Wednesday, September 2, 2015

As the World Burns

Islamist terrorism is metastasizing. Russia has become increasingly powerful and menacing.

In response to these threats, the President of the United States has declared war on climate change. Having ensured that Iran will have nuclear weapons and having succeeded in funding Iran-based terrorism to the tune of $150 billion, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in the wilds of Alaska.

Closer to home, American college students are being indoctrinated in political correctness, are obsessing about gender neutral pronouns and are having a great national conversation about Caitlyn Jenner's genitalia.

No matter how you spell it, it sounds like surrender.

Caroline Glick remarked in a Facebook post:

Within 5-10 years, Pakistan will have the third largest nuclear arsenal. Thanks to Obama, Iran will have nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
Egypt will continue to teeter on the brink.

And while US academia obsesses over gender neutral pronouns, Islamic State and its jihadist brethren are captivating the imagination of millions of Muslims in the Middle East and throughout the world.

What could go wrong?

You cannot fight the war on Islamist terrorism without recognizing that you are fighting a war against Islamist terrorism. As Glick points in her column, out the idea of “jihad” must count as one of the most powerfully captivating ideas in the world today:

And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.

Perhaps we are so inured to the Obama administration’s dereliction, that we ignore what is happening. Glick explains:

We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.”

US Vice President Joe Biden claimed, the “perverse ideologues...may be able to inspire a single lone wolf, but they can never, never threaten who we are.”
Both men were wrong, and dangerously so.

The meaning of the killings was no mystery.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot his victims down in cold blood because he was a jihadist. He wrote of his devotion to the Islamic war for global domination on his blog. He downloaded messages from Anwar Awlaki, the American al-Qaida commander killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.

On other fronts, the administration has decided that it’s all about the messaging. If you do not call it evil, it is not evil. If you do not call it Islamist, it is not Islamist. In order to win the war all you need to do is to say we are winning, to put out reports and press releases saying that we are winning, and skew all intelligence reports toward the victory narrative:

Last week the Pentagon’s Inspector General announced it is investigating reports that the Obama administration has required US intelligence agencies to minimize their reporting on the threat IS poses. Intelligence officers have allegedly been ordered to exaggerate the success of the US’s anemic campaign against its bases in Iraq and Syria while understating the threat IS constitutes.

Over the past year, jihadists published the home addresses of American soldiers and officers. On numerous occasions, what an FBI alert referred to as “Middle Eastern men” accosted the wives of US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan outside of their homes.

Speaking to concerned soldiers last week, Carter again pretended away the problem. While insisting that protecting soldiers is “job one for all of us,” Carter insisted that the threat was limited to “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”

Australian Foreign Minister Julia Bishop warned in June that IS may already have sufficient nuclear material to produce a dirty bomb. As we have seen with IS’s wide-scale use of chemical weapons in Iraq, we must assume that its fighters will use all weapons at their disposal.

Had the West – led by the US – been willing to abandon the intellectual straitjacket of political correctness with which it has willingly shackled itself, IS may very well have been a marginal movement able to attract no more than “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”

In the indoctrination mills that America calls universities, any discussion of these topics will be greeted with outrage. Those who dare bring them up will be charged with Islamophobia.

And yet, the universities are too easy a target. The fault lies with President Obama and his administration’s failure to fight the war against Islamist ideas. If you cannot name it you cannot fight against. If you do not fight against it, you are telling the world that it is acceptable.

We can only hope that Republican presidential candidates will address this issue and will hope Obama to account for what his policies have wrought. It would be better than spending their time forming a circular firing squad and trying to destroy each other. And let's hear about some proposals that are more consequential than capturing an oil field or two.

4 comments:

  1. As the world burns? Is this hysteria I hear?

    If the world is burning, perhaps it is a record acreage of Alaskan forests in 2015.
    http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/08/us/alaska-fires-hot-summer/
    ----
    The summer of 2004 "carries the dubious distinction of being the largest fire season in Alaska history, with 6.7 million acres burned," the center said. But 2015 could trump that record if the pace of fires keeps up.
    --------

    Stuart: Having ensured that Iran will have nuclear weapons and having succeeded in funding Iran-based terrorism to the tune of $150 billion.

    This imagined "funding" is money that Iran already has, but has been denied access to by international freezing international banking accounts. And where does Iran get its money from? Oil! And how much oil does the U.S. import each year? It looks like about 8 million barrels per day, or 44% of our consumption. And that assumes we're able to continue producing $80/bbl oil that can be sold for $40/bbl, or $20/bbl if a new economic crisis hits.
    http://time.com/67163/why-are-u-s-oil-imports-falling/

    If we were serious about fighting terrorism and tyrants, we'd be serious about trying to run our economy without oil in the first place, and then export our nonoil economy to the rest of the world. And then we don't have to worry about civil war or terrorism in the middle east, other than the ordinary humanitarian needs.

    Meaning President Obama (doing his victory laps in Alaska),
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/us/politics/obama-to-urge-aggressive-climate-action-in-visit-to-arctic-alaska.html
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    It’s inconsistent on the one hand for President Obama to lead the world toward comprehensive action on climate change, while on the other allowing companies to pursue difficult, expensive oil in dangerous and remote places,” said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, an environmental group.
    ...
    In his weekly radio address on Saturday, the president acknowledged, as he had in the past, that although he was pushing to transition the nation “away from dirty energy sources that threaten our health and our environment,” the economy was still reliant on oil and gas.

    “As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports, and we should demand the highest safety standards in the industry — our own,” Mr. Obama said. “I share people’s concerns about offshore drilling. I remember the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico all too well.”
    -----------

    So because we are a nation of addicts, we at least have enough integrity to try to supply our own drug supplies, but we still refuse to admit we have a problem, and that our demand for oil leads the world (in per capita apetite) and so helps keep dictators and tyrants in power across the world.

    But maybe the republicans can still save us. They can vow to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill dozens of ISIS terrorists and keep the world safe for another year or two, until the next generation of children are raised by vengeful mothers.

    Perhaps the Republicans can also vow to double or quadruple down on Obama drone strikes against terrorists, and expand lethal technology to kill people at a distance.

    And if we can just have enough can-do spirit, eventually all the muslims will surrender to our superiority and promise to stop hurting other people.

    Then we'll win, and all the burning will be worth it.

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  2. Don't underestimate the power of the modern "Swooniversity" to do damage to everything it gets a chance to deconstruct or destroy. When one creates graduates that require "trigger warnings," "safe rooms," et al one is creating people like Obama who are not up to the tasks of dealing with the challenges of the world. Obama is a symptom of the modern "Swooniversity" that sees everything through the prism of race, sex, oppression and is incapable of dealing with or finding solutions to the real problems facing any modern society. Thorough the prism of activism it make infants who can only see an "either or solution" to all problems.
    The sad part of this is that one cannot be an effective advocate if they are dead because they ignored the requisite to create the conditions to keep the country protected. Radicals/activists almost always create their own destruction as will the modern "Swooniversity." The academy has long given up education and intellectual pursuit to indoctrination and a fear of ideas.
    Harvard, et al created Obama not the other way around.

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  3. It's not about education; it's about hurt feelings. See this column by Peter Berkowitz:
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/09/01/colleges_big_fail_protecting_feelings_but_not_speech.html

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  4. "Russia has become increasingly powerful and menacing."

    Russia is facing hard times cuz of gas prices.

    This New Cold War stuff is a fantasy.

    Besides, Russia now stands for conservative values while US is totally sicko and decadent with its homomaniacal worship of lunacy and likes of Bruce 'Caitlyn' Jenner.

    As for the Middle East, it would be a lot more stable if the West hadn't aided the rebels in Syria and Libya.

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