Tel Aviv Shooting Attack

Debka:

A gunman in black opened automatic fire on crowds outside the Dioz Bar, on Dizengoff Street in central Tel Aviv Friday, Jan. 1, injuring 10 people, two of whom died of gunshot wounds and four were seriously injured. He escaped as large police and security forces reached the scene. They have cast a wide net to hunt the killer in the neighboring streets up to the seaside promenade. Police officials decline at this point to determine whether the gunman was a Palestinian or Islamic terrorist or a criminal murderer. ...

Arutz Sheva:

The shooting took place at Dizengoff 122, close to Dizengoff Center Mall, as the area was packed with people. It began at a popular pub, and the attacker reportedly shot at several other institutions as well as at pedestrians walking along the street....

 Stratfor reports that 'two witnesses said a person dressed in black and wearing a black mask carried out the attack with what appeared to be a military-style assault rifle.'

Why They Fought

Then and now.

John Gallagher, Jr. (d. 2015):
Why the War in Kurdistan Matters

First, let me get the obvious out of the way: I do not expect anyone to agree that it is a wise course of action to volunteer to fight against ISIS. Would-be terrorists from all over the world, including Canada, (including some I probably went to school with,) are flooding into the Middle East by the thousands. They’ve got the numbers and the weapons to win this war, so to go stand on the other side of the battlefield is objectively insane.

I also respect the viewpoint that the last thing any westerners ought to do is get involved in another Middle Eastern conflict. We’ve already done tremendous damage to the region; the rise of ISIS is a direct result of foreign policy blunders by the last two Presidents (at least!). If you think that for the good of the region we should all sit this one out, I can understand that. But I can’t agree.

The cause of a free and independent Kurdistan is important enough to be worth fighting for all on its own. The Kurdish people are the largest ethnicity in the world without a country of their own, and have suffered enormously under the boot-heel of regional powers. Now they are under threat from another genocidal foe, yet they have not given themselves over to the joint manias of religious fanaticism and suicide murder. This should be enough reason for the West to give them whatever support they need in such a time of crisis. But there is an even better reason.

For decades now, we have been at war. This war has been unacknowledged by our leaders, but enthusiastically proclaimed by our enemies. This war has produced casualties on every continent, in nearly every nation on earth. It has had periods of intense fighting, followed by long stretches of rearming and regrouping, but it has never ended. It is not even close to being won. Someday historians will look back and marvel at how much effort we put into deceiving ourselves about the nature of this conflict, and wonder how we convinced ourselves that it was not even taking place. This war may have started in 1979, or earlier; 2001 increased the intensity of the conflict; the withdrawal from Iraq kicked off the latest phase. Like the American Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War, this war is about ideas as much as it is about armies. Slavery, fascism, and communism were all bad ideas which required costly sacrifice before they were finally destroyed. In our time, we have a new bad idea: Theocracy.

We live in a society that’s grown around a very basic philosophical principle: That the world around us can be understood using our senses and our minds. From this simple insight comes the moral revelation that all human beings are equal in this capacity, and therefore equal in dignity. This radical idea was the turning point in human history, before which all civilizations had been dominated by the idea that class hierarchies and racism were perfectly justified according to the revealed wisdom of ancient texts, and sanctified by holy men with a special relationship to some ‘divine’ power. We began to see justice as something which could be measured by its effects on living people, not as superstition.

This idea has been under threat ever since its inception, because it’s the most powerful force for human emancipation that has ever been, and so it is a deadly threat to the privileged. It is also a threat to those who fear a world where human beings must be the judges of our own actions. Some prefer to subordinate their own morality to a doctrine they know they can never fully understand; this is more agreeable than facing the thought that we are alone in this world. This terror at our own freedom, and hatred for the mind that makes its realization inescapable, has given birth to movements that promise to give us back our comforting delusions. Communism and fascism were both answers to the problem of human freedom. These ideas were defeated. But always in the background the germ of these ideas was aggressively breeding. Theocracy isn’t just as dangerous as fascism; it’s the model of fascism, and all totalitarianisms. Communism said ‘instead of god, the Party.’ Fascism said, ‘instead of god, the Nation!’ Theocracy simply says ‘God.’

There is nothing uniquely Islamic about this trend, except that it just so happens that the most violent proponents of theocracy today happen to be Muslim. In the 1500’s, it was the Christians. By hard fighting and a brave defense of our principles, the forces of secularism managed to wrestle control of European society away from the theocrats, and we have been fighting the regressive movements that have tried to take their place ever since. The Muslim world has been dominated by theocratic politics for decades now, and that war has overflowed to engulf the rest of the world.

We are all on the front lines of this conflict, whether we know it or not. We can measure the causalities not only in the body counts of deadly terror attacks, ‘mass demonstrations,’ embassy assaults and assassinated artists; we can also measure it in the terror produced among cartoonists, satirists, publishers and booksellers, news media and educators who are being prevented from doing their necessary work of maintaining the machinery of the enlightenment. Not only have we all been threatened; in many ways we are all already casualties of this war.

The stance of pacifists and the appeasement left on this issue is not tolerance, but ironically, what it claims to oppose: fearmongering, and even ‘Islamophobia,’ since it betrays their utter terror of offending the sensibilities of immigrant communities and the so-called ‘community leaders’ who are presumed to give them their marching orders. Their pre-emptive apologism for barbarity betrays a deep contempt for the character of immigrant Muslims, since it presumes that they enjoy their mental oppression and prefer the moral stagnation of sharia law and the hadith to the pleasures of an open, cosmopolitan, secular society.

I have met plenty of self-described Muslims who have never even read the Qur’an, don’t care what it has to say about the role of women or the punishment for blasphemy, who don’t know or care how Muhammad treated prisoners of war, or how he dealt with dissenting poets in Mecca. That’s fine. I personally wish they would learn a bit about those last points and take more responsibility for the company they keep, but the point is that they are not an active part of the problem. Yet elements of our government are perfectly willing to accept that thuggishness is something we must automatically and un-judgmentally expect from Muslims, that it is US who must accommodate ourselves to THEM. What we need here is more historical education, not cultural sensitivity.

The war that is ongoing in the Middle East is a war against theocracy. In many ways it is a civil war, and I believe more depends on its outcome than anyone in power is prepared to face. But it is also a distant front in a civil war within Western society, since we are sending troops to fight on both sides. And here the stakes may be even greater. Our war is not just about theocracy; it is between those who still believe in the enlightenment, that self-determination is the most basic and most crucial of all human rights, that the first duty of every man in society is to defend the mechanisms by which we make ourselves free; and those who ultimately lack the capacity to believe in anything. These people have been corrupted by the masochistic fables circulated by leftists and identity politicians that tell us Western society is inherently racist, inherently sexist, and inherently imperialist, when it is Western society which pioneered the ideas that racism, sexism, and imperialism might be a problem in the first place.

Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated, and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence. And the crisis we face today is the direct result of this ‘progressive’ thinking: we are now under threat by those who take advantage of the masochism and apathy fostered by the left to recruit people who will take a violently affirmative ideology over nihilistic pessimism, even or especially if that means committing atrocities that would make the average ‘imperialist’ vomit. Those who contribute to this environment of moral decay and vulnerability are the useful idiots of jihad and fellow travelers of theocracy, and it is the duty of thinking persons to oppose their influence by every means at our disposal.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religious environment. If today I have any intellectual or spiritual existence worth fighting for, it is because it was impossible for the religious forces in my life to have their way and shield me from the assaults of reason and conscience. They could teach me that evolution was a lie, but they couldn’t prevent me from reading about it or prohibit the public schools from teaching it. They could tell me blasphemy was a sin, but they couldn’t prevent me from sneaking Monty Python and South Park. The mechanisms of society, in other words, gave me the tools by which I could make myself free. They saved my life. Who safeguards the social machinery now? Only an overbred political elite and intelligentsia who burble about the urgent need to never give offense. This is not only a disgraceful failure; it is a national emergency.

Like theocracy today, fascism used to be an international movement, with fascist parties in every western country. Then World War II happened. Nazi Germany became the standard-bearer of fascism, and when it was crushed, the movement wasn’t just destroyed, it was discredited for all time. Ironically, the rise of ISIS gives us the same chance now. We have the ability to eradicate jihadism in our lifetime. The terrorists’ own playbook sees the taking and holding of territory as a necessary step to discredit Western democracy and prove that the Caliphate is a real political possibility in the 21st century. We have to prove that it is not. And like we did with Nazi Germany, we must crush it with overwhelming, unrelenting force. We have to take it while the mass graves are still fresh, while there are still survivors to give testimony to the atrocities they’ve witnessed, while the murderers are still around to be put on trial. Only by destroying ISIS without mercy can we discredit the idea, and force the would-be jihadis and fellow-travelers to give up their insane dreams of a new Mecca and join the modern world.

I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization. A free Kurdistan would be good enough cause for any internationalist, but we are fortunate enough to be able to risk our necks for something more important and more righteous than anything we’ve faced in generations. With some fortitude and guts, we can purge the sickness that’s poisoning our society, and come together to defeat this ultimate evil. I’ve been fighting this battle in one way or another for my entire life. I hope for success. The rest is in the hands of the gods.

Via Facebook.


Mark J. Daily (d. 2007):

Sunday, October 29, 2006

WHY I JOINED
Current mood: optimistic

Why I Joined:

This question has been asked of me so many times in so many different contexts that I thought it would be best if I wrote my reasons for joining the Army on my page for all to see. First, the more accurate question is why I volunteered to go to Iraq. After all, I joined the Army a week after we declared war on Saddam’s government with the intention of going to Iraq. Now, after years of training and preparation, I am finally here.

Much has changed in the last three years. The criminal Ba’ath regime has been replaced by an insurgency fueled by Iraq’s neighbors who hope to partition Iraq for their own ends. This is coupled with the ever present transnational militant Islamist movement which has seized upon Iraq as the greatest way to kill Americans, along with anyone else they happen to be standing near. What was once a paralyzed state of fear is now the staging ground for one of the largest transformations of power and ideology the Middle East has experienced since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to Iran, Syria, and other enlightened local actors, this transformation will be plagued by interregional hatred and genocide. And I am now in the center of this.

Is this why I joined?

Yes. Much has been said about America’s intentions in overthrowing Saddam Hussein and seeking to establish a new state based upon political representation and individual rights. Many have framed the paradigm through which they view the conflict around one-word explanations such as “oil” or “terrorism,” favoring the one which best serves their political persuasion. I did the same thing, and anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).

I joined the fight because it occurred to me that many modern day “humanists” who claim to possess a genuine concern for human beings throughout the world are in fact quite content to allow their fellow “global citizens” to suffer under the most hideous state apparatuses and conditions. Their excuses used to be my excuses. When asked why we shouldn’t confront the Ba’ath party, the Taliban or the various other tyrannies throughout this world, my answers would allude to vague notions of cultural tolerance (forcing women to wear a veil and stay indoors is such a quaint cultural tradition), the sanctity of national sovereignty (how eager we internationalists are to throw up borders to defend dictatorships!) or even a creeping suspicion of America’s intentions. When all else failed, I would retreat to my fragile moral ecosystem that years of living in peace and liberty had provided me. I would write off war because civilian casualties were guaranteed, or temporary alliances with illiberal forces would be made, or tank fuel was toxic for the environment. My fellow “humanists” and I would relish contently in our self righteous declaration of opposition against all military campaigns against dictatorships, congratulating one another for refusing to taint that aforementioned fragile moral ecosystem that many still cradle with all the revolutionary tenacity of the members of Rage Against the Machine and Greenday. Others would point to America’s historical support of Saddam Hussein, sighting it as hypocritical that we would now vilify him as a thug and a tyrant. Upon explaining that we did so to ward off the fiercely Islamist Iran, which was correctly identified as the greater threat at the time, eyes are rolled and hypocrisy is declared. Forgetting that America sided with Stalin to defeat Hitler, who was promptly confronted once the Nazis were destroyed, America’s initial engagement with Saddam and other regional actors is identified as the ultimate argument against America’s moral crusade.

And maybe it is. Maybe the reality of politics makes all political action inherently crude and immoral. Or maybe it is these adventures in philosophical masturbation that prevent people from ever taking any kind of effective action against men like Saddam Hussein. One thing is for certain, as disagreeable or as confusing as my decision to enter the fray may be, consider what peace vigils against genocide have accomplished lately. Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics. Often times it is less about how clean your actions are and more about how pure your intentions are.

So that is why I joined. In the time it took for you to read this explanation, innocent people your age have suffered under the crushing misery of tyranny. Every tool of philosophical advancement and communication that we use to develop our opinions about this war are denied to countless human beings on this planet, many of whom live under the regimes that have, in my opinion, been legitimately targeted for destruction. Some have allowed their resentment of the President to stir silent applause for setbacks in Iraq. Others have ironically decried the war because it has tied up our forces and prevented them from confronting criminal regimes in Sudan, Uganda, and elsewhere.

I simply decided that the time for candid discussions of the oppressed was over, and I joined.

In digesting this posting, please remember that America’s commitment to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his sons existed before the current administration and would exist into our future children’s lives had we not acted. Please remember that the problems that plague Iraq today were set in motion centuries ago and were up until now held back by the most cruel of cages. Don’t forget that human beings have a responsibility to one another and that Americans will always have a responsibility to the oppressed. Don’t overlook the obvious reasons to disagree with the war but don’t cheapen the moral aspects either. Assisting a formerly oppressed population in converting their torn society into a plural, democratic one is dangerous and difficult business, especially when being attacked and sabotaged from literally every direction. So if you have anything to say to me at the end of this reading, let it at least include “Good Luck”

Mark Daily

Via Michelle Malkin.

Paris Terror Attacks

On 2015 November 13, Paris was attacked by Muslim terrorists, and 130 innocent people were killed.

Regie Hamm:
I work in the world of entertainment. My colleagues and I live a life of creativity, philosophizing and experimentation. We build nothing, feed no one, serve no one and provide nothing of life-sustaining value. We are the singers and dancers and circus clowns. And even as we bask in this pointless existence, we have the audacity to pontificate and issue decrees and tell the world where it has gone wrong. Some of us even have the unmitigated gaul to do this from bed (are you listening Russell Brand?)

Most of my contemporaries in the entertainment business are liberal progressives. I’m pretty used to it and I get along with them fine. They are, for the most part, harmless. But what I know that many of them seem to not be able to get their heads around is that we all get to be peevish punks for one reason only …We. Are. Protected.

Free societies don’t just happen on their own. ...

Sam Harris:
Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity. It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.

But there is now a large industry of obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these truths. Our humanities and social science departments are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other diverse fields, who claim that where Muslim intolerance and violence are concerned, nothing is ever what it seems. ...

Bret Stephens:
We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.

Students bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.

And then there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our astonishing willingness to indulge it. ...

Naftali Bennett:
Europe, the U.S. and their allies can defeat the terrorists of Islamic State, or ISIS. The first step is making the decision to fight back. The next step is understanding that drones and standoff missiles will not be enough. Ground troops will be needed.

In 2002 Israel went on the offensive in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Tulkarm, going house-to-house and door-to-door to hunt down Palestinian terror suspects. ...

Some people are going to quibble about the phrase 'Muslim terrorists'. That's just tough. These are invariably the same people who never hesitate to generalize about the people they don't like politically: Republicans, Conservatives, whatever. So you can skip the lecture.

The Threat of Threats

You'll hear some people point out that statistically, your individual chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is very small - less than your chance of being struck by lightning, or sucked up in a twister, or trampled by a caribou, or whatever.

And that's factually true, but it misses the real threat of terrorism, which is to gradually intimidate society and its institutions into complying with the objectives of the jihadi islamist movement behind the attacks.

By incrementally applying pressure, first here, then there, they hope to erode the resistance of a free society over a period of time. These guys aren't stupid. They are smart, sophisticated, and very very patient. They know what they're doing, and they know that it works.

And what, Gul'Dan, must we give in return?

A teenage Austrian girl who fled to Syria along with her friend is believed to have been beaten to death after being caught trying to flee the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa.

Samra Kesinovic, 17, and her friend Sabina Selimovic became 'poster girls' for ISIS after they arrived in Syria in April 2014.

I don't know what it is about islamist jihadi ideology that appeals to young people from liberal, secular, western backgrounds.

Maybe it's the quest for a strong identity in a world that seems to offer only bland, generic identities.

Maybe it's the dangerous lure of the exotic and the primitive in a world that seems almost too civilized, too comfortable, too safe.

Maybe it's admiration of the ruthless power of the jihadis, or fear of that power, or the desire to put one's money on "the strong horse".

Or maybe it's even simpler than that: the promise of untold wealth and power tomorrow if one will only swear fealty to the Muslim warriors today.

These girls figured out more than a year ago that they had made a terrible mistake. But it was already too late, and there was no turning back.

The Radical

I've recently had the pleasure of reading 'My Year Inside Radical Islam' by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Daveed's book interested me because his journey in some ways paralleled, and in some ways mirrored, my own. And I believe there are also important lessons to be learned about identity, will, and the spread of radical Islam today.

Daveed was born in 1976, into a liberal, secular Jewish family in Ashland, Oregon. They lived at what he describes as "the hippie end of a hippie town" and embraced a spiritual, multicultural ethos. In his activist college days, he became friends with al-Husein Madhany, who would provide Daveed's introduction to Islam. Before long, Daveed embraced the Muslim faith and converted.

Al-Husein's mystical, universalistic, Sufi-oriented brand of Islam appealed to Daveed. But as he became more deeply involved in Islam through the Al-Haramain Foundation, he quickly became exposed to a very different side of the faith - one bitterly opposed to the message of people like Al-Husein.

I recommend reading the book to find out how Daveed found his way out of radical Islam, and came to embrace another faith.

I found DGR's book fascinating on a number of levels, some of them personal. Like Daveed, I'm a convert, but not to Islam or Christianity. Born in suburban New England about half a generation earlier than Daveed, I grew up in a home that, apart from my family's lack of Jewish roots, sounds similar to Daveed's in a lot of ways. My parents were nominally Unitarian Universalists, who had broken away from their conservative Christian upbringings and met in a Unitarian church. As a young adult I became interested in Judaism, learning Hebrew and attending Jewish services (first Reform and Conservative, later Orthodox) from my late teens to early twenties. At 25 I had an Orthodox Jewish conversion.

But I want to get back to DGR's book. Reading 'My Year Inside Radical Islam', I was struck by the way the fanatical Salafi stream of Islam drove out the milder Sufi and Nashqibandi strains - and I was reminded of my friend Michael Totten's book 'Where the West Ends'. Totten traveled throughout eastern Europe and western Asia, along the fault-lines of cultures. He witnessed many things, including the inexorable advance of radical Islam against the moderate forms of the religion. In my review of the book I wrote that

There is the image of the lonely liberal, surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile and violent factions. There is the conflict between old traditionalism and new fundamentalism. ...

The Serbian film writer Filip David is one of those lonely liberals; so is the half-Serbian, half-Bosnian Predag Delibasic, who takes pride in having declared himself variously a Jew, a Muslim, and a Yugoslav - and claims that nonexistent nationality to this day. Perhaps the loneliest, though, is Shpetim Mahmudi, an Albanian Sufi mystic who must watch the gradual encroachment of foreign-backed Arab islamists on the grounds of his religious compound. His story is tragic.

It also points to something important about religious conflict in the Muslim world: that the conflict is often not - as Westerners sometimes imagine - a case of Western modernity threatening to extinguish Islamic tradition. Rather, it is instead a direct attack on centuries-old, evolving religious traditions by well-armed, well-financed followers of a comparatively recent fundamentalist sect. It is ancient moderation versus newfangled fanaticism.

And I think that that's the same thing Daveed Gartenstein-Ross witnessed in his time in the world of Islam.

My own relationship to religion is complicated and better suited to another post. But I do want to bring up Natan Sharansky's central insight from his book 'Defending Identity':

"The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own."

The widely-accepted fallacy is that "conflicts arise because of religious dogma, so if we get rid of religious dogma we'll reduce conflicts". But the danger in having no fixed set of doctrines is that you can easily get drawn into all kinds of crazy stuff. And that's as true today as it was when Daveed was in college.

Devotion to a good doctrine can give you the strength and the faith to reject bad ones. What you believe matters.

Freedom and Power

I've been posting for eleven years at Dreams Into Lightning on Blogger. I'm now moving my current events and political writing onto Freedom and Power at WordPress. All my new posts will appear there.

General Nagata and the Secret Sauce

 WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?

In the space of two short paragraphs, the NYT uses the words "decipher', "complex", "conundrum", "brain", "professors", "understand", and "idea" - in connection with a savage, sadistic enemy that rapes and tortures children.

This is the language of intellectuals whose only weapons are their intellects and their immense self-regard.

There is a time for intellect and reflection; and there is a time for courage and action. The sad irony here is that these geniuses are precisely the people who will NEVER understand the Islamic State. It is too simple for them to grasp.

*

I found the intellectualism of the Times' approach off-putting, but I want to focus here on what I take to be the substance of Gen. Nagata's comments.  I'll begin at the end: 

“When I watch Americans use words like cowardly, barbaric, murder, outrageous, shocking, etc., to describe a violent extremist organization’s actions, we are playing right into the enemy’s hands,” General Nagata added. “They want us to become emotional. They revel in being called murderers when the words are coming from an apostate.”

There are three components to this quote:  (1) "playing into the enemy's hands" i.e. the assumption that if the enemy wants us to do something, it is in our interest to do the opposite; (2) "they want us to become emotional" and therefore respond with rash, ill-considered action; and (3) "they revel in being called murderers [by] an apostate" because this is an indication that they're fighting an effective war against an an enemy they hold in contempt.

In general, you want to do the opposite of what the enemy wants you to do; but if you have reason to believe you can win a confrontation and that the enemy underestimates your capabilities, then you and the enemy want the same thing:  you both want a confrontation.  If you have capabilities that the enemy doesn't know about or underestimates, then it's in your interest to do what the enemy wants, and it would be just as logical to speak of the enemy playing into your hands.  That Gen. Nagata presents this scenario in purely reactive terms is, I think, unfortunate.

Clearly a calculated decision is more likely to represent sound judgment than an emotional one.  But an emotional - or I would say gut-level - response to a threat is basically one of two things:  fight or flight.  The enemy prefers the latter because it makes their job easier:  they can then enslave and butcher us at their leisure with minimal cost or risk to themselves.  The enemy "want us to become emotional" precisely to the extent that they assume this will be our response, and their early experience with the Iraqi Army no doubt confirmed this assumption.  We gain the advantage precisely to the extent that we defy the assumption.

It is perfectly reasonable for any army to value a reputation for toughness.  Combat involves killing and soldiers are not babysitters.  When the enemy embraces an ethic (for want of a better word) utterly different from our own, we should not be surprised that they take pride in being called murderers, as it signifies both their effectiveness and their indifference to our cultural standards.  Yet all of this seems to be a conundrum for Gen. Nagata.

Returning to the question of "playing into the enemy's hands", I would say that the enemy's interests are served just as well when we busy ourselves with endless hairsplitting and deliberation.  By Nagata's own admission, he does not understand the movement, or even its "idea", and therefore is not even close to defeating the enemy.

A general who wants to "engage in a long-term conversation" does not fill me with confidence.  This is an admirable trait for a debating society, less so for an army.

*

It looks to me like Gen. Nagata - along with a lot of other smart people - is trying to find the "secret sauce" of Islamic State's success.  There is nothing wrong with that, I just don't think it is all that complicated.  You can control people pretty easily if you terrorize them enough. 

I think a more interesting and more productive approach would be to find the secret of those who have successfully resisted - notably the Kurds.  It seems that a strong cultural identity is a key ingredient.

"The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong.  And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own."  This is Natan Sharansky's thesis in 'Defending Identity' (preface, p. x), and I think it's an important idea for us now.

Sharansky explores the perceived conflict between identity and liberty, and refutes the liberal fallacy that "nationalism leads to oppression, so we must erase all forms of national or group identity".  On the contrary, Sharansky asserts:  "Despite our profound differences, we recognized that to successfully defend the values most dear to us, we had to make sure that others were strong enough to defend theirs."  (Sharansky, p.41.)  Among Sharansky's closest allies in the Soviet prison camp were evangelical Christians.

Michael J. Totten observed - back in 2006 - that "the Kurdistan Regional Government actually provides money and housing for Arab Christians who want to pick up and resettle in the north."  ('In the Wake of the Surge', p. 31.)  This suggests to me that the Kurds as a culture have internalized Sharansky's insight. 

I don't know if there is a "secret sauce" for Kurdish success, but if there is, I think its ingredients include a sense of identity.  I think Americans have a long-established sense of national identity that incorporates this insight.  Perhaps Iraqis, as a nation, have yet to develop it.  Perhaps they can learn it from the Kurds.

The Future

The Federal and state governments will likely go broke, and people who depended on government benefits will feel a lot of hurt. Social Security will be long gone. Big liberal states like California will be hardest hit. Infrastructures will suffer and things like serviceable roads, law enforcement, and emergency services will deteriorate.

Depending on how successful Obama is in his effort to wreck our economy in general and our medical system in particular, doctors and hospitals will likely be few and far between.

Over the past couple of generations, a lot of worthless paper has changed hands because (1) loans were given to people who didn’t have the means to repay them; and (2) politicians made promises that they didn’t have the means to pay for.

The government and its agencies will grow hungry and mean – like any other predatory animal – and will increasingly focus their dwindling resources on functions that generate revenue. This means finding ever more creative ways to expropriate citizens of their money and belongings. So we can expect to see increases in everything from petty robberies such as parking tickets to major hauls like seizures of cars, homes, and businesses on the pretext that they were used for “drug trafficking”.

End result is that survival strategies are going to go back to being what they’ve always been. Be honest, courteous, hardworking, competent, and educated, and associate with other people who are. Take care of those close to you and be ready to defend them – and yourself.

Source Bias Checklist

1. identify sources
2. assess source's reliability
3. get specifics
4. avoid vendettas
5. first-hand knowledge
6. ideological orientation
7. financial interests
8. debts and favors
9. bias of intermediaries
10. past experiences
11. psychological factors
12. internal consistency
13. external consistency
14. insider details
15. dialog and dissent
16. awareness of objections
17. nuance
18. the human voice
19. snarl/purr words
20. narrative
21. implicit bias
22. red herrings / straw men
23. fallacies
24. weasel words

Mohammad Zoabi, Arab Zionist

Bill Maher's Liberalism: Free Speech, Free Thought, Free Faith

I'm not always a fan of Bill Maher, but here are two clips I think are just splendid, whether you label yourself a "liberal" or a "conservative":

Post by Bill Maher.

Here Maher takes on Kathleen Parker's Washington Post editorial defending self-censorship in a world without privacy.

I would listen to a hundred horrific Cliven Bundy rants if that was the price of living in a world where I could also listen to interesting and funny people talk without a filter. Perhaps most chilling of all, Parker said that 'speaking one's mind isn't really all it's cracked up to be.' Which is quite a statement, since her job is speaking her mind. It's like the mailman telling you letters are stupid.

So let me get this straight: We should concede that there's no such thing anymore as a private conversation, so therefore remember to lawyer everything you say before you say it, and hey, speaking your mind was overrated anyway so you won't miss it. Well, I'll miss it. I'll miss it a lot. And for the record, speaking my mind is absolutely everything it's cracked up to be. ...

Does anyone really want there to be no place where we can let our hair down and not worry if the bad angel in our head occasionally grabs the mike? ...

Who wants to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head? That's what life in East Germany was like. That's why we fought the Cold War, remember? So we'd never have to live in some awful limbo where you never knew who, even among your friends, was an informer.

Go to the video link for the rest. Now here's Maher again, speaking against both the misogynistic violence committed by jihadi Muslims like Boko Haram, and the reluctance of Western "liberals" to name this for what it is:

There was a Pew poll of Egypt, which is a leading Muslim country, and something like 80 or 90 percent believe that death is the proper punishment for leaving the religion.

Where it becomes dangerous is that liberals like yourself [to Arianna Huffington] do not stand up for liberalism. Liberalism means number one - mostly - equality of women. Free speech. No death threats.

Listen to the whole thing, and don't miss the discussion on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brandeis University at the end (beginning around 7:45).

Now I want to say a few words about -isms. Generally I try to avoid getting too much into ideological debates - "liberalism is better than conservatism" or vice versa - because I think they can be distracting. And arguing over what constitutes "real" conservatism / liberalism / you name it can quickly become a tedious waste of time. An ideology is a way of organizing your ideas and principles to help you make sense of the world, but what really matters is how you live your life.

But it's a fact that we often identify ourselves with our ideologies, be they political, religious, cultural, or otherwise. I vote Republican and most of my liberal friends consider me a "right-winger" but I have never thought of myself as a "conservative". Why? I don't know. I was raised by liberal parents, and I guess I feel my basic values haven't changed from the ones I was raised with.

What has changed, as I see it, is how the whole notion of liberalism - the liberal "brand", if you will - has morphed into something completely different from what it was in my parents' generation.

And what I see Bill Maher trying to do here is to reach out to liberals and remind them of the values that liberalism is supposed to stand for. I hope that he may be able to reach people who identify as "liberals" - the very people who need to be reached, and who may listen to someone they see as a fellow liberal when they will not listen to a "right-winger".

This being Mothers' Day, I'll just take a moment to acknowledge how much I learned from my Mom. She was a complicated woman and growing up with her was not easy; I wrote a short post about her at my personal journal. She had experienced sexism, and hated it; she had witnessed institutional racism, and hated it. She fought for the right of her darker-skinned friends to eat at the same lunch counter.

But she was never anti-American, and she was no friend of Communism. (Among my boxes of books I still have books by Soviet dissidents, from my Mom's collection.) And she had no patience with the entitlement mentality of people who thought society owed them something because of past wrongs. She believed in free access to the lunch counter - not a free lunch.

Mom was raised in a strict Baptist home in small-town Maine, and her childhood was in the pre-WWII era. She moved to the big city - Boston - as a young woman, and later moved to Connecticut and joined the Unitarian Universalist church, where she met kindred spirits, including my father. She had a lifelong distaste for religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism, but was never anti-religious and was always respectful and courteous to people whose beliefs she did not share. She judged people by their actions.

I don't consider myself a conservative, and I don't call myself a "liberal" anymore either, mainly because I don't want to get bogged down in semantics. What you call yourself is your own business. What matters is what you do.

Sudan court convicts Ethiopian woman over ‘gang-rape’

Sudan court convicts Ethiopian woman over ‘gang-rape’
This is unutterably grotesque.

The woman was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended because she is pregnant, her lawyer, Samia al-Hashmi, told the AFP news agency.
She was also fined 5,000 Sudanese pounds ($880; £530).
She had also faced charges of adultery and prostitution, which could have led to a penalty of death by stoning, but these were dropped after she convinced the court she was divorced, reports SIHA.

More via AllAfrica:

Glenn Beck: Human First

Rabbi Natan Gamedze Visits His Swaziland Home

I first linked Rabbi Gamedze's story back in 2005. This fascinating video offers an in-depth profile of Gamedze, and a view of his first visit home in sixteen years.

Sharansky: The free world has betrayed democratic dissidents | The Times of Israel

Sharansky: The free world has betrayed democratic dissidents | The Times of Israel

 “... Democracy is free elections and a free society. We should not be blinded by the fact that elections happened in some countries and automatically call those countries democracies. That’s the lesson from Egypt,” Sharansky said, adding that the creation of civil society institutions must precede the ballot box.

Fallujah Before Obama: Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City by Michael J. Totten, City Journal Spring 2008

Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City by Michael J. Totten, City Journal Spring 2008

By late 2006, Fallujans had had enough. Though they had little desire to be ruled, or even nurtured into self-rule, by Americans, the jihadist alternative was clearly worse. So Fallujah formed an alliance with its former enemies. The alliance is one of convenience, and possibly temporary, but it was forged in the crucible of the most wrenching catastrophe Fallujans have experienced in living memory.
“I feel the sincerity in the American support for the Iraqi civilians here,” one Fallujah resident tells me. “I am not going to say any bad words about Americans. I can feel that they really are eager to accomplish that mission.” Another Fallujan, who works as a money changer, says, “It will be a shame on all of us if the terrorists ever come back.” “Security is good now because the coalition, Iraqi army, and Iraqi police all work together,” says a third, the owner of a fruit stand. “One hand does not clap.”

▶ Henson Ong on gun control at Connecticut public hearing on gun violence - YouTube

▶ Asian immigrant schools americans on gun control at public hearing on gun violence - YouTube

Breaking: Identity of Pajama Boy revealed!

The Voice of Igbo Israel: What are responsible for Igbo and Jewish higher intelligence?

The Voice of Igbo Israel: What are responsible for Igbo and Jewish higher intelligence? Remy Ilona:

So we can say that Igbos have suffered more than their peers. But can suffering release the juice of intelligence? My mother ’Amaka Ilona, nee Nwosu; used to say that ‘afufu na eme ka mmadu mar’ ife’ (that suffering induces people to become sensible). Suffering can actually lead to innovativeness, to a bursting of the barriers. Certain types of suffering can lead to inventiveness. Here I will still rehash what I mentioned before. There are subtle suggestions that the Igbos were targeted. Why? The answer is that they were unique. Higher intelligence made them unique. The uniqueness aroused the ire of their neighbors, and antagonists. At the end of the day one may be wrong to just dismiss the argument that persecution, marginalization and oppression may release the juices that give rise to high intelligence. However one would in my opinion be on surer ground if one also looks at other variables that could give rise to higher intelligence. In my opinion ‘culture’ is one such variable. ...

Read the whole post at the link.

Nobel Laureate: Torah is Key to Jewish Genius

Nobel Laureate: Bible is Key to Jewish Genius - Israel Today | Israel News '“Torah study is an intellectual pursuit, and honoring this ultimate value transfers to other pursuits as well,” Aumann told Israel’s Army Radio. ...' The original title says 'Bible' which isn't really the same thing. Torah is a much broader and more distinctively Jewish concept, referring to the study and exposition of the Bible and the Mishnah.

Are Tolkien's dwarves an allegory for the Jews? | The Times of Israel

Are Tolkien's dwarves an allegory for the Jews? | The Times of Israel

Boko Haram Attacks Air Base in Borno, NE Nigeria

AllAfrica:

The outlawed Boko Haram sect on Monday morning attacked the international airport and various parts of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

The attack has forced the military to impose a 24 hour curfew on the Borno capital.

Unconfirmed reports say a plane was burnt down at the airport. Yakubu Datti, the aviation spokesperson, could not be reached to comment on the airport attack.

The attack is the first in recent months to be launched in Maiduguri by the sect ...

Long War Journal:

Boko Haram, a Nigerian terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda, launched a major attack on a Nigerian Air Force base in the insurgency-wracked city of Maiduguri. A number of security personnel were killed and several aircraft were destroyed during the nighttime attack that is said to have been executed by hundreds of Boko Haram fighters.

Hundreds of fighters assaulted the base on the outskirts of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, using trucks and even a stolen armored personnel carrier, beginning at 2:30 a.m. local time, according to The Associated Press. Boko Haram fighters yelled "Allahu akbar" as they attacked.

According to Brigadier General Chris Olukolade, the Ministry of Defense spokesman, at least 20 security personnel and 24 insurgents were killed, while two helicopters and three decommissioned military aircraft were "incapacitated." Boko Haram's use of explosives and RPGs has been confirmed. ...

Today's attack also takes place just one week after the Nigerian military claimed it cleared the terror group from bases in the Sambisa forest. The military said that more than 100 Boko Haram fighters were killed during the assault. ...

Armin Rosen on South Sudan

Via Michael J. Totten, Armin Rosen has an excellent piece on South Sudan from a year and a half ago.

The oldest building in Juba is its Mother Church, which was built by Anglican missionaries in the 1920s and sits at a confluence of shaded dirt roads, behind an expensive hotel that opened less than a year ago. It’s a red brick, open-air building with a roof made out of tin siding; the pews are also brick, and the floor is a lustrous concrete. It is cool and breezy, and on a boiling day—which is most days—the winds whipping through its partly-open ceiling evoke a sense of spiritual expansiveness, of being in a place quite a bit larger than mere physicality would suggest.

When we were here during the war, the pastor told me, all the South Sudanese that lived here were not allowed to go outside more than 15 kilometers. And if you want to go out you need to get a permit. For you just to get to your farm, you must get a permit to travel, and you must get no objection from internal security, public security or military intelligence. When you get no objections on your documents, you can go out. Sometimes you’re given a no objection document, but all of a sudden you find yourself kept in. You were treated as a foreigner in your own home.

And then the war itself—those years when the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the country’s eventual liberators, laid siege to the last major city it had been unable to capture, a northern garrison where the only cars were military vehicles, and the only permanent structures were government offices and mosques that hardly anyone uses anymore, even though they’re the largest and really most impressive buildings in the city—everything is centered on the war, he continued. Everything is actually portraying the image of war. ...

Go read it all.

Because.

English has a new proposition. This following the accession of selfie to the hallowed ranks of "Word of the Year".

Nigeria / Israel ties are getting closer with the new BASA (Bilateral Air Services Agreement) paving the way for direct flights between Israel and Nigeria.

True the Vote gets tax-exempt status, finally.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R - SC4) on Benghazi

Trey Gowdy to the press:

"Can you tell me why Chris Stevens was in Benghazi the night that he was killed? Do you know? Does it bother you whether or not you know why Chris Stevens was in Benghazi?"

Obama's Bubble

This might be a good time to refresh our memories on this story. Back in
the golden days of 2007, candidate Barack Obama dazzled a techie
audience with his answer to a technology question:

'Asked by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt what the most efficient
way to sort a million 32-bit integers is, Obama said the wrong way would
be the "bubble sort method," which is a basic but inefficient method for
sorting numbers. "You answered the question correctly," Schmidt said.'

Anybody who's ever taken even a basic programming class knows that the
"bubble sort" algorithm - which sorts a list of numbers by comparing
each successive term to its neighboring terms - is the easiest to
understand and to code, but the least efficient way of sorting a long
list. I'm no computer geek, but even I could have told you that much.

But Obama had the gift for saying the right words at the right time to
the right people. In the minds of the geeks at Google, he was "one of them".

And now? Is Obama still "Google-like" now?

Local Update

So I went out for a walk on Dolores, turned up 17th Street, and found
myself swimming upstream against a stampede of young, mostly
professional-looking men and women, some wearing colored armbands. Some
were carrying maps apparently printed for the occasion.

One cheery, heavyset, tattooed young women stopped me and asked for
directions, and for help in re-tying her armband. She pulled me over
into an alley; apparently she didn't want to be caught cheating. The
situation struck me as comical, and I imagined a police cruiser slowing
down for a look at what must have appeared to be a couple of junkies
getting a fix.

A few minutes later I ran into a couple of young guys, both equipped
with armbands and maps but apparently in less of a hurry than the rest.
(I gathered that it was a race of some sort, and wondered if it was a
scavenger hunt of the sort they have in Portland.) I stopped them and
asked them about it - was it some sort of game? From what I was able to
get from them, it was an annual event that had been started a few years
ago, and had something to do with zombies.

I gleaned the name "Journey to the End of Night" from the maps, and it
turns out the thing is "a free street game of epic proportion run by
volunteer masterminds in cities around the world. It is a race/chase
through city streets at night." [http://ichaseyou.com/]

OK, so there it is. Well, you never know what you're going to run into
when you step outside.

Mission

The Future

The Federal and state governments will likely go broke, and people who depended on government benefits will feel a lot of hurt. Social Security will be long gone. Big liberal states like California will be hardest hit. Infrastructures will suffer and things like serviceable roads, law enforcement, and emergency services will deteriorate.

Depending on how successful Obama is in his effort to wreck our economy in general and our medical system in particular, doctors and hospitals will likely be few and far between.

Over the past couple of generations, a lot of worthless paper has changed hands because (1) loans were given to people who didn't have the means to repay them; and (2) politicians made promises that they didn't have the means to pay for.

The government and its agencies will grow hungry and mean - like any other predatory animal - and will increasingly focus their dwindling resources on functions that generate revenue. This means finding ever more creative ways to expropriate citizens of their money and belongings. So we can expect to see increases in everything from petty robberies such as parking tickets to major hauls like seizures of cars, homes, and businesses on the pretext that they were used for "drug trafficking".

End result is that survival strategies are going to go back to being what they've always been. Be honest, courteous, hardworking, competent, and educated, and associate with other people who are. Take care of those close to you and be ready to defend them - and yourself.

Syrian Jihadis Behead Catholic Priest

Jihadists in Syria kidnapped a Catholic priest in the Idlib area and beheaded him as scores of onlookers, including children, cheered and recorded the event on their cell phones. The Vatican reported last week that the priest was captured by fighters "linked" to the Al Nusrah Front for the People in the Levant, al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.

The Vatican confirmed that Father François Murad was killed on June 23 after jihadists affiliated with the Al Nusrah Front overran his monastery in Gassanieh, a town in the countryside in the northern province of Idlib.

"According to local sources, the monastery where Fr. Murad was staying was attacked by militants linked to the jihadi group Jabhat al Nusrah [the Al Nusrah Front]," said the Fides News Agency, the Vatican's official media outlet. ...

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Lee Smith to Syrian Oppo: Why Americans Aren't In A Hurry to Help You

Lee Smith at Now:

It’s true that, on the other hand, there is some bipartisan backing for your cause, but the reality is that arming your sons, husbands, and brothers is not popular with the American public, neither with the right, nor the left. Americans are tired of the Middle East, frustrated by it – also, frankly, we’re angry.

Over the last decade, the United States has brought down or helped to bring down four Arab dictators, and with little to show for it. For spending trillions of dollars to topple Saddam, you’d think that instead of conspiracy theories imputing the worst motives to us, we might have earned some gratitude in the region. Gratitude at least for the sacrifices made by our family and friends in uniform, the thousands dead, the tens of thousands wounded, so that Iraqis can vote in free and fair elections and live without fear of being dragged off by Saddam’s security forces to be tortured, raped, and murdered.

We also helped bring down Qaddafi, which didn’t stop Libyan Islamists from killing our ambassador there and three other Americans. ...

Read the rest at the link.

The World Today

Before Google Reader vanishes from cyberspace, here are a few recent items from the feeds:

Massive protests in Egypt against Morsi. 'Huge protests calling for the resignation of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi and early presidential elections are taking place in the capital, Cairo, and other cities' on the anniversary of Morsi's rise to power. 'The protesters' goal again is to unseat a president, this time their first freely elected leader, the Islamist ....' PowerLine sees a religious/secular struggle. More at Arutz Sheva.

The US Park Police are missing a lot of guns. Maybe the Canadian Mounties can find 'em?

Life in post-tinfoil-hat reality.

Caroline Glick on Obama's foreign policy. Jonathan Spyer on Qatar.

Chicago Tribune calls for special prosecutor in the IRS scandal. And here in San Francisco, BART looks ready to go on strike.

Priorities

Boston Police Exercise Featuring Right-Wing Terrorists With Backpack Bombs Disrupted By Real Muslim Terrorists With Backpack Bombs:

The scenario had been carefully planned: A terrorist group prepared to hurt vast numbers of people around Boston would leave backpacks filled with explosives at Faneuil Hall, the Seaport District, and in other towns, spreading waves of panic and fear. Detectives would have to catch the culprits.

Months of painstaking planning had gone into the exercise, dubbed “Operation Urban Shield,” meant to train dozens of detectives in the Greater Boston area to work together to thwart a terrorist threat. The hypothetical terrorist group was even given a name: Free America Citizens, a home-grown cadre of militiamen whose logo would be a metal skull wearing an Uncle Sam hat and a furious expression, according to a copy of the plans obtained by the Boston Globe. ...

Flashback: "Police Go Undercover to Thwart Protesters Against Globalization"

Cheerios

I'm sharing this just because it's Friday.
Oh wait, it's Thursday? Then I'm sharing it just because.

習近平去死

Harry's Place on Edward Snowden's Hong Kong hypocrisy:

... [Snowden] said that he chose Hong Kong because the city has “a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”.

Really? Really? When Hong Kong is overseen by China??

Global Voices reported just over seven weeks ago:

Hong Kong netizens are outraged by the abuse of police force in the arrest of a 46-year-old man for writing “Go to Hell, Xi Jinping” (習近平去死) on the stairwell of a residential building in Hong Kong’s Ma On Shan district. Xi Jinping is the President of China. ...

We, the People

There was a time in America when "the People" were a force to be reckoned with.

Now, the connotation is rather different:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/2448255679001/people-staff-forgets-obamas-speech/#

"People!" Spoken twice, in a peremptory tone. Now the term refers to staffers, underlings, vassals. Those who must literally trip over themselves to do the bidding of The One.

Secular Jew Ira Glass: Christians Portrayed as Crazies by Media

Beautiful. Link here.

How to tell when a Republican strategy is successful.

1. The Democrat media fret that it "could backfire". (Just trying to help!)
2. The Democrat media scold that it's not nice. (New civility, folks.)
3. The Democrat media dig up "at least one Republican" to condemn the tactic. (And usually at most one. Or one and a half if you count John McCain.)

At least one Republican doesn't like Rick Perry's "job raids".

Hey Eric Holder

Homelands

The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own.
- Natan Sharansky, 'Defending Identity'

The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.
- Mohammed Akram, 'An Explanatory Memorandum'

I.
Who are you?
What is your name?
What's the place you call home? And if you were taken from your home by force, how would you stay true to who you are?

The Israeli television series 'Hatufim' - adapted for American TV as 'Homeland' - tells the story of two Israeli POWs who return home after 17 years in captivity at the hands of a terrorist group. Throughout the series, Nimrod and Uri struggle with questions of loyalty and identity; over and over, both of them tell the women in their lives "I'm not the same man I was before."

The first episodes show Nimrod and Uri being taken to a "facility" for debriefing, where they're questioned intensively by the relentless Major Haim Cohen. Cohen wants to learn all he can about the enemy, of course, but he also wants to know whether the two men have given up information to their captors.

As the show progresses, we begin to wonder how much - and on what levels - they have been altered by their time with the enemy. Early in the second season, a psychologist is shown giving a lecture (for our benefit) on "Stockholm syndrome". Later, another soldier returns home from a deep-cover mission, having ostensibly converted to Islam and taken the name Yusuf to work with the Children of Jihad - but hearing the muezzin's call for the first time since returning to Israel, and standing in his own childhood home, he begins reciting the Muslim prayers. And late at night, he is still haunted by the guard's repeated question, "What is your name?"

One real-life prisoner who stayed loyal to his cause was Natan Sharansky. His valuable book Defending Identity recounts his experiences in prison, and the lessons he drew from those times. Despite being held by the Communists for nine years in a Soviet prison, Sharansky (then known by his Russian name, Anatoly Shcharansky) did not back down from advocating human rights and Jewish solidarity.

But are not these two things - universal rights and ethnic solidarity - in conflict with one another? Sharansky insists that they are not, and in fact believes that this truth is the secret of his strength. From his own experience, and from observing others in the gulag, he concludes that "those with the strongest identities were the least likely to succumb to tyranny" (p. 61). And very often, this identity is found in religion. Sharansky does not claim it can be found only there, but it's clear that he sees faith as a source of strength with few rivals.

Religion - Jewish religion, that is - is notably absent from 'Hatufim'. The Jews of 'Hatufim' are secular Israelis who go to the synagogue only for bar mitzvahs. It's unlikely that they are fastidious about observing the Sabbath or the kosher laws (although it's hard to tell on this latter point, as all the characters are vegetarian). The Bible is quoted only once - in a reference to the Mossad's motto, Proverbs 24:6.

Contrast this with the devotion to purpose the Children of Jihad (the fictional terrorist group), whose members pray regularly, listen to Koranic sermons, and are often found at the mosque. In a battle of wills - if we accept Sharansky's premise - which side is better armed?


II.
Jihad is closer than we like to think.

On July 29, 1983, a guy named Stephen Paul Paster tried to blow up what was then the Hotel Rajneesh on SW 11th Avenue and Main Street in Portland, Oregon. The bomb exploded prematurely, damaging the building and injuring him; he escaped and the law caught up with him two years later. He was sentenced to 20 years, of which he served four, getting released early for good behavior. He immediately took off for Pakistan, where he's believed to be living to this day.

Paster was a member of Jamaat al-Fuqra, a jihadi organization founded by Sheikh Gilani and believed to be a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The incident was soon forgotten, and the Rajneeshees, for their part, staged a bioterror attack of their own the following year and eventually dropped off the radar.

Jamaat al-Fuqra dropped off the radar, too, but they haven't gone away. Back in 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing, the Anti-Defamation League published (pdf) a report on Al-Fuqra listing known and suspected incidents involving al-Fuqra through that date. The India-based South Asia Terrorism Portal has an article on Jamaat al-Fuqra also:

One of the persons convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a Fuqra member. JF was linked in a Congressional testimony to the planning of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Gilani is now in Pakistani custody for the abduction of US journalist Daniel Pearl. Official sources in Pakistan have indicated that Daniel Pearl was attempting to meet Gilani in the days before he disappeared in Karachi. Pakistani police arrested Gilani in Rawalpindi on January 30, 2002 and shifted him to Karachi for questioning. Although he denied any link to the abduction, police also detained several of his colleagues. Consequent to his arrest, he reportedly told his interrogators that he had links with the Pakistani intelligence agencies.

A media report has indicated that the JF is also being probed for links with Richard Reid, a Briton, accused of trying to use explosives in his shoes to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner on December 22, 2001. ...

Three suspected US-based JF members have been arrested on weapons charges in the year 2001, including two following the September 11 multiple terrorist attacks. Vicente Rafael Pierre, a 44-year-old native of Brooklyn and his wife Traci Upshur, both JF cadres, were arrested on gun charges and convicted on November 30, 2001. Pierre's Virginia compound, near the Red House Commune, is reported to have served as a JF base.

Islamberg, New York was founded by Gilani in the 1980s. Martin Mawyer's Christian Action Network alleges that Islamberg is part of a network of settlements built for the purpose of training jihadi fighters. Mawyer details these allegations in his book Twilight in America, which has brought him a lawsuit from Gilani; Mawyer says bring it on.

Jamaat al-Fuqra think long-term, like their parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood. That's one of the hallmarks of the MB - they're disciplined, dedicated, and very patient. Their goals are set forth in a document, authored by Mohammed Akram and dated 1991, which became public during the Holy Land Foundation trials. If you haven't read the Explanatory Memorandum (pdf) yet, go take a look (English translation starts on page 16). You can also order a printed edition of the translation.

Akram, a member of the Brotherhood's board of directors and a senior member of Hamas, describes the process of Islamic "settlement" in North America as a "civilization-jihadist process". This process is projected to happen in five phases: settlement, establishment, stability, enablement, and rooting. It's not just a plan to address the needs of Muslims living in North America, or to improve Islamic education. Here's what it's really all about:

The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes ...

You might wonder if the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan il-Muslimun in Arabic) is banned in the US as a terrorist organization. It's hard to say; might be tricky, since Ikwhanul Muslimun in Hancock, New York is a registered tax-exempt charity. Martin Mawyer's book says (p. 137) that

if you type the words 'Ikhwanul Muslimun' into the IRS web site in search of charities, you will learn that Ikhwanul Muslimun, Inc. is a tax-exempt organization filing as a church, and located on a 70-acre terrorist training camp in Hancock, New York— the same camp owned by Muslims of the Americas. It was registered with the IRS in 1974, yet, when contacted, the IRS claims to have no supporting or founding documents for the group. They know nothing more about them other than to confirm that they pay no taxes.

III.
Michael Totten has traveled all over the world and he's spent a lot of time in the Middle East. He's published books about Iraq, Lebanon, and the former Communist world. But his first novel - a story about a kidnapping - is set in the United States, in the Pacific Northwest.

In 'Taken', Michael Totten (the author as character) is abducted from his home in Portland and held hostage by American jihadists. The premise is chilling and entirely plausible.

Ahmed, Michael's interlocutor for much of the story, presents an articulate and reasonable-seeming face. Calmly and confidently, he outlines what he sees as the inevitable victory of Islam. Ahmed claims that he does not want to convert America "at gunpoint" (p. 67), and insists that "there is no compulsion in religion."

"The Jews don't like converts," Ahmed asserts. (That hasn't been my experience.) Ahmed, himself from a secular Muslim family background, sees the advance of Islam as inevitable. For him it's a choice between dynamism and stagnation, between meaning and emptiness, between something and nothing.

One of the most disturbing passages in 'Taken' comes near the end, where Totten, as narrator, describes his feelings of attraction toward Islam after feigning an interest in conversion to please his captors.

Does the narrator begin to succumb to Stockholm syndrome? Despite explicitly denying it, despite giving a knowledgeable discussion of the subject, is Totten's narrator in fact slipping into Stockholm syndrome himself towards the end of the story? I'll let you read the book and decide for yourself.

In Hatufim (Season 2, episode 4), the professor explains the process of Stockholm syndrome, citing the importance of creating a total dependency within the prisoner. She enumerates three essential conditions for this dependency: the prisoner's certainty that his life or death rests within the captor's hands; absolute isolation and deprivation of knowledge about the outside world, except for what the captor tells him; and finally, arbitrary kindness, which renders the prisoner defenseless and makes his identification with the captor "complete and absolute".

Totten brings out another aspect of the process, though, which I think is especially interesting. "I realized I was changing," the narrator admits (p. 109). "I was building invisible chains for myself." He realizes that even without being physically chained, "my own mind would create invisible walls for myself."

If the jihadis succeed in creating an atmosphere of intimidation, they will prevail. The Muslim Brotherhood will not need to resort to spectacular, mass-casualty attacks like al-Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; instead, by incrementally circumscribing the actions of free people into an ever-tighter sphere, they will achieve their goals with scarcely any resistance at all. We will have built our own invisible walls, and tied ourselves in our own invisible chains.


IV.
If you walk up to Jaffa from Tel Aviv, you'll pass an old, gutted brick building - once a soap factory - with its arches covered, jail-like, by iron bars. If you stand still in the afternoon heat and listen, you can hear the rustling and squeaking. It's full of bats.

I'm thinking about that building this afternoon.

On a day like today I can look out at San Francisco and think it'll last forever. The sky is clear, and it's warm outside - 80 degrees, and it's not even September yet! From the air-conditioned office where I work, the buildings of the Financial District appear immaculate, geometric, impregnable. In a century or two, will there be bats in these buildings? Will they be fit to live in, or even still be standing?

I have lived a pretty sheltered life. I haven't seen death up close, except once or twice. One night in a desert far away from my home, four of my buddies lost their lives to one of our own missiles outside of Khafji. The blast had obliterated their vehicle and there wasn't anything left to bury; we just held a short memorial service in the cool, damp January air and moved on. I could easily have been one of them. That was the night before my 28th birthday.

A year and a half later, my sister - who had just turned twenty-eight - was lying on a stainless steel table in the coroner's office. She looked so much smaller than she had in life, and healthier - like a child. Her face looked peaceful; her body, wrapped in the sheet, made me think of a cocoon or a chrysalis. Perhaps her soul had broken free like a butterfly; if so it flew in a hidden dimension of space where I could not see it.

She was a poet, and what she left us was her memories and her words. Every one of us will have to leave some day, and we will all leave something behind. What we build, and what we leave for others, exists in that invisible space, in that untouchable dimension. And that's what we're fighting for.

I think of my teenage son and my little girl. What kind of world will they live in? What words will they have? Will they write poetry? Will they know Hebrew? Will they light Sabbath candles with their children?

"A man with no children has no home," says Yusuf's Muslim mother-in-law when she's begun to suspect that his loyalties still lie with the other side.

Our true homes have their foundations deep in the invisible inner space of our minds and souls, but they become part of the larger world in the children we leave behind.

More than the physical space of our cities, it's our mental and spiritual space that we're fighting for. Will we be as defenseless as the villagers in Totten's dream image? When we are asked 'What is your name?' will we know how to answer?

Holidays I'd Like to See

Free Market Day.
Build Something Useful Day.
Personal Responsibility Day.
Family Day. (Arizona and Nevada, you're way ahead of the rest of us here.)
Human Life Day.
Human Achievement Day.

Warsaw and Memory

'Today, April 19, marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. ...' Adam Garfinkle on Holocaust and heroism. Read it all.

Fuck you, he explained.

Sharyl Atkisson on Boston and Benghazi, with commentary.

The Passing of Google Reader

is duly lamented here:

Faith

I support your right not to believe in G-d. I support every person's right to make their own decisions about religion: to believe in one God, or many, or none at all. To practice religion as a traditionalist, or as a liberal, or a reformer or a heretic or an apostate or an unbeliever. To embrace revelation or to reject it. To pray facing Jerusalem, or Calvary, or Mecca, or not to pray at all. To follow a single, absolute, fixed line of belief, or to change your mind a hundred times a day about what you believe and why you believe it (the latter is closer to my own faith). And I expect that you respect every other person's rights. A faith coerced is no faith at all; and a faith that justifies evil is an evil faith.

As a believer, I stand with the unbelievers.

Peretz on New New Republic: 'I Don't Recognize Magazine I Used to Own. We Were Liberal But Not Narrowly Partisan' | NewsBusters

Peretz on New New Republic: 'I Don't Recognize Magazine I Used to Own. We Were Liberal But Not Narrowly Partisan' | NewsBusters