Middle East

Deadly Naivete – Updated

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Jeffrey Goldberg, reporting in the Atlantic on an interview with Israel’s new prime minister:

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

Unfortunately, our current leadership in Washington does not see this issue with anywhere near the clarity that Netanyahu does…indeed, Obama seems more upset by American nuclear weapons than by the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian regime. The same is true of a substantial number of Americans, especially those who consider themselves to be political “progressives” and who work in the media and in academia.

Ralph Peters: One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuititive recognition of our enemies.

Paul Reynaud–who became Prime Minister of France just two months before the German invasion of 1940–incisively explained what was at stake at that point in time, and why it was so much greater than what had been at stake in 1914: People think Hitler is like Kaiser Wilhelm. The old gentleman only wanted to take Alsace-Lorraine from us. But Hitler is Genghis Khan.

Obama and his acolytes seem to think we are dealing with Kaiser Wilhelm-like figures in Iran and North Korea. It is a shallow and dangerously naive way of looking at the world.

Why do people who are highly educated, and often fairly intelligent, so often fail at comprehending and predicting the behavior of thugs and fanatics?

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Rhinoceros!

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This link is not about a zoological species, but rather about Israel-bashing, anti-Semitism, and political intimidation on an American college campus. It deserves careful reading.

The “rhinoceros” reference is, of course, to Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play, which is summarized at the link. (The play has also been made into an excellent film, featuring Zero Mostel–this would be a very good time to order it from Netflix or pick it up at a local video store.)

See also my 2002 post on the rise of political violence and intimidation in America.

link via Meryl Yourish

Images of Hate

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Zombie has extensive photo and video coverage of anti-Israel demonstrations around the world. Not pleasant viewing, but it’s important to understand how much of this stuff is going on and just how virulent it is.

Here’s a video about the inculcation of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs in Palestinian children, and the use of these children as human shields by Hamas.

A report on the sinister activities of the United Nations agency known as UNWRA.

On a much more positive note, here’s coverage of a pro-Israel demonstration in Italy. Fiamma Nirenstein, a journalist and new member of the Italian Parliament, believes that the obvious thuggishness of Hamas is leading to a revulsion against the “progressive” justification and romanticization of terrorist violence. I hope she is right, but I’m less sanguine. Many of those who identify as “progressives” feel such rage against their own societies that they have no anger left for the terrorist enemies of civilization, and are indeed all too willing to make common cause with these enemies.

Superb Talk by Peter Mansoor

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This video is excellent. It is a talk by Col. Peter Mansoor about the Iraq war. Even the Q&A is good. Col. Mansoor was a brigade commander in Iraq, and he is now a military historian at Ohio State. He wrote a book about his experiences, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq. After listening to this talk, I am going to read his book as soon as I am finished re-reading Clausewitz. The lecture is over 90 minutes, including Q&A. The video portion is just Mansoor standing at a lectern. So, it is easy to just have the audio going while you do other stuff. You lose nothing without the video.

Highly recommended.

UPDATE: The talk is extremely critical of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld and particularly Bremer. If you don’t want to hear that criticism, don’t listen.