Waging The War on “Terror,” Vichy-style

[Valin]

National Review:

Victor Davis Hanson

November 14, 2015

 

A few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now “contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and “Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen, Tea-party zealots?

 

Middle Eastern websites may be crowing over the jihadist rampage and promising more to come, but this past week in the United States we were obsessed over a yuppie son of a multi-millionaire showboating his pseudo-grievances by means of a psychodramatic hunger strike at the University of Missouri and a crowd of cry-baby would-be fascists at Yale bullying a wimpy teacher over supposedly hurtful Halloween costumes. I guess that is the contemporary American version of Verdun and the Battle of the Bulge.

 

This sickness in the West manifests itself in a variety of creepy ways — to hide bothersome reality by inventing euphemisms and idiocies likely “workplace violence” and “largely secular,” jailing a “right-wing” video maker rather than focusing on jihadist killers in Benghazi, deifying a grade-school poseur inventor who repackaged a Radio Shack clock and wound up winning an invitation to the White House, straining credibility in Cairo to fabricate unappreciated Islamic genius. Are these the symptoms of a post-Christian therapeutic society whose affluence and leisure fool it into thinking that it has such a huge margin of security that it can boast of its ‘tolerance’ and empathy — at the small cost of a few anonymous and unfortunate civilians sacrificed from time to time? Is deterrence a waning asset that has now been exhausted after seven years of Obama administration apologetics and contextualizations?

 

Our premodern enemies have certainly got our postmodern number. Newsmen compete to warn us not of more jihadists to come or the nature of the Islamist hatred that fuels these murderers, but instead fret about Western “backlash” on the horizon, about how nativists and right-wingers may now “scapegoat” immigrants. Being blown apart may be one thing, but appearing illiberal over the flying body parts is quite another. Let’s hurry up and close Guantanamo Bay so that it will stop “breeding” terrorists; and let’s hurry up even more to restart the “peace talks” to remind ISIS that we are nice to the Palestinians.

 

 

(Snip)

 

 

[Valin]

The War That Hasn’t Ended
BAndrew C. McCarthy
November 13, 2015

There is always the chance that the next attack will knock the scales from our eyes. Always the chance that we will realize the enemy is at war with us, even as we foolishly believe we can end the war by not fighting it, by surrendering.

As this is written, the death count in Paris is 158. That number will grow higher, and very many more will be counted among the wounded and terrorized.

“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West.

It is what animates our enemies.

Barack Obama tells us — harangues us — that he is the president who came to end wars. Is that noble? Reflective of an America that honors “our values”? No, it is juvenile. In the real world, the world of aggression — not “micro-aggression” — you don’t get to end wars by pronouncing them over, or mistaken, or contrary to “our values.”

You end them by winning them . . . or losing them. If you demonstrate that you are willing to lose, then you lose. If you sympathize with the enemy’s critique of the West on the lunatic theory that this will appease the enemy, you invite more attacks, more mass murder.

France is hoping the night’s bloodshed is done as it counts its dead. And perhaps it is for now. But the atrocities are not over, not even close.

 

(Snip)

 

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1. When George Bush Said This Was Going To Be A Generational War, He Wasn't Just Engaging In Rhetoric...He Was Speaking The Truth.

2. You May Not Be Interested In War, But War is Interested In You...Leon Trotsky

[Valin]

Nice...but basically meaningless