It’s almost Thanksgiving. And that means that Christmas, Chanukah, and whatever other holiday might suit your diverse fancies are all coming up sooner than you think.
So I’m encouraging you to feel their hot panting breaths on your neck, and to solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.
And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money yourself. What could be more wonderful?
I thank you all in advance. And I’ll be bumping this up and/or re-posting it every now and then until Christmas.
[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).]
[NOTE: I thought you might enjoy a recycling of this old post, as a palate cleanser.]
What’s a pirouette? Here’s the Wikipedia definition—and, as a former dancer, I can attest to its correctness:
One of the most famous ballet movements; this is where the dancer spins around on demi-pointe or pointe on one leg. The other leg can be in various different positions; the standard one being retiré. Others include the leg in attitude, and grand battement level, second position. They can also finish in arabesque or attitude positions. A pirouette can be en dehors – turning outwards, starting with both legs in plie, or en dedans – turning inwards.
The definition may seem Greek to you (actually, of course, French) but to me the terms are as familiar as English. The terminology of ballet, repeated to me from the age of four till my late thirties, when I quit dancing, gets drummed into the brain until it becomes reflexive.
The diagram, for instance, shows an en dehors turn, since the dancer is spinning in the opposite direction from the leg supporting her weight, and her other leg is held in the postion known as passe.
But I’m not here to teach you dance–fortunately for both of us, since that would be quite a trick, online. I want to talk about the psychological phenomenon every dancer knows about, which is known as “losing your turns.”
All of dance is hard for the dancer, although it’s incredibly satisfying and rewarding, a completely absorbing meshing of the physical, musical, artistic, and spiritual. But turns are notoriously hard for most people.
Certain people are different, however; they’re that rare phenomenon known as “natural turners.” Some strange trick of brain and inner ear, some unusual sense of centered balance, allows them to turn easily almost from the moment the step is first introduced to them. Natural turners almost never lose their turns; but the rest of us not only have to struggle to learn to turn, but are acutely aware that the knack can be lost.
Every person has a preferred side to which turning is easier, almost always the right. There have been only a few famous dancers who are/were “left-turners” (the extraordinary Fernando Bujones and the elegant Anthony Dowell come to mind), so most ballet choreography features turns to the right. The favored side for turning has no relation to handedness, by the way; it’s an entirely separate issue (I’m left-handed and a right turner, for example).
So the way the brain is structured is definitely part of what makes turns easy or hard. Turns are also especially challenging because, more than any other part of ballet, they require strength and relaxation in almost equal measure. Tension is a great turn-killer, especially tension of the head and neck, which have to work together to move fluidly in the manner known as “spotting” in order to avoid getting too dizzy (spotting involves keeping the eyes on a single “spot” until the last moment of the turn, and then whipping the head around quickly to come back and focus on that object again).
The best comparison I can think of is to baseball: the batter’s swing and the pitcher’s curve ball. Both are notorious for disappearing for unknown reasons, sometimes for a long time (sometimes ending a career, actually), and then mysteriously reappearing. When a batter loses his swing, he works with a coach, trying to locate the problem, fine-tuning things till it returns.
Likewise with dancers. You can see them practicing their turns after class, over and over and over, looking in the ever-present mirror to see if they can detect that elusive flaw that’s spoiling their turns. Because when turns go, it’s not a pretty sight. Balance is a thing that’s either on or off; a person who could once do four flawless revolutions from a single push-off preparation will now have trouble getting around twice—perhaps even hopping to complete the revolutions or, (for a female) falling off pointe, which can involve an ignominious and dangerous pratfall.
Virtually all dancers know that losing one’s turns is a possibility every time they take the preparation for a turn (usually a momentary pause in fourth or fifth position with the knee bend known as a demi-plie, eyes fixed on something ahead for the “spotting,” arms poised to whip and then close in for a bit of added impetus [see instructions]) . It’s a leap—well, not exactly a leap—of faith, a push into the unknown. Will the turn hold? The dancer has to have the confidence that it will, and relax into it, bringing together all his/her technique and knowledge without really thinking about it. It’s part of the dancer’s body memory, and trust has to enter into it.
Strangely enough, writing a blog has some aspects of this process, too. No, it doesn’t have that element of physical release–au contraire, it’s physically quite static. But every day, or even several times a day, the blogger faces that blank screen and has to take a little preparation and push off, assuming the turn (of phrase) will come. It’s different from other types of writing, because there’s so little time to prepare, and even less time to polish. One must produce at a fairly fast clip, digesting the news and what’s being said on other blogs (sometimes swallowing whole without chewing enough) and then saying one’s piece.
I’m not complaining; it’s a self-imposed labor of love. Sometimes I face that blank screen with eager anticipation—I’ve got an idea, the words flow, and the thing practically writes itself. A quadruple turn, as it were. Other times I cast about for something to say, or I have an idea but my thoughts are hard to sort out, or I realize that to do justice to the topic I’d really have to write a small book. Sometimes the product is only so-so; sometimes I’m just hopping around and fall off pointe. But the next day I usually return to take my place again, make my preparation, and try to relax into the turn with confidence. And, if it doesn’t turn out quite right, I try again the next day.
It occurs to me that the Cultural Revolution in American universities is entering a new phase. Previously, the demands were for the resignation of administrators and professors who were insufficiently self-flagellating and compliant. Now the focus has turned to getting rid of fellow students who are not enthusiastic enough or ethnic enough or supportive enough or apologetic enough to please the protesters drunk on their own power.
At the Dartmouth library about 150 people (some students, some perhaps outside activists?) are reported to have gone through the building cursing, shoving, and shouting racial epithets at white students who were studying there.
If you wonder what I mean by “cursing” and “racial epithets,” here’s a sample:
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!”
“F*** you and your comfort!”
Not all the protesters were participating in the worst behavior. But the students among them who did should, of course, be expelled and charged with assault in cases where it got physical. Any bets on whether that will happen? According to reports here and here, nothing is likely to be done.
Is it not ironic and ominous that at Mizzou all it took for the protests to start that resulted in the administrator resignations were a couple of allegations of the use of the n-word (one completely undocumented and involving people who may not have been students, the other more credible but involving a drunk), whereas at Dartmouth there were many students committing documented offenses (cellphone videos) involving racist speech and some reported physical assaults, and yet it appears nothing will be done to punish the perpetrators?
Meanwhile, at the University of Kansas, protestors are demanding that three white student body leaders resign for not “standing in solidarity with their black peers.” I guess they didn’t sing the Internationale loudly enough.
The three tried to correct that error:
The three leaders released a statement Saturday, according to AP, saying they planned to go on serving and support minority groups. “Black lives matter. Black lives matter at the University of Kansas,” the three leaders reportedly wrote.
We’ll see if that placates the mob.
By the way, when this sort of thing began at Mizzou, I referenced Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. One of the things the movement did at Cornell when Bloom was there (an event he describes at length in his book) was to turn against and threaten a black student who didn’t get with the protest program. The story bears repeating [emphasis mine]:
In the following excerpt Bloom is describing an incident that occurred when he was a faculty member at Cornell during the late 60s, when black militants with guns occupied a campus building and made demands. Bloom had gone to the university provost to speak up for a black student of his (unnamed in the book, but actually Alan Keyes””who happens, in a strange twist of fate, to have been the person Barack Obama soundly defeated in his 2004 US Senate race, when Keyes was put on the Republican ballot as a hasty substitute for Jack Ryan). Keyes had earlier been threatened by a black professor at Cornell for refusing to take part in a demonstration. Here’s what Bloom says transpired:
The provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance. He, of course, fully sympathized with the young man’s [Keyes’] plight. However, things were bad, and there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association”¦He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.
”¦The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble…At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so”¦No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later””immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected””the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.
Well, at least this time the protesters don’t have guns. Yet.
Look, all my regular readers know what I think of Donald Trump. Suffice to say I’m not a fan.
But no, he did not say all Muslims in the US need to be registered. If you want to get the full story, see this. It’s pretty clear that Trump’s comments consisted of a careless response to a reporter’s trap question. Trump’s original answers were very general, like almost all of his answers, and the Muslim registry idea came from the reporter—not Trump, who was distracted.
However, these tendencies towards spouting meaningless generalities and exhibiting distraction and carelessness are a marked feature of Trump’s political posture. Those are a few of the many reasons I find him to be a very poor candidate. But the MSM won’t stop with this sort of thing, and he’d better be more alert (and more specific and attendant to detail) or he’ll find it happening again and again and again.
Here’s a fascinating article (to me, anyway) written by a man named Teun Voeten who moved to the Molenbeek section of Brussels back in 2005 and lived there for nine years.
In case you haven’t heard, Molenbeek is the area mostly populated by Muslim immigrants and their offspring, and it was the home to the terror cell that planned the Paris attacks. Voeten came there for the low rents, and brought with him some idealistic and naive hopes (is idealism always naive?):
I was part of a new wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated ”” what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) ”” who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions. Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for a multicultural society.
Those nine years were an eye-opener for Voeten, who seems to be the classic liberal mugged by reality:
Hassan turned out to be a crook and disappeared with €95,000, the entire budget the tenants had pooled together for our building’s renovation. The neighborhood was hardly multicultural. Rather, with roughly 80 percent of the population of Moroccan origin, it was tragically conformist and homogenous…
Over nine years, as I witnessed the neighborhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning. Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them “filthy whores.” If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and called a racist
There’s much more; well worth reading. One of the reasons it’s important is that it’s been clear for years that Brussels is an epicenter for jihadism in Europe. The city’s policies illustrate the worst excesses that have allowed this sort of fanaticism to slowly build—as Voeten describes—over the course of the last decade into a very critical mass. It’s the result of a combination of disorganization and fear on the part of the authorities, plus of course the vital ingredient of PC multi-culti thinking [emphasis mine]:
How did Molenbeek become Europe’s jihadi base? Essentially, it has to do with Belgium’s messy governance and the culture of denial that pervades the debate about Islam in the country. Molenbeek is a vibrant community, with narrow streets and a busy street life. There is a teahouse on every corner, a quiet mosque on every block, where people can congregate undisturbed. There are cheap apartments galore, no questions asked. Just like the guerrilla can hide in the jungle, jihadis feel safe in the disorganized Kashba of Molenbeek. The highway and the city’s busiest international railroad station are a stone’s throw away. It’s the perfect logistical base.
It is nearly impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many administrative posts are not filled with competent people.
Not just incompetent, but willfully stupid and in thrall to a theory of multiculturalism that is on a course to bring about the death of all they hold dear. Time to wake up. Way past time, actually.
With all the news coming hot and heavy, this story has sort of fallen by the wayside. It’s about those five Syrian men intent on coming to this country through Latin America, traveling on forged Greek passports:
Five Syrian men who caused international alarm when they were stopped in Central America on their way to the United States were only caught because their flight was delayed, Daily Mail Online has learned exclusively.
If the last Avianca Airlines flight from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, had not been held up on Tuesday, the men would have been free to travel on.
But it was so late they missed their connecting flight to the northern Honduras city of San Pedro Sula, just 20 miles from the border. From there they planned to cross into Guatemala and travel by land through Mexico to the United States.
If you want to get the whole story, read the whole thing. Again, the British tabloid papers seem to do a much more thorough job than in the US. I’m not sure if every single word is true, but that’s the case for the shorter and more sober US coverage, as well.
These particular men are all young, and authorities who have questioned them at some length have determined they are not terrorists, but merely illegal immigrants with some deep pockets. Whether you believe that about their relatively innocent intent, here’s what I mean about the deep pockets:
They each paid $10,000 for their trip. Family and friends had collected the money for them in Syria, officials say.
I don’t know the usual wages in Syria, but that seems extraordinarily high to me. Perhaps they came from rich families, but I’d certainly like to know the details of how they obtained this money, and why these particular men were sent. But our highly trustworthy authorities (or was it the highly trustworthy Honduran authorities?) have determined them to be ordinary refugees fleeing Syrian persecution, which certainly could be the case, and they are now asking for asylum in Honduras. They may even get it.
But if they do, I have no doubt they could easily continue with their original plan of going overland through Mexico into the United States.
What does it all mean? Whoever these guys are and whatever their ultimate goal, it proves anew how porous the entire system is, and how easy it is to obtain excellent false documents and get wherever you want to go. If ordinary refugees can do it, why not terrorists? They’ve got the motivation, and access to even deeper pockets and levels of sophistication and training.
A Syrian family that fled the war-torn country in 2011 was welcomed Wednesday to its new home of Connecticut after Indiana officials objected to plans for the refugees to resettle in their state.
The married couple and their 5-year-old son had been living as refugees in Jordan and been waiting three years to resettle in the United States.
Chances are they’re lovely people. At the very least, I doubt they’re terrorists, although it’s not outside the realm of possibility. But I’m more than willing to say they’re probably not; and are just a family looking for a better life.
My point is that these people were not recent emigrants from Syria. They were in Jordan. Jordan is one of the best Arab countries; perhaps the best. Not only that, Jordan and Syria are similar culturally and religiously. There are at present 619,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, so the threesome would have a lot of company there, the vast majority of them not living in refugee camps:
Approximately 80 percent of Syrian refugees in Jordan live in urban areas in the north of Jordan, while the remaining 20 percent live in the Za’atari, Marjeeb al-Fahood, Cyber City and Al-Azraq camps…
Many residents of Northern Jordan feel as Syrian as they are Jordanian ”“ they have lived and married together, crossing the border easily. When the conflict first began, many Syrians went to Jordan to stay with relatives ”“ many didn’t consider themselves “refugees.” Yet as the war escalated, the situation became critical: Syrians without relatives in Jordan began to cross the border.
I have little doubt that by moving here this family gets a better deal financially. But that’s not a reason to come here under fast-tracked refugee status. They, like most of the Syrian refugees in Europe, are now financial migrants. Why should they go to the head of the line?
Vox’s Matt Yglesias offers an essential explanation, from a sympathetic source, of how things look to Obama administration insiders.
“Many senior administration officials at this point are part of the permanent national security apparatus, but the core group of real ”˜Obama people’ has a surprisingly dovish self-conception, where they see themselves operating in a world in which demands for military intervention are constant and endless””from the media, from congressional Republicans, from foreign governments and their allies in Washington, and from the permanent security bureaucracy itself””but America’s actual ability to engage in non-counterproductive interventions is quite limited.”
Thus, Yglesias concludes, “the hardest problem in US counterterrorism policy is in some ways as much a speechwriting challenge as anything else. The next time something goes wrong and an attack hits the United States, how do you sell the American people on the idea of not really doing anything about it?”
So the hardest problem in counter-terrorism is how to write speeches, or better yet, how to write speeches about doing nothing?
Well, I supposed that’s what we should expect from a president who got elected for his speeches and not for doing anything. And this, I suspect, is how he is going to end up being remembered as commander-in-chief: as the guy who, in a crisis, gave us petulant speeches about why he was doing nothing.
Early on, every problem Obama had was reduced to a messaging problem. Find the right narrative to present your superior views to the peons with their pea brains, and everything falls into place.
What’s more, don’t listen to the experts—because YOU are the biggest expert on everything in the entire universe. Obama made that clear even before he was elected to his first term, and anyone who wasn’t alarmed by these sorts of statements from Obama was a poor judge of character or not paying a particle of attention.
It was an instructive exchange. Obama, a first-term senator with no experience in military or intelligence matters, challenged the general who had beaten back a jihadist insurgency in Iraq, led a remarkable turnaround in the country, and was a leading figure in America’s broader war on terror. The assessments Petraeus offered were based on years of personal experience guiding U.S. troops against jihadist armies generally, and Al Qaeda in Iraq specifically, and they were bolstered by mountains of intelligence reporting on the enemy, its objectives, and its practices.
Obama simply thought he knew better. His challenge wasn’t based on facts that contradicted Petraeus, or on facts at all. Rather, Obama made a series of assertions based on nothing more than his long-held conviction that Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. And when he was presented with evidence that contradicted his thesis, Obama simply set it aside and restated his own view. It’s a pattern that would play out repeatedly throughout his presidency.
Obama will be president for another year, and he can add incalculable damage to the incalculable damage he’s already done. His leftism combined with his hubris has been a toxic combination, and the American people bought it—twice.
Twenty-seven people were slaughtered in a Mali hotel by Muslim terrorists. Rescuers stormed the building and found the bodies; the rest of the hostages were freed.
You can find the details at the link.
Up to this point, I can’t say I could accurately find Mali on a map, although I knew its location in a very general sense. This attack is one in a long, long line of similar events in third-world countries where whatever tenuous civil order there used to be has broken down, and Muslim extremists have taken advantage of the situation to add to the carnage.
Get the picture? It’s a familiar one. Here is some background for Mali:
In 2012, a major rebellion against Mali’s government heralded the rise of terrorism across the country.
It was led by the nomadic Tuareg rebels and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a military organisation partly made up of former Libyan soldiers.
The MNLA took control of the north and declared independence for the unrecognised state of Azawad.
But Islamist groups including Ansar Dine and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), who helped MNLA defeat the government, turned on the indigenous Tuareg and seized the north with the goal of implementing sharia law in Mali.
The French army launched Opération Serval in January 2013 and recaptured most of the north a month later.
Islamists continued to operate in the north and began spreading into central and southern areas at the start of this year.
We pay a lot of attention to the attacks in Paris for many reasons, the main one being it’s a Western nation with which we strongly identify, and when the bell tolls for them it takes very little imagination at all to hear it tolling for us, too. But the same bell is tolling in Mali and elsewhere around the world.
We’d better do something about that ringing bell, and fast. And yet our leadership (I’m talking about this administration in particular) can’t be bothered. Obama can’t even muster up the energy to have sounded incensed when he spoke about the Paris attacks; he was phoning it in. He saved his ire for Republicans who oppose him and for reporters who deign to question him.
It’s not a very strong bill. Here’s the gist of it:
The House easily passed a bill Thursday that would suspend the program allowing Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the U.S. until key national security agencies certify they don’t pose a security risk.
But the interesting thing about the vote in the House is this:
The vote was 289-137, with 47 Democrats joining 242 Republicans in favor of the bill, creating a majority that could override President Barack Obama’s promised veto.
Lest you get too excited, the President could have a nice chat with them after his veto and give them cover to change their votes in the other direction (as happened with Iran). And of course, the security agencies involved might just say “no problem with these people, don’t worry, we’ve got it under control” when they haven’t.
(By the way, since the CNN website has one of those nasty autoplay features, I was hearing the autoplay interview at the link, and the interviewer was quoting some refugee as saying “What choice do I have? No one in Turkey will rent to me” as the reason that person had to come to America and we had to take them.)
Not only could some of those Democratic votes in the House change back again in order for Obama to avoid a veto override, but there’s always the Senate, “where Minority Leader Harry Reid said he will try to block the bill.”
A new report says that, despite being a known terrorist on watch lists, Abdelhamid Abaaoud came to Europe as part of the flood of recent “Syrian refugees,” and no one knew he was there.
It’s a bit complicated. Abaaoud is not an actual refugee. He’s a holder of an EU passport and seems to have been born and raised in Belgium, although he recently spent quite a bit of time in Syria and was known to have joined the jihadi cause. He even returned to Belgium for a while and tried to organize an attack there and was later in a firefight with police (read the whole article; it’s quite informative about the vicious background of this guy, and how he’s evaded European security in the past.) Recently, Abaaoud used the flood of Syrian refugees to pretend to be one of them, and he passed muster:
The Paris terror mastermind was able to sneak into Europe among Syrian migrants, it emerged on Thursday evening, as police on the continent admitted that they are unable to monitor thousands of suspected jihadists.
EU interior ministers will on Friday move to tighten the continent’s borders to ensure that every single migrant is checked against a terrorism watchlist, after French authorities revealed that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was able to return from Syria via the migrant route of Greece.
At a summit in Brussels, they are also expected to bow to French demands to screen every single EU passport holder entering the continent for the first time to catch fighters returning from the Middle East.
What a surprise.
And he was not the only one that we already know of:
Abaaoud, the plot’s mastermind, and at least two of the Paris terrorists took a route to France via Greece, it emerged on Thursday, intensifying fears that terrorists are passing themselves off as refugees.
People who want to stop the flood of Syrian refugees aren’t targeting actual refugees, unlike what Obama and his supporters would like you to think—although, to be sure, they and their children constitute a possible reservoir for future terrorist conversion and activity in this country. The idea has been that Islamic terrorists would be sneaking in among them, and that authorities lacked the capacity to differentiate them from the others. It didn’t take long for this to be proven, did it?
At the moment, the thousands of migrants arriving in Europe every day are logged only on an electronic register of asylum seekers, if that. The register does not interact with SIS.
Under the new measures, all migrants will be “systematically” scanned against SIS, as well as against a Europol register of stolen passports and against national police database…
There is also a major hole in ECRIS, the EU’s criminal records sharing network system of which Britain is a part. At present, the records of EU nationals are shared, but those of foreign criminals who are convicted in Europe are not ”“ something the draft conclusions say must change.
Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol and a former intelligence officer in MI5, this morning admitted that a major database he runs contains data on only 40 per cent of Europe’s foreign fighters…
Focal Point Travellers is an EU-wide database for sharing names and travel patterns of known jihadists between intelligence agencies in order to disrupt plots…
We are only confident we have 2,000 names in the system, even though the general assessment across Europe is there are at least 5,000 European nationals who have travelled to Syria and Iraq,” he told a committee of MEPs, adding it was ““not at an optimum level”.
And these are the sorts of people we are supposed to trust to screen the newcomers. Why on earth would we?
Let me just add that I can’t think of a reason Abaaoud couldn’t have come to Greece on a fake passport, either. It’s apparently ridiculously easy to get one, and once into Europe and given official refugee status, as I understand it he could have traveled around at will. But, as I understand this story (although it’s not clear from the article), he was probably using his real EU passport.]
Say what you will about the French and their leaders, when faced with the ISIS attack in Paris, they have responded with some vigor:
The French airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria are only the beginning of the counterattack against ISIS, as French officials themselves are promising. And as anyone familiar with France’s military capabilities can attest, when it comes to war the French are among the very best.
Moreover, whatever France does probably will not look like anything the U.S. would do. There is a French way of warfare that reflects the French military’s lack of resources and its modest sense of what it can achieve. They specialize in carefully apportioned and usually small but lethal operations, often behind the scenes…
Maybe that praise is a bit much. But if you think about it, the French government’s reaction has been a lot tougher than Obama’s would have been if (heaven forbid) we had experienced something similar under his watch. He probably would have given ISIS (whoops, ISIL) a pro-forma tongue-lashing and reserved his real ire for the Republicans.
The French have also been quite effective and impressive in the post-attack operation in St. Denis.
So what accounts for the difference? President Hollande is a socialist, Obama is a (somewhat secret) socialist, but not all socialists are alike.
One difference is that Hollande is honest about his socialism and Obama is not. Nor is Holland a narcissist; at least not any more than most politicians. Hollande doesn’t appear to have delusions of grandeur and a plan for the realignment of the Moslem world through his own manipulations.
But perhaps the biggest distinction is that Hollande is a patriot and Obama, I’m sad to say, gives every appearance of not being one. Obama also has the very distinct foreign policy goal of making the US less prominent as an actor on the world stage, and less trustworthy; I wouldn’t say the same about Hollande and France. Lastly, Obama also would like to support Iran as the dominant power in the region, and his actions and reactions are geared towards that end. I’ve not seen any indication that Hollande is dedicated to playing that particular game.
[NOTE: A more extreme point of view about Obama has been voiced by those who believe that Obama wants more dictatorial powers, and that therefore he is hardly averse to a terrorist attack on American soil because that would give him the opportunity to declare a national emergency and adopt emergency powers. Note that in France an emergency has been declared, in order to expand the authorities’ search capabilities in the wake of the attack. I’m not privy to the back and forth on French forums, but I’m not aware of any serious allegations that Hollande is pleased about that or has dictatorial ambitions.]
