Unforeseen Contingencies

Yemen is in chaos.  Civil war and an Al Qaeda insurgency, a coup by the Shiite Houthis, and now bombings of two Shiite mosques that murdered at least 46 people.  So what is on the mind of Yemen Observer op-ed writer Hasna’ Abdulmaji? Follow your passion!  "To be of service to others, we must give life to our positive inclinations. And the only way to obtain true life is to get back in touch with our innermost self and take risks that resonate with that part of us. When we are not true to ourselves, and when we are far removed from our inner self then most likely we are not growing."

What???!!! Yemen is coming apart with religious and political violence, and the most important thing this op-ed writer can think of is to tell readers to "get in touch with their innermost selves?"  Does this make any sense at all?

Well, yes.  Frankly, I'm not sure there's any more important or appropriate message in the midst of such a mess.  After all, how do you remain sane in the midst of the collapse of your society? If you are not true to something, if you aren't singlemindedly dedicated to some set of principles, you'll have no chance of retaining your equanimity.  You'll be confused and lost and helpless, and others will be in charge of you and your soul.  You'll be swept away by events around you.  Sure, you might be swept away anyway, but at least it will be as someone in control of himself or herself.

The only people who are rock solid are those grounded in principles,  But too often, the set of principles chosen is dedication to one theology or other, something supposedly greater than one's self.  Yeah, great, that's what's getting us things like churches and mosques bombed, women burned to death for offenses against "holy" books, and similar insanity.  Far better to be true to ourselves.  This will be increasingly important; one can slide along just following the current in normal times and do OK.  But the world is going to become much more tumultuous before it gets better.  If you hope to keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs, remember that this is the only way to do it.  Be true to the best within yourself.  And to do that, you'd better learn what that best self is.

A few more excerpts from Abdulmaji:

"In stagnation, we can hardly be of benefit to ourselves, never mind others besides. True growth is not merely learning by taking in knowledge, reading what experts have said, understanding the ways of great men. This is helpful only if it then directs us to ponder over our own experiences, to enhance what needs to be enhanced and to make changes so that we can be express our true self. Too often it is we who stand in the way of reaching our maximum potential. We cannot allow others to influence our perspective and to stand in our way either physically or with limiting ideas."

I agree.  I wish I'd said this.  Well, I'm saying it now!

I suppose Abdulmaji could have laid out a brilliantly crafted solution to Yemen's crisis.  None of the warring parties would have paid any attention and nothing would come of it.  Instead he (she?) wrote something that will really have the effect of making the world better.  Abdulmaji only has to remind one person of these truths to have been successful.  If you are reading this, and act on it, Abdulmaji has been successful at least twice.

Despite sending Democrat campaign operatives, Democrat funders, and State Department funds provided by American taxpayers, Obama lost.  Despite Obama's sabotaging of Netanyahu's speech to the U.S. Congress with the lie that the administration had not been informed, Obama lost.  Despite having Joe Biden and John Kerry meet with Isaac Herzog, Benyamin Netanyahu's main opponent, while insisting on a complete administration boycott of Netanyahu, Obama lost.  Good.  A Likud victory is a victory for free markets (it's largely been missed in the U.S. that a major issue in the Israeli election was over whether or not to expand the welfare state and increase state control of the economy) and for a non-appeasement foreign policy.  Thank heavens Likud seems to have come out on top, and Netanyahu will have a chance to form a government.

It's very telling that so much of the media narrative, in both the United States and Israel, has been that returning Netanyahu to the post of Prime Minister "damages relations between the United States and Israel."  Telling, in that it exposes the bias in the media in both countries.  In fact, Netanyahu is quite popular in the United States, among Republicans, for one, and even more among conservatives and sane libertarians (such as yours truly).  The bad relations are between Bibi and Barack Hussein, his administration, and that part of the foreign policy establishment that sides with him.  They certainly are not the totality of "the United States," and once Obama is gone from office it's hard to see why the alleged bad relations between the two countries would persist.  The media definition of  "United States" counts the majority party in Congress and a substantial share of the American electorate as "not part of the United States."  That's par for the course, since we live in a world where the Obama and co. say there's no such thing as Islamic extremism, and but regularly declare his political opponents "extremists" and sets the IRS and DHS after them.

One of the things I most appreciated about Netanyahu's campaign is that, at the end, he declared that if he returned as P.M., he would block the establishment of a Palestinian state.  I appreciated this for two reasons.  First, a Palestinian state under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas is unacceptable, since Abbas declares his goal of eliminating Israel.  (So much for a two state solution.)  The more likely scenario, a Palestinian state under the murderous Hamas, would be even worse.  Second, how refreshing to hear a politician take a firm stance on a controversial position.  One can imagine a Jeb Bush, a Chris Christie, a Hillary Clinton, or a Barack Obama, trying to frame a position that appeals to a wide swath of voters, by basically speaking mush.  It's good to hear a politician take a strong position, and actually think that he means it.  These days, that kind of moral certainty too often comes from the likes of ISIS or a Putin.  It's great that one of the good guys publicly takes such a stance... and then wins.

Quite a number of people -- mostly critics -- have noted Barack Obama's steadfast and explicit refusal to recognize such a thing as "Islamic terrorism," and his insistence that extremists are not really Islamic, but follow a false, perverted ideology that is not Islamic. This argument has become standard for White House and State Department spokesmen who have followed suit, often to the point of absurdity as they trip over themselves trying to explain why ISIS, say, isn't Islamic.  Anyone who follows Unforeseen Contingencies knows that "we" think it glaringly obvious that there's such a thing as extremist Islam and that it's incompatible with civilization.  So how to account for Obama's strange position?

One argument, usually from supporters, is that this is actually well-considered strategic policy.  This account on the Beirut to Beltway blog is the most reasonable defense of this I've seen.  But I don't buy it.  If that's it, there are plenty of other things often labeled "Islamic" that he seems quite comfortable with, e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood.  For another, it requires us to impose an interpretation on his words.  But, as I'll argue, it makes more sense to simply take them at face value and assume he means what he says.  He's consistent, after all.

So consider the critics.  Some critics -- Sean Hannity, for example -- argue that Obama is incredibly naive.  That's hard to believe.  It's not as though the rest of us have access to better information than the president does, and even a superficial glance shows that Boko Haram, Al Shabab, ISIS, and the many incarnations of Al Qaeda all claim Islam as their inspiration and Sharia as their goal.  Naivete seems a weak explanation at best -- it really seems to be "steadfast refusal" rather than confusion.

Another explanation is political correctness.  Blogger "Lorenzo from Oz" has a particularly insightful analysis of this phenomenon.  I think this goes a long way to explaining why leftist academics sympathize with Islamism, and probably explains a good part of the machinations of the Obama administration and foreign policy establishment.  (That, plus "following orders" is darn near a complete explanation.)  But "political correctness" and the philosophy behind it is another argument that ultimately amounts to a failure on the part of those who insist that Islam is blameless to really understand the nature of Islamism.

I don't think these explanations explain Barack Obama's position, and I'd like to offer a different one -- one that is based entirely on taking his own words at face value.  Barack Obama has repeatedly called violent extremism and terrorism done in the name of Islam to be a perversion of Islam.  In doing so, he is taking a theological position, and it is one that has been made by a number of people and groups that are Islamist -- that is, who believe political systems should be Islamized, made into compliance with the Koran and Sharia, but that terrorism is the wrong -- and even immoral -- route to this.  I first encountered this position in 1989, in the discussion with my Pakistani friend I've occasionally mentioned.  He made the point to me not that the ultimate goals of jihadi terrorists were wrong (the spread of Islam, including Sharia, throughout the world), but that their methods  -- terror and violence -- were wrong.  As I understand it, many others, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, make the same argument: terrorism is unIslamic.  But political Islam and the imposition of Sharia is Islamic.  This is a theological position, based on particular interpretations of of the Koran and Hadith.  When Barack Obama argues that violent extremism is unIslamic, he makes exactly this point.  I have never heard him suggest that Islamism is in any way a perversion of the Koran, nor, for that matter, in any way objectionable.  To the contrary, his statements suggest he is supportive of Islamism, at least mildly.

Given all that we've seen in his presidency, his speech in Cairo in 2009 seems much less bizarre.  Whether he's secretly a Muslim or not I neither know nor care (I suspect he has no serious religious beliefs at all and is a de facto atheist), but he knows Islam, I think well, from "three continents," and think of it with a great deal of sympathy and respect -- hence his references to the "holy Koran," "the prophet Mohammed," and "the revelation of Islam."  Given his background, he surely must understand Islam better than most Americans (I cannot fathom how he could be naive on Islam) and his pointed refusal to say anything at all against political Islam is telling.  I think he is sympathetic to Islamism.  Hence:

• His refusal to speak in favor of the liberals who opposed the mullahs during Iran's failed "Green Revolution"
• His support for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's "Arab Spring"
• His immediate condemnation of the removal of Morsi and crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood by General al Sisi
• His otherwise incomprehensible lament that the First Amendment "tied his hands' so that he couldn't go after the maker of the film on Mohammed that allegedly stirred up the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi (an allegation that turns out to have been a lie concocted by Obama and his administration) 
• His appointment of Harvard Law Dean Harold Koh as legal advisor to the State Department (Koh has written on how the First Amendment could be circumvented so that the government could prohibit things like blasphemy and bring America more in line with international "standards.")
• His apparent willingness to get any kind of nuclear deal with Iran, even a temporary one that leaves all of Iran's nuclear infrastructure intact (more on this shortly)
• His remarkable hostility to Benyamin Netanyahu, and to Israel in general
• His repeated negative and even hostile references to Christianity, from denigrating its "bitter clingers" to condemning it for slavery (as if slavery is unIslamic!) or the Crusades
• All sorts of other strange things start to make some sense if one supposes Obama is taking a theological position as to what is and is not Islamic, e.g. Obama's insistence that the murders of Jews in a Paris market were "random" or that the Fort Hood shootings were "workplace violence" 

So what to make of all this?  Based simply on his own words and action, Barack Obama is sympathetic to authoritarian -- totalitarian -- political Islam. He's also hostile to the American founders' principles of strictly limited government.  Rudy Giuliani recently said Barack Obama does not love America and was widely criticized.  But Giuliani is right.  What America is, fundamentally, is a set of ideas -- individual rights as the fundamental political value, government that exists and governs only with the consent of the citizens, and strict constraints on the powers of government.  These are completely incompatible with his progressivism and his leftism, as well as with Sharia and Islamism.  This is an extremely dangerous thing.  We should regard Obama the same way a president would have been viewed during the Cold War had one publicly defended Marxism-Leninism, criticized America's Constitutional system, and acted as a fellow-traveller.  He'd have been considered an enemy infiltrator, even if he had not been recruited by the KGB.  So too Barack Obama.  Again, I think he's not a Muslim, but his words and actions are more sympathetic to Islamism than to American political values.  He ought to be regarded as infiltrator.  His own words suggest this interpretation.

Daesh, the derogatory name used in the Arab world for ISIS, needs women's lingerie, now!  Delivered, preferably, by underage teen girls.  Al Bawaba has the story.

What kind of religion is it that openly and explicitly combines the most draconian puritanical intolerance with the sexual restraint of a XXX movie character?  What kind of religion promises its martyrs 72 perpetual virgins, or houris -- "perfect" women (i.e. big breasts, never menstruate, can't get pregnant) ... and "fresh boys," to boot?  It's the religion of peace, of course.

A woman is taken to a secluded place against her will and gang raped by seven men.  They are caught and convicted, each given five years in prison.  She is also arrested, charged with having been in public unaccompanied by a male relative, convicted and receives a sentence of 90 lashes.  She appeals her conviction, and she and her attorney also complain publicly about her sentence -- which on appeal is raised to 200 lashes and six months in prison, and her attorney banned from further representing her and threatened with disbarment.

No terrorist groups were involved in this, and it's hard to argue that this is Islam being hijacked by unIslamic extremists -- unless one argues that the entire Saudi system is a hijacking of Islam, which I gather is what Iran's Press TV argues.  This case is actually from 2007, but the Press TV article is dated today (March 7 2015).  Iran and Saudi Arabia are at war by proxy in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, so I gather this case is being dredged up by Iran as a part of their effort.  Jerusalem Post then picked it up and re-reported it, where I first noticed it.  As it turns out, King Abdullah eventually commuted the woman's sentence, apparently because of pressure from the non-Muslim West, and the disbarment of the attorney was cancelled.

I know that Iran's Shiites believe that Saudi Wahhabism is not really Islam.  But it's not the mainstream Saudis that Barack Obama is thinking of when he says extremists are not Muslims.  And  the practitioners of political correctness insist that "Islam is a religion of peace" and anyone who disagrees is to be condemned as "Islamophobic" aren't condemning mainstream Saudi Islam as "unIslamic."  Wahhabi Islam is arguably the purest Islam.  Saudi Arabia's "constitution" is the Koran and the Sunnah, and its law is Sharia.  Trying this woman for any crime at all was an act of uncivilized savages, and the crazy ideas that drove them are similarly uncivilized.

I know very well that there are Muslims who would agree with my last sentence, and whose version of Islam is quite different and really is peaceful.  But this Saudi version is also Islam, it appears to be spreading (after all, the Saudis have spent over 100 billion of USD promoting it abroad), and it is indeed a religion of violence and destruction.  Never mind terrorism.  The mainstream version, as practiced by the Saudis themselves, is nasty and violent.

In the runup to Spring Break things have become rather hectic, hence I've been a bit lax in getting posts up.  This is a bit unfortunate, as there's plenty going on I'd love to be talking about, and I have some interesting things to say (at least I think they're interesting, and that's what counts!) about Greece and the euro, Obama and Islam, Netanyahu's trip to Congress, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov (yes, Putin did it), Russia's continuing war on Ukraine, the Republican Congress and DHS, and a few other things.

These will have to wait until either the stack of exams sitting beside me corrects itself, or I do.  If the former happens, expect a full report.  Otherwise the next posts will be on some of the above subjects.  It'll be soon, I promise.