WSJ Editorial
Are Palestinians entitled to a state? Before certain readers erupt at the mere suggestion that Palestinians may not be so entitled, we’d note that the Kurds—one of the oldest ethnic groups in the world—don’t have a state. Neither do the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs and Tibetans of China, the Basques of Spain, the Chechens of Russia or the Flemish of Belgium. The list of peoples with plausible claims to statehood is as long as the current number of U.N. member states, if not longer.
Yet when the United Nations holds its annual meeting in New York this week, the session will be dominated by the efforts of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to declare statehood. First the PA will apply to the Security Council for full membership in the U.N., which the Obama Administration has promised to veto. Then the General Assembly will hold a vote on whether to give the Palestinians “observer state” status on a par with the Vatican. This is almost certain to pass by a two-thirds, 129-nation majority.
A vote at the U.N. won’t create a Palestinian state and will likely retard the creation of one, perhaps for years. It won’t remove any Israeli settlements from the West Bank and might well give Jerusalem reason to accelerate the pace of construction. It could also lead Israel to take various punitive measures against the Palestinians, including freezing tax transfers worth about $100 million a month. The U.S. Congress might follow by cutting off the $600 million in annual aid to the Palestinians.
Why, then, are the Palestinians intent on winning the sort of symbolic trinket with which their cupboards are already full? The charitable explanation is that they are using the statehood bid as a gambit to get Israel to agree to various demands, including a halt in settlement construction.
But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered a hint of his real ambition when he wrote, in the New York Times in May, that “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only as a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court.”
That means not the usual feckless resolutions at the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, but travel bans and international arrest warrants for Israeli soldiers involved in the “occupation” of a supposedly sovereign state.
In other words, what Palestinians seek out of a U.N. vote isn’t an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel. “We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years,” Mr. Abbas said the other day. That’s another way of saying that the “occupation,” in Mr. Abbas’s view, began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and not with Israel’s takeover of the West Bank and Gaza after a war that threatened Israel’s existence in 1967.
Mr. Abbas may also see the U.N. gambit as a cost-free exercise, since the international community (including Israel and the U.S.) hasn’t exactly been punctilious in holding Palestinians to account for violating their diplomatic or political undertakings. Sooner or later, we will read an op-ed explaining that defunding the PA will only help the radicals of Hamas, and that the only way forward is for Israel to make new concessions to entice the PA back to the very negotiating table they spurned by going to the U.N.
Here is a better course: The Obama Administration, which has wasted six months begging the Palestinians to change course, might instead announce that a declaration of Palestinian statehood in New York would lead to the closure of the Palestinian representative’s office in Washington. Congress could also enact Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s bill to cut funding to the U.N. if it endorses a Palestinian state. This worked wonders the last time the Palestinians sought to have the U.N. declare their state during the George H.W. Bush Administration.
Perhaps it’s also time to rethink the fundamental desirability of a Palestinian state so long as the Palestinians remain more interested in tearing down their neighbor than in building a decent political culture of their own.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
The man who could trigger a world war
David Warren
Ottawa Citizen
September 15, 2011
The greatest threat to the world's peace, at this moment, comes from a man named Recip Tayyip Erdogan. He is the prime minister of Turkey, at the head of the Justice and Development Party ("AK," from the Turkish). A former mayor of Istanbul, he was arrested and jailed when he publicly recited Islamist verses ("the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets," etc.), in defiance of the old secularist, Ataturk constitution, which made it an offence to incite religious and racial fanaticism.
Erdogan's credentials as an anti-Semite, but also as an anti-Communist, were established from his school days. He came from an observant Muslim family, and while nothing he says can be taken without salt, he claims an illustrious ancestry, of fighters for Turkish and Ottoman causes.
He is an "interesting case" in other respects. His post-secondary education was in economics; he is a very capable technocrat, and under his direction the Turkish economy was rescued. He is a dragonslayer of inflation, and public deficits; he took dramatic and effective measures to clean up squalor in the Turkish bureaucracy, and as the saying goes, "he made the trains run on time."
Erdogan is also a "democrat," who has no reason not to be, because he enjoys tremendous and abiding domestic popularity. The party he founded came to power by a landslide, and has been twice re-elected. (He had a stand-in for prime minister at first, for he was still banned from public office.) There are demographic reasons, too, why Turkish secularism has been overwhelmed by Turkish Islamism. The Muslim faithful have babies; modern secularists don't.
The "vision" of this politician, which he can articulate charismatically, is to combine efficient, basically free-market economic management, with a puritanized version of the religious ideals of the old Ottoman Caliphate. (Gentle reader may recall that I am allergic to visionary and charismatic politicians, who operate on the body politic like a dangerous drug.)
Erdogan's vision has turned outward. His strategy has been to seek better economic integration with the West, while making new political alliances with the East - most notably with Iran. He now presents Turkey as the champion of "mainstream" Sunni Islamism, while trying to square the circle with Persian Shia Islamism. This could still come to grief over Syria, where the Turks want Iran's man, Assad, overthrown, and the Muslim Brotherhood brought into a new Syrian government.
Turkey's military was the guarantor of pro-western Turkish secularism, under the Ataturk constitution. With characteristic incomprehension of the consequences, western statesmen supported Erdogan's efforts to establish civilian control over the generals - our old NATO friends. By imprisoning several senior officers on (probably imaginative) charges of plotting a coup, Erdogan was able to induce the entire Turkish senior staff to resign, last month.
They did this because they had run out of allies. Hillary Clinton and company hung the only effective domestic opposition to Erdogan out to dry. Turkey's powerful, western-equipped military is now entirely Erdogan's baby, and the country's secularist constitution is a dead letter. Erdogan, the Islamist, now has absolute power.
It was he who sent the "peace flotilla" to challenge Israel's right to blockade Gaza (recognized under international law and explicitly by the U.N.). He made the inevitable violent result of that adventure into an anti-Israeli cause célèbre. He has now announced that the next peace flotilla will be accompanied by the Turkish navy.
This will put Israel in the position of either surrendering its right to defend itself, or firing on Turkish naval vessels. There is no way to overstate the gravity of this: Erdogan is manoeuvring to create a casus belli.
He has made himself the effective diplomatic sponsor for the Palestinian declaration of statehood next week - from which much violence will follow. Every Palestinian who dies, trying to kill a Jew, will be hailed as a "martyr," with compensation and apologies demanded.
He has been playing Egyptian politics, by adding to the rhetorical fuel that propelled an Islamist mob into the Israeli embassy in Cairo last Friday. He is himself in Cairo, this week, on a mission to harness grievances against Israel, in the very fluid circumstances of the "Arab Spring." For action against this common enemy is the one thing that can unite all disparate Arab factions - potentially under Turkish leadership.
The West is just watching, while Erdogan creates pretexts for another Middle Eastern war: one in which Israel may be pitted not only against the neighbouring states of the old Arab League, but also Turkey, and Iran, and Hamas, and Hezbollah.
This is what is called an "existential threat" to Israel, unfolding in live time. It could leave the West with a choice between defending Israel, and permitting another Holocaust. In other words, we are staring at the trigger for a genuine world war. With Recip Erdogan's twitching finger on it.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Understanding Poverty in America
By Robert
Rector and Rachel Sheffield
The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty report, released this morning, found that 46.2 million Americans, or one in seven of us, were poor in 2010. The prolonged recession, with its high levels of unemployment, clearly has swollen the ranks of the poor.
But high numbers for poverty as defined by the Census Bureau predates the current recession. In most years for the past two decades, in fact, the Census Bureau declared that more than 35 million Americans were “living in poverty.” Last year’s number was 43.5 million.
These figures sound ominous.
But do we really understand poverty in the United States? What does it mean to be poor?
To the average American, the word “poverty” implies significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing.
Activists reinforce this view, characteristically declaring that to be poor in America means being “unable to obtain the basic material necessities of life.” The old-stream news media traditionally amplify this idea: Most news stories on poverty feature homeless families, people living in crumbling shacks, or lines of the downtrodden waiting to eat in soup kitchens.
But the actual living conditions of most of America’s poor—that is, the poor as defined by the Census Bureau—differ greatly from these images, as we document in a new research paper from The Heritage Foundation called "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts about America’s Poor."
This is in part because in calculating income the government agency doesn’t count most means-tested welfare assistance --on track to top $1 trillion this decade alone -- and in part because of exaggerated depictions of the poor.
According to data compiled by other government agencies, the typical household considered “poor” by census officials has a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household has cable or satellite TV, two color televisions, a DVD player and a VCR. If children (especially boys) are in the home, they have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household has the ordinary conveniences: refrigerator, oven, stove, microwave.
Half the poor now have a personal computer. A third have a widescreen TV (plasma or LCD); a quarter have a digital video recorder such as TiVo.
In all these cases, U.S. Department of Energy data say so. Consumer items that were luxuries or significant purchases for the middle class a few decades ago have become commonplace in households defined by the Census Bureau as poor. In part, this is a result of the normal downward trend of prices in the years after a product is introduced. Initially, new products tend to be expensive and available only to the affluent; over time prices fall sharply, and the product saturates the entire population.
The Left uses the declining relative prices of many amenities to argue that it’s no big deal that poor households have air conditioning, computers, cable TV and widescreen televisions. They argue that even though most poor families have a house full of modern conveniences, the average poor family still suffers from substantial deprivation in basic needs such as food and housing.
Fortunately, that’s not the case.
Let’s look at housing. The old-stream media usually present America’s poor living in real deprivation: a large family crowded into a leaky, rundown trailer, for example. But only a tenth of the poor live in mobile homes, according to government data; half live in single-family houses and the remaining 40 percent live in apartments.
These homes in most cases are in good repair and almost never overcrowded, according to the government’s own statistics. Poor Americans, on average, live in larger houses or apartments than does the average, non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.
The media cry with alarm that “nearly one in four kids” in the nation are hungry. Again, government data show otherwise. Fully 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during 2009, despite the severity of the recession, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Of course, these facts don’t mean that all poor Americans escape hardship. Although the overwhelming majority of the poor are well-housed, around one in 70 poor persons was homeless at any specific time during the last year, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And although the majority of poor families have an adequate, reasonably steady supply of food, many worry about keeping food on the table. One in five poor adults experienced temporary food shortages and hunger at various times during the year.
Those who are temporarily hungry or homeless will find no comfort in the fact that their condition is relatively infrequent. Their distress must be a real and serious concern for policy makers.
Regrettably, however, most discussions of poverty in the U.S. are riddled with exaggeration and misinformation. Effective anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the long-term causes of real deprivation—especially the collapse of marriage and erosion of the work ethic.
Over the long haul, as we conclude in “Understanding Poverty in the United States,” grossly exaggerating the extent and severity of material deprivation won’t benefit the poor, the economy and our society as a whole.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty report, released this morning, found that 46.2 million Americans, or one in seven of us, were poor in 2010. The prolonged recession, with its high levels of unemployment, clearly has swollen the ranks of the poor.
But high numbers for poverty as defined by the Census Bureau predates the current recession. In most years for the past two decades, in fact, the Census Bureau declared that more than 35 million Americans were “living in poverty.” Last year’s number was 43.5 million.
But do we really understand poverty in the United States? What does it mean to be poor?
To the average American, the word “poverty” implies significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing.
Activists reinforce this view, characteristically declaring that to be poor in America means being “unable to obtain the basic material necessities of life.” The old-stream news media traditionally amplify this idea: Most news stories on poverty feature homeless families, people living in crumbling shacks, or lines of the downtrodden waiting to eat in soup kitchens.
But the actual living conditions of most of America’s poor—that is, the poor as defined by the Census Bureau—differ greatly from these images, as we document in a new research paper from The Heritage Foundation called "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts about America’s Poor."
This is in part because in calculating income the government agency doesn’t count most means-tested welfare assistance --on track to top $1 trillion this decade alone -- and in part because of exaggerated depictions of the poor.
According to data compiled by other government agencies, the typical household considered “poor” by census officials has a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household has cable or satellite TV, two color televisions, a DVD player and a VCR. If children (especially boys) are in the home, they have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household has the ordinary conveniences: refrigerator, oven, stove, microwave.
Half the poor now have a personal computer. A third have a widescreen TV (plasma or LCD); a quarter have a digital video recorder such as TiVo.
In all these cases, U.S. Department of Energy data say so. Consumer items that were luxuries or significant purchases for the middle class a few decades ago have become commonplace in households defined by the Census Bureau as poor. In part, this is a result of the normal downward trend of prices in the years after a product is introduced. Initially, new products tend to be expensive and available only to the affluent; over time prices fall sharply, and the product saturates the entire population.
The Left uses the declining relative prices of many amenities to argue that it’s no big deal that poor households have air conditioning, computers, cable TV and widescreen televisions. They argue that even though most poor families have a house full of modern conveniences, the average poor family still suffers from substantial deprivation in basic needs such as food and housing.
Fortunately, that’s not the case.
Let’s look at housing. The old-stream media usually present America’s poor living in real deprivation: a large family crowded into a leaky, rundown trailer, for example. But only a tenth of the poor live in mobile homes, according to government data; half live in single-family houses and the remaining 40 percent live in apartments.
These homes in most cases are in good repair and almost never overcrowded, according to the government’s own statistics. Poor Americans, on average, live in larger houses or apartments than does the average, non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.
The media cry with alarm that “nearly one in four kids” in the nation are hungry. Again, government data show otherwise. Fully 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during 2009, despite the severity of the recession, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Of course, these facts don’t mean that all poor Americans escape hardship. Although the overwhelming majority of the poor are well-housed, around one in 70 poor persons was homeless at any specific time during the last year, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And although the majority of poor families have an adequate, reasonably steady supply of food, many worry about keeping food on the table. One in five poor adults experienced temporary food shortages and hunger at various times during the year.
Those who are temporarily hungry or homeless will find no comfort in the fact that their condition is relatively infrequent. Their distress must be a real and serious concern for policy makers.
Regrettably, however, most discussions of poverty in the U.S. are riddled with exaggeration and misinformation. Effective anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the long-term causes of real deprivation—especially the collapse of marriage and erosion of the work ethic.
Over the long haul, as we conclude in “Understanding Poverty in the United States,” grossly exaggerating the extent and severity of material deprivation won’t benefit the poor, the economy and our society as a whole.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Obama repeats same kinds of things
By Thomas Sowell
Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along?
Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending!
If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?
Or just because Obama now assures us that "everything in this bill will be paid for"? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.
When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies -- more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers' unions, and "thousands of transportation projects."
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can "grow the economy" by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it -- so long as they call spending "investment."
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override?
Obama says he wants "federal housing agencies" to "help more people refinance their mortgages." What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics.
Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics -- including the great political game of "Heads I win and tails you lose."
Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: "Things would have been even worse without this policy."
It's heads I win and tails you lose.
Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.
Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama's speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe -- that "the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own."
Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. www.tsowell.com.
Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along?
Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending!
If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?
Or just because Obama now assures us that "everything in this bill will be paid for"? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.
When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies -- more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers' unions, and "thousands of transportation projects."
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can "grow the economy" by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it -- so long as they call spending "investment."
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override?
Obama says he wants "federal housing agencies" to "help more people refinance their mortgages." What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics.
Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics -- including the great political game of "Heads I win and tails you lose."
Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: "Things would have been even worse without this policy."
It's heads I win and tails you lose.
Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.
Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama's speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe -- that "the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own."
Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. www.tsowell.com.
Why Obama Is Losing the Jewish Vote
By DAN SENOR
New York's special congressional election on Tuesday was the first electoral outcome directly affected by President Obama's Israel policy. Democrats were forced to expend enormous resources in a losing effort to defend this safe Democratic district, covering Queens and Brooklyn, that Anthony Weiner won last year by a comfortable margin.
A Public Policy Poll taken days before the election found a plurality of voters saying that Israel was "very important" in determining their votes. Among those voters, Republican candidate Robert Turner was winning by a 71-22 margin. Only 22% of Jewish voters approved of President Obama's handling of Israel. Ed Koch, the Democrat and former New York mayor, endorsed Mr. Turner because he said he wanted to send a message to the president about his anti-Israel policies.
This is a preview of what President Obama might face in his re-election campaign with a demographic group that voted overwhelmingly for him in 2008. And it could affect the electoral map, given the battleground states—such as Florida and Pennsylvania—with significant Jewish populations. In another ominous barometer for the Obama campaign, its Jewish fund-raising has deeply eroded: One poll by McLaughlin & Associates found that of Jewish donors who donated to Mr. Obama in 2008, only 64% have already donated or plan to donate to his re-election campaign.
The Obama campaign has launched a counteroffensive, including hiring a high-level Jewish outreach director and sending former White House aide David Axelrod and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to reassure Jewish donors. The Obama team told the Washington Post that its Israel problem is a messaging problem, and that with enough explanation of its record the Jewish community will return to the fold in 2012. Here is an inventory of what Mr. Obama's aides will have to address:
• February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel." Likud had been out of power for two years when Mr. Obama made this statement. At the time the country was being led by the centrist Kadima government of Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, and Prime Minister Olmert had been pursuing an unprecedented territorial compromise. As for Likud governments, it was under Likud that Israel made its largest territorial compromises—withdrawals from Sinai and Gaza.
• July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put "daylight" between America and Israel. "For eight years"—during the Bush administration—"there was no light between the United States and Israel, and nothing got accomplished," he declared. Nothing? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted thousands of settlers from their homes in Gaza and the northern West Bank and deployed the Israeli army to forcibly relocate their fellow citizens. Mr. Sharon then resigned from the Likud Party to build a majority party based on a two-state consensus. In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn't one of them. It's impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.
• September 2009: In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama devoted five paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during which he declared (to loud applause) that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He went on to draw a connection between rocket attacks on Israeli civilians with living conditions in Gaza. There was not a single unconditional criticism of Palestinian terrorism.
• March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a now-infamous 45-minute phone call, telling him that Israel had "harmed the bilateral relationship." (The State Department triumphantly shared details of the call with the press.) The Israeli ambassador was dressed-down at the State Department, Mr. Obama's Middle East envoy canceled his trip to Israel, and the U.S. joined the European condemnation of Israel.
Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel's planned construction of apartments in its own capital an "insult" and an "affront" to the United States. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on Fox News to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of "weakening trust" between the two countries.
Ten days later, Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Washington to mend fences but was snubbed at a White House meeting with President Obama—no photo op, no joint statement, and he was sent out through a side door.
• April 2010: Mr. Netanyahu pulled out of the Obama-sponsored Washington summit on nuclear proliferation after it became clear that Turkey and Egypt intended to use the occasion to condemn the Israeli nuclear program, and Mr. Obama would not intervene.
• March 2011: Mr. Obama returned to his habit of urging Israelis to engage in self-reflection, inviting Jewish community leaders to the White House and instructing them to "search your souls" about Israel's dedication to peace.
• May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department's No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting "Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank." In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel. Later in the month, only hours before Mr. Netanyahu departed from Israel to Washington, Mr. Obama delivered his Arab Spring speech, which focused on a demand that Israel return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders with land swaps.
Mr. Obama has made some meaningful exceptions, particularly having to do with security partnership, but overall he has built the most consistently one-sided diplomatic record against Israel of any American president in generations. His problem with Jewish voters is one of substance, not messaging.
Mr. Senor is co-author with Saul Singer of "Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" (Twelve, 2011). He served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
New York's special congressional election on Tuesday was the first electoral outcome directly affected by President Obama's Israel policy. Democrats were forced to expend enormous resources in a losing effort to defend this safe Democratic district, covering Queens and Brooklyn, that Anthony Weiner won last year by a comfortable margin.
A Public Policy Poll taken days before the election found a plurality of voters saying that Israel was "very important" in determining their votes. Among those voters, Republican candidate Robert Turner was winning by a 71-22 margin. Only 22% of Jewish voters approved of President Obama's handling of Israel. Ed Koch, the Democrat and former New York mayor, endorsed Mr. Turner because he said he wanted to send a message to the president about his anti-Israel policies.
This is a preview of what President Obama might face in his re-election campaign with a demographic group that voted overwhelmingly for him in 2008. And it could affect the electoral map, given the battleground states—such as Florida and Pennsylvania—with significant Jewish populations. In another ominous barometer for the Obama campaign, its Jewish fund-raising has deeply eroded: One poll by McLaughlin & Associates found that of Jewish donors who donated to Mr. Obama in 2008, only 64% have already donated or plan to donate to his re-election campaign.
The Obama campaign has launched a counteroffensive, including hiring a high-level Jewish outreach director and sending former White House aide David Axelrod and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to reassure Jewish donors. The Obama team told the Washington Post that its Israel problem is a messaging problem, and that with enough explanation of its record the Jewish community will return to the fold in 2012. Here is an inventory of what Mr. Obama's aides will have to address:
• February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel." Likud had been out of power for two years when Mr. Obama made this statement. At the time the country was being led by the centrist Kadima government of Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, and Prime Minister Olmert had been pursuing an unprecedented territorial compromise. As for Likud governments, it was under Likud that Israel made its largest territorial compromises—withdrawals from Sinai and Gaza.
• July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put "daylight" between America and Israel. "For eight years"—during the Bush administration—"there was no light between the United States and Israel, and nothing got accomplished," he declared. Nothing? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted thousands of settlers from their homes in Gaza and the northern West Bank and deployed the Israeli army to forcibly relocate their fellow citizens. Mr. Sharon then resigned from the Likud Party to build a majority party based on a two-state consensus. In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn't one of them. It's impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.
• September 2009: In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama devoted five paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during which he declared (to loud applause) that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He went on to draw a connection between rocket attacks on Israeli civilians with living conditions in Gaza. There was not a single unconditional criticism of Palestinian terrorism.
• March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a now-infamous 45-minute phone call, telling him that Israel had "harmed the bilateral relationship." (The State Department triumphantly shared details of the call with the press.) The Israeli ambassador was dressed-down at the State Department, Mr. Obama's Middle East envoy canceled his trip to Israel, and the U.S. joined the European condemnation of Israel.
Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel's planned construction of apartments in its own capital an "insult" and an "affront" to the United States. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on Fox News to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of "weakening trust" between the two countries.
Ten days later, Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Washington to mend fences but was snubbed at a White House meeting with President Obama—no photo op, no joint statement, and he was sent out through a side door.
• April 2010: Mr. Netanyahu pulled out of the Obama-sponsored Washington summit on nuclear proliferation after it became clear that Turkey and Egypt intended to use the occasion to condemn the Israeli nuclear program, and Mr. Obama would not intervene.
• March 2011: Mr. Obama returned to his habit of urging Israelis to engage in self-reflection, inviting Jewish community leaders to the White House and instructing them to "search your souls" about Israel's dedication to peace.
• May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department's No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting "Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank." In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel. Later in the month, only hours before Mr. Netanyahu departed from Israel to Washington, Mr. Obama delivered his Arab Spring speech, which focused on a demand that Israel return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders with land swaps.
Mr. Obama has made some meaningful exceptions, particularly having to do with security partnership, but overall he has built the most consistently one-sided diplomatic record against Israel of any American president in generations. His problem with Jewish voters is one of substance, not messaging.
Mr. Senor is co-author with Saul Singer of "Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" (Twelve, 2011). He served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Why the Muslim Beard Bodes Trouble
By Raymong Ibrahim
To develop a thorough understanding of Islam, one must learn to "connect the dots." For instance, Muslims who adhere to non problematic aspects of Islam, indirectly indicate their acceptance of problematic aspects of Islam—such as enmity for infidels, death for apostates, subjugation for women, and so on.
Consider the Muslim beard. Because Muhammad wanted his Muslims to look different from infidel Christians and Jews, he ordered them to "trim closely the moustache and grow the beard." Accordingly, all Sunni schools of law maintain that it is forbidden, a "major sin," for men to shave their beards—unless, of course, it is part of a stratagem against the infidel, in which case it is permissible.
Prior to Ramadan, Islamic leaders in Egypt called for a million men to grow their beards and show Egypt's adherence to Muhammad's commands. Popular and enthusiastic preachers such as Muhammad Hassan went as far as to pray for the day when 80 million Egyptians grew their beards (a figure that presumably includes women and children, as 80 million is the size of Egypt's entire population).
Amr Adib, a popular talk show host on Cairo Today, mocked this call for a "million man beard" with his trademark sarcasm: "This is a great endeavor! After all, a man with a beard can never be a thug, can never rape a woman in the street, can never set a church on fire, can never fight and quarrel, can never steal, and can never be dishonest!"
He and his Egyptian viewers know quite well that it is precisely those Muslims who most closely follow the minutia of Muhammad—the Salafists—that are most prone to violence and deceit, which were also advocated by the prophet. Towards the end of the program, Adib spoke seriously, ominously, saying this issue is not about growing a beard, but rather, "once you grow your beard, you give proof of your commitment and fealty to everything in Islam."
While Egyptians instinctively understand how fealty to the Muslim beard evinces fealty, or at least acceptance, to all those other things Muhammad commanded, even in fuzzy Western op-eds, the connection sometimes peeks out. Consider the following excerpt from a recent New York Times piece titled "Behold the Mighty Beard, a Badge of Piety and Religious Belonging":
The italicized portion speaks for itself. Whereas the Muslim beard represents piety, some people, mostly Westerners, are shocked to find that those who wear it are often "crooks" and "liars." In Islam, however, outer signs of religiosity on the one hand, and corruption and deceit on the other, are compatible. After all, the same source—Muhammad, as recorded in the hadith—that tells Muslims to grow a beard also advocates deception and all sorts of other practices antithetical to Western notions of piety.
The hijab, or headscarf, which cloaks Muslim women, also on Muhammad's command, produces the same symbiosis. Tawfik Hamid, a former aspiring jihadist and acquaintance of al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, accurately observes that "the proliferation of the hijab is strongly correlated with increased terrorism…. Terrorism became much more frequent in such societies as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, and the U.K. after the hijab became prevalent among Muslim women living in those communities."
The question is simple: Why do some Muslim men wear the prescribed beard and why do some Muslim women wear the prescribed hijab? Most Muslims would say they do so because Muhammad commanded them to in the hadith. Yet if such Muslims meticulously follow the minor, "outer" things of Islam simply because their prophet made a few utterances concerning them in the hadith, logically speaking, does that not indicate that they also follow, or at the very least accept as legitimate, the major, "inner" themes Muhammad constantly emphasized in the hadith—such as enmity for and deceit of the infidel, and, when capable, perpetual jihad?
To develop a thorough understanding of Islam, one must learn to "connect the dots." For instance, Muslims who adhere to non problematic aspects of Islam, indirectly indicate their acceptance of problematic aspects of Islam—such as enmity for infidels, death for apostates, subjugation for women, and so on.
Consider the Muslim beard. Because Muhammad wanted his Muslims to look different from infidel Christians and Jews, he ordered them to "trim closely the moustache and grow the beard." Accordingly, all Sunni schools of law maintain that it is forbidden, a "major sin," for men to shave their beards—unless, of course, it is part of a stratagem against the infidel, in which case it is permissible.
Prior to Ramadan, Islamic leaders in Egypt called for a million men to grow their beards and show Egypt's adherence to Muhammad's commands. Popular and enthusiastic preachers such as Muhammad Hassan went as far as to pray for the day when 80 million Egyptians grew their beards (a figure that presumably includes women and children, as 80 million is the size of Egypt's entire population).
Amr Adib, a popular talk show host on Cairo Today, mocked this call for a "million man beard" with his trademark sarcasm: "This is a great endeavor! After all, a man with a beard can never be a thug, can never rape a woman in the street, can never set a church on fire, can never fight and quarrel, can never steal, and can never be dishonest!"
He and his Egyptian viewers know quite well that it is precisely those Muslims who most closely follow the minutia of Muhammad—the Salafists—that are most prone to violence and deceit, which were also advocated by the prophet. Towards the end of the program, Adib spoke seriously, ominously, saying this issue is not about growing a beard, but rather, "once you grow your beard, you give proof of your commitment and fealty to everything in Islam."
While Egyptians instinctively understand how fealty to the Muslim beard evinces fealty, or at least acceptance, to all those other things Muhammad commanded, even in fuzzy Western op-eds, the connection sometimes peeks out. Consider the following excerpt from a recent New York Times piece titled "Behold the Mighty Beard, a Badge of Piety and Religious Belonging":
[A]ll over the Muslim world, the full beard has come to connote piety and spiritual fervor. It is such a powerful cultural signifier, in fact, that it inspires non-Muslims, too…. Of course, the beard is only a sign of righteousness. It is no guarantor, as Mr. Zulfiqar [a Muslim interviewee] reminds us: "I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, 'I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.' His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him." [emphasis mine]
The italicized portion speaks for itself. Whereas the Muslim beard represents piety, some people, mostly Westerners, are shocked to find that those who wear it are often "crooks" and "liars." In Islam, however, outer signs of religiosity on the one hand, and corruption and deceit on the other, are compatible. After all, the same source—Muhammad, as recorded in the hadith—that tells Muslims to grow a beard also advocates deception and all sorts of other practices antithetical to Western notions of piety.
The hijab, or headscarf, which cloaks Muslim women, also on Muhammad's command, produces the same symbiosis. Tawfik Hamid, a former aspiring jihadist and acquaintance of al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, accurately observes that "the proliferation of the hijab is strongly correlated with increased terrorism…. Terrorism became much more frequent in such societies as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, and the U.K. after the hijab became prevalent among Muslim women living in those communities."
The question is simple: Why do some Muslim men wear the prescribed beard and why do some Muslim women wear the prescribed hijab? Most Muslims would say they do so because Muhammad commanded them to in the hadith. Yet if such Muslims meticulously follow the minor, "outer" things of Islam simply because their prophet made a few utterances concerning them in the hadith, logically speaking, does that not indicate that they also follow, or at the very least accept as legitimate, the major, "inner" themes Muhammad constantly emphasized in the hadith—such as enmity for and deceit of the infidel, and, when capable, perpetual jihad?
Raymond Ibrahim, an Islam specialist and author of The Al Qaeda Reader, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
THE DESPERATION OF DEPRIVATION MYTH
By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/275679
The West has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale.
Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”
When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.
In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.
To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.
The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” — or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security.”
The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”
“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.
In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.
Why?
As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America’s state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it’s still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub–Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton’s career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers — in 1887 H. A. Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria’s daughter. But by the time Jack came along, the family’s private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They’re giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.
Again: Why?
The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada, and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/275679
The West has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale.
Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”
When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.
In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.
To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.
The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” — or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security.”
The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”
“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.
In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.
Why?
As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America’s state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it’s still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub–Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton’s career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers — in 1887 H. A. Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria’s daughter. But by the time Jack came along, the family’s private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They’re giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.
Again: Why?
The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada, and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Middle Eastern Christians and anti-Semitism
By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
I was recently told by my aunt in Baghdad that there was a widespread belief among Iraqis that some external force was behind the protests and uprisings across the Middle East. What outside conspiracy, I wondered, could be responsible for the Arab Spring? Not to worry, however; George Saliba – the Syriac Orthodox Church's bishop in Lebanon – offers us a simple answer. In an interview with Al-Dunya TV on July 24, Saliba declared that "the source... behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils" in the Arab world is nothing other than Zionism, "deeply rooted in Judaism." The Jews, he says, are responsible for financing and inciting the turmoil in accordance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These remarks are not an isolated case among Middle Eastern Christians. The anti-Semitic trend has become especially apparent in the aftermath of Iraq's assault last October on the Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, leaving 58 dead and 67 wounded in the worst attack on the Iraqi Christian community since 2003.
Two months after the atrocity, for example, the Melkite Greek Patriarch Gregory III Laham characterized the terrorist attacks on Iraq's Christians as part of "a Zionist conspiracy against Islam."
He further affirmed, "All this behavior has nothing to do with Islam... but it is actually a conspiracy planned by Zionism... and it aims at undermining and giving a bad image of Islam."
He then said the massacre "is also a conspiracy against Arabs and the predominantly Muslim Arab world that aims at depicting Arabs and Muslims in Arab countries as terrorist and fundamentalist murderers in order to deny them their rights, and especially those of the Palestinians."
While the patriarch has warned of the dangers of Christian emigration and the formation of a "society uniquely Muslim," he attributed the risk of "demographic extinction" solely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Similarly, in an interview with NBN TV on November 9, 2010, Iraqi priest Father Suheil Qasha claimed that the Jews consider all gentiles to be beasts, and asserted that the "real danger" to Middle Eastern Christians came from Zionism. He went on to state that those who perpetrated the attack on the church in Baghdad were certainly not Muslims, but probably those trained and supervised "by global Zionism."
Anti-Semitism extends to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which, serving around 10 percent of Egypt's population, is the largest single church in the Middle East and North Africa. As liberal Egyptian blogger Samuel Tadros points out, a certain Father Marcos Aziz Khalil wrote in the newspaper Nahdet Masr: "The Jews saw that the Church is their No. 1 enemy, and that without [the] priesthood the Church loses its most important component . Thus the Masonic movement was the secret Zionist hand to create revolution against the clergy."
AT THIS point, many would no doubt be inclined to explain away this anti-Semitism by pointing to the anti-Jewish sentiments that are mainstream among the Muslim populations of the region. Living in such an environment – the reasoning goes – Christians would naturally be careful not to denounce deeply held convictions among their Muslim neighbors for fear of provoking persecution.
However, the cancer of hostility toward Jews among Middle Eastern Christians goes much deeper than that.
Indeed, it is telling that other non-Muslim minorities that have suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamists – including the Yezidis, Mandeans and Bahá'ís – have never blamed Jews or Zionism for their persecution; their religions have not featured anti-Semitic doctrines.
The case of the Bahá'í community is especially important because, with the religion's global center located in Haifa, charges of collaboration with Israel can easily be leveled against Bahá'ís. Yet the Universal House of Justice has never complained of a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy against the Bahá'í communities in Iran and the wider region. Rather, it has always rightly identified the problem as enforcement of traditional Islamic law on the treatment of non-Muslims and apostasy, along with the supremacist attitudes fostered by the promotion of Shari'a.
Ultimately the malaise of anti-Semitism among Middle Eastern Christians is entrenched in charges of deicide (i.e., of killing Jesus) against the Jewish people as a whole. As Saliba put it, Jewish conspiracies are "only natural" because the Jews repaid Christ for his miracles by crucifying him. In particular, Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church lambasted the Western churches for exonerating Jews for Christ's death, in a televised interview on April 8, 2007. He argued that Jews were "Christ-killers" because "the New Testament says they are."
It is clear that in general, the Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs repudiated by the Vatican in its Nostra Aetate declaration issued in 1965, after the Second Vatican Council. If anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa is to be eradicated, the burden of theological reform will evidently not be a task for Muslims alone.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at the Middle East Forum and a student at Oxford University. His website is www.aymennjawad.org
I was recently told by my aunt in Baghdad that there was a widespread belief among Iraqis that some external force was behind the protests and uprisings across the Middle East. What outside conspiracy, I wondered, could be responsible for the Arab Spring? Not to worry, however; George Saliba – the Syriac Orthodox Church's bishop in Lebanon – offers us a simple answer. In an interview with Al-Dunya TV on July 24, Saliba declared that "the source... behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils" in the Arab world is nothing other than Zionism, "deeply rooted in Judaism." The Jews, he says, are responsible for financing and inciting the turmoil in accordance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These remarks are not an isolated case among Middle Eastern Christians. The anti-Semitic trend has become especially apparent in the aftermath of Iraq's assault last October on the Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, leaving 58 dead and 67 wounded in the worst attack on the Iraqi Christian community since 2003.
Two months after the atrocity, for example, the Melkite Greek Patriarch Gregory III Laham characterized the terrorist attacks on Iraq's Christians as part of "a Zionist conspiracy against Islam."
He further affirmed, "All this behavior has nothing to do with Islam... but it is actually a conspiracy planned by Zionism... and it aims at undermining and giving a bad image of Islam."
He then said the massacre "is also a conspiracy against Arabs and the predominantly Muslim Arab world that aims at depicting Arabs and Muslims in Arab countries as terrorist and fundamentalist murderers in order to deny them their rights, and especially those of the Palestinians."
While the patriarch has warned of the dangers of Christian emigration and the formation of a "society uniquely Muslim," he attributed the risk of "demographic extinction" solely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Similarly, in an interview with NBN TV on November 9, 2010, Iraqi priest Father Suheil Qasha claimed that the Jews consider all gentiles to be beasts, and asserted that the "real danger" to Middle Eastern Christians came from Zionism. He went on to state that those who perpetrated the attack on the church in Baghdad were certainly not Muslims, but probably those trained and supervised "by global Zionism."
Anti-Semitism extends to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which, serving around 10 percent of Egypt's population, is the largest single church in the Middle East and North Africa. As liberal Egyptian blogger Samuel Tadros points out, a certain Father Marcos Aziz Khalil wrote in the newspaper Nahdet Masr: "The Jews saw that the Church is their No. 1 enemy, and that without [the] priesthood the Church loses its most important component . Thus the Masonic movement was the secret Zionist hand to create revolution against the clergy."
AT THIS point, many would no doubt be inclined to explain away this anti-Semitism by pointing to the anti-Jewish sentiments that are mainstream among the Muslim populations of the region. Living in such an environment – the reasoning goes – Christians would naturally be careful not to denounce deeply held convictions among their Muslim neighbors for fear of provoking persecution.
However, the cancer of hostility toward Jews among Middle Eastern Christians goes much deeper than that.
Indeed, it is telling that other non-Muslim minorities that have suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamists – including the Yezidis, Mandeans and Bahá'ís – have never blamed Jews or Zionism for their persecution; their religions have not featured anti-Semitic doctrines.
The case of the Bahá'í community is especially important because, with the religion's global center located in Haifa, charges of collaboration with Israel can easily be leveled against Bahá'ís. Yet the Universal House of Justice has never complained of a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy against the Bahá'í communities in Iran and the wider region. Rather, it has always rightly identified the problem as enforcement of traditional Islamic law on the treatment of non-Muslims and apostasy, along with the supremacist attitudes fostered by the promotion of Shari'a.
Ultimately the malaise of anti-Semitism among Middle Eastern Christians is entrenched in charges of deicide (i.e., of killing Jesus) against the Jewish people as a whole. As Saliba put it, Jewish conspiracies are "only natural" because the Jews repaid Christ for his miracles by crucifying him. In particular, Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church lambasted the Western churches for exonerating Jews for Christ's death, in a televised interview on April 8, 2007. He argued that Jews were "Christ-killers" because "the New Testament says they are."
It is clear that in general, the Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs repudiated by the Vatican in its Nostra Aetate declaration issued in 1965, after the Second Vatican Council. If anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa is to be eradicated, the burden of theological reform will evidently not be a task for Muslims alone.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at the Middle East Forum and a student at Oxford University. His website is www.aymennjawad.org
Sunday, August 14, 2011
John Roberts Is No Fool
By James Taranto
"The White House . . . has quietly altered its website to remove the references to Jerusalem being in 'Israel,' " the New York Sun reports. It sounds like another make-work Keynesian stimulus: dig a hole, fill it up. But the Obama administration forgot the first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging. (How's that for a passably bad Thomas Friedman imitation?) The website editing is an attempt to put one over on the Supreme Court, and we doubt it will succeed.
Currently pending before the high court is the case of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. Appellant Menachem Zivotofsky, 9, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Jerusalem. As a Sun report from last week explained, two months after Menachem's birth, his parents went to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport for the boy. They asked that his country of birth be listed as Israel, but "the embassy refused, citing longstanding State Department policy that such passports list only 'Jerusalem,' with no country added." (This policy applies only to the capital, not other Israeli cities.)
In 2002 Congress enacted legislation to reverse this policy, directing the State Department to list the country of origin as Israel on passports (as well as birth and nationality certificates) if a Jerusalem-born applicant requests it. The provision was part of a larger spending bill, which President Bush signed into law, but he issued one of those "signing statements" that were anathema to liberals before Barack Obama fundamentally transformed America.
The Bush administration's position, which is now the Obama administration's position, is that the provision is an unconstitutional infringement of the president's "power to recognize foreign sovereigns." Part of Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan until 1967, and the State Department views the city's sovereignty as disputed.
In 2009 the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to rule on the question, holding that the case posed a nonjusticiable political dispute. The Supreme Court's having agreed to take the case suggests that the justices disagree. There wouldn't be much point hearing an appeal only to affirm a lower court's ruling that the courts have no business deciding the matter.
Last week the Sun reported on the references the White House has now scrubbed from its website: "On the official website are a series of pictures from Vice President Biden's trip last year to Israel, where he met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israelis. In cutlines associated with the pictures the vice president is described as being in 'Jerusalem, Israel.' "
As the Sun acknowledges, "the cutlines on the White House photos were themselves not formal legal recognition of sovereignty." It is only symbolic. But so too, the Zivotofskys argue, is the change in policy dictated by the 2002 law. If the White House website can acknowledge that Jerusalem is in Israel without undermining the administration's diplomatic position, why can't Congress, in a law governing only the administration of vital documents, compel the State Department to do the same?
The White House changed its website in an attempt to shore up its legal position by depriving the Zivotofskys of this argument. It is at least mildly deceptive, but it will succeed only if it escapes the notice of the Supreme Court.
But if the guys at the White House thought they could get away with this, they didn't read footnote 10 of Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the court in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (citations and extraneous quotation marks omitted): "Prior to oral argument in this case, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission's Web site stated that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.' The Web site now says that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to restore citizen participation and confidence in our political system.' "
The court had previously held that preventing corruption was a "compelling state interest" that justified some restrictions on political speech. But as the chief justice noted, "we have repeatedly rejected the argument that the government has a compelling state interest in 'leveling the playing field' that can justify undue burdens on political speech." The commission, a state government agency, was altering its public statements to bring them into line with its legal defense--precisely what the White House is now doing.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rejected what she inferred to be the majority's claim "that a statement appearing on a government website in 2011 (written by who-knows-whom?) reveals what hundreds of thousands of Arizona's voters sought to do in 1998 when they enacted the Clean Elections Act by referendum." She added: "Just to state that proposition is to know it is wrong." Maybe so, but the Obama administration's position in Zivotofsky was not adopted by plebiscite, so that even if you accept Kagan's rebuttal in the Arizona case, it would not apply here.
The White House website's photo captions may not prove decisive to the outcome of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. But if Obama's men thought that pulling a stunt like this on the Web-savvy Roberts court would strengthen their case, they really are a bunch of amateurs.
"The White House . . . has quietly altered its website to remove the references to Jerusalem being in 'Israel,' " the New York Sun reports. It sounds like another make-work Keynesian stimulus: dig a hole, fill it up. But the Obama administration forgot the first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging. (How's that for a passably bad Thomas Friedman imitation?) The website editing is an attempt to put one over on the Supreme Court, and we doubt it will succeed.
Currently pending before the high court is the case of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. Appellant Menachem Zivotofsky, 9, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Jerusalem. As a Sun report from last week explained, two months after Menachem's birth, his parents went to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport for the boy. They asked that his country of birth be listed as Israel, but "the embassy refused, citing longstanding State Department policy that such passports list only 'Jerusalem,' with no country added." (This policy applies only to the capital, not other Israeli cities.)
In 2002 Congress enacted legislation to reverse this policy, directing the State Department to list the country of origin as Israel on passports (as well as birth and nationality certificates) if a Jerusalem-born applicant requests it. The provision was part of a larger spending bill, which President Bush signed into law, but he issued one of those "signing statements" that were anathema to liberals before Barack Obama fundamentally transformed America.
The Bush administration's position, which is now the Obama administration's position, is that the provision is an unconstitutional infringement of the president's "power to recognize foreign sovereigns." Part of Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan until 1967, and the State Department views the city's sovereignty as disputed.
In 2009 the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to rule on the question, holding that the case posed a nonjusticiable political dispute. The Supreme Court's having agreed to take the case suggests that the justices disagree. There wouldn't be much point hearing an appeal only to affirm a lower court's ruling that the courts have no business deciding the matter.
Last week the Sun reported on the references the White House has now scrubbed from its website: "On the official website are a series of pictures from Vice President Biden's trip last year to Israel, where he met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israelis. In cutlines associated with the pictures the vice president is described as being in 'Jerusalem, Israel.' "
As the Sun acknowledges, "the cutlines on the White House photos were themselves not formal legal recognition of sovereignty." It is only symbolic. But so too, the Zivotofskys argue, is the change in policy dictated by the 2002 law. If the White House website can acknowledge that Jerusalem is in Israel without undermining the administration's diplomatic position, why can't Congress, in a law governing only the administration of vital documents, compel the State Department to do the same?
The White House changed its website in an attempt to shore up its legal position by depriving the Zivotofskys of this argument. It is at least mildly deceptive, but it will succeed only if it escapes the notice of the Supreme Court.
But if the guys at the White House thought they could get away with this, they didn't read footnote 10 of Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the court in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (citations and extraneous quotation marks omitted): "Prior to oral argument in this case, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission's Web site stated that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.' The Web site now says that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to restore citizen participation and confidence in our political system.' "
The court had previously held that preventing corruption was a "compelling state interest" that justified some restrictions on political speech. But as the chief justice noted, "we have repeatedly rejected the argument that the government has a compelling state interest in 'leveling the playing field' that can justify undue burdens on political speech." The commission, a state government agency, was altering its public statements to bring them into line with its legal defense--precisely what the White House is now doing.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rejected what she inferred to be the majority's claim "that a statement appearing on a government website in 2011 (written by who-knows-whom?) reveals what hundreds of thousands of Arizona's voters sought to do in 1998 when they enacted the Clean Elections Act by referendum." She added: "Just to state that proposition is to know it is wrong." Maybe so, but the Obama administration's position in Zivotofsky was not adopted by plebiscite, so that even if you accept Kagan's rebuttal in the Arizona case, it would not apply here.
The White House website's photo captions may not prove decisive to the outcome of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. But if Obama's men thought that pulling a stunt like this on the Web-savvy Roberts court would strengthen their case, they really are a bunch of amateurs.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
THE FAILURE OF THE LIBERAL GODS
By Wes Pruden
The gods of the liberals—“progressives,” as they insist on calling themselves this season—are failing all over the place. Restless natives are rioting in London. Peasants are getting rich selling 90-proof Oolong in Washington. The elites are “unsettled,” as elites always are, in a lot of places between.
The “progressives” are particularly frightened by Barack Obama’s prospects for expanding the debacle he wrought in Washington. They haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s not just the man, but his fraudulent message. Another speech won’t accomplish anything more than another national shrug.
“He’s a do-gooder at heart,” a former official in the Clinton administration and now one of the consultants who make a good living dispensing cheap wisdom and other profundities, tells the London Daily Telegraph. “He thinks everyone has the same agenda to do the right thing, but other people don’t have the same agenda. Their agenda is to score points and get their party re-elected. This is the downside of him not being terribly political like Bill Clinton. Bill woke up every day relishing this kind of fight, and Hillary is just a tougher person. The Clinton are much more combative. They’re always ready to go to Defcon 1.” Defcon 1, as every Washington slinger of insider slang knows, is Pentagon talk for “war is imminent.”
The terror that dare not speak its name is not yet Barack Obama (the left is getting there), but Jimmy Carter. Mr. Jimmy is the president’s mortal twin, the doppelganger the White House tries to keep to shelling peanuts in the basement. The Obama approval ratings, as reckoned by the pollsters, are sinking well into the neighborhood where Mr. Jimmy dwelt for one miserable term. Gallup reckons the Obama number is flirting with the 40-percent mark. Rasmussen posts a similar finding.
Gallup finds even scarier signs and omens in its plumbing of sentiments of religious folk. By far the friendliest are the Muslims, who make up only a fragment of the population and who, fairly or not, are the religious folks who frighten everybody. Eighty percent of Muslims think Mr. Obama is doing a good job as president, compared to 65 percent of the Jews, 60 percent of the atheists (who yearn recognition as a sort of religion), 50 percent of the Catholics, 37 percent of the Protestants and 25 percent of the Mormons.
Anyone paying proper attention to what’s causing Mr. Obama’s trouble has concluded that the stuff everyone got drunk on in 2008 was poison moonshine. The portents abound, in the prospects of incumbent mayors, governors and senators. The easy ride is over, and the future of easy riders is dark and bleak. But the land is nevertheless littered with those unable to learn the lessons taught by Experience. Theory, after all, grades on an easier curve.
The chattering class is drinking deeply just now of an elixir peddled by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, and author of an op-ed essay in the New York Times suggesting that all the nation needs is better bedtime stories from the president. “The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred . . . Children crave bedtime stories.”
If only President Obama would let him write the bedtime stories the professor could help the president put the children to sleep happy, contented and oblivious to the harsh vicissitudes of reality. All those unhappy American children want is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right.” They want to be reassured that the problem was not caused by “tax-and-spend liberalism,” as common sense is telling them, but by . . . George W. Bush.
This is a familiar pot of mush from a wimp, like Jimmy Carter’s much-mocked malaise, but it’s mush that still finds an appetite on the left. The professor’s op-ed has been much e-mailed, whizzing about the Internet at the speed of fright since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago. A “progressive” just can’t understand how anyone so kind, so compassionate, so educated, so tender-hearted, so like himself, could be so misinformed about a ma
n who so many wise and good people drooled over for so long. The humiliation of the “progressives” is the realization that such loathsome folk as Tea Party voters are smarter than they are, and were never fooled by the man.
The “progressives” are particularly frightened by Barack Obama’s prospects for expanding the debacle he wrought in Washington. They haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s not just the man, but his fraudulent message. Another speech won’t accomplish anything more than another national shrug.
“He’s a do-gooder at heart,” a former official in the Clinton administration and now one of the consultants who make a good living dispensing cheap wisdom and other profundities, tells the London Daily Telegraph. “He thinks everyone has the same agenda to do the right thing, but other people don’t have the same agenda. Their agenda is to score points and get their party re-elected. This is the downside of him not being terribly political like Bill Clinton. Bill woke up every day relishing this kind of fight, and Hillary is just a tougher person. The Clinton are much more combative. They’re always ready to go to Defcon 1.” Defcon 1, as every Washington slinger of insider slang knows, is Pentagon talk for “war is imminent.”
The terror that dare not speak its name is not yet Barack Obama (the left is getting there), but Jimmy Carter. Mr. Jimmy is the president’s mortal twin, the doppelganger the White House tries to keep to shelling peanuts in the basement. The Obama approval ratings, as reckoned by the pollsters, are sinking well into the neighborhood where Mr. Jimmy dwelt for one miserable term. Gallup reckons the Obama number is flirting with the 40-percent mark. Rasmussen posts a similar finding.
Gallup finds even scarier signs and omens in its plumbing of sentiments of religious folk. By far the friendliest are the Muslims, who make up only a fragment of the population and who, fairly or not, are the religious folks who frighten everybody. Eighty percent of Muslims think Mr. Obama is doing a good job as president, compared to 65 percent of the Jews, 60 percent of the atheists (who yearn recognition as a sort of religion), 50 percent of the Catholics, 37 percent of the Protestants and 25 percent of the Mormons.
Anyone paying proper attention to what’s causing Mr. Obama’s trouble has concluded that the stuff everyone got drunk on in 2008 was poison moonshine. The portents abound, in the prospects of incumbent mayors, governors and senators. The easy ride is over, and the future of easy riders is dark and bleak. But the land is nevertheless littered with those unable to learn the lessons taught by Experience. Theory, after all, grades on an easier curve.
The chattering class is drinking deeply just now of an elixir peddled by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, and author of an op-ed essay in the New York Times suggesting that all the nation needs is better bedtime stories from the president. “The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred . . . Children crave bedtime stories.”
If only President Obama would let him write the bedtime stories the professor could help the president put the children to sleep happy, contented and oblivious to the harsh vicissitudes of reality. All those unhappy American children want is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right.” They want to be reassured that the problem was not caused by “tax-and-spend liberalism,” as common sense is telling them, but by . . . George W. Bush.
This is a familiar pot of mush from a wimp, like Jimmy Carter’s much-mocked malaise, but it’s mush that still finds an appetite on the left. The professor’s op-ed has been much e-mailed, whizzing about the Internet at the speed of fright since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago. A “progressive” just can’t understand how anyone so kind, so compassionate, so educated, so tender-hearted, so like himself, could be so misinformed about a ma
n who so many wise and good people drooled over for so long. The humiliation of the “progressives” is the realization that such loathsome folk as Tea Party voters are smarter than they are, and were never fooled by the man.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)