RUTHFULLY YOURS

Linda Sarsour knows how to attract attention. She may be the most visible Islamist activist in the United States today, and her use of the word “jihad” during a speech to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) July 1 generated a predictable response from opponents, followed by an even more predictable wave of sympathetic media coverage.

The Huffington Post and Time magazine published op-eds defending Sarsour, who until recently directed the Arab American Association of New York, and accepting that she did not use to word to incite violence. The Washington Post went further, giving Sarsour her own op-ed to cast herself as “a target of the Islamophobia industry.”

It might be easier to give her the benefit of the doubt if she didn’t have such a deep history of hatred and extremism, especially against everyone who supports Israel’s right to exist. It also might help if she didn’t make a point of lauding radical Islamists and at least one terrorist.

In addition to mentioning jihad, Sarsour used her ISNA remarks to praise Imam Siraj Wahhaj as “my favorite person in this room,” calling him “a mentor, a motivator an encourager of mine. Someone who has taught me to speak truth to power and not worry about the consequences.”

Muslims shouldn’t become politically active because it is “the American thing to do,” Wahhaj said in 1991. Muslims who do get involved should “be very careful [to remember] that your leader is for Allah … You get involved in politics because politics can be a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”

In 1995, Wahhaj also described America as “a garbage can … filthy and sick.”

Does Sarsour agree with her mentor? She should say so publicly and with the same conviction that she uses to attack her critics.

Wahhaj was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the first World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. He defended Abdel-Rahman as a “respected scholar,” and a “bold, as a strong preacher of Islam.”

Years later, Wahhaj spoke at a fundraiser for Aafia Siddiqui, known as “Lady al-Qaida,” following her conviction on terrorism charges. “I studied the case a little bit,” he said in 2011. “I think that she innocent. And I think at least there is grounds, there’s reasonable doubt. And by law, if there’s reasonable doubt, you have to acquit.”

Celebrities, academics, and journalists have publicly threatened or imagined decapitating Donald Trump, blowing him up in the White House, shooting him, hanging him, clubbing him, and battering his face. They have compared him to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. And some have variously accused him of incestuous relations with his daughter and committing sex acts with Vladimir Putin, while engaging in some sort urination-sex in a hotel in Moscow.

Yet all this and more is often alleged to be the singular dividend of Trump’s own crudity, as if his own punching back at critics created the proverbial progressive “climate of fear” or “climate of hate” that prompted such uncharacteristic venom.

In truth we are back to 2004-2008, when the Left did to George W. Bush what it is now doing to Donald Trump.

Assassination? Alfred A. Knopf published Nicholson Baker’s novel,Checkpoint, about characters fantasizing how to kill Bush. A guest columnist in the Guardian, Charlie Brooker, wrote to his British readers on the eve of the election fearing that if Bush were reelected, there would be no assassin to shoot him: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.—where are you now that we need you?”

Do we remember filmmaker Gabriel Range’s “Death of a President,” the docudrama about Bush’s assassination that was a favorite at the Toronto Film Festival? Cindy Sheehan wrote she wished to go back into time to kill a younger Bush before he could be president.

Trump as Hitler or Mussolini is a Bush retread. Well before Trump, everyone got into the fascist/Nazi act, from Sens. Robert Byrd and John Glenn to celebrities like Linda Ronstadt and Garrison Keillor.

Hate? Jonathan’s Chait infamous New Republic article began: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”

Do we remember the delusions of Howard Dean, who foamed, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”?

Even decapitation chic is not new. After Bush left office, his detached head appeared on a stake in an episode of “Game of Thrones”; had they tried the same with Barack Obama, the hit show would have gone off the air.

Yet there is one difference. The Bush Administration, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, went high as progressives went low, and thus chose not to respond in kind. The result in part was that a battered Bush accordingly left office demonized, with a scant 34 percent approval rating.

The difference with Trump hatred is not some unique intensity or prior provocation, but rather Trump’s singular counter-punching. It may not be traditionally presidential, but the Trump mode is to nuke those who first attacked him, in an effort to create a sort of deterrence. CNN, to take one example, or Barack Obama to take another, at least knows that their smug, chic Trump putdowns will receive a reply in a manner that is neither smug nor chic. Trump in Samson fashion is quite willing to pull the temple down on top of himself, if it means his enemies perish first.

Daniel Bonevac is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/09/inside-chomsky-world/

Some 35 years ago I attended a party in honor of Noam Chomsky. A group of us stood around him, hearing his thoughts on the relevance of psychology to linguistic theory. Inevitably, conversation flagged—not least because he didn’t see much relevance in it—so I piped in. I had just seen an ad in Forbes featuring Chomsky, and I asked him how that had come about. What followed was an hour-long lecture on American Middle-East policy. The group dwindled as he went on. Soon I was the only one left listening. His account was multifaceted, intricate, and utterly brilliant. As far as I could tell, it touched on reality only lightly. But it was an intellectual tour de force of a sort.

That brings me to philosopher George Yancy’s interview with Chomsky the other day in the New York Times. To say that it touches on reality lightly would be far too kind.

So, why talk about it at all? Because some people are still listening. I have friends on the Left who think highly of this interview. They believe it captures something important. And I want to understand what they see in it. I’m interested in how people on the Left are thinking about our current political moment.

I used to understand liberals. We tended to share the same goals, though we might prioritize them differently. We disagreed about various empirical questions. But we could discuss them openly and rationally.

That rarely seems possible now. I no longer understand why many of my political opponents see the world as they do. Whatever they are, they aren’t liberals. I find it hard to find common ground. And that worries me.

Consider Yancy’s opening question: “Given our ‘post-truth’ political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump . . . .”

Stop right there. What “growing authoritarianism”? Let’s see, it’s been five months. Has Trump sent stormtroopers to assault members of other parties? Has he jailed thousands of Democrats, including their political leaders, for thought crimes? Has he cajoled the Congress to grant all legislative power to his cabinet? Did he burn down the Capitol and blame it on the Democrats? Has he opened concentration camps for his political opponents? Have his followers roamed campuses burning books? No? Within five months of seizing power Hitler had done all that.

What are these people talking about?

Apparently, Chomsky’s answer reveals, climate change, “a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life.” That’s right. Climate change—and the North Carolina legislature and Trump administration declining to act on it.

If this seems out of proportion to authoritarianism rhetoric, that’s because it is.

It’s also an article of quasi-religious faith rather than a rational conclusion. Yancy and Chomsky assume that science shows us that we face an existential threat. Neither is trained in environmental science. Has either read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—not the political summary, but the whole thing? Do they read scientific journals on the topic? Are they familiar with the arguments of critics such as Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke? Do they read blogs by critics such as Watts Up with That? Can they discuss the differences between satellite data sets? The differences between those, oceanic measurements, and surface records? Are they familiar with the variation among existing models? Can they explain why some ought to be preferred to others? If so, no sign of it here. The issue isn’t up for debate.

In the wee morning hours of July 5, a Bronx police officer, 48 year-old Miosotis Familia, was shot dead as she sat in her patrol car.

Familia was a 12-year veteran of the New York Police Department and the mother of three children. She was murdered by 34-year-old Alexander Bonds, a career criminal with a record for violence, including violence against police officers.

Officer Familia, judging from her name and photograph, is a dark complexioned Hispanic.

The scumbag who robbed her of her life is black.

This last point bears mentioning, for there is no way to divorce this cold-blooded, unprovoked assassination of one of New York’s Finest from the anti-police Zeitgeist to which forces on the left have given rise. It’s true, of course, that there has long existed in America, especially since the emergence of leftist “liberationist” movements in the 1960’s, hostility toward those entrusted with maintaining the thin blue line between civilization and savagery.

Yet it’s equally true that this hostility accelerated considerably during Barack Obama’s second term as President, particularly since the shooting death of Mike Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose in its wake.

Leftists are forever excusing non-white actors for their conduct, however atrocious it may be. It is to “the root causes,” the context of “social conditions” or “institutions,” that we must turn to account for why, say, blacks, though comprising no more than 13% or so of the American populace, are responsible for over half of all murders.

In other words, non-whites are never, ultimately, accountable for those of their behaviors that are undesirable and destructive (it is always and only their bad behavior from which nonwhites are exempted of responsibility). It is “society,” i.e. whites, who bear accountability for the bad deeds of nonwhites.

Never, though, do leftists look upon their own words and deeds as “root causes.” Indeed, while the search for “root causes” and the specific excuses that the left invokes are almost always fundamentally wrongheaded for more than one reason, to understand patterns of conduct larger contexts must be sought.

And the shooting death of a police officer by a black criminal does in fact belong to an all-too extensive—and established—pattern.

With June behind us, so is the first half of 2017, a year that seems to have just begun, yet which has brought so much news.

Mainstream media has assumed a Potemkin village-like stance – twisting news to corroborate a prescribed narrative. James Comey’s testimony before the Senate (see my TOTD “The Dystopian World of James Comey,” June 19, 2017) began as an investigation into alleged Russian interference in last year’s election, but then had to adjust, as Comey suggested that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch needed scrutinizing for persuading him to refer to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server as a “matter.” Muddying the waters further, it was disclosed that then President Obama tried to put a lid on probing Russian interference last fall, when it seemed probable that Mrs. Clinton would win the Presidency. In Georgia’s sixth district, Republican Karen Handel overcame a $30 million spending campaign by Democrat Jon Ossoff to keep Tom Price’s seat in Republican hands. DNC Chair Tom Perez blamed the loss on gerrymandering, while mainstream media took succor from the fact that Democrats narrowed the size of the loss; though they skipped over the inconvenient fact that Congressional wins in Georgia and South Carolina were by wider margins than that achieved by the President in November.

The Senate healthcare bill was released by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but a full vote in the Senate was delayed until after the July 4th recess. Unilateralism, as we saw in the previous Administration, encourages partisanship. In 2009, with 60 Democrat Senators, it took 18 months to pass the Affordable Care Act, and it was passed without a single Republican vote. The insufferable Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, said we would have to pass the bill to see what was in it. The American people would like the Party’s to work together, but the media knows that bad news (partisanship and bickering) sells better than good news (reconciliation and concessions). In the meantime, the Affordable Care Act is in trouble. An article in the June 9th The New York Times reported that by next year no insurance companies would be operating in 45 counties in the U.S., and that 1,388 counties will only have one plan. For left-leaning Democrats, the only option to a failing ObamaCare is a single-payer system – socialized medicine. For right-leaning Republicans, the only answer is repeal, and replace later. Neither is good. The best would be for the two Party’s to find a bipartisan path – seek common ground, fix what needs to be fixed, eliminate what’s wrong, work on tort reform and allow insurance companies to compete across state borders. But that is not what Party leaders want, nor is it what the media prefers.