Archive for 2015
February 15, 2015
COPENHAGEN: Nothing Random Here.
Yesterday evening’s Copenhagen synagogue shooting is yet another attack on Jews as Jews — just as we have witnessed such attacks at the Toulouse Jewish primary school, the Brussels Jewish museum, the Paris kosher supermarket, the firebombing of the synagogue in the German city of Wuppertal, and at many other places in recent years, from the Jewish communal centres in Mumbai and Casablanca, to the ancient synagogues in Istanbul and Jerba.
Yet only last week President Obama and his spokespeople were suggesting that it was just some kind of “random” accident that Jews were being killed.
The Obama team has consistently demonstrated a willful lack of understanding about the nature of Islamism, about anti-Semitism, and about the intentions of the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran. They seem more interested in disparaging the prime minister of America’s ally Israel than in preventing the regime in Tehran going nuclear – a regime which has already de facto taken control of large swathes of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Its terrorist actions outside the Middle East spread to, among other places, Thailand, Bulgaria (where Jewish tourists were blown up in 2012) and Argentina, where 85 people were murdered at the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. Only last month an Iranian diplomat in Montevideo was expelled from Uruguay for planting a bomb designed to kill Jews. (This foiled attack was barely reported on outside the Uruguayan and Israeli media.)
As Middle East scholar Bassam Tawil wrote last week: “Does Obama really want his legacy to be, ‘The president who was an even bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain’?”
It’s not that the Obama Administration doesn’t understand. It’s that they don’t want you to understand. Because then you’d want them to do something, and they don’t want to do anything.
We live in a time in which it is said about Dresden, “never again,” and about Auschwitz, “it’s complicated.” Among certain Europeans, at least, and those Americans who ape their attitudes.
OVER AT SARAH HOYT’S PLACE, Christopher Nuttall on Making A Statement By Not Making A Statement.
I liked Nuttall’s Ark Royal.
WELL, WELL, WELL: C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons. The Sarin, though “old,” was still potent.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The New Reckoning.
For bewildered and increasingly quietist Americans, the center holds mostly in family, religion, a few friends, the avoidance of the cinema and nightly news, the rote of navigating to work and coming home, trying to stay off the dole and taking responsibility for one’s own disasters — as the world grows ever more chaotic in our midst.
All sorts of escapism from the madness is now epidemic. Home-schooling. Gun ownership. A second home in the mountains. A trunk of freeze-dried food. Kids living in the basement. A generator. Some gold coins. A move to Wyoming. An avoidance of the old big cities. A tough choice between death and going to the nearby emergency room (at least your relatives are safe as you pass away at home). A careful and narrow selection of channels on cable TV. A safe room or escape plan. And on and on.
There is a strange new and dangerous sentiment brooding below the spoken surface that whatever is going on in the world and in America today cannot go on much longer — although as the sages say, there is a lot of rot in the West to enjoy for some time yet.
The postmodern world of our new aristocracy and the premodern world of those they both avoid and romanticize won’t hold. The old caricatured middle shrinks and turns inward. Even if the doomsday mood is a mere construct of the new instantaneous media, it is a dangerous mood nonetheless.
We all know what follows from this — either the chaos grows and civilization wanes and tribalism follows, or the iron hand of the radical authoritarian Left or Right correction is just as scary, or a few good people in democratic fashion convince the mob to let them stop the madness and rebuild civilization.
I hope for option three. I fear option one is more likely at home. And I assume that option two will be, as it always is, the choice abroad.
I’m an option three man myself, even if it takes some pitchforks to do the convincing.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Mark Steyn: The War On Free Speech, Day In And Day Out. In particular, don’t give the censors credit for good intentions. Call them out for what they are: Horrible people on a power trip at the expense of society’s well-being.
ROGER SIMON: Wonderful Copenhagen: Lessons for 2016. “With each passing day it becomes increasingly clear we are in a huge war of civilizations. This is a bigger deal than anything since WWII. Nothing could be more obvious. That means 2016 is about as serious as it gets. We need our Churchill fast, but in searching for him (or her) we cannot afford a bloodletting. We have to treat this as a wartime situation because it is.”
THIS MORNING I MENTIONED THAT GAIL COLLINS STILL HADN’T CORRECTED HER COLUMN. Now it bears this update:
An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that teacher layoffs in Milwaukee in 2010 happened because Gov. Scott Walker “cut state aid to education.” The layoffs were made by the city’s school system because of a budget shortfall, before Mr. Walker took office in 2011.
So basically, it’s now an Emily Litella column. Never mind! I’d love it if Greg Gutfeld or someone would do a Gail Collins as Emily Litella skit with this. . . .
UPDATE: The irony: Her article is entitled “Scott Walker Needs An Eraser.” Have you noticed that the lefty attacks on him seem to rebound on the attackers?
THE PROBLEM WITH VACCINATION: “We are at a stage where people have no memory of just how dangerous pathogens used to be. There is no visceral fear of viruses and bacteria. Children in wheelchairs as a result of polio are a thing of the past because the United States has been polio free since 1979 as a result of vaccines. The only people I’ve ever met who were hobbled by damage from polio were older than me. . . . I do not expect an innumerate and unscientific public to become more trusting of medical organizations that support vaccination. In some communities herd immunity has already been lost and it will be lost in more other communities. This trend will continue until an old disease comes sweeping thru and racks up lots of damage and fatalities.”
The 21st Century isn’t turning out as I had hoped.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Obama Hides $22 Billion In Student Debt.
AT AMAZON, 25% off Helly Hansen clothing. But only until tomorrow.
Plus, new 2015 Wilson Baseball Gloves. Spring is coming.
SPENGLER: The Lessons of Copenhagen: Too Many Most-Wanted Men. “It appears that the methods employed by European security agencies to control jihadists have broken down. Some 9,000 French citizens are fighting for ISIS or other jihadist organizations, according to a French government estimate. After several hundred thousand deaths in Syria and Iraq and the disintegration of Libya and Yemen, a very large number of young Muslims are prepared to sacrifice their lives. Security services control prospective terrorists by blackmailing petty criminals at the fringe of jihadist organizations and turning them into informants. Because the Muslim criminal milieu overlaps extensively with the terrorist organizations, this has been an effective strategy for the past decade and a half. The John le Carre novel and Philip Seymour Hoffman film “A Most Wanted Man” portrays this approach reasonably well. . . . The lesson of Copenhagan is the same as the lesson of Paris: the fragile social peace that European governments have maintained with their Muslim immigrant communities requires a fundamental revision. In the past, European security services let jihadists blow of steam while quietly culling potential killers. That has failed. The alternative is to tighten the screws on Muslim communities.”
Also attack this at the source, which is Saudi Arabia and the gulf emirates.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Swedes And The Clash Of Civilizations:
The indispensable Gatestone Institute reports on some very disturbing news out of Sweden.
In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the former homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%.
If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.
That makes Sweden the rape capital of the West, second globally to only Lesotho in Southern Africa in the number of rapes it suffers. Politically correct academics in the U.S. are sounding the alarm bells about a “rape culture” on U.S. campuses. In fact, the groves of academe across the fruited plain are among the safest, most coddled environments in the world. If the “mattress girl” at Columbia wants to find a hostile environment for women, she need look no further than Sweden.
But these rapes are okay because, you know, they’re by immigrants and that’s their culture so we have to be sensitive.
Plus: “For their part, Swedish bureaucrats prefer to explain the expanding rape culture by denying it.” Naturally.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Spread of Insular Hiring Practices.
ED DRISCOLL: Law & Order: SVU Takes On #GamerGate. “What could go wrong? Pretty much everything.” Plus: “Law & Order was actually a fairly watchable police procedural for its first three or four seasons before it became an ever-expanding parody of itself.”
ONCE ALL THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE DEPLOYED, WHAT WILL WE NEED PEOPLE FOR?
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: ISIS releases video of 21 Christians being beheaded — in Libya.
DENMARK’S ATTACKS have their roots in the Rushdie Fatwa. We probably should have killed every mullah who issued or endorsed that fatwa, as an example to the others. But it was a simpler, more innocent time.
GIVEN THE STATE OF THEIR NATIONAL LIBIDO, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD PROBABLY BE SUBSIDIZING THESE PLACES: Japanese Sex Hotels Cater to All Kinds of Fetishes, Even Hello Kitty S&M.
AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Health Care.
Also in Vitamins & Dietary Supplements.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Of Tulsa Suspends Student For Someone Else’s Facebook Post. “In a triple blow to free speech, due process, and freedom of the press, the University of Tulsa (TU) arbitrarily banned a student from campus until 2016 for Facebook posts that someone else admitted to writing and then attempted to intimidate student journalists who were trying to cover the story.”
You know, I think we need a federal civil rights bill for college students, sort of like Title IX, that will make attorney fees and treble damages available against institutions that misbehave. . . .
STAND ASIDE, APPLE: The Dell XPS 13 is the PC laptop to beat.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: A World Without Dragons.