What can you say about apocalyptic jihad?

The New Neo Posted on by

It turns out that the answer is “a great deal.”

The first weekend in May I attended a conference held in Boston entitled “GenerationCaliphate: Apocalyptic Hopes, Millennial Dreams and Global Jihad.” It was organized by Richard Landes, millennial scholar, inventor of the term “Pallywood,” blogger at The Augean Stables, exposer of the suspect nature of the claims about al Durah’s death, author of the book Heaven on Earth, brilliant and original thinker, and a person I’m happy to call my friend.

This was a scholarly conference, but that certainly didn’t mean it was dull. Au contraire; it was very lively.

One of the strongest impressions I got from the conference is how many people there are who have dedicated their lives to studying the history of Islam and Islamic thought, and how much information they have gleaned about how that thought informs the motives and expectations of modern terrorists. Many of us non-experts tend to think of terrorists as more grounded in the present than they apparently are, and to ignore what seem to be their wild fantasies about the end of the world and fail to appreciate how very much those apocalyptic dreams are informed by Islam and its history.

Something else that struck me about the conference was how it illustrated that although many of us (and I include myself here) tend to think everyone fighting terrorism is on the right, there are some people on the left who are very concerned about terrorism and take it very seriously, but that there are some rather large rifts between those of the right and left who share this common cause and common interest in combating terrorism.

There were too many erudite and engrossing speakers at the conference to describe each one, but some highlights (in addition to the aforementioned Richard Landes) were, in no particular order:

(1) Graeme Wood, who wrote an article in The Atlantic back in February (I discussed it here) on the subject of the apocalyptic belief system of ISIS.

(2) Timothy Furnish, an expert in the more ancient history of the Capiphate and of Islamic end-time beliefs, and how they are influencing modern politics.

(3) Jeffrey M. Bale, who discussed the many reasons why so many people refuse to take the ideology behind Islamic terrorism seriously, prominently including what he calls “mirror imaging,” which is the tendency to project one’s own thoughts and beliefs onto others.

(4) David Cook, a professor of religion and an expert on Boko Haram.

(5) JM Berger, who gave a fascinating talk on the increasingly sophisticated ways in which Islamic terrorists use modern social media to transcend geographic limitations.

(6) Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media Watch, an invaluable site for studying the ferocity and hatred expressed in Palestinian propaganda. I’ve already discussed his website in this post, but I suggest that if you haven’t looked at it, please do.

(7) Charles Jacobs, founder of the Boston branch of CAMERA, founder of the David Project, and instrumental in the fight against slavery in the Sudan, was a forceful speaker who explained why some of the Jewish organizations traditionally involved in the fight against anti-Semitism and intolerance (such as the Anti-Defamation League) have been reluctant to involve themselves very heavily in these issues.

(8) David Redles spoke on a topic I’d never really heard about before, how apocalyptic thinking figured in Nazi ideology.

(9) Paul Berman, one of the liberals at the conference and author of the well-known book Terror and Liberalism, spoke of how terrorism presents the west with a crisis among the left, particularly its intellectuals, and academia.

One of the scheduled presenters was Hirsi Ali, whom I’ve long admired. I was much looking forward to her appearance in such a relatively small venue. She was due to speak on the second day, but unfortunately she had to cancel. I wasn’t privy to her reasons, although I’m sure she had them. It certainly didn’t escape anyone’s notice, however, that the evening after the first day of the conference, when we went back to our rooms, the news of the attack and shootings in Garland, Texas aimed at Pam Geller and the free speech event was being broadcast.

Geller’s conference was very different from ours both in tone and purpose. But even academic get-togethers such as the one I attended provide substantial security details these days. That this is so is a sad commentary on the growth and scope of terrorism today; I doubt that such a presence (at least not so large a presence) would have been necessary prior to 9/11. But that’s the reality of our times.

[ADDENDUM: Richard Landes has kindly provided a set of recommended articles and website links connected with the conference and its authors. You can read them here; they are listed towards the bottom of the page.]

Amtrak didn’t install an older system that would have prevented the crash

The New Neo Posted on by

Congress had mandated that a new “positive train control” automatic braking system be installed on all passenger and major freight railroads by December 31 of this year. Had that system been in place in Philadelphia, the Amtrak disaster would not have happened.

However, it turns out that if an already-existing, older and less sophisticated system had been in place, that would have prevented the crash as well. But Amtrak had decided not to install it on that side of the curve, although it had been in place for years on the other side of the same curve. Their reasoning was as follows:

If Amtrak Train 188 had been heading to Philadelphia from New York City, it would not have derailed at the sharp Frankford Junction curve, because an automatic braking mechanism has been in place for years on the southbound side of the tracks to stop a speeding train.

But Amtrak never installed the same electronics on the northbound side, so Train 188 was able to enter the curve where the speed limit is 50 m.p.h. at more than 100 m.p.h.

Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman said in an interview that the lack of the automatic-braking control on one side of the curve was “a loophole” that he was unaware of until Train 188 derailed Tuesday, killing eight people and injuring about 200.

He said that the railroad had not installed automatic-braking technology on the northbound side of the curve under the assumption that trains just leaving 30th Street Station would be slower than those barreling south from New York.

So this was a judgment call made years ago, and until last week the call had seemed reasonable.

We still don’t know what caused the crash, but we do know that the train actually sped up considerably as it approached the curve. The engineer is said to have sustained a concussion and lost his memory of the events that preceded the crash, and the investigation proceeds.

Ramadi falls…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to ISIS.

This means a death sentence for a lot of people:

“We have not received reinforcements from the government, and there will be a massacre of these people like there was in Speicher,” said Dahl. He referred to a former U.S. military base near Tikrit where an estimated 1,700 Iraqi soldiers were captured and killed en masse by the Islamic State last summer.

In the comments to the article you can see quite a few that blame Bush.

A little delayed today

The New Neo Posted on by

I just got back from a trip to NYC and am somewhat behind in a host of tasks. So further posting will be delayed till this evening.

It was beautiful in New York. Here are some of the things I saw at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I recommend them highly this time of year:

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Tree peonies. Just about the most beautiful flowers in the world. Not the easiest plants to grow though, unlike regular peonies, which thrive in New England. The photos don’t show how huge they are, either—bigger than a hand.

Let’s see…

The New Neo Posted on by

…whether it’s still considered perfectly okay for Clinton partisan George Stephanopoulos to be among the press covering the presidential campaign in 2016, as well as controversies about the Clinton Foundation, after this revelation. ABC seems to think he’s just as objective as ever; no problem.

At least he has now recused himself from moderating the debates. But they don’t need him; they’ve got plenty more who are every bit as objective as Stephanopoulos.

Obama the knave: the long view

The New Neo Posted on by

When you blog you write an awful lot, day after day after day. That means that you forget some of what you wrote—perhaps not “forget” exactly, but it slips your mind and it’s only on looking at it again that it rings a bell of familiarity. Sheer volume of output can do that.

Recently I came across an article I wrote in October of 2009 about what I thought Obama’s plan for the US and the world might be. When I recently came across that essay again by chance (prompted by a commenter mentioning Reagan’s “city on a hill” remark) it had only a vague ring of familiarity. I was surprised, also, by how early in the game I’d written it, which shows how easy it was to see much of what Obama was up to even then. I will never understand why more people didn’t see it, sense it, feel it.

Here’s an excerpt:

Obama may not be speaking in openly religious terms as Reagan did, but he nevertheless looks on America in a way that could be seen as religious: he sees it as a nation conceived in original sin, one that has gone on to commit offenses against the world for which it must now atone. And Obama views himself as the special instrument through which America can finally purify herself, join the world of other nations as an equal rather than a leader, and go forth and sin no more.

You might say that Reagan believed in American exceptionalism, whereas Obama believes in Obama’s exceptionalism.

Please go back and read it.

[NOTE: The article only discussed part of Obama’s motivation, because even by that time I believed he was a committed leftist as well: see this and this.]

Maligned UVA dean sues Rolling Stone and Sabrina Erdely

The New Neo Posted on by

An excellent move:

Nicole Eramo is seeking more than $7.5 million in damages from Rolling Stone; its parent company, Wenner Media; and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the investigative journalist who wrote the explosive account of sexual assault on the campus in Charlottesville.

Eramo, who is the university’s chief administrator dealing with sexual assaults, argues in the lawsuit that the article destroyed her credibility, permanently damaged her reputation and caused her emotional distress. She assailed the account as containing numerous falsehoods that the magazine could have avoided if it had worked to verify the story of its main subject, a student named Jackie who alleged she was gang-raped in 2012 and that the university mishandled her case.

“Rolling Stone and Erdely’s highly defamatory and false statements about Dean Eramo were not the result of an innocent mistake,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court. “They were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts.”

Preach it sister, preach it!

You can find many of my previous posts on the UVA Rolling Stone story here. In my opinion, both the periodical and reporter Erderly were guilty of everything Eramo’s suit alleges, and more. I am very glad (in case you hadn’t noticed) to see that lawsuits are forthcoming. Perhaps—perhaps—this will have a chilling affect on the next publication that tries to stir up public opinion and outrage with such an obviously suspect story, if the penalties end up being high enough.

One can dream, anyway.

I stand by my original position that universities shouldn’t be investigating rape allegations anyway and that the police should be in control. If the allegations don’t constitute a crime or a possible one, the university not become a kangaroo court. Of course, the universities still would have to figure out what to do with an accused student in the meantime, but in the “Jackie” case there was no actual accused student, there was an entire fraternity.

I also don’t think universities can or should patrol the bedroom negotiations of its students. If students want to be treated like modern-day adults and be allowed the freedom to screw around as they wish, then they should have to act like adults and take responsibility for it. I am very serious, and seriously libertarian, about this. In my day students were protected from some of these complexities—certainly not all of them!—by stricter rules about being in each others’ dorm rooms or the bedroom floors of fraternities or sororities. Now that those rules are gone, and students want complete freedom, they should be prepared to deal with it, and let the police handle the serious problems when they arise.

Obama to liberals: my way or the highway

The New Neo Posted on by

Now it’s liberals’ turn to feel the sting of Obama’s sharp tongue. They seemed to have had no problem with his previous personal attacks on Republicans for disagreeing with him, or with secrecy on the contents of previous bills. And in addition to his nastiness towards Republicans, Obama didn’t really seem to respect or confer with them (the liberals in Congress), either. Nevertheless, for the most part, they sucked it up for the good of the party and the Cause.

But now Obama has really let them have it for disagreeing with him on the trade bill. Here’s Brent Budowsky on the subject:

I spent many years working for senior Democratic Senators such as Lloyd Bentsen and House Democratic leaders beginning with the legendary Speaker Tip O’Neill, and have never seen any president of either party insult so many members of his own party’s base and members of the House and Senate as Mr. Obama has in his weeks of tirades against liberals on trade.

In Mr. Obama’s speech at Nike last week, his comments to Matt Bai of Yahoo over the weekend, and White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s comments to reporters on Monday, Mr. Obama and his White House staff have repeated a string of personal insults directed against prominent liberal Democrats in Congress, liberal Democrats across the nation, organized labor, and leading public interest and environmental groups who share doubts about the TPP trade deal…

Mr. Obama’s tirades on trade have included accusations that these liberal Democrats are ignorant about trade policy, insincere when offering their opinions, motivated by politics and not the national interest, and backward looking towards the past. Obama’s repeated attacks against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in which he charged that Warren’s concern about the trade bill is motivated not by a reasoned view of what is right for America but by her personal political motivations, is one of the most dishonest and repellant examples of character assassination and contempt by any American president, against any leading member of his own party, in my lifetime.

Budowsky seems surprised, and I suppose it’s possible that the Democratic targets of Obama’s ire might be surprised too. But if so, they shouldn’t be. Have they not paid attention to what’s happened lately to Democratic Senator Menendez? More importantly, have they not paid attention to Obama’s style and approach to his opponents in the past, and to his propensity for nasty tactics, going all the way back to his earliest days as a rookie politician? Personal attack is not just a tool in his arsenal; it’s the main tool in his arsenal.

I guess they figured the crocodile would never eat them. But it’s a hungry crocodile.

Amtrack derailment

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a bad one.

I don’t have much commentary or speculation right now, because we know so little about the causes. What we do know is that at least six people are dead and 146 injured in the derailment that affected the entire seven cars and engine of the Washington-to-NY Amtrak train. It occurred as the train rounded a curve in Philadelphia, resulting in a scene of carnage and devastation.

People don’t expect this to happen on the train, and they are correct that it is highly unusual. But the statistics don’t matter for the vicitms today, because it happened to them.

Bearing witness to the Reich

The New Neo Posted on by

I have continued to read Victor Klemperer’s two-volume diary I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (I’ve written about the book before, here and here).

Klemperer was in an unusual position in Germany. Although born a Jew, he had converted to Christianity before World War I. He had served in that war, and married a non-Jewish (“Aryan”) woman named Eva. That combination of factors meant that his presence was tolerated in the Reich during the 30s and World War II, although he was treated as a Jew and subject to all the Draconian restrictions Germany placed on those who were allowed to remain (most of them being married to non-Jews; see this for background on why Jews married to Germans were allowed to stay for a while in Germany).

The net was closing in on him as the war went on, however, and but for an unexpected event he would have been sent to the camps. His life was saved, paradoxically, by the Allied bombing of Dresden, which he survived and which gave him cover for leaving the city and claiming he had lost his identity papers.

The following is an entry Klemperer made in his journal much much earlier in the game. It gives you an idea of the quality of the diaries he kept, and their significance to information about the attitude of so-called “ordinary” Germans at the time. For some background, understand that Klemperer was a scholar who depended heavily on access to the library for his intellectual life’s work:

DECEMBER 3, 1938

Yesterday afternoon at the library, Striege or Striegel, who is in charge of the lending section, an old Stahlhelm man of middling position and years”¦[said?] I should come into the back room with him. Just as he had announced the reading room ban [on Jews] a year ago, so he now showed me the complete ban on using the library. The absolute end. But it was different from a year ago. The man was distressed beyond words, I had to calm him. He stroked my hand the whole time, he could not hold back the tears, he stammered [and said]: I am boiling over inside”¦If only something would happen tomorrow”¦”“Why tomorow?””It’s the Day of Solidarity”¦They’re collecting”¦One could get at them”¦But not just kill them””torture, torture, torture”¦They should first of all be made to feel what they’ve done”¦

”¦Even before that (I knew nothing about the ban yet) Fraulein Roth, very pale, had gripped my hand in the catalog room: Could I not get away, it was the end here, for us too””St. Mark’s was set alight even before the synagogue and the Zion Church was threatened, if it does not change its name”¦She spoke to me as to a dying man, she took leave of me as if forever”¦But these few, sympathizing and in despair, are isolated, and they too are afraid.

The following entry was written by Klemperer a couple of years later, as the war was going on and the already-massive restraints on “Jews” like him who were married to “Aryans” were increasing day by day in the Reich:

MAY 15, 1942

”¦Jews with the star and anyone who lives with them are, with immediate effect, forbidden to keep pets (dogs, cats, birds), it is also forbidden to give the animals away to be looked after. This is the death sentence for Muschel, whom we have had for more than eleven years and to whom Eva is very attached. He is to be taken to the vet tomorrow, so that he is spared the fright of being fetched and put down together with others. I feel very bitter for Eva’s sake. We have so often said to each other The tomcat’s raised tail is our flag, we shall not strike it, we’ll keep our heads above water, we’ll pull the animal through, and at the victory celebrations Muschel will get a “schnitzel from Kamm’s” (the fanciest butcher here). It makes me almost superstitious that the flag is being lowered now.

Although taking pets away to be killed hardly compares in severity to so many of the cruelties perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others, it symbolizes the persecutors’ attention to detail and the extreme malice with which they operated. Even such a small comfort was forbidden; they wanted that flag lowered.

Free speech is threatened—but of course, you already knew that

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the topic of free speech has been coming up again and again and again lately. The battle to protect it has taken on new urgency, in part because too many people appear to have forgotten what free speech is and why it is so vital.

The movement to limit speech took hold in the university community decades ago. I first noticed it in the early 90s when I went back to school to get my Master’s, but I’m told it actually began considerably earlier. Whenever it started, by now it’s a firmly entrenched idea that it is okay to limit speech that is even mildly upsetting if anyone finds it hurtful or objectionable in any way. And who makes the judgment on whether it is or isn’t? The offended one.

People on the left like to characterize conservatives as power-hungry fascists [sic] who are out to control and limit us. But as with so many of the restrictions on liberty, those on free speech are being driven almost wholly by the left. Whether the campaign is against Pamela Geller’s right to repeat the hateful statements of jihadis without being accused of hate herself for condemning them, or whether it’s about remarks defined as sexist or bigoted in general, or whether it’s about the Obama administration’s efforts to condemn the reporting of Fox News or intimidate and investigate reporters it doesn’t like, we need understand that it’s part of a much larger movement described here by Peter Berkowitz, and that much of the press is allied with it rather than against it:

…[M]ost of the elite media””overwhelmingly left liberal””have largely neglected to cover the left’s crusade against free speech. Operating out of newsrooms, as [Kirsten] Powers observes [in her new book The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech] in which “there is nobody to push back on their biases,” reporters seem unable to detect anything amiss on campuses, in the media, and in the political arena where, after all, the draconian regulation of speech is intended to serve avowedly left-wing causes.

An increasingly illiberal left, according to Powers, has found a ruthless ally in an increasingly illiberal feminism. To oppose abortion, or to suggest that owners of family businesses should not be required by law to subsidize their employees’ purchase of a narrow range of birth control options to which the owners object on religious grounds, or to insist that the accused in campus sexual assault cases be accorded fundamental due process rights is, illiberal feminists declare, to wage “war” on women and to advocate positions that have no place in polite conversation or public debate.

From feminism to the media to the professoriate to the West Wing, the illiberal left has been empowered to curtail freedom of speech by the transformation of liberal education””whose classic purpose was to emancipate the mind and promote toleration””into a means for reproducing progressive dogma and inculcating intolerance of alternative points of view. Because Kirsten Powers is right””our colleges and universities have become ground zero in the fight for freedom of speech””the restoration of free speech depends on the restoration of liberal education.

I’ve criticized Kirsten Powers for many of her positions, particularly on illegal immigration. But on this she seems absolutely correct. As Berkowitz points out, Powers is a liberal on most issues. But on this I’d say she’s a classical liberal, which is another thing entirely, and I applaud her. The trouble is that her fellow liberals (of the non-classical variety) will probably just shrug or berate her and consider that on this she’s been led astray by sleeping with the enemy—that is, her stint at Fox News.

And perhaps they would be right on that latter point—not that she’s gone astray (I happen to think she has been led toward an acknowledgement of the truth), but on the influence of her job at Fox. She says so herself:

Powers grew up in a liberal family but said that interacting with conservatives, and finding God, has given her a new perspective.

“Two experiences unexpectedly put me in a regular relationship with conservatives: working as a contributor at Fox News and a later in life conversion to Christianity. The more I got to know actual conservative and religious people, the harder it was to justify the stereotypes I had so carelessly embraced. In my early days at Fox, I can remember trying to convince a conservative there that George Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court didn’t really count as a female appointment because she was conservative and an evangelical Christian. He was horrified. I was confused as to why he would be horrified. I’m now embarrassed that I ever thought such a thing, let alone said it aloud. Such a prejudiced view was only able to take root because of the lack of ideological, political, and religious diversity,” she wrote.

Powers added: “This intolerance is not a passive matter of opinion. It’s an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people. This conduct has become an existential threat to those who hold orthodox religious beliefs. But increasingly I hear from people across the political spectrum who are fearful not only of expressing their views, but also as to where all of this is heading. I’ve followed this trend closely as a columnist with growing concern. It’s become clear that the attempts””too often successful””to silence dissent from the liberal worldview aren’t isolated outbursts. They are part of a bigger story. This book is that story.”

That is the sad truth that I learned, too, after my political change experience. I was so naive beforehand, and had operated in so much of a liberal bubble (as well as having steered clear of political discussions in general in my adult life), that I had no awareness of the phenomenon. I first learned of it from bitter, painful personal experience, when I was the dissenter.

It sounds as though Powers’ book could actually influence at least a few people to change their minds about what’s happening out there. I don’t usually say that about books, which in my opinion seldom influence people in such a profound way, but this one could have a special persuasive force because of Powers’ status as a liberal woman. As I wrote earlier, though, I think it will be easy for many people to dismiss her as tainted by her Fox news experience. Ironically, such an attitude on their part would be in line with the phenomenon she describes in the book. People are frightened of even hearing different points of view lest they be swayed.

Christianity declining in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Especially among the young. As William Jacobson points out, this is likely to be the result of decades of effort among “progressive” educators and the MSM.

Many people I know consider it axiomatic that religion and science/logic are antithetical, and prefer to cast their lot with science and rationality—although I have noticed that most of those same people don’t seem to be able to talk to me about politics in a rational or well-informed manner. It’s also hard to avoid the impression that liberalism has become a new religion, with its saints and its demons and its entrenched faith.

As for Christianity, the decline is sharpest in the mainline Protestant churches—you know, the ones that have moved further and further to the left. Catholics too. Evangelicals are doing much better, with their numbers actually growing. The Christian-church-affiliated black population has remained fairly stable.

Also interesting is the growth of the “religiously unaffiliated.” It’s not clear exactly who these people are, but they don’t identify themselves as either atheist or agnostic, but prefer “unaffiliated.” My guess is that they are the sort of people who would check off the box “spiritual” if there was one—who profess a sort of vague (or sometimes not so vague, but nevertheless idiosyncratic) belief in something but don’t like churches or synagogues.