Doc's Talk: The Least We Can Do

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

The Least We Can Do

DANIEL GREENFIELD February 6, 2013

The one thing that Hagel, Kerry and Brennan all have in common, besides being Washington insiders, is that they all agree that terrorism is basically a misunderstanding. All three fancy themselves men of the world who know more than the peasants back home because they have spent a few days being shepherded through high level meetings in Brussels, Riyadh and Beijing.
They have spent decades marinating in talking points and they know, for example, that terrorism is due to poverty and that Islamic terrorists aren't really Muslim, they just try to convince us that they are to trick us into going to war with Islam. Most of all they know that we can't beat the terrorists on the battlefield, all we can hope to do is wage a war for their hearts and minds, empowering moderates by resolving grievances until the extremists are discredited and peace reigns on earth.

Every word of it is nonsense, but national policy runs on nonsense. In the last four years the government has run massive deficits to save the economy, compelled everyone to buy health insurance to fix health care and flirted with minting a trillion dollar coin to cover its debts. A policy's obvious ridiculousness only ranks it higher in the estimation of idiots insiders who confuse stupidity with out-of-the-box thinking.

Whether it's domestic crime or the international rise of a terrorist movement, the left clings to its sociological security blanket explaining everything in terms of poverty and disenfranchisement. It doesn't matter to the idiot left whether they are dealing with gangs in Oakland, Marxist terrorists in Nicaragua, drug dealers in Chicago, Communist guerrillas in Vietnam, race riots in New York or Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan; to them it's all reducible to the same tired formula of Imperialism + Capitalism = Poverty and Resistance to be solved with day care centers and grievance commissions.

Leftists love moving to Chicago slums, Afghan caves or Latin American peasant villages, living with the natives, struggling with their toilets and finding deep spiritual meaning in their simple lives. And despite learning to speak their language, badly, and taking enough photos of them to populate a museum, they invariably leave without a clue about who the locals are and what makes them tick. But that's because they assume that they already know what makes them tick. Oppression. And with that covered, they never bother to learn anything of more significance than a greeting and a goodbye.

The one indispensable word that the left uses to explain all the violence is "Misunderstood." Criminals and terrorists aren't bad... they're misunderstood. We think that they're threatening and they think that we're threatening. We think that they're attacking us, but they're really just defending themselves. We think that they want to destroy us, but they just really want us to live up to our ideals.

According to John Kerry, the Viet Cong and the Sandinistas were both misunderstood. We thought that they were Communist terrorists, when really it was we who forced them to become terrorists and Communists. Since then Kerry has continued discovering other misunderstood people, including Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad, and will go on discovering them on a freelance basis.

Liberal misunderstanders take a look at almost any atrocity, and sigh wearily and ask, with the patience of saints, "Don't you understand that we made them do it?"

The Taliban didn't want to go to war with us, but we made them do it because we refused to work with them to extradite Bin Laden. Bin Laden didn't want to go to war with us, but we made him do it by defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam. Saddam Hussein didn't want to invade Kuwait, we made him do it and then we made him pretend that he had WMDs because we made him afraid of us.

By the time the ball of twine is fully unwound, we discover that no one in history ever wanted to fight us, but we made them do it by refusing to do the right thing or by doing the wrong thing and thereby throwing the whole picture out of whack leaving them with no choice but to do what they did. And all of it was just blowback from looting the world of its oil and diamonds and turning it into markets for our products. And when we weren't stealing diamonds and oil, then we were starting wars just so the military-industrial complex could bill the government for some more $145 screwdrivers.
The people who think this way aren't just some smelly hippies sunning themselves at a protest rally; they're the next Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and CIA Director of the United States.

John Brennan knows that you can't beat terrorists on the battlefield. So does John Kerry. And so does Chuck Hagel. And two Johns and a Chuck can't be wrong. Neither could Vyacheslav, as in Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's Foreign Minister, who said, during the tenure of the Hitler-Stalin pact, that, "Everyone can see that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force...Thus it is not only senseless, it is criminal to wage such a war as a war for 'the destruction of Hitlerism,' under the false flag of a struggle for democracy."

Hitlerism was destroyed by force and war. Islamism could be destroyed by force and war, or at the very least by not sending it billions of dollars, but our leaders are much too wise for such a policy. Instead they sign their own Hitler-Stalin pacts and then act surprised when 'Hitler' overruns their mission in Benghazi and kills everyone he can get his hands on.

Liberals face the same divide on foreign policy that they did on crime which splits them between the appeasers and the radicals. The radicals wanted to dismantle the police forces while the appeasers only wanted to neuter them and have them police the streets as gently as possible. Terrorism brings out the same policy instincts in them. The radicals ally with the terrorists, going off to visit them in Gaza and Pakistan, while the appeasers figure out how to fight them as little as possible.

Sending remote drones to kill terrorist leaders is the least we can do short of doing nothing at all, which is why the radicals object to it. The difference between the radicals and the appeasers is that the radicals believe that we are 100 percent wrong... while the appeasers assume that we are only 60 to 70 percent wrong. That gives them a 30 or 40 percent worth of moral elbow room which they can use to arrest drug dealers and snipe at Al Qaeda leaders.

But what both radicals and appeasers have in common is that they don't believe that fighting the war will actually accomplish anything. The appeasers fight it as a formality, for political reasons or as part of some grand chess game for isolating the "extremists". They're no more committed to it than Obama was to his Afghanistan surge. It's always a ploy, a positioning maneuver that will discredit the enemy and force them to come to terms. War to them is just peace negotiations by other means. And when they realize that the peace negotiations aren't happening, they give up on the war.

War to liberals is a strategy for gracefully conceding a losing argument. They don't believe in the war itself, which they feel only happened as a result of a series of mistakes and violations by us. What they would like to do is wind it down at a peace conference where everyone admits they were wrong and shakes hands eager to move on with the business of opening gay bars in Kandahar. And if they can't think of a way to win the peace, then they have no interest in winning the war.

The essence of the "Hearts and Minds" dogma is a denial that wars can be won in any sphere other than the social context. Wars on poverty can be won, but not wars on people. Once you begin fighting the Nazis, the Viet Cong or Al Qaeda... then you have already lost. Even if you win, the people are bound to rise up and then you'll be stuck playing occupying imperialist. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when armies are neutered to lose battles while wining hearts and minds, getting stuck in the middle and losing both kinds of wars.

Our three new leading foreign policy figures who will be expected to advance American interests around the world are different, but they are basically the same. They have that blank distant look of dimwitted men who fancy themselves intelligent, They think that the talking points that they have borrowed from the Saudis explain everything and the war is a chess game that we can win if we just outmaneuver the misunderstood terrorist Islamist by aiding the misunderstood political Islamists proving once and for all that you don't need to fight to take over a country, you can just run for office. Stalin could not comprehend that German tanks were headed his way, no matter how many Soviet agents passed along the word. Liberals, whether they come from Massachusetts or Nebraska, are similarly unable to understand that the planes really are headed for them. They have gotten too bogged down in thinking of this as a war of ideas, of ideologies, where they are always more right than we are, to see that this war isn't about us, it's about them.

This isn't a war of ideas, at least not the kind that we can play a part in. Islamic theological debates are as abstract and irrelevant to us as Communist debates over the finer points of Historical Materialism. It can be helpful to understand them if you're making a detailed study of the enemy, but most wars really come down to a group expanding its power and territory through conquest. It can't be won by making Al Qaeda look bad with some Saudi inspired "Hearts and Minds" campaign. It can only be won on the battlefield.

Kerry, Hagel and Brennan are men of nuance. They know better than to try and win wars by winning them. Instead they believe that we can only win by losing, triumphing through appeasement and securing a permanent peace by letting ourselves get kicked around while fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. They are not interested in what we can do to win, but in the least we can do to wait out the war until the inevitable force of progressivism finally reaches deep into Kandahar, Riyadh and Tehran bringing with it gay bars, mandatory abortion coverage and the brotherhood of all mankind.

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger, columnist and freelance photographer born in Israel, who maintains his own blog, Sultan Knish.

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The IDF’s Minorities in Numbers and Pictures

In honor of IDF Diversity Week, we present diversity through numbers and pictures. Each year, more and more Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin and immigrants from around the world take on the responsibility of defending Israel.

MUSLIMS:

Muslim Arab Israelis are not required to draft in the IDF, but there are many who volunteer. In 2013, there were over 200 Muslims serving in the IDF and over 300 in the reserves.

Bedouins:

Bedouins are nomadic Muslims who were in Israel when modern borders were set in place and are now considered Israeli citizens. They are not required to draft but a growing number choose to enlist. In 2012, there were over 1,400 Bedouin Muslim soldiers doing regular IDF service and almost 1,500 in the reserves.

Read more:http://www.idfblog.com/2014/02/27/truth-idf-numbers-pictures/#more-34027

Are you aware that in 2013, Middle class taxes go up-significantly?

In January of next year, the federal income tax rate for middle-class taxpayers is scheduled to rise from 25 percent to 28 percent, and the payroll tax is scheduled to rise from 13.3 percent to 15.3 percent… This drives the marginal tax rate based on the aforementioned three taxes to 48.12 percent. Add in state and local property, corporate, excise, and other state and local taxes, and the percentage of each additional dollar that is taxed hovers around 50 percent… When half of each additional dollar earned is taxed away, taxpayers experience a disincentive to start businesses or expand existing ones. This leads to fewer jobs being created.

Why is HAMAS Inside Tampa Schools?

Clare Lopez

Kelly Miliziano, who teaches history classes at Steinbrenner High School in the Tampa, Florida area apparently thinks it’s perfectly OK to invite a senior official of a HAMAS-affiliated organization into her classroom to discuss Islam with her students. According to local media reports, not only has this been going on for years, but in spite of the civil and criminal proceedings that could result from such reckless negligence, the Hillsborough County school superintendent, Mary Ellen Elia, and the chairman of the school board, Candy Olson, also expressed approval for students under their responsibility to be exposed repeatedly to guest speaker, Hassan Shibly, who is the Executive Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the Tampa area.
More...

Did You Know... Ignoring the Call to Islam will Bring Jihad

‘Conquest through Da’wa [proselytizing] that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wa.’
-- Yousef al-Qaradawi , Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader The Arabic word ‘Da’wa’ means the “call to Islam.” But do not think that Da’wa is the same thing as an invitation to an optional holiday event. The classical Islamic doctrine of jihad mandates that enemies must be given the opportunity to convert to Islam or pay the jizya tax before it is permissible to attack them.
Clare M. Lopez

Who is being discriminated-facts tell the truth

Religious bias

Hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,409 offenses reported by law enforcement. A breakdown of the bias motivation of religious-bias offenses showed:

65.4 percent were anti-Jewish.
13.2 percent were anti-Islamic.
9.5 percent were anti-other religion, i.e., those not specified.
4.3 percent were anti-Catholic.
3.8 percent were anti-multiple religions, group.
3.3 percent were anti-Protestant.
0.5 percent were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/narratives/hate-crime-2010-incidents-and-offenses.

On March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview

with PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

In March 1977, Zahir Muhsein, a PLO executive, said:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism."

"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

The Arab Apartheid

Ben-Dror Yemini
In 1948, the Arab countries refused to accept the UN partition proposal and they launched a war of annihilation against the State of Israel which had barely been established. All precedents in this matter showed that the party that starts the war - and with a declaration of annihilation, yet - pays a price for it. Between 550,000 and 710,000 Arabs fled because of the war and a larger number of 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries (the "Jewish nakba").
Population exchanges and expulsions were the norm at that time, occurring in dozens of other conflict points and affecting about 52 million people. In all the population exchange precedents that occurred during or at the end of an armed conflict, there was no return of refugees to the previous region, which had turned into a new national state.
Only the Arab states acted completely differently from the rest of the world. Instead of assimilating the refugees, they crushed them despite the fact that they were their coreligionists and members of the Arab nation - instituting a regime of apartheid. So the "nakba" was not caused by the actual dispossession, which had also been experienced by tens of millions of others. The "nakba" is the story of the apartheid, oppression, abuse and denial of rights suffered by the Arab refugees at the hands of the Arab countries. (Maariv)

International Law and Military Operations in Practice - Col. Richard Kemp

"Islamist fighting groups study the international laws of armed conflict carefully and they understand it well. They know that a British or Israeli commander and his men are bound by international law and the rules of engagement that flow from it. They then do their utmost to exploit what they view as one of their enemy's main weaknesses. Their very modus operandi is built on the correct assumption that Western armies will normally abide by the rules, while these insurgents employ a deliberate policy of operating consistently outside international law. "

Lost Historical Moments

What Rabin’s last Knesset speech really said:repudiation of a Palestinian state

Rabin ruled out a fully sovereign Palestinian state :

“We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”

Rabin ruled out a total withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and thus a return to the pre-June 1967 borders :

“The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”

Rabin ruled out withdrawing form the Jordan Valley:

“The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”

Rabin ruled out uprooting settlement blocs, like the Gush Katif bloc in Gaza (which was subsequently uprooted by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon):

“The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif.

AND

Rabin ruled out removing any settlement before coming to a full peace agreement with the Palestinians:

“I want to remind you: we committed ourselves, that is, we came to an agreement, and committed ourselves before the Knesset, not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth.”

Rabin insisted on Israel retaining full security control of the borders with Egypt and Jordan, contrary to Israel’s relinquishment of the Philadelphia Corridor on the border with Egypt:

“The responsibility for external security along the borders with Egypt and Jordan, as well as control over the airspace above all of the territories and Gaza Strip maritime zone, remains in our hands.”

Correcting Oslo Myths-Part 2

3) Kuttab laments that the post-1993 Oslo process resulted in a Palestinian Authority "whose ministers and legislators are not guaranteed passage between Gaza and the West Bank ...."

Before free passage or other perquisites, PA leaders were obligated, among other things, to eliminate the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, end anti-Israeli, antisemitic incitement in schools, mosques, and communications media, and resolve all outstanding issues through peaceful negotiations. They met none of these commitments, sometimes bolstering terrorism and greatly increasing incitement.

4) Kuttab complains that under Oslo the PA got "lightly armed police ---- but no real sovereignty over the land or contiguity between our communities in Gaza and the West Bank."

Oslo agreements repeatedly were revised, regardless of Palestinian non-compliance, until the authorized number of police grew from 8,000 to 40,000. Though they were to be the only armed forces in the territories, Israeli estimates early in the second intifada put the number of gunmen - police, "security services," terrorists, and armed gangs - at 85,000. Their armament reportedly included not only heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, but also anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

Sovereignty was to be negotiated in the envisioned 1998 "final status" talks - after a five-year period of confidence-building. Palestinian leadership chronically undermined the process. Palestinian terrorism made the 1993 - 1998 Oslo period more deadly for Israelis than the 15 years preceding it.

The United States doesn't have contiguity between the lower 48 states and Alaska and Hawaii; territorial contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza Strip - that is, through the 20 miles of Israeli territory between them - was never promised and would destroy Israeli contiguity.

5) "Palestinians have been made to endure hundreds of checkpoints in the West Bank, an eight-foot wall deep in our territories, and tight Israeli control over borders."

The security barrier is not "deep in Palestinian territories," but rather encompasses less than 8 percent of Judea and Samaria, and is mostly a fence, rarely a wall; the land in question is not "our [Palestinian] territories" but disputed territory to which, according to the authors of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, Jews as well as Arabs have claims; and there are no international borders, only the 1949 armistice lines with Jordan. Under 242, borders remain to be negotiated. As for checkpoints - like the security barrier and "tight Israeli control" - Palestinian Arabs precipitated these measures themselves. No terrorism and there would be no fence or tight Israeli control and few checkpoints - like before the first intifada.

Correcting Some Oslo Myths

1) In Oslo "Israeli, Palestinian and other world leaders promised that ... Palestinian sovereignty would be solidified."

No, they didn't. The 1993 Declaration of Principles and subsequent Oslo agreements outlined a process by which final status negotiations about the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be reached. The process required an end to anti-Israel terrorism and incitement and a commitment to peaceful negotiations. The PA, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other terrorist groups, sabotaged the process from the start.

2) "The reality is that, in defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which states that it is inadmissible to occupy land by force, Palestinian territories are still under foreign military occupation."
Wrong again. Resolution 242 (1967) does note "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." It also affirms the right of every state in the area "to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." There were no "Palestinian territories." Jordan occupied the West Bank, Egypt controlled Gaza. Israel did not have "secure and recognized boundaries," so retention of some of those territories was possible under 242. Israel is not a "foreign" military occupier in the West Bank but, pending final negotiations, the lawful military administrator as a result of a successful war of self-defense.

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