Moral Paralysis of the West

Thomas Sowell describes exactly why I think the West is in serious trouble in confronting evil. Pebble to JWR.

"Moral paralysis" is a term that has been used to describe the inaction of France, England and other European democracies in the 1930s, as they watched Hitler build up the military forces that he later used to attack them.

It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times.

Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing — and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him.

Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today — "negotiations."

No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own — when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938, waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time."

We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia.

Looking back after that war, Winston Churchill said, "There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action." The earlier it was done, the less it would have cost.

At one point, Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks "without the firing of a single shot," Churchill said.

That point came in 1936 — three years before World War II began — when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, in violation of two international treaties.

At that point, France alone was so much more powerful than Germany that the German generals had secret orders to retreat immediately at the first sign of French intervention.

As Hitler himself confided, the Germans would have had to retreat "with our tail between our legs," because they did not yet have enough military force to put up even a token resistance.

Why did the French not act and spare themselves and the world the years of horror that Hitler's aggressions would bring? The French had the means but not the will.

"Moral paralysis" came from many things. The death of a million French soldiers in the First World War and disillusionment with the peace that followed cast a pall over a whole generation.

Pacifism became vogue among the intelligentsia and spread into educational institutions. As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core."

It was morally paralyzed.

History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: Is America today the France of yesterday?

We know that Iran is moving swiftly toward nuclear weapons while the United Nations is moving slowly — or not at all — toward doing anything to stop them.

It is a sign of our irresponsible Utopianism that anyone would even expect the UN to do anything that would make any real difference.

Not only the history of the UN, but the history of the League of Nations before it, demonstrates again and again that going to such places is a way for weak-kneed leaders of democracies to look like they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing.

The Iranian leaders are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And, like Hitler, they don't think we have the guts to stop them.

Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear — and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them.

Iranian leaders today make only the most token and transparent claims that they are building "peaceful" nuclear facilities — in one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, which has no need for nuclear power to generate electricity.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and its international terrorist allies will be a worst threat than Hitler ever was. But, before that happens, the big question is: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?

QOTD: Gates of Vienna on Islam

QOTD:Gates of Vienna on Islam:

Islam is a political ideology with the trappings of a religion, and adherents who are zealous in their practice of Islam are engaging in political activism, often of the most radical and violent form.

"Customary International Humanitarian Law" Is Neither Customary, Nor Law, Nor Humanitarian

Pebble to Daled Amos

The law is an ass

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
July 12, 2007

The term "collective punishment" conjures up images of Nazis executing entire villages in retaliation for a partisan ambush. No wonder Jews are acutely sensitive to charges of imposing collective punishment or targeting civilians.

And we hear those charges a lot: last summer in Lebanon; every time Israeli artillery hit back at the source of Kassam fire from Gaza. Were Syria to fire missiles at Israeli cities, and Israel to strike back at Syrian cities with even greater force, the international community would undoubtedly condemn Israel.

Accusations of war crimes by states attempting to defend against terrorist attacks have become a major weapon in the terrorist arsenal. In the words of Boaz Ganor of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, so-called customary international humanitarian law (CIHL) is a "force multiplier" for terrorist groups, who think nothing of putting civilians in the line of fire.

That requires some serious rethinking of the laws of war predicated on an outdated model of opposing armies facing off on an open field far removed from civilian populations. Modern warfare inevitably implicates civilian populations.
The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which protected against nuclear conflagration during the Cold War, for instance, is predicated on the threat of collective punishment on a massive scale. Few citizens of the Soviet Union would have had any input into the decision to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. But they would nevertheless have been incinerated by the American retaliation. Similarly, Israel's survival today depends on the credibility of our willingness to respond in kind to any attack on Israeli civilians by Iran or Syria.

One might distinguish Soviet citizens from residents of Gaza or southern Lebanon on the grounds that the former were part of a hierarchical governmental structure. But the distinction is far from clear. Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in southern Lebanon essentially function as autonomous governments. And they are far more representative of the populations they rule than the government of the Soviet Union ever was. Hamas was popularly elected, and Palestinian polls show widespread support for the ongoing Kassam attacks on Israel. And residents of southern Lebanon have more to say about Hizbullah rocket launchers in their backyard and weapons stored in their basements than Soviet citizens had about the actions of their regime.

IT IS TIME we recognize, to paraphrase Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire, that "customary international humanitarian law" is neither customary, nor law, nor humanitarian. It is not customary because it is not based on the actual behavior of nations past or present. When the Southern states began executing captured former slaves fighting in the Union Army, president Lincoln announced that the Union would execute captured Confederate soldiers in reprisal. The executions stopped. (In the same vein, denying Palestinians access to security prisoners held by Israel would be far more effective in securing access to our captive soldiers than beseeching the international community to intervene.)

During World War I, the Allies blockaded the Central Powers to force them into submission via starvation. And in 1943, Churchill ordered 1,000 British bombers to hammer Hamburg. (For good reason did the British omit the bombing of civilian populations from the Nuremberg indictments.) The firebombing of Dresden in the waning days of World War II killed tens of thousands of German civilians. Was that firebombing, however, self-evidently immoral if it also saved thousands of far more innocent Jews in the death camps by hastening the end of the war?

Yet if Israel engaged in any of these actions, it would be roundly condemned by the international community.

NOR IS customary international humanitarian law law in any meaningful sense. Its "rules" were not enacted by any international governmental body to which sovereign nation-states ceded the right to legislate. Nor are they even embodied in reciprocal treaty obligations entered into by sovereign states. They are nothing more than "rules" derived from declarative statements made by any and everybody - from various tinpot dictators and tyrants to Human Rights Watch - on what they think international law should be; and presto, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it is.

Nor are the "rules" humanitarian. As Ganor points out, they render civilian populations more vulnerable by creating incentives for terrorists to operate from their midst.

And notes Jeremy Rabkin, an incisive academic critic of the inanities of CIHL, the rules are designed to favor guerrilla and terrorist fighters. In particular, they sever the obligations on states trying to defend themselves against terrorism from any reciprocal obligations on the part of terrorists.

Those "rules" are the outgrowth of a Geneva Conference convened by the ICRC in 1975, at which Third World countries outnumbered Western powers. And they form a pattern with UN General Assembly resolutions of the period demanding a New World Economic Order. In effect, they have redistributed military power to terrorist groups.

In responding to claims that Israel has violated CIHL, our recourse must be to elementary logic and an examination of the actual conduct of nations. Just as the US Constitution is not a "suicide pact," neither is international law. Until human rights advocates tell us what we can do to protect our cities from missiles and our citizens from suicide bombers, CIHL has no claim on our attention.

In the meantime, let Israel begin to place the lives of its citizens first, as has every other nation in history. We have no wish to see the people of Gaza starve, but unless the Hamas government stops the Kassams, closes the tunnels bringing in lethal weapons and returns Gilad Schalit, neither does Israel have any obligation to supply food, water and electricity to a quasi-state that has declared war on its existence.

China Mine Fires Cause More Greenhouse Gases Than All US Emissions

The New York Sun has a proposal for reducing greenhouse gases. Apparently, China mine fires cause more greenhouse gases than all US emissions. And that does not even count India.

It is astounding that with all the expensive proposals to combat global warming no one is discussing reducing global carbon emissions by putting out mine fires. Although putting out fires in America would not have a significant effect, putting out fires in China and India would.

...China loses between 100 and 200 million tons of coal a year — a significant fraction of its production of 2.26 billion tons — to mine fires, according to Holland's International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation. This results in carbon dioxide emissions in a range of between 560 and 1,120 million metric tons, equaling 50% to 100% of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline.

It may well be less costly for us to put out the Chinese mine fires than to cut emissions at home.

Second to China is India, where mine fires burn between 3 and 10 million tons of coal annually, with emissions of 15 to 51 million metric tons. Emissions will only grow in the future as China and India expand production of coal to fuel their thriving economies.

We should destroy our economy with inane green laws while leftists like Gore exempt themselves with offsets and other shams? Put out the fires, first, Al.

An Indictment of the Anti-War Left

James Webb reveals a damning indictment of the anti-war left during the Vietnam War. It is same song, different verse today.

Few, if any, of the old anti-war luminaries, Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, George McGovern, Peter Arnett, 'Tom Harkin, Bill or Hillary Clinton--the list could fill the page--could find it in themselves to conjure up an apology, or admit they were wrong in judging a communist apparatus that brought Southeast Asia's strongest and most pro-Western culture [Vietnam] back into the dark ages, only to haltingly emerge fifteen years later reeking of torture, prison camps, Stalinism and corruption.

The reason, which remained either unspoken or unreported during the anniversary coverage, was stated most honestly and directly to me by George McGovern, who unfortunately was off-camera at the time. During a break while taping the CNN Crossfire show, after I had made a comment regarding the ability of the U.S. under the right leadership to have adjusted its strategy early on and prevailed in the war, the antiwar candidate who had once promised to go to Hanoi on his knees if he were elected President turned to me and announced in his emotionless monotone, "What you don't understand is that I didn't want us to win that war."

The people who directed the antiwar movement did not care whether McNamara had a workable strategy, or whether it could have been adapted to circumstances. They did not care whether Nixon's Vietnamization program might have worked. They did not care whether the South Vietnamese should have been given an adequate chance to adjust their strategy after the American withdrawal. And they did not care whether the communists signed a pledge guaranteeing free elections and a peaceful reunification of the country. Quite simply, they wanted the communists to win.

Knowledge from the East

Abraham sent his other sons to the East. Pebble to Michael Gros from Jewish Press.

For [Rabbi] Shlomo Aharon[Fenster] it was a time of great soul searching as he was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

While sitting together with his host father Mitsuo Kiyosu in the kitchen sipping green tea, Shlomo Aharon unburdened the challenges he was facing. The conversation turned from his job search to his larger search for direction in his life.

"My host father realized that I was searching not only for a job, but for spirituality," Shlomo Aharon said. "He told me that when he dies 'there will be such and such spirit in the next world who will save me. I live this life with confidence because I know I will be saved when I die. On the other hand, a Christian person has Jesus. A Christian person has Jesus, who is a bridge to the Jewish G-d. That’s how he will be saved when he dies.'"

"'But you, you are a Jew. You have a direct connection to the Jewish G-d. What more are you searching for?'"

That comment opened Shlomo Aharon’s eyes. He grew up hearing about G-d as the Judeo-Christian G-d, but he had only ever heard Christians speak about G-d. His host father said No! It is not Christianity that has a direct connection to G-d, and not even Buddhism. It is the Jewish people who have a direct conduit to G-d.

"He woke me up to the fact that I have a unique place in this world as a Jew and an intrinsic relationship to G-d," Shlomo Aharon said. "G-d had been just a philosophical concept to me and the last thing I was searching for."

...(published in The Jewish Press July 6, 2007)

What's Next, Then?

Jihad Denial
By Bruce Thornton [but emphasis mine]

The New York Times's Thomas Friedman is right on the mark most of the time in his analysis of the dysfunctions troubling the Muslim world and of our own failures in confronting them. Particularly important is his frequent criticism of our feckless disregard of our dependence on fossil fuels. As Friedman argues, we should all be doing more about the fact that our oil consumption subsidizes the terrorists who want to blow us up.

But even Friedman has a blind spot that compromises his otherwise sensible analyses. His July 4 column is a perfect example. It accurately links global Muslim terrorist attacks to the intolerant chauvinism inherent in Islam, which to its adherents is "the most perfect and complete expression of God's monotheistic message, and the Koran is God's last and most perfect word." Yet this spiritual perfection collides with a world dominated by the same West that for nearly a thousand years quailed at the armies of Allah. "This creates," Friedman writes, "a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out."

That last sentence, redolent of middle-class parents trying to figure out why their geeky kid vandalized the neighbor's SUV, is where Friedman loses it by indulging a reductive psychology that locates behavior not in the spiritual imperative he himself identifies, but in a neurotic reaction to environmental pressures. By the end of the piece this misstep has become a pratfall: "Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor."

Notice that metaphor: jihad––for that is what the terrorists are engaged in, as they repeatedly tell us––is a cultic deformation of otherwise healthy cells in the body of Islam, an alien growth that needs to be excised so health returns. Yet this received wisdom, repeated over and over, even by the Bush administration, is simply false to Islamic history, theology, and jurisprudence. If one attends carefully to that record, it is obvious that jihad is not an alien "tumor" but a vital organ of Islam.

Of course, one can try to avoid this unpleasant fact by denying that what the terrorists are engaged in is jihad. One can indulge the laughable rationalization that jihad is really "inward striving" to be a better Muslim. This minority interpretation of jihad appears late in Islamic history, and is looked on with scorn by many Muslims themselves. Listen to the Ayatollah Khomeini, creator of the first modern Islamic nation, writing in 1942: "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and the shadow of the sword." And again in 1979, from a speech delivered at the Feyziyeh Theological School: "Islam grew with blood . . . . The great prophet of Islam in one hand carried the Koran and in the other a sword . . . . Islam is religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people."

Some Westerners, following duplicitous Muslim apologists, no doubt would argue that Khomeini, a revered Muslim theologian, is distorting the traditions of his faith. But given that the 1979 speech was delivered at a theological school, where the audience is knowledgeable about their faith and so could identify distortions of its tenets, this rationalization is incredible. Common sense tells us that Khomeini and the other modern jihadists know their own faith and its doctrines, and are speaking squarely in that tradition, as can be documented from the Koran, Hadiths, and subsequent Muslim theologians, jurists, and other commentators (see Andrew Bostom's invaluable anthology, The Legacy of Jihad). All these sources tell us that jihad indeed is the imperative to follow the example of the prophet Mohammed, who said in his farewell address: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.'"

Modern jihadists, then, aren't "heretics" or "fanatics" who have "highjacked" the "religion of peace" in order to compensate for their neurotic "humiliation" at Muslim backwardness. Bin Laden and his lieutenant Aymin Al Zawahiri have issued many writings that define their terrorist war as a traditional jihad, backing up their argument with numerous references to Islamic theology and jurisprudence. In a few weeks The Al Qaeda Reader will be published, Library of Congress researcher Raymond Ibrahim's translation of the most significant Al Qaeda treatises, many of which have not appeared before in English. This promises to be one of the most important books since 9/11, a critical resource for accurately understanding the motives of Al Qaeda. These writings, especially those intended for Muslims, ground the war against the West squarely in the Islamic tradition of jihad: "Zawahiri's writings," Ibrahim notes, "especially are grounded in Islam's roots of jurisprudence; in fact, of the many thousands of words translated here from his three treatises, well more than half are direct quotations from the Koran, the Sunna of Muhammad, and the consensus and conclusions of the Ulema [past and present commentators and interpreters of Islamic belief and practice]."

Even the killing of women and children is argued for on the basis of that same tradition, which provides traction for rationalizations based on Islamic military weakness, sophistic definitions of "innocence," and the oft-repeated injunction to kill all infidels. This interpretation may be erroneous, but the mere fact that it can be argued for at all, and accepted by many Muslims, is itself significant. And such an interpretation is possible because there already exists the doctrine of jihad, which glorifies and justifies violence against non-believers. This helps to answer the obvious question why other ex-colonial peoples supposedly "humiliated" by their failure to keep up with the powerful West have not resorted to terrorist violence.

Again, it beggars belief that a Zawahiri or a Khomeini is distorting his faith's traditions and dogmas, particularly when millions of Muslims world-wide agree with those traditional interpretations. Are we to think those millions don't know their own religion? That they are dupes of manipulators and distorters? Or is it rather the case that they know very well their faith and see Bin Laden et al. as traditionalists attempting to restore to Islam the doctrinal purity that fueled Islam's remarkable conquests? Perhaps this agreement with the so-called "Islamists" explains the dearth of protests against these presumed "distortions" on the part of all those "moderate" Muslims we keep hearing about.

No, it is we who are the dupes of distorters, all those apologists, propagandists, and Western useful idiots who obscure the truth of Islam and its history. And they are successful: Washington Times columnist Diana West, writing on July 6 about Robert Spencer's important web-site jihadwatch.org, reports that "very ominously, Mr. Spencer's Web site is being blocked by assorted organizations which, according to his readers, continue to provide access to assorted pro-jihad sites. Mr. Spencer reports he's 'never received word of so many organizations banning this site all at once.' These include the City of Chicago, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, GE IT, JPMorgan Chase, Defense Finance and Accounting Services and now, a federal employee in Dallas informs him, the federal government." Why? "Some Internet providers deem the factually based, meticulous analysis on display at jihadwatch.org to be 'hate speech.'"

This is the pass that we have come to: facts about the motives of an enemy sworn to our destruction are censored as "hate speech." This betrayal of the truth demonstrates perfectly the West's self-loathing failure of nerve that confirms the enemy's belief in his spiritual superiority–– and his ultimate victory.