Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: Islam (Page 1 of 2)

Robert Spencer on Islamic Supremacism, U.S. Middle East Policy, Defeating Jihad

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My Guest

Robert Spencer (@jihadwatchRS) is the director of the invaluable counterjihadist website, Jihad Watch, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of eighteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS.

Mr. Spencer’s work sits at the nexus of a number of seminal issues, from national security and foreign policy, to identity politics and free speech, and theology and political philosophy. The battle being waged by Islamic supremacism against the West implicates all of these matters, and Mr. Spencer’s insights make him uniquely qualified to discuss them. 

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Andrew C. McCarthy: Lessons from the Blind Sheikh Terror Trial, What Animates Jihadists, Why U.S. Middle East Policy Fails, Collapsing Iran’s Regime (Part I)

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My Guest

Andrew C. McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, contributing editor of National Review and author most recently of essential books on the threat of Islamic supremacism including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the JihadThe Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

In addition to being one of the nation’s foremost national security analysts and legal experts — formerly serving as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the vaunted Southern District of New York — he is one of the most humble, insightful and devoted patriots I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

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Andrew Klavan on the Criticality of Conservative Competition in Culture, Regressive Progressivism, Political Correctness, Free Speech

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My Guest

Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) is a screenwriter, bestselling crime and suspense novelist, contributor to publications such as City Journal and PJ Media and proprietor of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” a video podcast on The Daily Wire.

Klavan is witty, he’s got a sense of humor and a keen understanding of the importance of narrative and storytelling to culture.

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3 Lessons From Syria for an American-First Foreign Policy

On a bipartisan basis, America’s foreign policy establishment has championed a progressive, Wilsonian internationalist agenda that has served to our great detriment over the last 30 years.

Syria presents an ideal case study illustrating the pitfalls of this stultifying status quo.

In a new piece at Conservative Review, I analyze three aspects of that situation worth exploring as we look to build a framework for a new national interest-oriented foreign policy, focusing on the familiar themes of (i) Deposing relatively secular authoritarian dictators, (ii) Arming Islamic “rebels” and (iii) Picking sides in the Sunni-Shia war.

I close my piece with the following assertion:

…[E]very situation in the Middle East, and indeed the world, must not be viewed parochially. Strategic thinking requires understanding all of the players on the ground both immediately and as proxies for other forces, as well as understanding the different goals, strategies and tactics of each of the players. Often, the U.S. is going to be left with a series of bad options and outcomes, and near-term interests that may conflict with longer-term goals. In the case of ISIS for example, America must defeat them. As with the victory over any enemy however, we must also be looking downfield at who might fill ISIS’ vacuum. For the destruction of ISIS would not only represent the elimination of our jihadist foe, but the elimination of a Sunni competitor to Iran in its quest for hegemony. Such complexity underscores the significance of Sun Tzu’s urging that we know our enemies, but also know ourselves.

For decades policymakers have eschewed such analysis. Our leaders have often failed to articulate a basic explanation for why their decisions are in our national interest. They have failed to present a sober cost-benefit analysis for such actions based on a clear understanding of the nature of the enemy. They have failed to think thought through the knock-on effects of such actions on the broader world chessboard. Most pernicious of all, they have allowed politics and political correctness to inform decision-making, rather than forthrightly dealing with the world as it is.

The U.S. has the greatest assets in the world. But they have been misused thanks to a lack of knowledge, judgment, and strategic thinking. The Trump administration provides an opportunity to change this dynamic, an opportunity that we must seize.

You can read the whole thing here.

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My In-Depth Interview With Hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam versus the West and Free Speech

My Latest in City Journal: New York’s Willfully Blind, Politically Correct Counterjihadist Document Purge

The very day that homegrown jihadist Edward Archer fired 13 shots at Philadelphia Police Officer Jesse Hartnett, New York City was settling two long-standing suits with Muslim individuals and organizations challenging the legality of the City’s intelligence and surveillance programs vis-à-vis the Muslim community.

While New York refused to acknowledge any liability arising from its counterjihadist programs, the NYPD agreed to scrub from its website a groundbreaking 2007 analysis published by two senior analysts in its intelligence unit, Radicalization in the West [download it before it’s gone], that represents one of the most clear-eyed and sober publicly disclosed analyses of the jihadist threat.

Radicalization in the West, Page 75.

Radicalization in the West, Page 75.

Eerily but tellingly, it provides a model of how an American goes from “pre-radicalization” to “jihadization” that matches perfectly the story and profile of the aforementioned Archer, and it argues that the chief animator of jihadists is theo-political Islamic supremacist ideology — something our national security establishment maddeningly and disastrously continues to ignore and/or deny.

The NYPD will not only purge what appears to be a valuable piece of analysis as a means of placating the Muslim community, but it has also agreed not to use the analysis to open or extend ongoing investigations.

I write about this politically-motivated travesty of a decision in a new piece at City Journal titled See No Islam, Hear No Islam.

Featured Image Source: PhillyVoice.

We’re All Infidels Now (and Forever): A Dire Message from Rudyard Kipling and Middle Eastern Christians to the West

Father George William Rutler has written a piece over at the Catholic Crisis Magazine worthy of the West’s attention, and therefore consequently unlikely to get it in these times of willful blindness and unblissful ignorance.

In it, he pens a critical passage linking the prescient poet Rudyard Kipling to the persecuted Christians of the Middle East [emphasis mine]:

[O]ne still might echo Rudyard Kipling: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” The Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Amel Shumoun Nona, has warned from exile in Kurdistan: “Our sufferings today are a prelude to what even European and Western Christians will incur in the near future. Your liberal and democratic principles here (in the Middle East) are not worth anything. You need to rethink our reality in the Middle East because you are receiving in your countries, an increasing number of Muslims. You too are at risk. You have to take strong and courageous decisions, at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think that men are all the same. It is not true. Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand in time, you will become victims of the enemy you have welcomed into your home.

East is East and West is West. Yet the Wise Men in their wisdom outwitted King Herod and such wisdom, mated with self-neglectful virtue, melts all physical and ideological boundaries with a charity that gives hope to the most helpless. That is why Kipling continued with his ballad:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

Jews have served as the historical canary in the coal mine of Western civilization, with the nation of Israel today’s first line of defense against Islamic tyranny.

But the unheeded cries of persecuted Christians in the Middle East are a harrowing reminder that Islamic supremacism’s enemy is Judeo-Christianity in toto.

We’re all infidels now, and indeed have been for all time.

There is a slow-motion global jihad being waged against us all, and we ignore the Islamic supremacist ideology that animates its soldiers abroad and at home at our own peril and to our own great detriment.

Allah and Man at Yale

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.

ESPN Silenced Curt Schilling, So What Would It Say to This Arab Writer Who Compared Hamas to the Nazis?

According to the invaluable MEMRI, an Arab writer named Majed Hadib recently published an article in a PLO-affiliated publication in which he compared Hamas to Hitler and the Nazis.

In particular, he argues that the terrorist group’s tactics are going to lead those under its control to destruction akin to that of the Germans during WWII:

[Hamas’] measures resemble those taken by Hitler when he sought the permission of the Germans to lead Germany and its people towards years of glory. [However,] Hitler led Germany to collapse and division, after murdering, arresting and oppressing the German people. The laws he passed were meant to protect his regime on the one hand, and on the other hand to rally the people behind him and lead Germany towards the ‘glorious skies,’ as he called it. If Hamas continues to march on his path and try to rally the people around it without any comprehensive and unified national strategy, and under the pretext of letting the resistance win – it will lead our people to doom and to the end of its lengthy historic struggle, which is soaked in the blood of martyrs…

The author continues:

Hamas must understand now, before it is too late, that its adherence to the principle of attempting to eliminate the other, the steps it is taking to silence others, its increasing oppression of Palestinian national forces and of the people of Gaza, the legislation of the so-called ‘Mutual Responsibility [Tax] Laws’[2] and the taxation that preceded them, the restriction of general liberties… and the hobbling of all media that oppose its activity – all this will not cause the Palestinian people to rally behind it. This, because the Palestinian people is not a herd, but rather a people with a national cause [which has shown] creativity throughout its lengthy struggle. The attempts to eliminate the national forces of the Palestinian people or suppress them will not enable Hamas to lead [the Palestinians] to victory and to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Rather, [Hamas will lead them] where Hitler led the German people – namely to defeat and years-long destruction.

He concludes:

… Will Hamas learn a lesson and cease seeing the other components of the people as something that must be uprooted in order to strengthen [itself], under the pretext of ‘resistance’ and of leading the people towards victory? Or will it insist on following in Hitler’s footprints by levying taxes, legislating harsh laws, and taking increased security measures – [which] will lead the people to the brink of disaster and cause it to deteriorate for many years, even decades, has happened to Nazi Germany?

Now I grant that the rationale behind the comparison of Nazi Germany to Hamas-controlled Arab is not the one I would have made.

Hamas seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state of Israel, and I think that pretty much says it all. Not to mention the fact that we could loosely trace Hamas’ ideology to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, one of Hitler’s close allies.

But given the comparison of Hamas to the Nazis, one wonders what ESPN would say.

In the case of current ESPN anchor and former pitching great Curt Schilling, he might have had a more compelling case than this Palestinian author, and his comment was far less pointed.

The image Schilling tweeted, deleted and paid for — with ESPN canceling his telecast assignment for the Little League World Series — made the comparison of Islamic supremacists to Nazis.

(Image Source: Twitter)

(Image Source: Twitter)

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America’s See-No-Islam Problem Exposed With Boston Jihadism

The Boston Globe published a column in the wake of the shooting of an Islamic State-linked jihadist from Rosindale, Massachusetts that is a quintessential example of why the West is losing to Islamic supremacists.

In “Are Boston terrorism cases a trend?” two Globe authors reach out to several “antiterrorism specialists” and ask why it is that Boston appears to be so “vulnerable to violent extremism.”

Some submit that Boston’s “emergence as an international hub may leave it exposed to strains of radicalized behavior.”

Others find the existence of Boston-based jihadists curious given these jihadists “cannot be traced to one network, and individuals and groups do not appear to be connected.”

One such expert who has written on the Islamic State, J.M. Berger, acknowledges that “There is some degree of social network here that seems to be involved in radical thought.”

Halfway through the Globe article, the reader is left utterly unaware of any link between Boston jihadists and…jihadism. In fact, readers will not find the word “jihadist” in the column.

What readers do see is the lexicon of our see-no-Islam national security establishment, including euphemisms such as “violent extremism,” “homegrown terrorist,” and “radical presence.”

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

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