Category Archives: War on Terror
Name that Enemy
Eli Lake thinks he knows why President Obama won’t name the enemy. In a Bloomberg column Lake says it’s because many of our allies in the Muslim world share the same beliefs but not the violent tactics of Islamic radicals. He cites a 2013 Pew Survey that says 74 percent of Egyptian Muslims favor Sharia law for Muslims and infidels alike.
Three-quarters of Pakistani Muslims support laws banning blasphemy. A majority of Muslim Iraqis said they supported “honor killings” of women who engage in premarital sex or adultery.
All of this gets to a paradox of the war on terror. It has never been a war on the tactic of terrorism, and it has always been a war against networks of radical Islamists. But in order to wage that war, the U.S. has had to ally with Muslim countries and people, many of whom believe the state should punish apostates, adulterers and blasphemers.
Can’t have a War without an Enemy
The administration doesn’t like to call it a war either – try overseas contingency operations. John Kerry in his 2004 run for the presidency called it a nuisance.
That would explain the detainees at Gitmo. If there’s no war they’re not POWs. If they can’t be prosecuted they have to be released.
Here’s a link to Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech.
That 70s Show
The going got weird on Friday. 70s icons, musician James Taylor and ‘Nam vet John Kerry, teamed up to soothe hurt feelings in Paris. The hurt feelings stemmed from the Obama administration’s failure to show up for a march in solidarity with those murdered by Islamist thugs at a Charlie Hebdo meeting and at a Kosher food store. Or “parade” as Valerie Jarrett called it.
70s Show
Taking the “better late than never” approach Secretary of State Kerry showed up in Paris 5 days late with Taylor in tow. He actually said he wanted to “share a hug with all of Paris”. Then Taylor serenaded the trapped Parisians with You Got a Friend.
It’s bad enough that jihadis are killing cartoonists. Now the liberal elites are stealing all the jokes. You really can’t make this stuff up. Oxford University Press has ordered its authors not to mention pigs, pork, or bacon so as not to offend Muslims or Jews. Really.
The best I could add to the farce was an imaginary Governor Chris Christie offering to hug France.
Third String quarterbacks and JV Terrorists
Cardale Jones, the quarterback for Ohio State’s national champion football team says he’s not yet ready for the NFL. He wants to work his way up from third string to second or maybe even first team for the Buckeye’s first.
Cardale has set the tone for benchwarmers everywhere. The Islamic State scrubs come to mind. ISIS doesn’t just hack off heads anymore. It’s now a cyber terror group. ISIS is taking credit for hacking US Central Command computers and exposing military personnel through social networking accounts.
The Commander in Chief, whose address is already exposed, once proclaimed ISIS the JV team.
Obama is no Charlie Hebdo
The president is not Charlie Hebdo. He can’t even bring himself to utter the words “Islamic terror“. Why would he fly to Paris to march against it?
Offending Islam
The New York Times and some others are worried that the murder of cartoonists by radical Islamists will cause offense – to Islamists.
Brendan O’Neill in National Review calls fear of an Islamophobic backlash “a myth”.
Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims.
Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.
Muslims against radical Islam
Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today says, “the most significant criticism of Islam in past weeks came not from traditional critics in Europe, but from inside the Islamic world itself, in the form of a speech, little-reported in the West, by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Muslim clerics in Egypt.
Al-Sisi commented:
“I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”
The Muslim mayor of Rotterdam seems to be on board with al-Sisi.
And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can f*** off.
“This is stupid, this so incomprehensible. Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here. All those well-meaning Muslims here will now be stared at”.
Victor Davis Hanson says the obsessive fear of offending other cultures a form of appeasement that leads to cultural suicide.
