RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today is the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s first big amnesty edict, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). So far more than half a million illegal immigrants claiming to have arrived here before age 16 have been legalized by the president’s unilateral riff on the Dream Act.

Contrary to the story line put forth by activists, and repeated uncritically by most of the media, the DACA decree was not a matter of simply delaying deportations of illegal aliens judged to be low-priority — the administration did that early on by formally exempting the vast majority of the illegal population from the workings of immigration law through a series of internal memos. Those directives, called the Morton Memos, after the then-director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, represent a nullification of existing immigration law, but not an affirmative grant of status.

DACA, on the other hand, confers work permits, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, documents allowing foreign travel, eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and affirmative-action preferences, and more. It’s an actual amnesty, “green-card lite,” if you will. (Even Obama’s most slavish acolytes don’t claim he can confer green-card premium.)

Nor is there anything genuinely temporary about it; the limited period merely requires a pro forma renewal every two years, something that is already underway. Despite the recent House vote to defund expansion of DACA (including renewals), DACA has created facts on the ground, and beneficiaries will never be illegal aliens again — bank on it.

For some weeks now, the White House has been leaking that it plans to use this same end run around the Constitution, but this time to amnesty millions, all of whom came as adults and knew perfectly well what they were doing. The response to such a subversion of the constitutional order was swift: warnings of caesarism, “a leap into the antidemocratic dark” through an act that “has basically nothing to do with our system of government.” Even independent liberals are warning of the dangerous precedent an amnesty decree would set, not to mention the electoral disaster Democrats would reap in November.

Calls to reconquer al-Andalus are becoming more frequent and more strident.

“Clearly Spain forms part of the strategic objectives of global jihad. We are not the only ones but we are in their sights.” — Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz.

Radical Muslims in Spain have launched a social media campaign aimed at generating support for the jihadist group Islamic State [IS].

The campaign involves posters that include images of famous Spanish landmarks and monuments emblazoned with Arabic slogans such as, “We are all the Islamic State” and “Long Live the Islamic State.”

One poster includes an image of the medieval Islamic Aljafería Palace in the Spanish city of Zaragoza and the black flag associated with the IS. Another uses an image of the famous La Concha beach in the Basque city of San Sebastián. Yet another includes an image of the statue of Jesus Christ on Monte Urgull in San Sebastián, with the Arabic words “Al-Andalus Country” instead of “Basque Country.”

A tweeted photo of an Islamic State supporter holding the IS black flag of jihad in front of Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza.
Al-Andalus is the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France that were occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. As the Basque Country is surrounded by mountains, however, the Moors never succeeded in occupying it.

The poster campaign comes after IS jihadists produced a video in which they vow to liberate al-Andalus from non-Muslims and make it part of their new Islamic Caliphate.

The video shows a jihadist speaking in Spanish with a heavy North African accent. He says:

“I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.”

In this exclusive exit interview with Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield, the outgoing chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, talks about metastasizing Islamic terrorism, his struggles to reform intelligence-gathering, and the risk of lurching from crisis to crisis in an Internet-accelerated world. – the editors.

“Disruptive.” That’s how Michael Flynn’s enemies reportedly described him during his time as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a tenure that ends tomorrow – a year early – when the three-star general retires after 33 years in the US Army. Was Flynn forced out? The Pentagon said his departure had been “planned for some time” when it made the announcement in April. But Flynn had challenged the Obama administration narrative that al-Qaeda’s brand of nihilistic extremism had died with Osama bin Laden in 2011. He had bruised egos at the DIA trying to transform the 17,000-person bureaucracy into a more agile and forward-deployed intel operation, one shaped by the lessons he had learned as intelligence chief for Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, working for the ill-fated iconoclast Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As early as 2010, Flynn made waves with a report, Fixing Intel, that said US intelligence could not answer “fundamental questions” in Afghanistan.

James Kitfield: DIA is tracking global crises from Ukraine to the Mideast to North Korea and the Western Pacific. Have you ever seen so many crises occurring simultaneously?

Flynn: No. I come into this office every morning, and other than a short jog to clear my head, I spend two to three hours reading intelligence reports. I will frankly tell you that what I see each day is the most uncertain, chaotic and confused international environment that I’ve witnessed in my entire career. There were probably more dangerous times such as when the Nazis and [Japanese] Imperialists were trying to dominate the world, but we’re in another very dangerous era. We rightfully talk about the last decade being the longest war in American history, for instance, but when we pull combat troops out of Afghanistan at the end of this year, it’s not going to feel like that war is over. To me, it feels like we’ll be facing a familiar threat and heightened uncertainty for a long time yet.

A sensitively written op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff, in Sunday’s New York Times, had the title: Is a hard life inherited? Mr. Kristoff relates the story of a childhood friend who has had a hard life. His mother died after choking on a bit of bacon. His father left home. This all happened when he was five. With his three siblings, he was raised by a grandmother, growing up in a “ramshackle home in a mire of disadvantage.” Despite having a “first-class” mind, he was suspended for truancy in the 8th grade, drifted through life in a haze of alcohol and drugs, while fathering two illegitimate children.

Mr. Kristoff’s point is that events beyond his friend’s control determined the man he became, and that there are steps society can take to help prevent such personal tragedies. He writes that a good teacher or mentor would have made a difference. Mr. Kristoff rues the loss of union jobs that might have created incentives for prudent behavior. He cites a higher minimum wage and a better education as steps that could be taken, but the starting point, he claims, must be empathy.

Empathy is indeed an endearing quality, but I suspect the problem has as much to do with shifting attitudes of behavior. As a society, we have embraced moral relativism. We have become more permissive. We have become hedonistic. Despite the proliferation of birth control and the general acceptance of abortion, the number of children born out of wedlock has soared. In 1965, less than 10% of all births were to women out of wedlock. Today it is 41%, and the numbers continue to rise. In 1965, the percentage of White children and Black children born to unmarried women were, respectively, 3.1% and 24%. Today, those numbers are 18% and 72%. “Shotgun” weddings have gone the way of the Dodo Bird. Granted, about 58% of single-mother births are to cohabitating couples, many of whom will marry. Nevertheless, a moral sense has been lost.

While Mr. Kristoff’s childhood friend may have suffered from problems impossible to readily treat, the issue Mr. Kristoff raises is one of priorities. He suggests empathy as the first line of defense, an important component, but not sufficient, in my opinion, to address the problem. Keep in mind, changes in the way we live have caused us to become disconnected from our community, as Robert Putnam detailed in his book, Bowling Alone. Suburbs are less personal in nature than villages. More women work than ever before – and both men and women work longer hours – leaving less time to volunteer. In cities, fund raising extravaganzas have replaced the more democratic concept of volunteering one’s time. In national political campaigns, raising money via $30,000-a-plate-dinners – afforded only by the few – has replaced grassroots efforts of door-to-door solicitations. We give of our money, but not of our time. The contagion of computers and hand-held devices has distracted us from the time necessary to participate in our children’s schools. We have become more self-absorbed. We have turned over most of the care for the indigent to public officials, blindfolding the rest of us to our communities’ needs.

During the Libyan War, Obama declared from Martha’s Vineyard that, “Tonight, the momentum against the Gaddafi regime has reached a tipping point.”

Then he went to play golf and accompanied Valerie Jarrett on a visit to the home of the CEO of Comcast.

It was August and the Libyan War had been going on for months. NATO planes were conducting hundreds of sorties. But their commander was on vacation.

That was only fitting since Obama had begun the Libyan War while hanging out in sunnier climes.

His ponderous announcement, “Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya” may have had an American flag in the background as stage dressing, but it was actually delivered from a Brazilian convention center.

Obama’s war announcement was made on the first day of his Latin American trip as if he had either made the decision to bomb Libya at the very last minute or he didn’t care enough to postpone a foreign trip for a day to be able to make the announcement from the White House.

The Egyptian military seemed to have picked up on Obama’s priorities when it decided crack down on his Muslim Brotherhood allies while the great man was vacationing in August at Martha’s Vineyard.

Obama had headed off on his vacation even though Egypt was burning. As the New York Times put it, “Mr. Obama was briefed on the situation by his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice. But he appeared determined not to allow events in Egypt to interrupt a day that, besides golf, included cocktails at the home of a major political donor, Brian Roberts.”

Brian Roberts is the aforementioned CEO of Comcast. By the time Obama could tear himself away from golf and his Comcast sugar daddy, hundreds were dead and it was all over but the shouting.

This August, Obama at least had the good grace to announce belated air strikes against ISIS from Washington D.C. before flying off to Martha’s Vineyard for yet another vacation.

The Yazidi in Iraq and the Christian Copts in Egypt are not “occupiers” or “settlers;” neither are the Jews in Israel. They are both victims of a common enemy that seems to want a Middle East free of non-Muslims.

The current Palestinian narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false. There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.

There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to “protect” them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922. The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.

Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities. As Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:

“The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them. The Jewish communities in many cities under Muslim Rule was ruined for such demands. This custom of legalized financial abuses and extortion shattered the indigenous pre-Arab populations almost totally eliminating what remained of its peasantry… In 1849 the Jews of Tiberias envisaged exile because of the brutality, exactions, and injustice of the Muslim authorities. In addition to ordinary taxes, an Arab Sheik that ruled Hebron demanded that Jews pay an extra five thousand piastres annually for the protections of their lives and property. The Sheik threatened to attack and expel them from Hebron if it was not paid.”

The Muslim rulers not only kept the number of Jews low through discriminatory taxes, they also increased the Muslim population by providing incentives for Muslim colonists to settle in the area. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service.

When all you seek is calm, while your adversary is committed to your total annihilation, what is a reasonable compromise? That he only annihilate half of you?

Two people wearing Israeli flags are told to leave by a protest organizer during a pro-Palestinian demonstration against Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip Photo: REUTERS
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
– Ancient proverb, misattributed to Euripides

Q: What is the difference between the State of Israel and a lunatic asylum?
A: In a lunatic asylum, the management is supposed to be sane.
– Popular joke

Any alien visitor from outer space, dispassionately observing events in the country, could well be excused for concluding – completely erroneously, of course – that successive governments, and particularly the current one, are not really concerned with the long-term survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Indeed, it would be entirely understandable if our extraterrestrial traveler reached a seemingly far more plausible – but, of course, equally erroneous – conclusion that instead, they are far more focused on delaying its collapse long enough so that they do not have to bear the blame for that collapse.

‘Like a rudderless ship…’

As mistaken as our naive alien might be as to the true motivations of our esteemed elected leadership, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile their actions, decisions and particularly their proposals for policy with prudent, provident regard for the future of the nation.

In past columns, I issued two severe indictments of this government’s policy.

In “The ruinous results of restraint” (July 10), I warned: “By adhering to a policy of avoiding confrontations which Israel can win, the government risks leading it into one in which it might lose”; and urged: “It is time for a bold new offensive – before we are overtaken by events.”

In “Like a rudderless ship in a stormy sea” (July 17), I remarked reproachfully that just as Hamas willfully exposes its citizens to deadly dangers in order to defend it against Israeli military attacks, so the Israeli government knowingly exposes its citizens to severe danger in order to prevent diplomatic attacks from the international community.”

Both these grim prognoses are being fulfilled with alarming accuracy and alacrity.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece of August 6 about “the surge of poisonous anti-Semitism around the world, particularly in Europe,” Andrew Nagorski had the temerity to note that “the president [Obama] has not prominently addressed the subject of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, much less its pervasiveness in the Muslim world.” This is, of course, an understatement.

Let us have a history lesson. President Obama’s first presidential grand tour of Europe took place in spring of 2009, shortly after Muslims had been expressing outrage over Israeli actions (in Gaza in January) by staging violent pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the continent. Mobs of Brotherhood members and their leftist sympathizers had intimidated policemen in London and Malmo, smashed up the Place de’Opera in Paris, burned Israeli and American flags.

Nowhere in Europe was this more blatant than in Turkey, chosen by Obama for the culmination of his European tour, in part because Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his “favorite European politician,” to whom he is reportedly “closer” than to any other world leader. In the months prior to that April 6-7 visit five years ago, Turkey had been the scene of the fiercest anti-Semitic agitation in Europe, extending from streets to schools, newspapers, and TV–for the very good reason that it was encouraged by Obama’s friend Erdogan, who declared that “Israelis know very well how to kill” and that “Jews control the media.” But nary a word of this unpleasantness crept into Obama’s speeches to Turkish parliamentarians and students. Rather they were full of his usual calls for “respect” for Islam and assurances that America is not and “never will be” at war with Islam. (How quaint, dangerously so, this now sounds when leaders of the ISIS/ Islamic State juggernaut declare several times a day that “We will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”)

The resurgence of anti-Semitism, “particularly in Europe,” is hardly a new subject. In fact, If we extend our history lesson by six more years to 2003, we find that another American president, named George W. Bush, directly addressed it in a speech at London’s Whitehall Palace on November 19 of that year. He not only warned of the return of anti-Semitism; he scolded European leaders for averting their eyes from it. “Leaders in Europe should withdraw all favor and support from any Palestinian ruler who fails his people and betrays their cause. And Europe’s leaders — and all leaders — should strongly oppose anti-Semitism, which poisons public debates over the future of the Middle East.” (When I had the opportunity, at a White House reception, to thank Mr. Bush in person for these remarks, he replied that “it’s much worse there than you can imagine.”)

In the years following the close of the Revolutionary War, the United States and Great Britain found little agreement on issues of national importance. There were ongoing disputes over trade, attacks on commercial shipping on the high seas… in which captured American seamen were forced to serve in the Royal Navy… as well as the provocation of American Indian tribes. As a result, the U.S. Congress approved a declaration of war against Great Britain in June 1812.

On August 24, 1814, British troops occupied Washington, DC, setting fire to the White House, the U.S. Capitol Building, and a number of other government buildings, and in September 1814 British forces in Canada invaded and occupied eastern Maine, along with portions of Michigan and Wisconsin.

With the exception of the shelling of an Ellwood, California oilfield by a Japanese submarine on February 23, 1942, the War of 1812 was the only instance in American history when forces of a foreign nation brought armed conflict to American soil… that is, until now.

Now, in the summer of 2014, in response to the open borders policies of Barack Obama, and in the face of the most horrific genocide taking place in Iraq… the kind of genocide we have not seen on this Earth since the Nazi holocaust of the 1930s and ‘40s, if then… we have no choice but to finally face reality.

The American people find their country invaded by hordes of minor children, drug dealers, and gang members from Mexico and Central America, and a host of troublemakers from Africa and the Middle East. Instead of importing the best and the brightest from the rest of the world, American leftists find it politically expedient to import the poorest and the most uneducated who will come to understand, as they enjoy the generosity of the American taxpayer, that liberals and Democrats are their principal benefactors. It is the most shameless and the most cynical political stratagem imaginable.

When all those impoverished indigents become registered voters, whether legally or illegally, and Arizona and Texas join the ranks of the blue states, Democrats will control 315 electoral votes, 45 more votes than are necessary to elect a president and a vice president. In that event, the United States of America, as we’ve known it, will cease to exist. No longer will we be the beacon of hope for all freedom-loving people; the “shining city on a hill” will be no more.