As a nation, we are not very good at figuring out when the end of history is going to dawn in particular countries, and because we are looking so hard for the triumph of democratic capitalism, we tend to assume that any sound we hear in the night must be its footsteps drawing nigh. Moreover, because we identify belief in our national principles as a moral quality, we are angry with those who seem to display an insufficient faith. When doubters questioned the Bush administration’s claims that the war in Iraq would begin a democratic transformation of the Middle East, they were called anti-Arab racists. When doubters questioned the Obama administration’s claims that moderate Islamists held the key to a democratic future for the region, they were called racists and Islamophobes. People who question whether Africa is on the brink of a mass breakout to democratic growth must also be expect to be called ugly names.

 

It seems misanthropic to doubt that a particular country isn’t on the road to freedom and prosperity, and it also seems like heresy against our national creed. That tendency is reinforced among our policy elite and chattering classes. The “experts” ought to know better and be more skeptical, but they are often more naive and more dogmatic than the American people at large. It is often the best educated and connected who are most confident, for example, that political science maxims work better than historical knowledge and reflection when it comes to analyzing events and predicting developments. When democratic peace theory or some other beautiful intellectual system (backed with regressions and statistically significant correlations in all their austere beauty) adds its weight to the national political religion, a reasonable faith can morph into blind zeal. Bad things often follow.

 

What Americans often miss is that while democratic liberal capitalism may be where humanity is heading, not everybody is going to get there tomorrow. This is not simply because some leaders selfishly seek their own power or because evil ideologies take root in unhappy lands. It is also because while liberal capitalist democracy may well be the best way to order human societies from an abstract point of view, not every human society is ready and able to walk that road now. Some aren’t ready because like Haiti they face such crippling problems that having a government, any government, that effectively enforces the law and provides basic services across the country is beyond their grasp. Some aren’t ready because religious or ethnic tensions would rip a particular country apart and cause civil war. Some aren’t ready because the gap between the values, social structures and culture of a particular society make various aspects of liberal capitalism either distasteful or impractical. In many places, the fact that liberal democratic capitalism is historically associated with western imperialism and arrogance has poisoned the well. People simply do not believe that this foreign system will work for them, and they blame many of the problems they face on the countries in Europe and North America who so loudly proclaim the superiority of a system that many people in the global South feel has victimized them.

 

As a result, there are many countries in the world where the dish Americans most want to eat just isn’t on the menu. This has certainly been true in Egypt, where a pluralistic, liberal society looks pretty effectively out of reach. Egypt’s liberals are too weak and too disconnected from the main currents of their society to govern, and neither the Islamists nor the army is particularly interested in building a liberal society. It was true in Yeltsin’s Russia, where liberal measures (carried out, as was inevitable under the circumstances, by people who were either incompetent or corrupt or both) led to national disintegration and ruin.

 

In such situations, American diplomacy is generally ineffective and often unites a whole country against us, frustrated by the mix of arrogance and cluelessness that we generally bring to such situations. We issue orders that cannot be fulfilled, judge people and movements by unrealistic standards, form strategic partnerships with individuals and groups who don’t understand their own country very well, set unobtainable goals and fail to grasp the most basic facts of political and social life. We do this over and over again; President Obama has followed a well worn trail into his current predicament.

 

Meanwhile the President’s most ardent critics, both on the right and the left, believe that his biggest problem is that he isn’t exhibiting sufficient faith in the national credo. Since we know that liberal democracy is triumphing everywhere, if it isn’t working in Egypt it must be the President’s fault. There must have been some policy path, there must still be some policy path, by which the President can bring Egypt into the Promised Land.

 

Americans need to face an unpleasant fact: while American values may be the answer long term to the Middle East’s problems, they are largely irrelevant to much that is happening there now. We are not going to stop terrorism, at least not in the short or middle term, by building prosperous democratic societies in the Middle East. We can’t fix Pakistan, we can’t fix Egypt, we can’t fix Iraq, we can’t fix Saudi Arabia and we can’t fix Syria. Not even the people who live in those countries can fix them at this point; what has gone wrong is so deeply rooted and so multifaceted that nothing anybody can do will turn them into good candidates for membership in the European Union anytime soon. If we could turn Pakistan into Denmark, the terrorists there would probably settle down—but that isn’t going to happen on any policy-relevant timetable. We must deal with terrorism (and our other interests in the region) in a world in which the basic conditions that breed terrorists aren’t going away.

 

This isn’t true of all Islamic countries, by the way. Turkey, Malaysia, Iran and Indonesia have their problems, but all of them have more and better choices than the countries going through such convulsions today. Poland and Yugoslavia went in different directions when communism fell; the Islamic world is no more monolithic than the old communist world.

 

There are, unfortunately, two things we can’t do in the Middle East. We can’t solve our problems and win the love and esteem of the folks who live there by promoting a transition to democracy that isn’t going to happen, and we can’t insulate ourselves from the region’s problems by walking away. Since those are the two alternatives most Americans instinctually prefer, our political and policy systems are going to be stressed. Moralists are going to hector presidents of both parties non-stop for their failures to impose Marquess of Queensbury rules on the various regimes and movements with which we will work, and isolationists are going to resist the commitments that a policy of messy engagement requires.

 

Winston Churchill famously said that Americans will do the right thing in the end—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives. I doubt we’ve exhausted all the alternatives yet, and we will likely make more costly and ugly mistakes before we finally find our feet in the new world of the 21st century Middle East. We do, however, seem to be coming to the end of the first phase of failure: the blind belief that the rapid diffusion of democracy and capitalism will make all those nasty, dreary problems melt away.

 

Meanwhile, at least somebody is getting some benefit out of America’s miserable crawl through the desert. For Egypt’s generals, hungry to use every scrap of material to whomp up patriotic fervor for their cause, every sign of American displeasure, every jet not delivered and every lecture sternly read, is pure gold. The one thing everybody in Egypt agrees on now is that the Americans are about the most horrible people around—arrogant, stupid, judgmental, impractical, and not to be trusted when the going gets tough. The liberals, the generals, the Mubarak family, the Christians, the Islamists: on this one point they can all agree.

 

Making the coup look anti-American helps the generals make it look patriotic. They benefit from our critiques and our outrage: standing accused of having soldiers and agents whipping up crowds to attack American reporters, issuing sharp rebukes to mealy-mouthed American protests, ostentatiously leaving the clueless American diplomats twisting in the wind: this is balm to the Egyptian soul right now, and money in the bank for the new regime.

Fathers, Daughters, and Rush Limbaugh. By Madeline Janis.

Dad, Rush Limbaugh, and me. By Madeline Janis. Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2013.

“You Can’t Wake Someone Up Who’s Just Pretending to Be Asleep.” By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 19, 2013.

Day 2: The Art of Persuasion. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 20, 2013.

Missionary Creep in Egypt. By Adam Garfinkle.

Missionary Creep in Egypt. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, September/October 2013.

The Sunni Divide. By Harold Rhode.

The Sunni Divide. By Harold Rhode. inFocus Quarterly, Summer 2013.

The Great Divide: The Political Process and Palestinian Discourse on the Social Networks.

The Great Divide: The Political Process and Palestinian Discourse on the Social Networks. By Udi Dekel and Orlit Perlov. INSS, Insight No. 453, August 11, 2013.

Dekel and Perlov:

An estimated one third of Palestinian society today are active users of social networks, which feature frequent discussions on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian identity, internal Palestinian conflicts, the relationship between the population and its leaders, the economic situation, and the impact of regional changes. New Media has thus become a platform for an open Palestinian discussion that highlights the complexity and the different processes within Palestinian society in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Interestingly, the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks has sparked a number of protests in Ramallah, but has not received significant attention within the domestic Palestinian discourse on the social media.

 

Although Palestinian society is sometimes perceived as monolithic, the geographic separation between Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is echoed by differences in lifestyle, outlook, and ideology. There is a common Palestinian identity, but the realities on the ground dictate completely different areas of interest, so that the populations of these three areas share few mutual interests that are topics for discussion. Gaza is oriented toward Egypt and influenced by events there. The Arab residents of East Jerusalem conduct themselves in an Israeli context and are influenced by the discourse among Israeli Arabs, taking little interest in the discourse in the West Bank and Gaza. In the West Bank, the Arabs are influenced by what is happening in Jordan, politically, economically, and socially. The Arab Spring, political Islam, democratization, and the demand for justice, rights, and freedoms have had a completely different impact on the three entities.

. . . .

 

The Common Denominator. The three entities are united by their rejection of the existing leadership, concern about rising prices, and an unwillingness to compromise the “right of return.” Two primary themes that reveal common attitudes resound on the social media. The first is the denial of any legitimacy of Hamas and Fatah leaders, and therefore, the Palestinian public will consider any national political decision made by these leaders to be illegitimate. The second theme is opposition to concessions by these leaders on the “right of return” in the negotiations. Conceding the “right of return” is considered taboo, especially among young Palestinians who do not recognize Israel as a Jewish state (60 percent of Palestinians are under 30). Any agreement in which the Palestinian leadership gives up the “right of return” would likely elicit a sharp response and be seen as a blow to social justice and a violation of civil rights.

 

In conclusion, contrary to expectation, the main discussion on Palestinian social networking sites is not focused on the resumption of the peace process, rather on the daily fundamental problems of the population. Three separate entities are oriented toward their respective geographical neighbors: the Gaza Strip toward Egypt, the West Bank toward Jordan, and East Jerusalem toward Israel. The Hamas leadership in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have lost much legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians. They do not respond to civil society needs, and their policy does not enjoy public support. President Abbas has little support from the Palestinian public for resuming the peace process, and the common perception is that he is motivated by foreign interests and not by the desire to advance domestic Palestinians needs.

 

There is almost no discussion on the social media about violent resistance or calls for terrorist activity against Israel. The young Palestinian society advocates a social struggle over justice and civil rights, not necessarily by means of violence.