Category Archives: War Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s War On Terror

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His half-hearted one:

Barack Obama’s heart was never in the war on terror, and he burst onto the national scene with an anti-Iraq War riff. He called it a “dumb war,” a phrase that echoes still in his foreign-policy slogan of “don’t do stupid stuff.” The latest declaration, “No boots on the ground,” is cut from the same cloth. As faculty-lounge wordsmiths go, he’s top shelf.

Voters were with him big time in 2008, and a majority stayed with him in 2012 as he promised to get out of Afghanistan, too. He had OK’d the assassination of Osama bin Laden, a fact he waved like a bloody scalp, and it shielded him from direct hits after the Benghazi terror attack.

His mistake, or his latest mistake, was that he began to take his Houdini-like escapes for granted, and thus was gob-smacked when the “war-weary nation” suddenly wanted a tougher president after the Islamic State beheaded two Americans. In a flash, the usually nimble president was way out of step with the country.

Yet Obama again proved himself a cynical politician worthy of a fickle public. After some flub-a-dubs, he announced a strategy that is true to his core. It is ­neither-nor.

It is neither a strategy for victory, nor a strategy for doing nothing. Like a man taking a shower while wearing a raincoat, he put America back into the fight without a commitment to win.

As Glenn notes, this is nothing except an effort to get through the next six weeks. After the election, he’ll (as he told Vladimir) have “more flexibility.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Multi-Culturalism And Rape

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Rotherham is a part of England that will be forever Pakistan:

Pakistanis first came in significant numbers to Rotherham in the late 1950s and early ’60s, in the wave of immigration that brought men from the Indian subcontinent to Britain, largely to do work that the indigenous white working class no longer wanted. My father was part of this first wave. He worked on the production line of the Vauxhall car factory in Luton, an unlovely town north of London. In Rotherham, many Pakistani men ended up doing dirty, dusty work in the steel foundry.

The new immigrants were from rural villages, typically in Kashmir, the northern province bordering India; they were socially conservative and hard-working. When I was growing up in the ’80s, the stereotype of Pakistanis was that we were industrious and docile.

The Pakistani community in Rotherham, and elsewhere in Britain, has not followed the usual immigrant narrative arc of intermarriage and integration. The custom of first-cousin marriages to spouses from back home in Pakistan meant that the patriarchal village mentality was continually refreshed.
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Britain’s Pakistani community often seems frozen in time; it has progressed little and remains strikingly impoverished. The unemployment rate for the least educated young Muslims is close to 40 percent, and more than two-thirds of Pakistani households are below the poverty line.

If you allow unrestricted immigration with no assimilation, you are basically welcoming your future conquerors.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Our Brilliant President

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The tragedy of being off teleprompter.

[Update a few minutes later]

[Update a while later]

Five lies that shaped the Obama presidency.

[Afternoon update]

Barack Obama’s biggest lie (and not, it’s not about keeping your plan and doctor). No, Mr. President, the Islamic State is actually as Islamic as can be.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Headchopper Next Door

Some uncomfortable truths about Islam:

Mohammed was quite clear about what he wanted. For all the abrogations, the Koran is reasonably clear on what it expects its followers to do. Mohammed’s history was that of a man who tried to convince the Arabs that he had seen an angel by telling them and failed, and who succeeded only when he killed enough of them, not to mention the Jews and any other infidels hanging around the place.

That is the history of Islam.

Germany was not a nation of monsters. It was a nation that behaved monstrously. The average German would not stick his neighbor in an oven in his basement or chain him up as a slave. He would however do these things in Poland because he was contextually contaminated by a monstrous ideology.

As an individual he was a nice man who loved his children, petted his dog and enjoyed street fairs. As a loyal member of a system run by the Nazi Party, he would do monstrous things. And then when the Nazi machine was switched off, he would go home to his wife and children without ever killing anyone else.

He was not a good man. Good men don’t do the things he did. But he wasn’t a budding serial killer. He was just doing what a death cult told him to do.

As I noted over the weekend…

Also, Barack Obama and John Kerry lecturing Muslims on what is and is not the nature of Islam is a theater of the absurd.