Just kidding!
Last night (11/24) I had the opportunity to speak with Newsmax host Steve Malzberg and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) on the topic of Syrian refugees and the global jihad more broadly.
Check out our conversation below:
Category: National Security (Page 8 of 12)
For my piece on why using “terrorism” instead of “jihadism” is such a consequential error, I received an honorable mention from the essential Watcher’s Council.
Read their round-up of exceptional writings for the week of November 18th here.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, it is vital to acknowledge that 14 years after 9/11, even the lexicon we use in connection with the slow-motion global jihad continues to be fatally flawed.
Lack of clarity and precision in terminology and definitions indicates a lack of cogency in our own minds; as it pertains to our understanding of the Islamic supremacist enemy — never referred to by our “leaders” as such — incoherence portends failure with respect to defending America against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Take our use of the word “terrorist” for example. I would submit that this term in and of itself misclassifies the enemy, and in effect serves its efforts by witting or unwitting obfuscation.
Terrorism is a tactic; the enemy properly defined consists of adherents to an Islamic supremacist, theopolitical ideology — that is, self-described jihadists. As others have noted, in World War II we did not refer to our enemy as “the blitzkrieg.”
Further, “terrorist” is just a marginally less politically correct term than “violent extremists,” but it similarly lumps animal rights nuts with sophisticated jihadi operatives. By painting with such a broad brush, we in turn dilute the perceived dangerousness of our mortal foe.
As such, the very name “War on Terror” is inapt.
This means of course that our foreign policy Establishment has failed the American people on a bipartisan basis.
How we counterjihadists make this clear to the public after 14 years of mendacious messaging is a monumental challenge as we think about how to turn the tide.
On Friday 10/31, I sat in as a guest again on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap.”
During the episode, we had the chance to discuss a variety of issues including Obama’s deployment of a limited number of American Special Forces members to Syria to help Syrian “rebels” (read: “good” jihadists) in the fight against ISIS, reaction to the CNBC GOP Debate and proposals for improving future ones, Hillary Clinton’s crude politicization of the VA, and more!
You can watch the show in full, along with some particularly pertinent clips below.
Full Episode
Obama’s Foreign Policy, Syria and ISIS
GOP Anger with the CNBC Debate
The notion that a video caused a jihadist attack, or that jihadism more broadly is tolerable or understandable given socioeconomics, “climate disruption” or anything else evinces a soft bigotry of low expectations.
Conversely, the notion that Israel’s defensive action in response to jihadism is always and everywhere “disproportionate” – that unless Israel acts in a self-righteously suicidal manner it is in the wrong – evinces a hard bigotry of “high” expectations.
I explore this outrageous double standard in context of the Third Intifada — in which the media is effectively complicit — in a new article for PJ Media titled Israel, the Media’s Hard Bigotry of ‘High’ Expectations and the Obama Intifada.
Here’s a taste:
As the Lutheran pastor and courageous Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Not to speak is to speak.” Today he might say of Israeli-Arab coverage, “Not to judge is to judge.” That is, in trying to appear “even-handed,” the media actually explicitly judges when it comes to Arab jihadists versus Jews in Israel.
In drawing moral equivalence between two morally unequivalent sides, the media downgrades Israelis while upgrading jihadists, and worse judges the Israeli as the oppressor and the Arab as the oppressed. The media judges jihadist savagery as tolerable, but Jewish defensive action as unacceptable. The media judges the Arab right to a state (for a Palestinian people that has never existed) as inviolable, but Israel’s right to exist as unconscionable.
Read the whole thing here.
Here’s a taste of my latest at The Federalist, in which I question why Yale University is taking $10 million from a jihadi-tied Saudi billionaire to build an Islamic (read: Sharia) Law center that propagates an ideology under which Yale itself could not exist:
While America remains financially and militarily the mightiest nation on Earth, it is losing the war Islamic supremacism is waging against her because it is chiefly an ideological one. We have the strength to defend ourselves, but we lack the knowledge and the will to defeat our enemies. We are morally relativistic and therefore unable to acknowledge that different peoples are different and that not all ideologies are equal or seek the same ends.
But people like Saleh Kamal surely understand us. In the conquest ideology inherent to Sharia—Islam compels Muslims to extend the Islamic sphere, the ummah, over all the world—America has found an enemy able to best take advantage of our deeply held freedoms. Sharia explicitly calls for the use of the very tactics against which America is most vulnerable.
As a consequence of our willful blindness (contrasted with Islamic supremacists’ comparable clarity), we are constructing Islamic law centers, inviting Muslims to immigrate by the hundreds of thousands without recognition that Hijra is a form of jihad, and, 14 years after 9/11, our top military minds are arguing that we back al-Qaeda against ISIS—that is, the newly “good jihadists” against the “bad jihadists.” For the coup de grace, we are actively aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran’s Twelver jihadist regime in its quest for nuclear domination of the Middle East and beyond.
Read the whole thing here.
Featured Image Source: YouTube Screengrab/Firing Line.
In working through some of the 7,000 Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department yesterday, I came across one curious one sent from aide Huma Abedin to the then-Secretary of State regarding a Koran-burning in the U.S.
Here is another intriguing email:
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at these meetings. #Libya #Benghazi pic.twitter.com/GJUYfeWbf5
— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) September 1, 2015
It is noteworthy that this message on a sensitive subject — presumably about a meeting between then-Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Sec. of State Clinton on weapons collections in Libya — would be left unredacted, while many other emails in the Clinton trove are redacted in toto.
This may be because news reports around the September 10, 2011 email date indicate that Rep. Rogers, former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was concerned that weapons including anti-aircraft missiles could get into the “hands of bad actors” in the wake of the fall of former Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was understandably kept abreast of all manner of news from all over the world during her tenure as Secretary of State.
But buried amidst the thousands of emails recently released by the State Department is one news report of particular interest sent from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Here is Abedin’s note:
Unclassified email from Huma Abedin to Hillary Clinton dated September 12, 2010 and released August 31, 2015. Doc No. C05772407.
This email begs the question: Why did Huma Abedin feel the need to bring the desecration of a Koran in East Lansing, MI to the attention of the Secretary of State?
Did Abedin feel that Clinton might be concerned about the news “inciting” attacks in America or abroad?
Might she have felt that such a story could be leveraged politically?
Was it just something Abedin as a Muslim found personally reprehensible, that she felt her confidant ought to be made aware of?
Actions like Koran-burning presumably would have been important to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, given her stated support for suppressing such activity.
As I noted elsewhere:
National Review’s Jim Geraghty asks an essential question in a recent edition of his Morning Jolt that every member of Congress — not just Republicans — should have to answer: “[W]hat are you willing to do to prevent a mushroom cloud either in the Middle East or closer to home?”
As it pertains to members of the GOP, the proof is in the pudding: The party will prove pusillanimous — unwilling to exhaust every avenue to block an Iran deal disastrous for the entire West.
How do we know this?
Sen. Bob Corker’s Iran legislation in and of itself was a complete and utter abdication of Senatorial prerogative, and perhaps the crowning act of Failure Theater of this Republican Congress.
For a refresher, as Geraghty’s colleague Andrew C. McCarthy noted in April:
In an age of victimology, moral relativism and a supreme lack of confidence in Western Civilization, you get comments like this from senior military officials:
“In testimony on Capitol Hill this year, Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, the [Defense Intelligence] agency’s director, said sending ground troops back into Iraq risked transforming the conflict into one between the West and ISIS, which would be ‘the best propaganda victory that we could give.'”
Lt. Gen. Stewart’s statement fittingly comes from the Times’ exposé on the alleged politicization of intelligence estimates regarding our nation’s supposed military campaign against ISIS in Iraq.
The half-hearted effort against ISIS as dictated by President Obama — more political than substantive in nature — is a symptom of which Stewart’s demoralized mindset is part of the cause.
We are in a war in which Islamic supremacists are and have been fighting infidels worldwide for multiple decades, while the infidels cower.
We do not need to transform any conflict into one between the West and jihadists because the jihadists have already defined their war with us as such.
We are losing today to ISIS and to Islamic supremacism more broadly not so much because we lack the capability to destroy them
