Dan Hannan thinks something in Europe has fundamentally changed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for the better.

This surprises me. I admire and respect Hannan, who is an eloquent man and who represents the Conservative Party for South East England as a Member of the European Parliament. I have never found him to be naive or overly optimistic.

So if he sees a silver lining to this cloud, I tend to listen. Hannan perceives a sea-change in Europe as a result of the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

We all know the traditional routine that follows an Islamist terror attack: momentary shock, then platitudinous disapproval, then condemnation of Western foreign policy, then hand-wringing about an imagined Islamophobic backlash…

But not this time. Something in Europe has changed ”” changed utterly. A decade ago, Trafalgar Square was filled with Muslims complaining about the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed ”” not, to be clear, about the assassination attempts they had triggered, but about the cartoons themselves. This time, crowds in the same place, including many Muslims, held pencils and “Je Suis Charlie” signs.

A decade ago, it was a rare and brave newspaper that reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. Today, it’s the papers that hang back that find themselves under pressure…

This time, the repudiation was unambiguous ”” not least from the main Islamic organizations.

So, why the change? Hannan thinks it was because “even the dimmest multi-culti sloganizers are starting to see that their cant about freedom not being an absolute right has led us to a bad place.” Again, I trust that Hannan has his finger much more firmly on the pulse of Europe than I do, but I’m not sure why this incident would be a turning point if previous incidents haven’t done it.

What could be so different this time? Not numbers of victims; there were many more killed in the Madrid train bombings of 2004 or the London subway bombings of 2005, to name just two. Their victims were random people going about their business on an ordinary day, surely a group whose murder by terrorists would engender enormous sympathy and outrage.

If Hannan is correct that the recent Paris murders are a turning point, it could be because the Charlie Hebdo victims weren’t randomly chosen. The killings were targeted assassinations of people who were well-known in France and somewhat known elsewhere in Europe, and who were murdered for exercising their right of free speech.

Conservatives have been saying for quite some time that jihadis are at war with Western civilization and/or the Enlightenment, although liberals and the left have often scoffed at that claim. However, one of the pillars of the West is freedom of speech, so when Muslim terrorists murdered the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for exercising that right in France, a Western country, the act gave credence to the idea that the terrorists are in fact out to destroy our civilization and our liberties. That could be a harder threat to ignore than previous ones, especially coupled with the ISIS beheadings of members of the Western press that have become frequent in the past year.

[NOTE: On the other hand, I don’t get any sense that anything has fundamentally changed in the attitude towards terrorism in the US, including and especially the attitude of the Obama administration.]

Obama’s community college plan

The New Neo Posted on by

More non-free lunch from Obama:

The White House proposal would waive tuition for students who attend community college at least half-time and maintain a 2.5 GPA (that’s a C+). You have to work hard not to get that grade. Washington would then cover 75% of tuition on the condition that states pay the rest. The Obama Administration calls this a federal-state “partnership.” It’s more accurate to call it the education version of Medicaid without the fiscal discipline…

White House officials are whispering to reporters that all of this will cost federal taxpayers $60 billion over 10 years, and another $20 billion by the states, if you choose to believe them. The White House predicted in 2010 that expanding its income-based repayment (i.e., student loan forgiveness) plans would cost $1.7 billion that year and $7.4 billion over the following decade. By 2014 the Administration’s estimate had ballooned to $7.6 billion for 2015 alone.

The bigger problem with the new entitlement is that there are already plenty of training programs and financial assistance for students attending community colleges. According to the College Board’s annual survey, tuition at public two-year colleges averages about $3,300, which is less than the $5,090 in average student aid (i.e., grants and tax benefits). Low-income students can also receive up to $5,730 in Pell grants, which Mr. Obama has greatly expanded.

The White House says its plan is based on a Tennessee program that pays for two free years of community college for state residents. If that’s how states want to spend their tax dollars, at least voters are in a position to hold local schools accountable.

But by nationalizing the program, the feds are likely to make community colleges more expensive and bureaucratic…

The whole thing is somewhat of a gimmick, a sound-good feel-good fish to throw to liberals. I’m not sure that even Obama thinks it has a chance of being passed. But it is ideologically in step with his general approach to government:

The new entitlement is best understood as an extension of the Administration’s ideological project to add higher education to the list of entitlements that keep the federal government in charge of American life from cradle to grave…

Punish private schools, subsidize often inferior public schools, snatch regulatory control from states, and add tens of billions in new taxpayer obligations…

Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? How many people will buy this, even as an idea?

Why did the French fail to monitor the Charlie Hebdo terrorists?

The New Neo Posted on by

There are an awful lot of French citizens who sympathize with the Muslim terrorist cause, and many of them are known to authorities, like the three terrorists in the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market killings. Some pundits are offering the excuse that there are just too many such people for intelligence to effectively track them and prevent the attacks.

If that’s true, then the situation is incredibly dire, because it would indicate that our resources have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of terrorists already in the West.

But I don’t buy it. We certainly could allocate more resources to the task. What’s more, those three terrorists weren’t just sympathizers; two of them had previously been in the prison system for terrorist activities, and had received sentences that were a mere slap on the wrist. Why is the French justice system so lenient on terrorists? Why weren’t they still in prison?

It’s not as though this leniency was unknown, either. Here’s a 2002 article by Theordore Dalrymple that talks about (among other things) the breakdown of the French criminal justice system and its almost complete lack of punishment, deterrence, accountability for out-of-control youths from the Muslim enclaves of France. And the perpetrators, both petit and grand, are well aware of it:

Several things struck me about the incident [of trying to steal from parking meters]: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?

Another motive for inaction was that, had the youths been arrested, nothing would have happened to them. They would have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for an hour?

The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their employees, were shot dead in front of the owners’ nine-year-old daughter.

The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcaé¨m to la fié¨vre flicardiaire””cop fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalist””that is to say, of a full human being””differently, let alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however true it might be.

Remember, the article was written back in 2002. More:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in [the low-income immigrant Muslim communities]””a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust””greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years””is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti””BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.

And Dalrymple issued the following warning:

Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is disputable: there are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975””and at least 5 million of them are Muslims. Demographic projections (though projections are not predictions) suggest that their descendants will number 35 million before this century is out, more than a third of the likely total population of France.

Indisputably, however, France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.

No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the cités.

So, rocket launchers and the rest were already common back in 2002. In the intervening years we’ve seen the growth of groups like ISIS, with their internet presence. They have a great deal of outreach in France, and it is obviously effective. The Charlie Hebdo terrorists were radicalized in that way, along with countless others. You can’t that say we—and France—weren’t warned.

Obama’s non-solidarity

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote that the message sent by Obama’s non-attendance at the Paris march was “unmistakeable.”

But I guess it wasn’t, because there’s been a lot of chatter about it (see, for example, the long list at memeorandum) and many people profess to be puzzled by it or to think it was some sort of oversight. So I’ll be more direct.

Yes, the march was mostly an exercise in hypocrisy, because many of those participating in it certainly don’t have the guts to defy the Muslim message the way the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo did. But the march still signified that world leaders were willing to stand up to radical Islam rhetorically and/or symbolically, and to defend free speech, which is more than Obama is willing to do. Rhetoric can be a prelude to action, although probably most of those leaders will confine their defiance to a march. But at least they’re not afraid to say the words “Islam” or “Muslim” or some variation of the two in the same breath as the word “terrorist.”

Obama is. Actually, “afraid” is not the right word, either. He’s not afraid to say those words; he refuses to say them. You can speculate on the reasons, from the possibility of his being a closet Muslim to being in sympathy with them to thinking that if he appeases them it will somehow cause them to make nice to the US. But the fact is that he is singular among Western world leaders in his reluctance to link the two.

Not only that, but he has explicitly condemned people such as the Charlie Hebdo satirists by saying, in his UN speech not long after the Benghazi attack, “The future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Why march in solidarity with those who protest their murder, then? He wrongly and intentionally blamed the Benghazi attack on reaction to an obscure satirist. The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not obscure, and the almost inevitable conclusion to draw is that Obama does not defend their right to mock Islam or its prophet.

Obama AWOL at Paris solidarity demonstration

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of world leaders attended the largest demonstration in French history, with one conspicuously absent (and no mention of that fact by the Times). Obama didn’t even send a representative such as Biden or Kerry, although the Secretary of State would have been a natural, since he speaks French:

The organizers said the rally was to show support for freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and to reinforce the message that France and the French would not be cowed by terrorists.

Officials from across Europe and elsewhere, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, were in Paris to attend the rally.

In a rare display of unity, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also participated.

If security was tight enough for Netanyahu, it ought to have been tight enough for Obama or another US official.

Remember this event attended by Obama? That was deemed important enough, although security was almost non-existent.

The absence from the Paris rally was unusual enough for CNN to comment on it:

Kerry was in India, attending an entrepreneurship summit with new Prime Minister Narendra Modi — with whom the United States is hoping to develop much closer trade ties.

Instead, the United States was represented by U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley.

Attorney General Eric Holder was also in Paris, attending a security summit on combating terrorism. He recorded interviews that appeared on several U.S. news outlets Sunday, but was not spotted at the unity march.

No one from the administration would speak on record about the U.S. representation at the march.

This is on the order of a snub—Holder was there, but didn’t attend? The message is unmistakeable.

Ugly outfits are not all alike

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are two very ugly outfits that don’t resemble each other at all.

One is not exactly a dress; it’s what I think is called a jumpsuit, meaning an all-in-one pants outfit that makes it very hard to use the ladies room and looks good on almost no one and yet periodically returns to the fashion world. This one combines the jumpsuit esthetic with the current trend for peekaboo breasts held up by something more physician-enhanced than the designs of Mother Nature.

Cara-Delevingne

This one is quite the opposite. First, there’s the color, a yellow that almost no one can wear successfully with the possible exception of redheads. The dress is an attempt at ballgown formality crossed with modern ironic casualness, and it succeeds on neither level, giving the viewer the impression that the wearer has either put on a dress too big for her or has failed to fasten some important element of the garment.

Katie-Holmes

The jumpsuit reminds me somewhat of Rudi Gernreich’s monokini, which those of you of a certain age may remember:

Think of something in your life that took 1/60th of a second to do. Now, imagine having to spend the rest of your life talking about it. I think it’s a beautiful photograph but, oh, am I tired of talking about it.”

But I guess that she liked the notoriety at the time:

Gernreich1964

1964, I remember it well. Fifty years ago.

French Prime Minister manages to say what Obama won’t

The New Neo Posted on by

From France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a declaration of war that is surprisingly specific:

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in é‰vry, south of Paris.

It remains to be seen what France is willing to actually do in that war. But naming the enemy is at least a first step.

Here’s an interesting fact:

Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State militant group.

I’m not sure what “large numbers” means, but it’s a very disturbing development. Does the French government know the names of these people? If so, is it prepared to strip them of their citizenship?

Connecting the dots with the Charlie Hebdo terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

All three perpetrators in the recent terror attacks in France—the two Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo, Coulibaly at the kosher market—were known to French authorities. And not just known, but well known to be jihadis who supported the Islamic terrorist cause. They also knew each other, and Cherif and Coulibaly had been convicted of terrorist-related offenses and had served time for them.

A summary:

Said, the elder of the Kouachi brothers, spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training and working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to U.S. officials.

His younger brother, Cherif, has a long history of jihad and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria “to go and combat the Americans.”…

Cherif was a close associate of Coulibaly, a Western intelligence source told CNN.

Here’s a lengthy article about their known ties, both to each other and to other terrorists. It’s an impressive list. Read the whole thing and you’ll end up wondering, as the author of the article does, how they could possibly have slipped through the radar screen:

It’s not as if, 10 years ago, the threat posed by these young men was unrecognized. “Those who aren’t dead and who come back will be the future chiefs of al Qaeda or Zarqawi in Europe,” French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard said at the time. But then, as now, there was no clear way to end it.

In Kouachi’s case, the court sent him to prison from January 2005 to October 2006, and there he began a new stage in his radicalization in the company of a new mentor, Djamel Beghal, who had plotted an attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris in 2001. After Kouachi got out, he was accused of joining a plot to free one of the most notorious terrorists held in France, Smaé¯n Aé¯t Ali Belkacem, who is serving a life sentence for his role organizing the bombing of a commuter train in central Paris in 1995.

It goes on, and on, and on. Why is it so hard to regard people like this as ticking time bombs who must be deported (if non-citizens), watched like hawks if they haven’t yet committed a crime and are citizens, or put away for a long, long, long time if they have committed one*? Why aren’t crimes of terrorism given penalties that are longer than a year or two, which is obviously way too short?

The fact that there may be too many of these people in a country like France (or the US, for that matter) to properly monitor them is no excuse whatsoever. Two of these three people were actually in the prison system and were then let out prematurely, and that could be seen even without the hindsight of knowing what they were about to do subsequently.

[NOTE: *I also have written a lengthy post arguing that in some cases, citizens who join terrorist causes should be stripped of their citizenship.]

Coco’s choice

The New Neo Posted on by

Do you remember the William Styron book Sophie’s Choice? First published in 1979, it was a literary sensation and became a movie starring Meryl Streep. Sophie was a Christian Polish woman who ended up in a concentration camp during World War II, and was forced by the Nazis to make an agonizing split-second decision about which child of hers to save and which to sacrifice.

To me, the theme of the book was how, in a situation of dire peril in which those bent on destructive evil are in charge, ordinary people are placed in situations in which they are required to make moral and ethical decisions when under extraordinary duress. And not just in the camps, either, because during the war everyone had to decide about the extent of their collaboration with evil (for example, join the Resistance, or keep a low profile?).

No one knows in advance how brave he/she will be. In the case of the fictional Sophie, she suffered for the rest of her life from the emotional consequences of the decisions she made, although she would have suffered no matter what decision she made because there really was no good one.

Which brings us to the woman, nickname “Coco,” who tapped in the security code that allowed the Charlie Hebdo killers to enter the magazine’s office and do their nefarious work.

As soon as I read about her I was struck by her dilemma. She was with her young child, and both were explicitly threatened by the armed killers. Probably the “right” thing, if looked at objectively, would have been to sacrifice her life and the life of her child. But none of us knows what we would actually do in such a case and we hope we’ll never face any decision even remotely like that.

Richard Fernandez has written an essay on the subject that says exactly what I would have said if I could write like Richard Fernandez. I suggest you read every word, but here’s an excerpt:

The assailants gained admittance by forcing a cartoonist to enter the door security code at gunpoint. A large percentage of people ”” maybe nearly everyone ”” would have done the same thing, yielded to that threat, in a moment of fear. A certain smaller percentage, perhaps 2 percent, would for some reason refuse; and refuse unreasonably without quite knowing why. Which of the two groups one belongs to nobody knows until the day…

Years ago there was a story about an Israeli security guard who grappled a suicide bomber outside a supermarket where they both blew up. It is doubtful the guard did it for his salary; nobody dies for a pittance. It is doubtful that he even knew what he was going to do until he did it. It was just one of those things you find out about yourself in a moment.

“Well, whadda ya know?” Boom. It’s nice to know you’re made of stern stuff. But it’s a helluva way to find out.

Fernandez then goes from a discussion of individual bravery to one of cultural and institutional courage. It’s our lack of the latter that could really do us in. Here’s how he puts it:

Leftist orthodoxy now accepts the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith,…They are too completely invested in multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution to doubt the faith now…

And therefore they will cling to their dogma, however improbable it might be, long past the point when any reasonable Leftist would have doubted it. This is the most dangerous aspect of the crisis facing the West. Not only are we in danger of tearing our politics apart, we must. It has now become a case of destroying our civilization in order to save it…The cultural elites of the West are going to hang themselves in the morning according to a schedule that they themselves have devised.

Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.

It’s that last sentence that sends the chill up my spine. It’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking for over a decade. Our own failure to tell the truth about what’s happening and the nature of the enemy, and to face the seriousness of the task ahead of us, has been made clear since shortly after 9/11. In fact, it was probably clear long before that, but after 9/11 it became undeniable.