The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

Victor Davis Hanson, Real Clear Politics

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness.

Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word "terrorism," was airbrushed from the new administration's vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like "overseas contingency operations," "man-caused disaster" and "workplace violence."

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism."

Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.

The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.

Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger -- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.

There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.

Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.

In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.

More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.

In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.

(C) 2016 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Erdogan’s Turkey

Erdogan’s Turkey

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Erdogan is NOT the head of a democracy. He is a de facto dictator for life. Here is why:

He destroyed the free press.

He ended free speech.

He went far in destroying an independent judiciary.

He hopelessly corrupted Turkey’s democracy when his ruling party lost the national election and he flouted the constitution by allowing them to form a new government.

Afterwards, to keep power he destroyed opposition parties and imprisoned their leaders.

He ended the peace process that had made great strides with the Kurdish minority.

Erdogan was never a friend of the United States. 

Beginning in 2003, he secretly supported the creation of the jihadist pipeline into Syria that then went into Iraq to kill Americans.

Ironically, the same pipeline was used to feed the Islamic State until Erdogan finally closed it down when they turned on him. What a jerk.

That helps to explain the troubles in Turkey today.

Enemies See America As Vulnerable Prey

Sitting duck...

Enemies See America As Vulnerable Prey

by Victor Davis Hanson

Our domestic tensions embolden our enemies.

Here is a sampling of some recent news abroad:

A Russian guard attacked a U.S. diplomatic official at the door to the American Embassy in Moscow, even as NATO leaders met to galvanize against the next act of Russian aggression.

The Islamic State continued its global terrorist rampage with horrific attacks in Baghdad and Istanbul.

Iran rebuffed United Nations warnings and defiantly boasted that it will continue testing ballistic missiles. German intelligence believes that Iran, empowered by the release of $100 billion in impounded cash, is violating its recent American-led nonproliferation deal in an effort to import nuclear bomb-making technology.

North Korea conducted a test (unsuccessful, apparently) of a submarine-based guided missile.

There are various ways of interpreting these ominous events.

They could represent just more empty chest-thumping by our enemies.

Or, because this is an election year in the U.S., enemies are posturing in order to advance their agendas, as they often do in times of uncertainty about who will be the next president.

Or, Obama is perceived as an exceptionally lame lame-duck president who is hoping to wind down his tenure in passivity, without a major incident abroad that might imperil his presidential legacy.

Or, after the explosive rise of ISIS, the disaster in Benghazi, the failed reset with Russia, the unchecked Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the concessions in the Iran deal, the veritable implosion of the Middle East, and the president’s counterproductive sermonizing about Brexit, enemies sense that the U.S. is directionless. These enemies may be unsure whether America still wishes to — or even can — exercise its traditional leadership of the free world and remain the custodian of the post-war international order.

But perhaps there is yet another catalyst prompting such events.

The United States appears to be entering another era of dangerous internal instability similar to the one it endured in the 1960s-1970s.

After the attacks by radical Islamists in San Bernardino and Orlando, Americans did not rally together as they had after 9/11. Instead, almost immediately, the country was torn further apart. About half the nation saw the terrorist killings as a reason for stricter gun control rather than a reason to fear the continuing spread of radical Islamic terrorism. The other half worried that political correctness and the president’s refusal to even mention radical Islamic terrorism are eroding the ability to deter it.

America’s enemies draw their own conclusions.

After the Orlando attack, al-Qaeda urged lone-wolf terrorists in the U.S. to focus exclusively on white targets. The organization’s leaders apparently worry that if terrorists again hit minority communities, it will prompt a bickering America to blame itself rather than give full credit to the attackers.

After the recent deaths of two black men in confrontations with police (in Minnesota and Louisiana), followed by national Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of five law-enforcement officers in Dallas, it might appear to our enemies abroad that the American superpower is internally unwinding into tribalism in the fashion of the Balkans, Iraq, or Lebanon. 

As in the case of Islamic terrorism, America seems to have no answers to racial tensions. Half the country believes African Americans are inordinately targeted by police and that inner-city violence can be attributed to a long history of racism, national neglect, and economic stagnation. The other half blame disastrous social-welfare and big-government policies for creating dangerous dependencies and a dearth of jobs in America’s inner cities, as well as a popular culture that glorifies rather than discourages the excesses of many young black males.

One America believes that the Obama administration genuinely tried, but so far has failed, to resolve the tensions between inner-city residents and police. The other America thinks Obama sought to leverage those tensions for political reasons.

Either way, most of America privately thinks that Islamic terrorist acts and racial tensions are going to get far worse — a perception that is probably shared overseas as well.

Our enemies increasingly may gamble that provocations won’t elicit a U.S. reaction. Or that even if America did respond, the resulting domestic divisions and turmoil would diminish the effectiveness of the response.

Add to the equation record debt and vast cuts in the defense budget, and our enemies may conclude that we are Rome of AD 500, Britain of the late 1940s, or Russia of the 1980s.

To be blunt, America’s vulnerable post-war global order may already seem to those abroad to be bloated carrion ready to be picked apart by opportunistic vultures.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Obama's Biggest Failure

Obama's Biggest Failure

The president has substantially set back race relations in the United States

Steven Malanga, City Journal

When the country elected Barack Obama president in 2008, those of us who disagreed with many of his policy ideas were nonetheless consoled by the fact that his victory illustrated that America had moved well beyond institutional racism. Certainly the fact that Obama had succeeded in both a hard-fought Democratic primary and a general election meant that the country was ready to move past the intense focus on race in our national politics. Boy, were we wrong! Rather than seeing his own victory as a significant advance in American social life, Obama and those he appointed to his administration vigorously put forward the idea that America remains a deeply racist country, and they have redefined racism in the broadest terms possible. It’s not a coincidence, then, that more than seven years into the administration of the nation’s first black president, Americans are more deeply divided on race then they have been in decades. Their own president has fostered the divide.

Several Obama administration initiatives have distorted the national conversation on race. In 2010, for instance, the administration’s education and justice departments launched investigations against school districts around the country for disciplining black students more often, proportionately, than students of other races. A Department of Education study observed that black students were three and a half times more likely to be disciplined. The study alleged that, “everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity.” In making its charges, the department ignored compelling data showing that black students were more likely to misbehave in and around school—including crime statistics revealing that blacks were 25 times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested at schools for serious offenses like battery.

Similarly, the administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, through a policy known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, now is essentially charging wealthier suburban communities like those in Westchester County, New York, with housing discrimination if their populations are not diverse enough for the administration’s taste. Under the new rules, the federal government no longer must prove that these communities are actively engaging in racial discrimination in order to compel them to cast aside local zoning rules and build housing that would attract low-income residents. The mere fact that a town’s population is not diverse suffices for the Obama administration to demand that the community make efforts to transform itself. “HUD’s power grab is based on the mistaken belief that zoning and discrimination are the same,” Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino wrote in 2013. What’s particularly ironic about this implication of racism in Westchester’s case is that the county voted by nearly a two-to-one margin for Obama in 2012.

The president himself has sadly made significant contributions to the notion that America remains deeply racist with his consistent attacks on the police, even in cases where officers’ actions against black perpetrators have subsequently been demonstrated to have been justified. “Too many young men of color,” the president said in November of 2014, “feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness. We know that, statistically, in everything from enforcing drug policy to applying the death penalty to pulling people over, there are significant racial disparities.” Later, he added that, “Communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. . . . These are real issues.” But the president has launched the charges while ignoring significant facts. As Heather Mac Donald has observed, more than 6,000 blacks die of homicides yearly, the overwhelming majority of which are committed by other blacks in minority neighborhoods. The police are more likely to patrol these neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is. And as the Dallas killings sadly illustrate, cops are far more likely to die at the hands of black perpetrators than black men are to be killed by cops. About 40 percent of all cop killings, in fact, are committed by black males. Data also reveal no significant racial component to police shootings. Black officers are far more likely to fire their guns at black citizens than are white officers.

The Obama administration’s tendency to see discrimination in so many crevices and corners of American life has created a new standard for what constitutes racism, as demonstrated by Minnesota governor Mark Dayton’s remarks in the wake of the tragic shooting of a black man, Philando Castile, by police in suburban Minneapolis last week. Implying that race played a role in the killing of Castile, who was legally licensed to carry a firearm, Dayton said that he doubted the shooting would have occurred if Castile had been white. But while the horrific video, taken by Castile’s girlfriend in the immediate aftermath of his shooting, shows that the officer was highly agitated, and the woman claims that the cop overreacted in firing on Castile, there is nothing in the video that is overly racist, and there is no reason to conclude that the outcome would have been different if Castile had been of another race. In America today, however, when a black man is killed by an officer of another color, that fact alone is prima facie evidence for some people that the killing was racially motivated.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against the president and his administration is that in the last four years alone, the percentage of Americans who believe racism is on the rise has nearly doubled. That sharp increase has come even amid little evidence that verified incidents of racism are on the rise. Indeed, efforts by the media to document a significant increase in police shootings of minorities have yielded little. New York City data, for instance, show that the number of times that police discharge their weapons every year has been declining for decades. And a close analysis of a Washington Post database on current shootings by police across America, which describes them in detail, reveals that many were justified.

It’s difficult now to ignore the role that President Obama has played in our growing racial divisions. Elected on themes of hope and renewal, his very ascendancy a powerful statement about the country’s racial journey, he chose to use the White House as a vehicle to introduce a new era of racial grievance into our national discourse. Unfortunately, he succeeded in this effort—and failed America.

Cotton Hits Clinton

Cotton Hits Clinton
John Hinderaker, Powerline

Tom Cotton is rapidly earning a reputation as the hardest-hitting spokesman for the conservative cause. Earlier today he spoke at the Western Conservative Summit. Breitbart has a report on his speech:

The Arkansas senator…told activists Saturday at the Western Conservative Summit that Hillary Clinton’s reckless and criminal behavior disqualifies her to become America’s commander-in-chief.

He also delivered that message forcefully at this year’s Lincoln-Reagan dinner in Minnesota.

A combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Sen. Thomas Cotton (R.-Ark.) said he was glad [to] make it on time for his speech after a series of travel delays.

“We were on the tarmac, I thought Bill Clinton might be boarding my plane to talk to me,” said the former Army Airborne Ranger officer.

Heh.

Clinton’s decision to conduct all her official business on her own private email account on her own private server and the way she has handled official and media inquires about it was just teaser of how her administration will approach transparency and national security, Cotton said.

That’s true. Barack Obama has run the least transparent administration in modern history, but the paranoid Mrs. Clinton would undoubtedly be more secretive still.

The FBI still does not have 30,000 emails the expected Democratic nominee for president claimed to have deleted. 

“It has gotten so bad, the FBI is on the verge of asking Vladimir Putin for his copies of Hillary’s emails,” Cotton said.

Ouch again. Humor is a powerful weapon.

In addition to the criminal nature of the former first lady’s scheme, he said, conducting official and classified business on an unsecured server exposed American national security to our enemies. 

Americans should not be surprised that the former secretary of state would put America at risk, he said. Working with President Barack Obama, Clinton oversaw a foreign policy that treated allies as troublemakers and our enemies as victims with legitimate complaints about the United States. Chief among the enemies is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Obama-Clinton empowered by lifting sanctions, thawing frozen assets, and ignoring Iran’s support of violent terrorism.

Some have speculated that Tom Cotton is on Donald Trump’s list of potential vice-presidential candidates. I have no idea whether that is true, nor do I know whether Cotton would accept the post if it were offered. (I believe he has downplayed that speculation.) But I do know that we need someone on the ticket who will hit Hillary hard and effectively, with the sort of credibility and stature that Tom’s history and abilities bring.