Believing the worst

The New Neo Posted on by

ISIS has done the world one favor, and one favor only.

Favor, you say? Are you mad? What sort of favor could ISIS be doing anyone?

That favor is to make more people believe that evil exists.

One would think 9/11 would have done it. And for many it did. One would have thought the beheading of Daniel Pearl would have done it. And for many it did. But something about ISIS and its atrocities and the scope of its victims, combined with its bloodthirsty reveling in its own mayhem, has silenced (for the moment; I certainly don’t think it’s permanent) a great many of those inclined to make excuses or offer rational explanations. Nor is anyone but those on the fringes denying that this is happening; the videos ISIS has released have seen to that.

Not that this realization will necessarily lead to truly effective action on the part of the West. So far it hasn’t, although it did seem to help the Yazidis on the mountain. It’s hard to imagine that the West will find its spine again, and even if it does the problem is much, much bigger than ISIS and will require a more concerted, sustained, and widespread effort than any country or group of countries seems to have the stomach for.

But the first step is recognizing evil when you see it.

World War II was an interesting case. The Nazis and the Axis powers were seen as evil, and an enormous number of countries united to fight them in an all-out war of the sort that might be mentally/emotionally impossible today. But the details of the evil regarding the Holocaust were minimized and/or even denied until after the war, when the evidence became irrefutable.* Why?

The Nazis were very different from ISIS in that they did not brag about their atrocities. They were “civilized” enough to hide them and perpetrate deceptions around them. Some of the motivation for that was to fool people, including their victims, into cooperating. But some was to lull the world into inaction. The Nazis knew that people find the worst difficult to believe, and they were counting on that. In fact, they often taunted their concentration camp victims by saying that if any happened to survive, the world would not believe their tales.

That brings me to Jan Karski. Karski was a hero of the WWII years, a Polish officer whose life had many twistings and turnings and stupendous bravery, and included action as a major figure in the Resistance. It fell to Karski (who was Catholic, but had been brought up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Poland) to document the Holocaust and to personally inform the Brits and FDR and other influential Americans about it as early as 1943. To say that their reaction was disappointing is to understate the matter.

Scott Johnson recently published a post at Powerline about Karski and his heroism, featuring some of Karski’s interviews. Watching them, I was struck by Karski’s demeanor. He just may be one of the most intense and yet controlled people I’ve ever seen, without being bombastic or loud. Even though he is speaking many decades after the events, he remains outraged at the responses he got.

There are videos of him discussing Roosevelt, too, but this is the one in which he talks about the reaction of Felix Frankfurter to his tale:

Frankfurter’s reaction sounded simple: “I don’t believe you.” But it was anything but. As Karski goes on to explain, “Probably he wanted to show me, yes, that the world is unprepared. This is an unprecedented problem, this is a horrible problem.” In other words, Frankfurter felt both overwhelmed and impotent, and in simultaneous denial and awareness of the horror of it all.

Was the Holocaust actually “unprecedented”? In the modern world, it seems to have been. Not that there hadn’t been problems something like it (the Armenians and Turks, to take just one example). But bad as that was, the Holocaust differed in style and especially in scope. The destruction of the Armenians was localized, but this was European-wide, and it was perpetrated by one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, European nation on earth, a country that was simultaneously trying to conquer the Western world.

I’m not excusing Frankfurter’s reaction. But I think light can be shed on it by the following passage written by Arthur Koestler, which I’ve discussed in a previous post. Koestler was one of the people with whom Karski met (in 1943), and he joined the cause of spreading the word. Koestler wrote this passage in 1944 as part of an essay entitled “On Disbelieving Atrocities” (it appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine) about how difficult it was to energize others to do something about the horrors. I think that here Koestler is describing some profound truths about human nature:

There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past, laughing and chatting.

I know that a great many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I have quarrelled about it with analysts and I believe it to be an archtype in the Jungian sense: an expression of the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence; and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda.

For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas.

Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time it happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye, and I tell myself: now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they will remain awake. But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected by the dream barrier which stifles all sound.

We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial [Koestler seems to have been unaware of the gassing method that had come to be used most often by that time] of the total Jewish population of Europe.

So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. he told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it.

As to this country [Koestler was referring to Britain, where he was living at the time and writing for the war effort], I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belsen; you can convince them for an hour, they they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas you others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would be alive.

In that earlier post, I wrote:

Why is it so difficult to hear the screaming? Much of it is self-protective: if we paid attention to all the pain and suffering in the world, we’d be paralyzed by empathy and unable to enjoy our own lives. What’s more, there’s often a sense of powerlessness to change things.

However, despite the denial, during World War II we were already dedicated to the all-out war against the Nazis. That was the excuse FDR and others gave: that the continuance of that fight was our most effective response. Now we are not willing to commit to that sort of huge effort, despite our lack of the ability to deny the evil that is happening before our eyes. We are not powerless, and we are not in denial, but we are unwilling to unleash the power we have. And it is understandable, as long as the horror continues to stay away from our shores. I don’t think it’s any accident that the US has experienced no widespread terrorist attack in the nature of 9/11 since that date. The giant isn’t sleeping, but it’s taking a light nap, and the terrorists want to keep it that way.

*[NOTE: Some, of course, continue to deny the Holocaust to this day. But for the most part they have a very different, and far more pernicious, agenda than those who ignored or denied it during the war itself.]

Why are all the excuses made for Islam?

The New Neo Posted on by

From Bush to Obama, and around the world, Western leaders are falling all over themselves to proclaim that ISIS is not Islamic, whereas ISIS declares itself to be proudly Islamic and the heir to ancient caliphates.

Looking-glass world.

Why is this happening? The truth—that there is something (and perhaps many things) about Islam that lends itself to violence in its name—is even apparent to such religion-haters as Bill Maher, who states it rather well (and, by the way, Charlie Rose is a simpering idiot):

[Hat tip: Ace.]

But that is the truth that cannot even be whispered by those in charge. Let’s not even focus on Obama, who may or may not have a special fondness for Islam. This is not about Obama, it’s about the entire West, except for a few brave souls who don’t mind being called bigots.

Who don’t mind being called bigots is actually the key. Islam, after all, is a religion, and has been for over a thousand years. You can call it a weird religion, a violent religion, an intolerant religion, not a “true” religion (whatever that means), but it certainly has claimed to be one quite successfully for all that time. Unlike the other Abrahamic religions which preceded it, and which have a text (the so-called Old Testament) that contains some violence and misogyny, Islam is steeped in both—positively marinated in them—and those Muslims who don’t espouse such things are not in the overwhelming majority. Maher describes the situation quite well, but our presidents—Democrat or Republican—can’t seem to bring themselves to concur.

Another reason they don’t is that the West still needs, or feels it needs, certain Islamic nations as both geopolitical allies and oil suppliers, and Europe is in a worse boat regarding the latter than we are. Still another reason is the potential for internal dissension and even violence from and towards the Muslims who live in the West and are very vocal.

But if we can’t even describe what’s happening, how can we fight it?

The wheels of Benghazi justice…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are still grinding.

Slowly. Very slowly. And Sharyl Attkisson, who’s been dogged in pursuit from the start, is still on the case:

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.

He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline””he says scapegoated””then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks…

…When he arrived, Maxwell says he observed boxes and stacks of documents. He says a State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though the office director technically worked for him, Maxwell says he wasn’t consulted about her weekend assignment.

“She told me, ”˜Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light,’” says Maxwell. He says “seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then-Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisers.

“I asked her, ”˜But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ”˜Ray, those are our orders.’ ”

They used to say “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.” In this case I’d say both crime and coverup are pretty reprehensible. And yet so far they’ve only gotten traction with the right. Will that ever change? I hope so, but I have strong doubts, and it’s for a strange reason: too many other dreadful things have happened at the hands of this administration for people to focus on any one thing. And that’s by design.

The other reason isn’t so strange. It’s that the MSM is still doing its level best to participate in the coverup, because this outrage was committed by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton rather than Republicans. Ask Sharyl Attkisson; she knows all about it:

On March 10, 2014, Attkisson resigned from CBS News, reportedly due to frustration over what she perceived to be the network’s liberal bias and lack of dedication to investigative reporting, as well as issues she had with the network’s corporate partners. She is working on a book tentatively called Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington regarding the difficulties of reporting critically about the administration.

Attkisson’s book is due for release on November 4, and the title appears to have been changed to the longer Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.

Strangely enough, that publication date is Election Day, 2014. I wonder who’s plan that was? Seems to me it would have been better to bring it out prior to that.

What’s the point of being thin?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you were to see me, you wouldn’t think “fat person.” But you wouldn’t think “thin person” either. You might think “there goes a woman who looks pretty good for her age”—if you knew my age, that is. But you wouldn’t think “there goes a woman who was once a very serious ballet dancer” (oh, maybe you would if you spied the legs, but we all know the legs are the last to go).

But I’m also a person who is always trying to lose fifteen or so pounds, and failing no matter what I do. And no, please don’t tell me about Taubes or Atkins; I’ve written several times before about how those things don’t work for me. In my dancing days I was very thin, probably close to forty pounds thinner than now, which made me fairly emaciated. But that’s what dancers need to be. And even though I was young, it wasn’t my natural state to be thin, and so I accomplished this feat only by dint of constant daily starvation, eating between 900 and 1000 calories every day although I was extremely active. This went on for years, and when I finally gave up my professional dance aspirations I gave up the daily and seemingly-unending starvation as well.

But enough about me. For the moment.

This PJ article on body fat and age is one of the best I’ve ever read. It puts the quest for that magical fifteen-pound loss in perspective:

Visible abdominal muscles are fashionable in Western society these days, but in some cultures visible abs mean poverty and privation, which is never fashionable anywhere among those who must endure it. Strength and health are not dependent on low bodyfat levels, which occur as a genetic predisposition among some people. Varying levels of bodyfat distribution are largely determined by both genetics and environment. Some people are fatter than other people, some people get fat easier than other people, and some people lose fat easier than other people. Losing fat that has been there a while requires that things be done differently, and just exactly how differently things must be done varies with the individual too. For people who naturally carry higher levels of bodyfat, attempts at radical bodyfat reduction can be expensive in terms of the psychological and physiological costs necessary for dropping below what for them would be normal healthy levels.

Let me just add that visible abdominal muscles are an even more elusive goal for woman in general than for men, and for older women they are rare indeed. Nature wants that layer of fat to cover them up, and gravity makes sure of the rest.

The mortality line is a not a hockey stick, folks. It is a “U,” slightly shifted towards the right…In fact, people of normal BMI have the same mortality rate as “moderately obese” people. According to the studies of all-cause mortality, mild obesity is protective, and both severely underweight and morbid obesity are, uh, not protective…

As we age and changes take place in our hormonal milieu, the physiological environment necessary for the growth of muscle and the loss of fat erodes. When you were young, you swam with the current; when you were fully mature, you swam in the lake; now that you’re older, you’re swimming upstream. I’m as sorry about that as anybody, but getting older simply makes staying skinny and muscular harder to do. It certainly doesn’t make it impossible…

For women, whose muscle mass and proclivity to create muscle mass is less than men to begin with, it’s even more difficult.

The answer for both sexes is strength training. For me (okay, so we’re back to me) I’ve unfortunately not been able to successfully add strength training to my aerobic regimen despite many attempts, because my chronic injuries have meant that every single effort so far at weight training (and that includes weights, bands, and/or machines, both with and without coaches) has ended in a significant increase in daily pain. But I advocate the practice in principle, and I keep trying to find a way.

ISIS beheads British aid worker

The New Neo Posted on by

David Haines, 44, father of two and aid worker captured in Syria, was beheaded by ISIS, as shown in a video released by the group. He had previously worked for aid groups in Libya and South Sudan.

Haines’ killing was no surprise, because he had been threatened by ISIS at the end of the Steven Sotloff video. At the end of the Haines video, another (as yet unidentified?) hostage was shown and threatened.

This will continue. It’s clear that ISIS is determined to offend and outrage the west to the maximum. This time they chose a humanitarian worker who could not possibly be argued to have a single thing to do with any violence. It doesn’t matter; the more offensive and evil and unmotivated their actions are the better, as far as ISIS is concerned.

I have previously written about the terrorists’ motivations for their behavior, here. I will just quote myself, because it still applies:

The audience ISIS hopes to reach is multifaceted. One segment of that desired audience is the people in the community where the perpetrators currently reside. For the ISIS terrorists, knowing that they engender fear is its own reward, but it also has the more practical goal of attempting to gain the locals’ cooperation, or at least their capitulation, through their desire to avoid a similar violent fate.

Then there’s the audience in the larger Muslim world. ISIS believes there are many potential jihadis, both local and distant, whom they hope to inspire to join up by demonstrating the intensity of their bloodthirstiness and therefore their dedication to the cause. The majority of people in the Muslim world are not going to become jihadis, of course, and many Muslims find such videos repugnant (as al Qaeda discovered some time ago). But as long as a significant number join and most of the rest are cowed, ISIS would consider the videos great successes. The Muslim world has a long history of bitter and violent disputes between factions, and ISIS’s brutality is also an effort to intimidate those it sees as its enemies within the greater Muslim world.

Last but far from least there is the entire west, both individuals and governments, those weak horses whom ISIS hopes will tremble and then appease them out of fear. Although we can probably safely say that most ISIS members have not read Yeats, the message they are delivering to the west is that they are the ones filled with passionate intensity, and the west is the one that lacks all conviction. ISIS is counting on the fact that the west is reluctant to unleash the full force of its arms against them, and that whatever retaliation it mounts will be tepid and limited and ultimately unsuccessful.

But even if the west somehow finds the will to fight back more forcibly, the jihadis are betting that, between their own dedication to their holy cause and the assistance of a deity they see as supporting them, they will prevail. It is sometimes said that terrorists such as those in ISIS are nihilists. But that definition isn’t a good fit, because ISIS members don’t believe in nothing. They profess belief in something, and that something is fundamentalist Islam and the return of the caliphate, with ISIS at the helm.

The west had better find its will, because these people can taste weakness, and they feed on it like sharks on blood.

[ADDENDUM: The next hostage to be threatened has been identified as another British aide worker, Alan Henning.]

The red delicious apple…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is considered by Sarah Yager of the Atlantic to be an abomination, bred for looks to the exclusion of the taste that gave it its name.

Well, I don’t know. Although I’ve sung my paean to the Jazz apple—expensive, hard to find, and stupendous in taste—and I think the last time I bought a Delicious apple (as opposed to a delicious apple) was a few decades ago, is the Delicious really so bad?

No. In fact, when picked off a tree (the last time I ate one), they prove quite worthy of their name.

The apple variety I dislike most are McIntosh, because they invariably tend to be mushy, whereas Delicious have at least a chance for crispness. But even the dread Macs are very good when picked in an orchard and eaten immediately. I’ve been to orchards that grow nothing but Macs and Delicious, and both types are so tasty that everyone scarfs down tons of them before they even go into the bag.

The thing those vaieties both lack is shelf life, a trait at which the Jazz shines bright. I’ve also had some good experiences with something even newer called the Envy, which is hard to find but almost invariably (I had one bad experience) tasty and crisp.

Just now, doing a little research, I discovered that the Jazz and the Envy are actually very closely related to each other (the Envy has “the same parentage as the Jazz apple, from the same producer”) although they look and taste quite different to me. Both are New Zealand-bred crosses between the Royal Gala and Braeburn varieties.

Envy tastes to me like a Delicious should taste, crisp and sweet. Look for the ones with the little flecks on the skin, the more the better. Jazz has a far more complex taste, with many overtones of sweet and tart and everything in-between to go with its intense crunch. To me, it’s the perfect apple.

You may wonder why I’m talking about red apples when my symbol is the green Granny Smith. Grannies have a lovely and unique color, and are fine for hiding half of one’s face. They’re not bad eating, either—but give me a Jazz any day.

It’s a puzzlement

The New Neo Posted on by

After all this time has passed and I’ve written all these words on the subject, the spell Obama has been able to weave still puzzles me.

I first noticed the phenomenon in early 2008, when an apolitical and very intelligent friend told me that, for the first time in her life, she was going to work for the election of a candidate. That candidate was Obama.

My friend proceeded to canvass and phone up a storm, and seemed starry-eyed—which is not her usual state, believe me. When I asked her why, what was so very wonderful about Obama, she just said that he was inspiring and intelligent and she felt he was a different sort of candidate, and she trusted him. And there wasn’t a hint in her demeanor or her words that this was mainly about his race, either, although that certainly didn’t hurt.

It was something else. Whether Obama’s gift was a form of hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, con artistry, or just plain charisma, this friend of mine would have been the last person I would have thought susceptible to it. That’s part of the mystery. And I’m afraid to ask her how she feels about him now, for fear she’ll tell me something like this:

I was talking to someone at work today, and he normally seems like a reasonable guy, ex-Navy.

And then out of nowhere he exclaims how much he hates conservatives, and that he thinks Obama’s a great human being.

I asked what brought it on, and he just said “Because Barack Obama cares about me.”

I s*** you not, that’s what he said (and keep in mind, he’s not even a minority. He’s as WASP-y as it gets).

I just shook my head and turned around, because there’s no getting through to that kind of stupid.

Let me reiterate: my friend is not stupid. I’ve known her for many decades, and she’s the opposite of stupid. To top it all off, she’s usually very perceptive about people, and neither gullible or naive. Sharp as a tack.

I have come to the conclusion, after six years of this, that I will never understand it. And don’t say the explanation is “women.” I’m a woman, for example. And I know women who are quite immune to Obama’s charm, and men who have fallen for it. Nor does it even break down on liberal/conservative lines, although of course that’s part of it (the more rational part). I know liberals who’ve always had strong reservations about Obama, and I’ve read about conservatives who at least initially were drawn to him.

No, I don’t truly and deeply understand, despite all my efforts. But I’ll keep trying. You say, why bother? I think it points to a dangerous susceptibility in human beings, one that certainly didn’t begin with Obama, but one that has wreaked havoc in the past and will again in the future. To understand it helps more people to recognize it earlier, and to recognize it earlier has the potential of offering more protection against it.

The dilemma of the government vs. the families of the kidnapped

The New Neo Posted on by

The families of James Foley and Steven Sotloff have complained about the Obama administration’s threats to prosecute them if they tried to ransom their loved ones. It is completely understandable why the families would be upset about this. How could any family not want to do anything possible to save their members from such a horrific fate? And how could any family not be horrified that their own government might try to stop or discourage them?

I don’t think there’s anyone who could fail to sympathize. But that doesn’t mean the government isn’t correct in these cases.

Therein lies a terrible ethical, emotional, and practical dilemma. By paying ransoms the behavior of the terrorists is rewarded, more kidnappings of Americans will occur, and our enemies grow richer. And there is no guarantee at all that a group such as ISIS is actually serious about such negotiations.

Every now and then the Obama administration is right, and this is one of those times. However, they were probably particularly insensitive in communicating with the families, although I’m not sure that under the circumstances there would have been any acceptable way to say “no,” or any approach short of complete cooperation that would not raise the families’ ire and frustration.

But even before the families spoke out, I wrote about this issue and came to the very reluctant conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to never pay a ransom and to strongly discourage private sources from doing so, too.

That’s heartbreaking, and it also feels wrong. But anything one can do in such a situation, short of a successful rescue operation, feels wrong. The Obama administration’s policy on this may have been coldly conveyed in too harsh a manner, but it represents the stance of previous administrations, as well. You can’t pin this one on Obama, although you can certainly criticize him, and harshly, for dragging his feet on a rescue, if that report is true.

In her interview, the mother of James Foley says something cryptic. In addition to refusing to pay a ransom or to let the family do so, she says:

We were told that our government would not exchange prisoners, would not do a military action.

Would not do a military action? I thought there was a rescue attempt that failed. I’m not sure what she’s referring to here.

I have nothing but sympathy for both families, and I want to make it clear that I don’t criticize them for this. The problem is inherent in the situation itself. The perspectives of the family and the government are going to be different, and there’s no way to change that.

[NOTE: If you go back and read my post from a few weeks ago on the subject, you’ll find a discussion of the long history of US policy on the matter.]

Demography, persecution, destiny, and Jew-hatred in the Middle East

The New Neo Posted on by

It may have come as a surprise to some people when Ted Cruz got booed when he called for solidarity with Israel when addressing a group of Christian Arabs as keynote speaker, because American Christians these days tend to be very supportive of Israel. But it probably didn’t surprise Spengler (David P. Goldman), who wrote this article back in 2009 on the situation of Christians in the Middle East vis a vis the Muslim majority and the Jewish minority:

Christianity in the Levant ultimately failed for the same reason that it failed in Europe: populations that are nominally Christian did not trouble to reproduce…

…Their elite misplayed its hand seeking influence through Arab nationalism, and now stands to lose everything to political Islam. As a culture, the Arabs are in profound crisis ”“ their most celebrated poet, the Syrian “Adonis”, calls them “extinct” ”“ and their decline weighs doubly upon the dwindling Christina minority.

And when in decline, blame the Jews, which many of the Arab Christians seem to do. But despite the persecution of Arab Christians by Arab Muslims that has only escalated since the article was written, there is a safe haven for Arab Christians today. You guessed it:

There is little risk, however, that the Holy Land will end up without Christians. Although Arab Christians are indeed leaving areas controlled by Muslims, Christians are immigrating to Israel itself, where the Christian community has doubled in size in the past 15 years. Some estimates put the number of Christians in Israel at nearly 300,000, twice the official count. To Israel’s 120,000 Arab Christians and 30,000 others must be added Christian immigrants from Eastern European, as well as many Filipinos and others who came as guest workers and have settled in Israel.

I’m not sure how that would work, though, because Christians wouldn’t have the right of return to Israel.

You call this a foreign policy?

The New Neo Posted on by

Foreign Policy eviscerates Obama’s (foreign policy, that is).

Excerpt:

…[U]nlike Bush, whose flaw-riddled first-term foreign policy was followed by important and not fully appreciated second-term course corrections, Obama seems steadfast in his resistance both to learning from his past errors and to managing his team so that future errors are prevented. It is hard to think of a recent president who has grown so little in office. …

The hope was that, in his second term, the president might address some of these issues. But by all reports, the situation has gotten worse. On the foreign policy side, this has meant that “the true believers” — as one first-termer called McDonough, Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, among others — have moved up and gained power, periodically being supported by Obama’s closest political advisors. Many of the people who often offset their views — such as Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates — have moved on…

As Obama’s bubble has gotten smaller, the president has reportedly become frustrated with criticism too, compounding his famous aloofness with a more defensive attitude…

The whole thing is worth reading, although I think it gives Obama way too much credit. But the author, David Rothkopf, editor and CEO of the magazine, appears to be a Democrat and former member of the Clinton administration with impeccable liberal credentials. Considering that, the depth of his criticism is telling.

And as low as my previous opinion of Susan Rice (and Obama’s foreign policy aides in general) has been, the following excerpt (if true) still has the capacity to shock me. How low can you go?:

In one meeting, Rice pressed the German delegation relentlessly for leadership within the European Union. The Germans sought more time and consultation with other EU member states, frustrating Rice to the point that she lost her cool and reportedly launched into a profanity-filled lecture that featured a rare diplomatic appearance of the word “motherfucker.” Germany’s national security advisor, Christoph Heusgen, was so angered that he told an American confidante it was the worst meeting of his professional life.

(Rice’s bluntness and hot temper have undercut her effectiveness throughout her career. In July 2014, the New Republic reported that she once confronted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas outside the Oval Office, saying, “You Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture.” A U.N. ambassador of one of the world’s major powers told me that he didn’t “understand what she thinks she is achieving by talking to us like a longshoreman.” The brusqueness hasn’t helped with her interpersonal relationships within the administration or with her staff, either. It is a particularly frustrating Achilles’ heel for someone who is well known among her friends as having the capacity to be very warm, humorous, and engaging.)

[Hat tip: Ace.]

Breakfast? Fahgetaboutit

The New Neo Posted on by

For those of you who aren’t keen on breakfast: no need to eat it.

I’ve never been much of a breakfast eater, even as a child. In my case it goes with not being a morning person. Over the years I’ve forced myself to eat it because it’s supposed to be A Good Thing. I would dispense with it at this point, but now I have to eat it for another reason: if I don’t, I get migraines.

Migraines are a funny thing, and not funny ha-ha. Everybody who suffers from them has his/her own basic pattern, but that pattern can change, and then change back again. Mine usually involve auras, most often of the typical visual type.

If you don’t know how that works, take a look. This isn’t exactly and precisely correct, and the aura usually takes about 25 minutes to go through its visual dance, but it’ll give you a rough idea:

Abortion: easy peasy

The New Neo Posted on by

The author of this WaPo piece, Janet Harris, says that for most women the decision to have an abortion is not a difficult one:

Getting an abortion is expensive ”” not as costly as carrying a baby to term or raising a child, but expensive enough that half of all patients need help paying for it. And in many places, getting a safe and legal abortion can be more difficult because of parental-consent laws, distance to an abortion provider or a gantlet of hostile protesters outside the clinic doors.

Of all these difficulties, deciding whether to get an abortion is often the least of them. The situation may be difficult, but the decision is usually straightforward.

No doubts or questions? No pangs of conscience, even if the woman thinks she ultimately made the right choice? No remorseful aftermath for some? Not even any acknowledgement of the existence of a moral dilemma? Only practical considerations matter for Harris; her article is basically an amoral one.

Harris doesn’t even want abortion to be called “difficult” by others. Her reasons are strategic:

…[W]hen the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.

Musn’t do that.

I hope we haven’t “advanced” to the point of considering abortion an easy decision with no ethical dimensions. Harris offers no evidence of what she asserts other than her own personal experience. She extrapolates her own amorality to women in general. She states as fact what she wishes were true. But we should all be relieved that it’s most likely not. If Harris ever got her wish, it would mean that the amorality of our society has advanced to a very chilling and dangerous point. It’s already pretty close, as articles such as Harris’s (and this one) demonstrate.

You may wonder why I use the word “amoral” rather than “immoral.” The thrust of these women’s articles is that abortion is a morally neutral activity, and they don’t even want the language of morality used regarding it. They believe we should have no right/wrong judgments whatsoever in regard to abortion.

It’s another example of the escalation that is part of the leftist activist agenda. At first, it is claimed to be enough that something become legal. Next, it is demanded that it never be met with disapproval or criticism. The next step is the requirement that everyone celebrate it.