RUTHFULLY YOURS

Boko Haram’s members justify their acts in the name of Islam, and Muslim leaders are intimidated into silence. Add to this a hatred for the West and its values, and you have an explosive combination of violence and faith being pushed upon innocent civilians.

Inaction on the part of both Nigeria’s government and global powers has led to this latest horrific act of abduction.

Muslims globally cannot remain under the illusion that because they put out press releases or say that Boko Haram is “not Muslim,” they can distance themselves from these crimes. If they do not openly condemn Boko Haram and similar groups such as the Taliban or the Muslim Brotherhood, they are by default supporting those causes.

Recently, on a radio panel about Islamic sharia law featuring two academics from American universities — a Muslim Professor of Islamic Studies and a Christian professor of Religious Studies — it was frustrating trying to keep the conversation on track.

Both professors were preoccupied with “The Golden Age of Islam” and “How Christianity went through a similar crises” and other similarly irrelevant information. The real focus should have been: “What is happening in the name of Islam today and what do we do about the atrocities being perpetrated in the name of sharia as we speak?”

Unfortunately, that question was consistently being buried. For many Muslims and especially Muslim organizations, a discussion about Islam and Muslims usually ends up in defense and deflection. Rarely does the conversation focus on half the population: women. That is the crux of the problem. If women are considered only half-human, why dwell on their human rights?

It is our moral and ethical responsibility, as Muslims, to discuss and debate these issues – even though they may be considered “our dirty laundry.”

The President skipped a few world events in his big foreign policy speech.

The speech President Obama delivered Wednesday at West Point was intended to be a robust defense of his foreign policy, about which even our liberal friends are starting to entertain doubts. But as we listened to the President chart his course between the false-choice alternatives of “American isolationism” and “invading every country that harbors terrorist networks,” we got to thinking of everything that wasn’t in his speech.

No mention of the Reset. “The reset button has worked,” Mr. Obama avowed in a 2009 meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s figurehead president. That was the same year Mr. Obama announced in Moscow that, “The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over.”

No mention of the Pivot or “rebalance” to Asia. This was billed by Hillary Clinton in 2011 as “among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time” and meant as proof that America’s withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t simply a retreat from the world. But as assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland admitted in March, following the latest round of Pentagon cuts, “Right now, the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly it can’t happen.”

No mention of Mr. Obama’s Red Line in Syria against the use of chemical weapons. No mention, either, of the ostensible success of using diplomacy to disarm Bashar Assad. The President was fond of boasting of this achievement until recently, when it emerged that Assad continues to use chlorine bombs to kill his enemies. Somehow that also didn’t make it into the speech.

No mention of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which occupied the bulk of John Kerry’s first year as Secretary of State and which has now collapsed as Mahmoud Abbas patches up his differences with the terrorists of Hamas.

Exactly one century ago, the renowned British writer G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), called by his admirers the greatest writer and thinker of the twentieth century, published a curious novel titled The Flying Inn. On the cusp of World War I, he imagined the Ottoman Empire conquering Great Britain and imposing Shari’a law.

Chesterton rides this implausible scenario as a vehicle to ridicule progressivism – that same arrogant, “scientific,” top-down, and leftist approach to government that characterizes the age of Obama. “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes” Chesterton rightly explained, and The Flying Inn mordantly exposes their failings. Along the way, his vision of an Islamized sceptered isle has arresting features deserving celebration on its centenary.

Chesterton tells of a war in which “the greatest of the Turkish warriors, the terrifying Oman Pasha, equally famous for his courage in war and his cruelty in peace” wins a famous victory over British forces, leading to the occupation of England, to Turks taking over the constabulary, and the growing influence of an “eminent Turkish mystic,” one Misysra Ammon, who argues for such Islamic customs as not eating pork, prohibiting representative images, taking one’s shoes off at the front door, and practicing polygyny.

But the most prominent Islamic custom, and the one around which The Flying Inn revolves, is Oman Pasha’s decree for the destruction of vineyards and the banishment of alcohol. Lord Philip Ivywood, an eager, progressive dhimmi adept of Ammon, passed in 1909 a prohibition of alcohol which allowed only minor exceptions: buildings with inn signs outside them (pending their universal disappearance) and two famous watering holes for (of course) members of parliament, Claridge’s Hotel and the Criterion Bar. Otherwise, pubs served lemonade, tea and other of what Chesterton dubs “Saracen drinks.”Taking advantage of the former loophole, a valiant Irish sailor and an English publican roll through the countryside carrying with them the sign of “The Old Ship” pub, a giant keg of rum, and a great drum of cheddar cheese. Their bacchanalian exploits, and Lord Ivywood’s growing fury, make up the bulk of this fantasy novel, culminating in an English revolt against Ivywood, against Londonistan, against the fez-wearing Turkish police force, and their teetotaler ways. Hating “the fact of being crushed by the weapons of men brown and yellow … had made the English what they had not been for centuries.” Their heroic insurgency leaves Oman Pasha dead “with his face toward Mecca” and pubs reopening.

Terrorists terrorize because they take an authentically great delight in meting out executions to “others.”
Investigators recreate the Hezbollah Bulgaria bus bombing last July which targeted Israeli tourists
Photo by: REUTERS

“I learn a science from the soul’s aggressions.”- Saint-John Perse

In an age that correctly celebrates science as the very best method of reaching conclusions – and such a method is plainly what science represents – deeper human meanings are sometimes lost. Our most acclaimed academic studies of terrorism, for example, appropriately scientific, are refined and dispassionate. Increasingly, such scientific studies subordinate all immeasurable and intangible issues to more handily verifiable “data.”

Generally, this subordination is as it should be. Still, there are corollary costs. Above all, they include the lamentable disappearance of more palpably personal kinds of understanding. Left unexcluded, these kinds of understanding could have had very pertinent government policy implications.

Sigmund Freud, who often wrote about the “soul” (Seele, in German) urged that psychological analysis never neglect private feelings. To be sure, nowhere in his writings does he offer any actual definition of “soul.” But this absence was not merely an omission by oversight. Rather, Freud saw in his core term’s imprecision a certain referential richness, an illuminating mirror image of the “soul’s” own inexactitude. Ironically, to have granted the term any more of a precise definition would have been to rob it of its most significant value.

More than anything else, Freud had wanted the architecture of psychoanalysis to be constructed upon the “odor of humanity.” This expressly humanistic or “unscientific” view can now be applied productively to present-day investigations of terror-violence.

Having outdone the major opposition party—UMP—and trounced the governing Socialists in last week’s European elections, Marine Le Pen went off to Brussels today, looking for allies. If she can form a block of at least 25 deputies representing seven different countries, she will drastically improve her chances to influence EU policy while sharing in the perks: funding, chauffeur-driven cars, offices, legislative privileges, etc. The Front National itself has 24 Eurodeputies; the problem is finding the 7 nations. More or less assured of her alliance with Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, the Austrian FPO, Belgium’s Vlams Blang, she is hard put to find the missing allies. Both UKIP and the Danish People’s Party have ruled out any alliance with the FN. On the other hand, Marine Le Pen can’t risk alliances with blatantly anti-Semitic antidemocratic parties like Golden Dawn, Jobbik, and other minor parties of similar persuasion.

What do committed and potential allies know about the Front National? Apparently not much. Marine Le Pen has pursued a forceful normalization strategy to rid the Front National of the sleazy image shaped by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen and upheld by party leaders and rank & file over the past 40 years since its founding. For some mysterious reason this window dressing has been respected by French media and gone unnoticed, with rare exceptions, in international media.

One of these exceptions, Gatestone Institute, links to Marine Le Pen’s foreign January 22nd foreign policy press conference, where she presents a superficially reasonable foreign policy and a seemingly brilliant advisor, Aymeric Chauprade, political scientist, author, professor, advisor, world traveler, and more. You don’t have to understand French to see how professional it looks. But you have to listen very carefully to Mme. Le Pen’s presentation to recognize the underlying values, affinities, logic, passion, and motives. (summarized in the Gatestone article http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4160/marine-le-pen-chauprade)

Does it have anything to do with the anti-jihad hopes pinned on the Front Natinal by well-informed thinkers with no hateful undertones? Does it have anything remotely concerned with the hopes of Europeans for relief from Eurabian oppression?

In April 1904 Scottish geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. His paper, The Geographical Pivot of History, caused a sensation and marked the birth of geopolitics as an autonomous discipline. According to Mackinder, control over the Eurasian “World-Island” is the key to global hegemony. At its core is the “pivot area,” the Heartland, which extends from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. “My concern is with the general physical control, rather than the causes of universal history,” Mackinder declared.
Fourteen years later, at the end of the Great War, profoundly concerned with what he saw as the need for an effective barrier of nations between Germany and Russia, Mackinder summarized his theory as follows:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island controls the world.
This dictum helps explain the essence of the Ukrainian crisis, as well as the motivation behind the continuing ambition of some U.S. policymakers to expand NATO eastwards.

The model has undergone several modifications since Mackinder. In his 1942 book America’s Strategy in World Politics, Nicholas Spykman sought to “develop a grand strategy for both war and peace based on the implications of its geographic location in the world.” In the nineteenth century, he wrote, Russian pressure from the “heartland” was countered by British naval power in the “great game,” and it was America’s destiny to take over that role once the Second World War was over. Six months before the Battle of Stalingrad he wrote that a “Russian state from the Urals to the North Sea can be no great improvement over a German state from the North Sea to the Urals.” For Spykman the key region of world politics was the coastal region bordering the “Heartland” which he called the “rimland.” He changed Mackinder’s formula accordingly: “Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Spykman died in 1943, but his ideas were reflected four years later in Harry Truman’s strategy of containment. Holding on to the rimland, from Norway across central Europe to Greece and Turkey, was the mainstay of America’s Cold War strategy and the rationale behind the creation of NATO in 1949. Containment swiftly turned into a massive rollback, however, as soon as the Soviet Union disintegrated. In 1996 Bill Clinton violated clear commitment against NATO’s expansion made by his predecessor, and the Alliance reached Russia’s Czarist borders. In 2004 it expanded almost to the suburbs of St. Petersburg, with the inclusion of the three Baltic republics. All along Ukraine had remained the glittering prize, however, the key to limiting Russia’s access to the Black Sea, and a potential geostrategic knife in southern Russia’s soft underbelly.

Amazingly, the last biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky in English appeared close to 20 years ago: “Lone Wolf,” a two-volume doorstop by Shmuel Katz (1996), which at almost 2,000 pages, deserves its reputation as “compendious.”

Now, in this new biography, Hillel Halkin has done the impossible. He has gracefully condensed the story of this complex tragic figure into a page-turner that is at once concise and a rattling good read.

Jabotinsky, known principally as Zionism’s most polarizing and bellicose crusader, was also a cultured, indeed aristocratic, polymath — multilingual, a prolific journalist, lawyer, translator of Poe and Dante, playwright, poet, and author. (His 1926 novel “Samson the Nazarite” was later made into a Cecil B. DeMille movie with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature.) That he may also have been a lover of women seems probable, given his early bohemian life in Rome and elsewhere, and his lifetime of traveling so much without his wife. Not that he embodied le beau ideal; indeed, though a fastidious dresser, he was small and rather “froggy” around the eyes, in Halkin’s words.

How a protean genius of Jabotinsky’s talents and superhuman energy arises among “normal” people is always a mystery, but Halkin suggests that the place of his childhood — Odessa, “carefree, contented Odessa,” Jabotinsky called it — may provide some clues. Born there in 1880, he left for the bohemian life abroad when he was only 17, and “said a last goodbye to it before World War I,” but “a part of him always remained there,” the intoxicating, cosmopolitan city where he studied, worked as a young journalist, and played the rascal as a boy.

Odessa, Halkin writes, was the only large Russian city from which Jews were not barred. A city with no established Jewish institutions, the thousands of Jews who flocked there were thus “less traditional and less subject to rabbinical influence” than other Jewish communities. A sophisticated, international city, Odessa’s lingua franca was for a time Italian before yielding to Russian. It was in Russian that Jabotinsky was raised, and his widowed mother kept a minimally observant home, perhaps engendering his lifelong laxity in Jewish ritual and his dedicated secularism.