RUTHFULLY YOURS

Libya is the new jihadist front on the Mediterranean — and just a few hours away from the centers of Europe.

Several security sources have confirmed that Belmokhtar is still alive and has moved, along with his troops, from Mali to a new base in the Libyan desert.

The leading jihadist commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar — also known as Khalid Abu Al-Abbas, and by his nickname “Al-A’war” (“the one-eyed”) — is hiding in Libya. From there, according to security sources quoted in media reports, he is planning to mastermind terrorist attacks against Westerners and their interests across Africa’s Sahel region.

Belmokhtar, born in Algeria in 1972, and an Algerian citizen, was a key member of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQIM]. After an internal power struggle, he decided in December 2012 to form a new group, known as the Signatories in Blood.

Jihadi commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

On January 16, 2013, armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, he led an attack against a Western-owned gas processing facility of In Amenas, Algeria. In the four-day siege of the complex, 39 hostages — including U.S. citizens Frederick Buttacio, Victor Lynn Lovelady, and Gordon Lee Rowan — were killed. After the assault, the U.S. State Department put a $5 million bounty on Belmokhtar.

As a former Algerian soldier with experience from training camps in Afghanistan, and as a member of the Armed Islamic Group [GIA] in Algeria, he rose quickly to the high rank of “emir” (commander). Later, he was one of the co-founders of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which evolved into AQIM.

One year after the bombs went off at the Boston marathon, Brandeis authorities were so intent on avoiding the issues those bombs had raised, that they would rather point the finger at a critic of the radical ideology than do anything to criticize the ideology.

Is not the Palestinian leadership a viable negotiating partner with whom peace is just about to be achieved? How do you protest if the protesters are Muslims? Who are the victims and who are the victimizers? After all, “victims” cannot victimize, can they?

When we see a global bigotry and hatred such as this, we should identify it as such and demand, in the name of all that is decent, that it stop.

The great Western disease of today — there could be quite a competition for that one — is probably denial. Denial now runs right through the Western way of looking at the world. It is just unfortunate for us that it does not run through the rest of the world in the same way.

Take three recent examples, one in America, one in Britain and one absolutely everywhere.

One year ago, two young male immigrants to America — to whom America had given absolutely everything — repaid the favor by planting bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Their victims included an eight year old boy. This atrocity was carried out because the young men had absorbed the grievance culture and violent radicalism of a form of Islam, a strain of thinking that has not gone wholly undocumented in recent years.

Yet from the moment the bombs went off, most of the media tried as hard as possible to avoid the subject. After the whiny early stages (“Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” as Salon so beautifully put it) there followed the obfuscation. Had the bomber of the Boston Marathon been someone who, say, had once attended a Tea Party rally, every columnist, and wider society, would be asking how such an atrocious ideology could come up from its wake. Intense scrutiny and introspection would be the order of the day.

Why the American spirit of innovation is in trouble, and what culture has to do with it.
Some years ago, I conducted an ambitious research project to document and explain patterns of human accomplishment across time and cultures. My research took me from 800 BCE, when Homo sapiens’ first great surviving works of thought appeared, to 1950, my cut-off date for assessing lasting influence. I assembled world-wide inventories of achievements in physics, biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and technology, plus separate inventories of Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophy; Western, Chinese, and Japanese art; Western, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese literature; and Western music. These inventories were analyzed using quantitative techniques alongside standard qualitative historical analysis. The result was Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences (2003).

My study confirmed important patterns. Foremost among them is that human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs.

In what follows, I want to conduct an inquiry into the ways in which the environment of achievement in early 21st-century America corresponds or fails to correspond to the patterns of the past. As against pivotal moments in the story of human accomplishment, does today’s America, for instance, look more like Britain blooming at the end of the 18th century or like France fading at the end of the 19th century? If the latter, are there idiosyncratic features of the American situation that can override what seem to be longer-run tendencies?

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

The Jerusalem question: Will a U.S. court case trigger WWIII? If the U.S. decides to list ‘Israel’ as the country of birth of an American born in Jerusalem, the consequences are potentially huge.

The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court Monday to give another hearing to one of the most explosive cases before it in years – the so-called Jerusalem question – certainly sets the stage for some high court drama in the Middle East. It concerns whether Secretary of State John Kerry will have to bow to Congress and state in Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky’s U.S. passport that he was born in Israel.

The law that requires Kerry to do this – for Zivotofsky, or any other American born in Jerusalem who wants Israel listed as his place of birth – was passed in 2002 by an almost unanimous House and a unanimous Senate. The Jerusalem requirement was part of a larger bill funding the State Department. It was signed by one of America’s most pro-Israel presidents, George W. Bush. But Bush issued a signing statement saying the requirement to issue consular documents listing Jerusalem as part of Israel infringed on his executive powers.

He may have promised to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, but he defaulted on that. He also refused to yield to Congress on the passport question. President Barack Obama took the same position, as did secretaries of state Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton and now Kerry. Clinton and Kerry balked, even though they’d been in the Senate that passed the law unanimously. They all tried to dodge it by saying that the question of Jerusalem was the president’s to decide and, in any event, was a political matter beyond the ken of the courts.

All the liberal commentators and the anti-Israel left were certain Master Zivotofsky was going to lose. And he was losing, until it reached the Supreme Court the first time. Then, in March 2012, the Supreme Court stunned the foreign policy bar by casting aside Secretary of State Clinton’s pettifogging. It did so by a vote of 8-1, in a stern opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who told the lower court in no uncertain terms that it would have to step up and decide the matter.

Roberts made clear that the courts weren’t being asked to decide whether Jerusalem was part of Israel. That is a political question. They were being asked to decide whether Congress has the authority, under the Constitution, to decide the political question. “This is what courts do,” Roberts wrote. “The political question doctrine poses no bar to judicial review of this case.” So, the matter went back to the second most powerful bench: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.