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January 2018

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Is Arab Democracy Possible? In his new book, Realism and Democracy, Elliott Abrams holds out hope that the Islamists will lose the battle for the soul of the Arab world. By David Pryce-Jones

By on January 16th, 2018

Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared in the December 31, 2017, issue of National Review.

One day in December 2010, a policewoman in a small and rather humdrum town in Tunisia slapped the face of Mohamed Bouazizi. The dispute was over his permit to be selling fruit and vegetables off a barrow. The injustice that he encountered, and the humiliation, drove the poor man to take his life. Just as a butterfly fluttering its wings is supposed to cause a cascade of faraway atmospheric effects, this suicide set off a movement of protest and solidarity in one Arab country after another. The monarchies and republics in which Arabs live are, in reality, dictatorships, and the time had apparently arrived for them to reform and take their place in what was supposed to be an emerging worldwide democratic order.

What became known as the Arab Spring did not live up to these expectations; far from it. Since 2010, Arab countries have suffered civil war, coups, terrorism, invasion by foreign powers, genocide, the sale of women in slave markets, the ruin of historic cities and monuments, the death of civilians by the hundreds of thousands, and the flight of refugees in their millions. The rise of the Islamic State, self-described as a caliphate, redesigned the boundaries of Syria and Iraq, countries that may not be reconstituted for a very long time, if ever. Islamist volunteers in this misappropriated territory murdered, beheaded, crucified, or tortured to death, often in public, whomever they pleased. Libya, Yemen, and Lebanon are also states in varying stages of collapse. A whole civilization seems to be coming apart.

The proper human response to such calamity is that something ought to be done about it. Elliott Abrams takes it for granted in Realism and Democracy: Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring that the United States can and should come to the rescue. His career has given him authority to comment on matters of power politics. In the Reagan administration, he was assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs (1981–85) and assistant secretary for inter-American affairs (1985–89); he later served as President George W. Bush’s adviser for global democracy strategy (2005–09). His sympathies are very wide, his quotations from the academic literature are numerous and apt, and his prose is almost miraculously jargon-free.

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Trump to PC: “No More!” However crudely, the president explodes shibboleths. Myron Magnet

By on January 16th, 2018

Two op-eds in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal and one on this website brilliantly call attention to aspects of the vast political and cultural change, still in its early stages, that is gathering force in this country as inexorably as the spring thaw breaks up a frozen river, first as a trickle and then a torrent. Donald Trump figures in all three stories. He is at once a cause and an effect of the change—the Tea Party movement embodied and in power, and as much a rejection of the existing order of things as the mob that swarmed onto British ships in Boston Harbor 245 years ago and flung overboard their cargo of tea whose tax they refused to pay in a gesture of defiance that declared “No more!” And they meant it.

Peggy Noonan’s Journal column observes that after Trump there will never again be a “normal” president. Never again, that is, will we elect some apparatchik from the haughty, out-of-touch, overpaid political class that has given us generations of arbitrary rule by the Administrative State’s unelected “experts” too inept to see a financial hurricane brewing; that has allowed the Supreme Court to cram the ethical beliefs of the coastal elites down the throats of a gagging nation—so that nuns have to sue not to hand out birth control, as if freedom of conscience were not the first of our freedoms; that admits immigrants by the carload without a thought of whether they will help or harm America and Americans; that goes to war foolishly believing that toppling dictators will magically turn their tribal subjects into democratic republicans; and that lets the IRS tax as tyrannically as George III. No more!

In the same paper, Shelby Steele points out that the lesson we should draw from the National Football League protestors—whose kneeling at the National Anthem drew much-publicized jeers from Trump and drove fans away from the stadiums—is that the days of black protest are over, because past years of heroic protest succeeded in making black Americans truly free (as Gene Dattel’s Reckoning With Race argued recently). The campus snowflakes’ worries about microaggressions, the Black Lives Matter protests, the armies of deans of diversity are all obsolete. For all their vociferousness, they are lost in a vanished past, and we no longer have to listen to them. The problem now, Steele notes, is that too many blacks feel naked without their victimhood, feel ashamed that most of Chicago’s or Baltimore’s myriad murderers are black, and don’t know what to do with their freedom. Time to man up, make a worthwhile life, and stop whining. No more!

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The Democrats’ Dilemma: Immigration and the Welfare State By Spencer P. Morrison

By on January 16th, 2018

The Democrats used to be the party of the working class: they supported trade unions and believed in the welfare state. Their goal was to smoothe capitalism’s rougher edges, to humanize modern industrialism, and to give the common man a fair shake. One may find fault with their methods, but their stated goals were laudable and most of them were sincere in their beliefs.

Fast forward to 2018. The Democrats are the party of the elites. Their new mantra is “open trade and open borders,” as Hillary Clinton told Wall Street bankers in a private speech. Remember, it was the Democrats who supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” deal that would have gutted American industries. And it is Democrats who currently oppose President Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration, which hurts America’s poor.

The Democrats don’t care about American workers. They care about winning elections.

At this point, the chorus of “progressive” rhetoric reaches fever pitch: “but we need immigrants to support the welfare state,” they say—”we need immigrants to pay for our pensions and healthcare!” But saying it does not make it so.

In truth, immigration is destroying the welfare state, in America and throughout the West. Here’s how:

Mass immigration destroys the welfare state because immigrants receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. This is not true for every immigrant—some never collect government handouts—but it is true for the overall immigrant population. Studies from across the Western world prove this point.

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Friedrich Hayek’s Enduring Legacy By Roger Kimball

By on January 16th, 2018

In 1929, Benito Mussolini boasted, “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”

This is the first in a series of essays on the life and thought of Friedrich A. Hayek.

Of course, Mussolini was wrong about his historical priority, just as he was wrong about most other things. The palm for first promulgating that principle in all its modern awfulness must go to V. I. Lenin, who back in 1917 boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.”

What Lenin didn’t know about “restricting the freedom of the individual” wasn’t worth knowing.

Granted, things didn’t work out quite as Lenin hoped—or said that he hoped—since as the Soviet Union lumbered on there was less and less work and mostly worthless pay. (“They pretend to pay us,” one wag said, “and we pretend to work.”) Really, the only equality Lenin and his heirs achieved was an equality of misery and impoverishment for all but a shifting fraction of the nomenklatura. Trotsky got right to the practical nub of the matter, observing that when the state is the sole employer the old adage “he who does not work does not eat” is replaced by “he who does not obey does not eat.”

Nevertheless, a long line of Western intellectuals came, saw, and were conquered: how many bien-pensants writers, journalists, artists, and commentators swooned as did Lincoln Steffens: “I have been over into the future,” he said of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921, “and it works.” Jeremy Corbyn updated the sentiment when, in 2013, he said that Hugo Chavez “showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something Venezuela has made a big step towards.”

Yes, Jeremy, it has. And how do you like it? Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of egg-shells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”)

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GREAT BLOG FROM JERRY HONIGMAN

By on January 16th, 2018

geraldahonigman.com
From time to time, I will post thoughts and articles…Jerry

I am a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs, created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and have publicly debated many Arab and other anti-Israel spokesmen. My articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world.
As a doctoral student in the late ’70s, I had my academic career nipped in the bud because I believed in academic freedom (not to mention the fact that this was, after all, America). I naively expected that the same lenses of moral scrutiny–which were routinely used to critique and dissect Israel in the classroom–would be applied to the so-called “Arab”/Muslim World as well. As I learned the hard way, that was indeed far too much to expect. I asked too many of the wrong questions. I was the most advanced doctoral student in the program at Ohio State University at the time, was a T.A. (Teaching Assistant), and the department used me to secure additional funding.

Somewhat earlier, I had received my M.A. and was an advanced doctoral student at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of New York, Columbia, and Princeton Universities based at N.Y.U.’s Washington Square campus. A prolonged illness and financial matters led to an interruption in my studies, and I next found myself based in Columbus in a fulltime job. A professor subsequently heard one of my presentations and suggested that I resurrect my doctoral work at Ohio State. I reluctantly agreed to do this…and you’ll see why I had reservations shortly.

Unfortunately, Middle Eastern Studies was fast becoming the most politicized field in academia…even more so since my earlier years at the Kevorkian Center. Universities were receiving money and other support from Arab countries, their supporters, and the like.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Captain the Illiterate! by Mark Steyn

By on January 16th, 2018

The fallout from the presidential s***hole continues. On the one hand, Republican senator Lindsay Graham pushes back against Trump:

I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.

On the other hand, most of us don’t get to live in an “idea”, but in something rather less abstract called “reality”, which is for better or worse “defined by its people”:

Not far from where I’m writing this, the kosher butcher shop is long gone; across the street, the church that once stood tall is now boarded up.

But next to it stands a mosque newly built and freshly painted. English in the neighborhood is a foreign tongue and nobody knows Frank Sinatra.

The boys don’t play stickball. The girls in their veils don’t play hopscotch and all the cabs are driven by men from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Strangers are not greeted warmly.

That’s a snapshot of what troubles President Trump…not the mosque, but the culture shift.

The novelist Martin Amis once described me as “a great sayer of the unsayable”. Since then, a lot more has gotten unsayable. So saying it becomes a revolutionary act: That’s what Donald Trump did in June 2015 when he came down the escalator and started talking about Mexico “not sending us their best”. “S***hole countries” is going down better with his supporters than almost anything he’s said since. At this stage, there would be disappointment if it turned out he hadn’t said it; the lack of s**t would hit the fans, badly.

The soft totalitarianism of our time – as manifested by CNN, Lindsay Graham et al having the vapors over Trump – requires that ever more should go unsaid other than the self-flattering sentimentalism of the Official Lie. When you discuss immigration, you’re supposed to say, “Well, my Guatemalan pool-boy is the hardest-working fellow I know” – or start yakking about your Moldovan grandfather. That’s it, that’s all. The notion that it’s public policy, not a heartwarming Hallmark Channel movie of the week, and that those public-policy needs might have changed since the days of Tsarist pogroms, must never be allowed to take hold.

The great question is whether the romance of Senator Graham’s “idea’ is so seductive it will utterly overwhelm reality – as it has in the scene from Paris at top right. The City of Light is becoming, as an Irish Trump would say, the City of Sh*te.

~Some countries are full of s**t, other countries are full of shorts. From The Derby Telegraph:

Derby terrorist Munir Mohammed was strict Muslim who told his neighbour off for wearing shorts

The neighbor pushed back:

There is nothing wrong with shorts.

Mr Mohammed is “a Sudanese asylum seeker who arrived in the back of a lorry in February 2014”, having been misinformed as to the prevalence of shorts in the United Kingdom. Seeking an accomplice to help him blow up his adopted but short-ridden country, he went to the online dating website SingleMuslim.com and was instantly smitten by Rowaida el-Hassan:

He sent her gory videos of IS executions, including some carried out by children.

She asked him to “send more” and helped guide him to the right chemicals for his bomb.

That’s some serious sexual chemistry.

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Why Did President Trump Really Extend the Iran Nuclear Deal Again? His move is disappointing, but he may well withdraw from the deal when he has a new national-security team in place. By Fred Fleitz

By on January 16th, 2018

Like many conservative Iran watchers, I was disappointed with President Trump’s decision last week to extend the controversial July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) by waiving sanctions and giving Congress and European states a final chance to “fix” this agreement in 120 days. This decision was especially disappointing given the recent Iranian protests and that the president issued a similar ultimatum in October 2016.

However, there appear to be some undisclosed reasons for this decision that give me hope the president will kill this terrible agreement in the near future.

A Deeply Flawed and Dangerous Agreement

Critics of the JCPOA were hoping that President Trump would reimpose U.S. sanctions — which would essentially kill the Iran deal — because they believe he was exactly right when he said during the 2016 presidential campaign that the JCPOA is the worst deal ever negotiated.

To get this “legacy” nuclear agreement with Iran for President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other Obama-administration officials made any concession necessary to Tehran. This included allowing Iran to continue enriching uranium with over 5,000 centrifuges and to develop advanced centrifuges; to construct a plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor in Iran; to wipe clean a long list of unanswered questions about nuclear-weapons-related activity; and to agree to a deal with extremely weak verification provisions. There are credible reports of Iranian cheating on the agreement, including several accounts from German intelligence agencies.

It gets worse. The JCPOA lifted terrorism-related sanctions from Iranians and Iranian entities. Iran’s missile program — which is a nuclear-weapons-delivery system — was excluded from the deal because of a last-minute demand by Iran. Under a side deal, the United States secretly paid Iran $400 million in ransom to swap five innocent Americans imprisoned by Iran for the release by the U.S. of seven Iranian criminals and the removal of 14 other Iranians from an INTERPOL wanted list. According to a bombshell December 18, 2017, Politico story, “The Secret Backstory of How Obama Let Hezbollah off the Hook,” the Obama administration also blocked an investigation of drug trafficking by Hezbollah — Iran’s terrorist proxy — to secure the nuclear deal.

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President Nobama Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 16th, 2018

Donald Trump continues to baffle. Never Trump Republicans still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by its supposedly odious author. Or surely it soon will be discredited by the next Trumpian outrage. Or his successes belong to congressional and Cabinet members, while his failures are all his own. Rarely do they seriously reflect on what otherwise over the last year might have been the trajectory of a Clinton administration.

Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.) Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.

To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.

In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States.

Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change, entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative state.

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ELECTIONS ARE COMING: CHELSEA MANNING RUNNING FOR SENATE IN MARYLAND’S DEMOCRAT PRIMARY

By on January 16th, 2018

MARYLAND’S DEMOCRAT PRIMARY WILL BE HELD ON JUNE 28, 2018….BEN CARDIN IS STANDARD ISSUE LIBERAL SENATOR BUT THE BUZZ AROUND MANNING IS INCREDIBLE…..STAY TUNED! EVERY VOTE COUNTS….RSK

Transgender Chelsea Manning was convicted in a 2013 court martial of 20 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, for illegally leaking more than 700,000 classified government documents to WikiLeaks. Chelsea Manning, known as Private Bradley Manning at the time of the crime, received a 35-year sentence, right after which she came out as a transgender and demanded that the army pay for sex change hormone treatment. Former President Barack Obama went one step further. Obama gave Manning a free “get of jail” card just days before the end of his term in office, granting clemency to the felon of all but 4 months of her 35-year sentence. She was released from prison last May, after serving only 7 years. In his last press conference as president, Obama doubled down on his clemency decision, declaring that “I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.”

Freed only a few months, Chelsea Manning has just announced that she is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, challenging the two-term incumbent Senator Ben Cardin in the party’s primary. The fact that Manning is a convicted felon does not appear to preclude her from being eligible to run for the U.S. Senate. If Obama were a registered voter in Maryland, he probably would vote for her.

Progressives have been fawning all over Manning as a symbol of the liberated transgender and proud supporter of the antifata movement, who has latched on to virtually every leftist cause from open borders to free health care for everyone. She is a celebrity, gracing the cover of Vogue magazine in a bathing suit last September, under the headline “Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History.”

Samantha Allen wrote in a column appearing in Rolling Stone last December that Chelsea Manning’s emergence from prison “brought a ray of digital sunshine into a dreary world. Manning’s aesthetic brilliance and social media optimism were both backed up by genuine political convictions, like vocally supporting the J20 defendants – a group of protestors arrested on Inauguration Day – or condemning the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.”

Linda Sansour tweeted out her support for Chelsea Manning’s Senate candidacy: “If you are cool with Sheriff Arpaio running for Senate in Arizona but up in arms that Chelsea Manning is running in Maryland – you my friend are a HYPOCRITE. #GoChelsea”.

Perhaps as a foretaste of what lies ahead in Chelsea Manning’s Senate campaign, she tweeted the following hate-filled expletive against the police on January 9th, Law Enforcement Appreciation Day: “f..k the police.” That is the kind of language leftists who conducted or supported violent anti-police riots in Baltimore in 2015 will love to hear more of.

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The Terrorism Jobs Program: Pampering the Palestinians Must End Threatening Terror is Not a Way to Earn a Living by Nonie Darwish

By on January 16th, 2018

Palestinians need to start taking responsibility for their own existence and stop relying on the world to take care of them while they use the money freed up — by the international community — to launch jihad and intifadas.

No entity should forever be permitted to devote its resources to terror while the world is expected to owe them everything: financial support, jobs, citizenship, and even building the infrastructure that they keep destroying. The moral of the story is that if you do not want to lose wars, it would be better not to start them.

The longer financial aid and the pampering of Palestinians continue as an “insurance policy” ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the longer the suffering, dependence, terror and conflict will go on. It is time for Palestinians to learn that threatening terror is not a way to earn a living.

A British woman, Kay Wilson, apparently realized that when a Palestinian terrorist “plunged a knife into her chest”, left her for dead and then murdered her friend, it was British taxpayers who had paid for it.

“Is the UK funding the terrorists who tried to murder me?”, she asked.

Yes, it is. “According to data collected by Israel’s Defense Ministry, the PA spent a total of 1.237 billion shekels ($358 million), or about 7% of the PA’s total annual budget, on terrorist stipends last year.”

International payments to Palestinians that are used to pay terrorists in jail, as well as their families, serve both as a “reward for bad behavior” and also as a powerful incentive for youths to become terrorists.

They are a jobs program.

Some Palestinians are complaining that Arab countries are discriminating against them, and even going as far as calling themselves victims of “shameless Arab Apartheid” against Palestinians.

Such an accusation is unfair to many Arab countries, especially Egypt, which has sacrificed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to support the Islamic jihad against Israel.

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