From such instances we learn what we have done wrong and how the pillar institutions of family and school have collapsed upon our children, rendering them largely unfit for the brave new world we are so busily and blindly preparing for them. The following passages are the concluding paragraphs culled from a handful of typical productions which, for all their touching bathos and occasional inarticulateness, identify a number of important truths we tend to dismiss as professionally inconvenient. I give them in their uncorrected form. As Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

–To conclude this journal, if this is what you call a journal. I know I have stated that the education that I have taken in is not up to standards to what most teachers would think as great academic work. But I believe that I am a reflection of what the education system has provided. It is not only the system that has failed but it is all of the western world. My mother always said, “Back in my days, we learned algebra in elementary school.”

–It is quite apparent that I am quite unhappy with the state of our education system. I do not feel it is giving me the tools I need to succeed in the world, it is giving me what they think I need to succeed. By they I mean the hundreds of bureaucrats working in the educational system. I have been pretty hard on the teachers but ultimately it is they [i.e., the bureaucrats] who should receive the blame. They cram more kids in a class and do this without ever setting foot inside the schools. They wonder why there are so many drop outs or why their standards are not being met. But instead of solving the problem they simply lower the standards or take the difficult material out of the course. As long as they are running the system it will most likely get worse. They have had their change and they haven’t done a very good job, it is time for a new way to educate.                                                                                

–If we want our children to progress as individuals, I think it is reasonable to depend on the trial and error method, personal experience, as well as                preaching a love of wisdom, philosophy, rather then solely our conventional and industrialized, formal schooling we hve today. I believe that along with learning the ability to read, write and communicate in a fashionably and respectful way, we are forgetting to teach our children simply how to think and make decisions on their own.

–I think that the level of education is weak because we are so worried about    getting the bottom percentage of the students to read and write that we dont have enough time to push the top percentage of students to excel. We try to   make sure that everyone is mediocre rather than have certain students excel   and others be weaned out. There seems to be more funding for special education than for talented and gifted programs.

–Why do things get worse and worse when all the bigshots keep telling us their going to get better and better? Why can’t we just have smaller classes    and unburnt teachers and maybe a couple of cheaper books to study from?

–Today educational system doen’t allow people to move a head.

These kids are evidently in serious trouble and I sometimes fear that it may be too late to do much about it. Although my respondents tend unanimously to indict the educational system for their malaise, I am tempted to lay the principal blame on a generation of parents who have given little intellectual attention to their offspring during their formative years. What does not begin well often does not end well. As Cicero put it in the Brutus, “It makes a great deal of difference whom one hears at home on a daily basis, with whom one speaks from childhood on, and also in what manner one’s father, teachers, and mother speak.”

After a rather long lull in activity, WikiLeaks is back in the headlines again. This time, the target was the United States’ base at Guantanamo Bay, with WikiLeaks releasing almost 800 classified military documents relating to the detainees who have been held at Gitmo. If WikiLeaks isn’t – as it claims – consciously trying to aid terrorist organizations, this latest release demonstrates, once again, that Julian Assange and his partners aren’t the benign, disinterested whistle-blowers they would like the world to believe they are. This is an organization that is blatantly anti-American and anti-West in its outlook — and its prejudice shines through every time it releases new information.

WikiLeaks wrestles with the same problem that the mainstream media has: they want the public to believe that they are unbiased sources of factual information, but – being leftists – they don’t trust the public to reach the “correct” conclusions on their own. So, rather than simply disseminating information and allowing people to form their own judgments, WikiLeaks feels obliged to steer readers’ opinions.

By the third sentence on their “Gitmo Files” introductory webpage, WikiLeaks abandons any pretense of impartiality, telling readers that they are about to learn more about “a notorious icon of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002, and remains open under President Obama, despite his promise to close the much-criticized facility within a year of taking office.”

Adjectives like “notorious” and “much-criticized” don’t leave much wiggle room for the reader. But, just in case there is any doubt, WikiLeaks moves on to lead readers further toward forming what is – in its opinion – the right conclusion, declaring that: “Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantánamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake (or because the US was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects), and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Two months ago, Washington was abuzz with speculation that Barack Obama was going to follow Bill Clinton’s re-election strategy and move to the center, forsaking his liberal agenda that cost him control of the House in 2010. Now, it is evident that he has decided to come down hard left and wage his re-election fight from his liberal bunker, firing shots at Republican cuts in Medicare, pushing tax increases on the rich and attributing the gas price increase to speculators.

Very possibly the decision to tack to the left was not entirely voluntary. With the Republicans constantly confronting him with budget cuts and spending reductions, Obama cannot portray himself as a centrist. Every day, he is on the defensive against proposals for Republican attempts to rein in federal outlays. Amid a background of repeated confrontations, he cannot move to the middle. Indeed, there is no middle. His budget compromises with House Speaker Boehner are not middle ground, they are partial surrenders, grudging acceptances of budget cuts he would never otherwise allow.

In the Clinton days, there were — and I suspect still are — two camps in the Democratic White House. There were those who advocated a fundamental repositioning in the center of our politics and those who wanted to battle along ideological lines, using economic populism and class antagonisms to bolster their chances of victory.

The problem with a leftist strategy is that the vote share a Democrat can attract with it has a very low ceiling — in the low 40s. Economic populism just doesn’t play that well outside of the Democratic left.

The key to this electoral model is, of course, turnout. Obama made it work and bring him a majority in 2008 by adding the votes of new, younger voters, increasing the African-American and Latino turnout, and playing on the unique economic panic of the times.

But, absent a big increase in liberal turnout, the appeal of class warfare and populist rhetoric is sharply limited.

In Greece, a second flight from reality has begun in earnest. In Aphidnai, a small town north of Athens where local residents lost their exemption from a roadway toll due to the austerity measures forced on Greece’s debt-ridden government, a movement known as “Den Plirono” (“I Won’t Pay”) was born.  The sentiment has gone national, and many citizens brazenly refuse to pay highway tolls or bus and subway fares, which have risen 40 percent. In a country with a reputation for lax law enforcement, such a movement is apparently effective in the sense that many people are getting away with such protests.  At the same time, it is a recipe for economic suicide, as the specter of default once again looms large.

Greece is currently servicing a $159 billion bailout loan.  It’s overall debt is $491 billion in a country with 11.3 million people, which comes to $43,450 of debt per person (sound familiar?).  Last Friday, the Greek government addressed the current crisis, laying out plans to privatize some key government businesses, including Europe’s biggest betting firm, OPAP, and reduce its stakes in others, such as telecom company OTE, and the Public Power Corporation. Regional airports and port authorities will also be privatized.

“Optimistic” forecasts conclude that Greece can raise $72 billion from such privatization. Benefit cuts, effective tax hikes and other measures would save about $33 billion in 2012-2015, bringing its budget deficit down to about 1 percent of GDP in 2015 from 15.6 percent in 2009.  ”The government presented today a broad and specific mid-term fiscal plan up to 2015,” Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou explained to Reuters. “This shows the commitment and willingness to proceed with fiscal consolidation and proceed further with structural reforms.”

Unfortunately, the debt markets weren’t buying it — literally.  Borrowing premiums rose to record levels last Thursday, perhaps spooked by a comment from Werner Hoyer, one of Berlin’s deputy foreign ministers and a member of the junior coalition party Free Democrats (FDP), who said it would “not be a disaster” if Greece were forced to restructure its debt. “[If Greece's creditors agreed that talks with Athens] would be helpful toward a restructuring of the debt, then of course this would be supported by us,” Hoyer was reported as saying. Adding to the uncertainty was the fact that a speech by Greek Prime minister George Papandreou earlier on Friday to address the debt crisis was seen as lacking in details. Papandreou promised to provide them after the Easter holiday. “The plan will be completed in the coming weeks and will be then submitted to parliament,” Papandreou told a cabinet meeting. “Today we are presenting the basic guidelines of a roadmap that will lead us from the Greece of crisis to the Greece of creativity,” he promised.

Yet government has seen disappointing revenues due in large part to an ongoing problem with tax evasion, and a deepening recession which threatens to undermine fiscal targets required by the EU and IMF. Further complicating efforts are Greek labor unions which have threatened to once again go on strike to protest austerity measures they see as futile. “It doesn’t matter how much family silver they sell, it won’t work,” said Nikos Kioutsoukis, general secretary of GSEE, the country’s largest private sector union. “After these announcements, we will take action.”

Mr. Kioutsoukis’s comments reflect the anger of those opposed to maintaining the present course, including the I Won’t Pay movement, whose “civil disobedience” translates into outright thuggery.  Activists, who many Greeks believe are spurred on, or hijacked by, left-wing political parties, have covered ticket machines on buses and trams with tape, even as thousands of people refuse to validate public transport tickets when they take the subway or the bus.  Doctors from state hospitals have blockaded pay counters to prevent patients from paying consultation fees.  A bus inspector hired to crack down on fare dodgers was shot. Thugs attacked Antonis Loverdos, the health minister, during a hospital visit in Athens, and James Watson, the 83-year-old Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, was attacked as he prepared to give a speech at the city’s university in Patras.

Social commentator Nikos Dimou explains the ease with which many Greeks engage in such behavior. ”There is a general culture of lawlessness, starting from the most basic thing, tax evasion or tax avoidance, which is something that Greeks have been exercising since their state was created,” he said.

There is a lot of talk from many people about bullying in school. The problem is that it is all talk. There is no sign that anybody is going to do anything that is likely to reduce bullying.

When politicians want to do nothing, and yet look like they are doing something, they appoint a blue ribbon committee or go to the U.N. or assign some Cabinet member to look into the problem and report back to the President — hoping that the issue will be forgotten by the time he reports back.

When educators are going to do nothing, they express great concern and make pious public pronouncements. They may even hold conferences, write op-ed pieces or declare a “no tolerance” policy. But they are still not going to do anything that is likely to stop bullying.

In some rough schools, they can’t even stop the bullying of teachers by the hooligans in their classes, much less stop the bullying of students.

Not all of this is the educators’ fault. The courts have created a legal climate where any swift and decisive action against bullies can lead to lawsuits. The net results are indecision, half-hearted gestures and pious public pronouncements by school officials, none of which is going to stop bullies.

When judges create new “rights” for bullies out of thin air, just as they do for criminals, and prescribe “due process” for school discipline, just as if schools were little courtrooms, then nothing is likely to happen promptly or decisively.

If there is anything worse than doing nothing, it is doing nothing spiced with empty rhetoric about what behavior is “unacceptable” — while in fact accepting it.

Might educators abuse their power, if the courts did not step in? Of course they could. Any power exercised by human beings can be abused. But, without the ability to exercise power, there is anarchy.

When responsible officials are prevented from exercising power, then bullies exercise power.

President Barack Obama has joined the chorus of those deploring bullying.

But his own administration is pushing the notion that a disproportionate number of suspensions or other punishments for members of particular racial or ethnic groups is discriminatory.

In other words, if a school suspends more black males than Asian females, that is taken as a sign of discrimination. No one in his right mind really believes that, but it is part of the grand make-believe that pervades our politics and even our courts.

In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have invited two distinguished guests to discuss the question: When does a religion become an ideology? Our guests today are:

Tawfik Hamid, an Islamic thinker and reformer who is the author of Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam. A one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt, he was a member of Jemaah Islamiya, a terrorist Islamic organization, with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who later became the second in command of al-Qaeda. He is currently a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

and

David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which is being made into a documentary film. His most recent work is Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.

FP: Tawfik Hamid and David Satter, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Mr. Hamid, let us begin with you. Make an introductory statement for us to get our discussion started: When does a religion become an ideology?

Hamid: A religion becomes an ideology when the followers of this religion cannot tolerate the existence of those who have different views or beliefs, and when they understand their religious text literally and refuse to accept any way of understanding the religion other than their own way of understanding.

FP: Thank you.

Dr. Satter how would you now build on Mr. Hamid’s statement?

Satter: I think another way of putting it is that a religion becomes an ideology when man-made dogma is treated as infallible truth.

Although there are adherents of all three major monotheistic faiths who believe that every word of the sacred texts is to be taken literally, for the post-Enlightenment rationalist mind, there is a distinction between transcendent moral truths, exemplified in the case of Judaism and Christianity in the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments and the dogmatic contents of the religions expressed in their historical accounts and ritual requirements.

This distinction is important to bear in mind because transcendent moral truths are never the content of an ideology. An ideology contains an assertion about society that is treated as ultimate truth and applied indiscriminately to explain all aspects of political reality. Since transcendent moral truths owe their character to the fact that they are “over and above” society, they cannot contribute to the content of an ideology. In fact, the effect of an ideology is always to destroy true moral transcendence.

The ritual requirements or dogmatic assertions about history of a religion, however, are perfectly suitable for the construction of an ideology. The obligation in Islam to wage jihad, properly interpreted, can be made the basis of an ideology which treats waging war on unbelievers as the highest obligation of a Moslem and evaluates all actions in terms of the extent to which they support this sacred obligation. Other religions too have aspects that could become the material of an ideology. One example is the doctrine of the Jews as the “Chosen People.” Although this doctrine has never been used to justify the oppression of others, it could be.

A religion becomes an ideology when its man-made elements become an idée fixe and are seized upon as an idea that can be imposed on all political and social institutions in the interests of power. The temptation was explained best in Dostoevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor where the inquisitor explains to Jesus the essence of an ideology’s appeal:

Instead of the strict ancient law, man had in future to decide for himself with a free heart what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him for guidance. But did it never occur to you that he would at last reject and call in question even your image and your truth, if he were weighed down by as fearful a burden as freedom of choice.

Laying down that burden may be easiest of all if the mental prison thereby created is constructed with the materials of supposedly sacred religious teachings.

Hamid: In general, I agree with many of the above views. I would like to add that, based on David’s analysis, I see that having an ideology is not by itself the problem. For example, the ideology of the chosen people — as he mentioned — was not used to oppress others.  It is the part of ideology that is used to oppress others, such as ‘violent Jihad’ in Islam that is actually causing the problem.

A good distinction that David made was the distinction between true moral transcendence and ideology. It is important to mention that one of the main problems in traditional Islam is that the pillars of the religion [to say Non G-d other than Allah and Mohamed is the prophet of Allah, the 5 prayers, the obligatory tax (Zakkat), the fasting of Ramadan and the pilgrimage (Haj)] are rituals rather than moral values. In other words, based on the traditional views within Islam, Bin Laden can be a good Muslim because he follows the 5 pillars of Islam. On the contrary, if the pillars of Islam include ‘you shall not commit murder’ or other moral values, Muslims would not have seen people like Bin Laden and the terrorists as real Muslims. The ideology and the religious dogma of the 5 pillars made many Muslims unable to use the transcendent moral truth to judge people like Bin Laden.

Regarding the view that ‘man had in future to decide for himself with a free heart what is good and what is evil,’ I agree with this but I will add that the inspired moral values from religion such as ‘you shall not commit murder and ‘you shall not steal’ should remain as the back bone for future moral values. We may change some practical applications for these values but the pillars for such values will remain — at least in the view of many — as inspired values via the creator (i.e. not man-made).

Regarding the statement that “Laying down that burden may be easiest of all if the mental prison thereby created is constructed with the materials of supposedly sacred religious teachings.” I have seen the practical application for this in our Islamic society when many in the Muslim world adopt Islam as an ideology as a reaction to the moral relativism concepts that flourished in the Muslim world in the 1950s and 60s partially due to the work of liberal movements. The Islamic societies could not tolerate the lack of clear borders or ‘prison’ for their mind and it was much easier for many in these societies to follow an ‘ideology’ with clear borders rather than having the burden of freedom of choice.

Satter: Muslims, of course, are not the only ones who seek “clear borders.” Very few people have the confidence to identify their fundamental moral values and apply them to the myriad of complicated situations with which life confronts us. Even the most educated people fall back on mental borders that are the product of past habit and unchallenged assumptions. The problem becomes much greater when the mental borders are ubiquitous and the product of a false universal theory – as in Nazism or communism – or the dogmatic contents of a religion as in the case of radical Islam.

We are also confronted with the problem of group dynamics. Ethical judgment is the property of an individual. Dogmatic rules guide the behavior of a group. They eliminate differences and mobilize people for common action. So to the difficulty of thinking for oneself is added in an ideological situation the emotional trauma of confronting the group. Under the circumstances, it is small wonder that fanaticism in power has such terrible force. It operates on the difficulty that people have, when challenged, of defending what is truly human in each of them, their ultimate moral sense.

So what can reinforce the moral sense of the individual in the face of religious or secular fanaticism? If I understand him correctly, Tawfik provides the answer with his reference to the five pillars of Islam, none of which deal with ethical values. I think we need to be very clear in distinguishing between dogma and genuinely transcendent values. In the case of Nazism and communism, the task was easier because there were no transcendent values. Communism prided itself on its rejection of metaphysics. But in the case of radical Islam, the fanatics can draw on an authoritative religious tradition. Every word of the Koran is treated as divine truth and the authoritative interpretation of the Koran is or, at least, can be seen as being implicitly terroristic.

It seems to me that, under these circumstances, we must insist on our ability to define terms. To be truly religious, values must be transcendent. They cannot be derived from a political objective, for example, creating a classless society or a restored Caliphate. They can’t be based on the hatred of outsiders whether capitalists or infidels because the tensions that these hatreds reflect owe their origin to society which higher values necessarily transcend. Where the measure of right or wrong is the interests of a group, whether the proletariat, Aryans or the ummah, we are dealing with man made dogma regardless of any pretended religious justification. Its absolutization creates an ideology not a religion and it should be treated as an ideology and not granted the legitimacy of a religion with which it actually shares nothing. In the case of Islam, this does not mean an attack on Islamic practices as such but only their use in the service of terror under which circumstances, the issue of transcendence becomes relevant. To search for meaning is only human but it can lead to barbaric conclusions if it proceeds without ethical guidance. In a nuclear world, we need to defend the distinction between higher values and dogma as a matter of fundamental self defense.

Hamid: I agree with the points that David mentioned and would like to add more applied points that relate to Radical Islam.

David raised the point of “Difficulty to think for oneself”. This is exactly what happened to me and to many members in the Radical organizations. We felt that we are like sheep that just need to follow the leader. Individual thinking was lost especially when the radical leaders discouraged us from ‘thinking’.

David considered the ummah concept as “a man made dogma regardless of any pretended religious justification”. This could be true however; Muslims see the ummah concept as a religious based one. It is vital to understand how Muslims see such a concept in order to be able to approach the problem and deal with it correctly. In this regard, it is also important to emphasize that Communism and Nazism were seen by most of their followers as manmade ideology. In Islam, the situation is completely different as most Muslims see the ideological component as a religious revelation from Allah. In the former situation (i.e. manmade ideology) it is much easier to change the ideology as you can prove it wrong. When the ideology, as in case of Islam, is processed at the subconscious and emotional levels of the brain (as a religion) rather than the high cortical levels (as the case of communism and Nazism) it is much more difficult to change it.

I completely agree with David about the need to have a clear distinction between religion

and Ideology. Islam that only works inside a mosque as a form of individual worship can be considered a religion. However, Islam that is used as a political power and a controlling system for the society must be treated as an Ideology. The West need to be clear about this issue, as giving the Ideological part of Islam (that promotes violence and control of others) the protection and privileges that are given to a religion can be catastrophic. This ideological part of Islam has to be fought as the case with fighting communism and Nazism. If we failed to make such a separation between Islam as personal type of worship and Islam (or its interpretations) as a political and driving force to dominate others we will not be able to control radical Islamic ideology in the future. In fact we may be actually giving support to the radical ideology if we gave it the advantages of a religion. Allowing the ideological part of Islam to flourish under the banner of religious freedom weakens the spiritual part of the religion itself and makes things more complicated.

Satter: Politics dominates our lives and there is always a temptation to make a religion out of politics. If a political objective has divine significance, it is worth dying for and, of course, worth killing for. Those obsessed with a political mission are fearless and resourceful. Relieved of the need to exercise individual moral judgment, they become ruthless spies, talented strategists and remorseless killers. This is why it is so important to show a political ideology in all its man made artificiality. Only in this way can an ideological movement be discredited.  One hopes that it will be harder to organize mass crimes on behalf of a system that has been shown to be not divinely inspired but man made. In any case, the effort offers some hope for the future.

FP: Tawfik Hamid and David Satter, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.

We’ve grown accustomed to video images of ten-year-old boys in Palestinian training camps, dressed like mujahideen and wielding AK-47’s. Luckily, the West knows how to respond to such shows of aggressiveness. For instance, in the last few years “tag” and similar games have been banned from numerous school playgrounds in the U.K. and the U.S. on the grounds that they are “hazardous” and “inappropriate.” So there, take that, you little jihadist!

As it did in the seventh century, Islam is taking on the appearance of an unstoppable masculine force. But in the West the masculine spirit looks more like a ghost. In The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris puts the matter in stark biological terms: “While we in the West are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless.”

Sounds like Harris is talking war, but in reality his book is more about cultural conflict than armed conflict. War isn’t necessary if the males of one culture can cow those of another culture into submission. Such intimidation might seem unlikely in the U.S. where the percentage of Muslims in the population is in the vicinity of one percent. Still, very small but determined minorities can sometimes impose their will on much larger majorities. For example, homosexuals make up only two to three percent of the population, yet gay activists have been highly successful in advancing the twin agendas of same-sex marriage and gays in the military. Likewise, thanks to CAIR and other activist groups, Muslims in this country have already begun to wield an outsize influence.

Then, too, there is the conversion factor. Conversions to Islam in the U.S. are hard to track, but as yet there seems to be no flood of conversions. On the other hand, during the first ten years of Muhammad’s ministry, Islam looked like an initial public offering that would go bust. Then, suddenly, Islam’s stock (in terms of conversions) went skyward and continued in that direction for centuries after. In short, conversion rates can accelerate dramatically. At certain tipping points in history, time seems to “speed up” and decades of change are compressed into years. Are we at such a tipping point now?

In line with Harris’ alpha male musings, the one place where conversions to Islam are exploding is in the U.S. prison system. Roughly 80 percent of inmates who find faith during their incarceration choose Islam. That works out to 30,000 conversions per year among federal prisoners. Many of the men are in prison in the first place because they were attracted to the masculine world of gangs. And since Islam is doing a better job of appealing to basic masculine psychology, it seems the logical choice. It’s not for nothing that the progenitor of all current jihadist groups is called “the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Meanwhile, Christianity, which ought to be the rival for the affections of wayward young men, seems to be undergoing a prolonged sexual-identity crisis. There is a serious problem in Christianity today, but it’s the exact opposite of the one the popular media focuses on. To read the papers and certain works of popular fiction you would think that the main problem with Christianity is that it’s too patriarchal: no women in the priesthood, no voice for women, no recognition of the divine feminine.

But the reality is a different matter. Look around you the next time you’re in church, and count the ratio of women to men. Normally, it’s about two-to-one in favor of the women. Moreover, women are much more involved in church activities. The Notre Dame Study of Parish Life showed that 80 to 85 percent of those involved in parish ministries or in teaching religion were women. As one writer put it, “the Roman Catholic Church has a rather rigid division of labor. The men have the priesthood, the women have everything else.” As for Protestants, all the mainline denominations have female priests or pastors, and the Episcopal Church even has a female Presiding Bishop (who prayed to “our mother Jesus” at her installation). About twenty-five percent of Episcopal priests are women, as are about twenty-nine percent of Presbyterian pastors. But this has failed to produce the miracle of renewal that Catholic advocates assure us will follow upon women’s ordination. Instead, mainline congregations have dwindled. As recently as 1960, mainline churches accounted for forty percent of American Protestants. Today it’s about twelve percent. If present trends continue, the mainline churches will end up with an all female clergy, preaching to mostly female congregations in the few remaining churches that haven’t been converted to mosques or condominiums.

Contrary to what liberal Christians think, the feminization of Christianity is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem. Christianity is unattractive to many, not because it is perceived as too masculine, but because it’s perceived as too feminine. Moreover, when you add the gospel of the divine feminine to the fact of lopsided church attendance, the problem only gets worse. Da Vinci Code theology is highly titillating, but it won’t bring the men flocking back to the churches. Men have enough trouble as it is with female spirituality and with sentimentalized hymns and sermons. To think that the notion of Jesus as the first feminist will sit well with them is sheer fantasy. Men are not inclined to take up their daily crosses to follow the androgynous one. If men can be persuaded that the picture of Jesus presented in The Da Vinci Code is the true one, that gives them one more reason to avoid church.

But many Christian leaders still don’t get it. As David Morrow points out in Why Men Hate Going to Church, many of the songs now sung in church “have the same breathless feel as top forty love songs.” In addition, women are now encouraged by some Christian pastors and writers to think of Jesus in frankly romantic terms. Naturally enough, such forms of piety tend to create psychological barriers for men. The idea of Christ as our brother challenges a man to become a better man, but the idea of Christ as boyfriend is challenging in a different sense.

A feminized Christianity may work to attract a certain type of man, but he’s probably not the man you want around when the local Imam starts practicing taqiyya on your congregation. When Islam, history’s most hyper-masculine religion, is experiencing a worldwide revival and is looking to recruit more young men to its ranks, it might not be the best time for the Church to emphasize its feminine side. So, Christians had better address the feminization and emasculation of Christianity in a serious way if they hope to counter the attractions of Islam. Churches that are long on sensitivity and short on manpower might want to lay in a supply of prayer rugs.

Of course, feminization is not just a problem for Christians, but also for the culture as a whole. If Islam is all about submission, Western culture, of late, seems to be all about submissiveness. Each day brings news of some abject accommodation to Islamic law or practices. The latest is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision (now apparently reversed) to sanction a less radical form of female genital cutting as a concession to Islamic cultural traditions.

It’s also telling that in Europe, where Christianity exerts much less influence, the submissiveness is more pronounced. So feminization and its attendant emasculation are not problems that are specific to Christianity. Nevertheless, because it’s a large part of American culture, the health of Christianity ought to be of concern to all. Our culture derives much of its strength from its Christian faith, but a Christianity without a strong masculine presence won’t be able to keep young men from defecting to the religion of guns n’ poses. There are a lot of young men in our world who are uncertain whether to follow the sign of the crescent moon or the sign of the cross, but it’s a good bet not many of them will be interested in following the “yield” sign which some contemporary Christians have taken as their emblem.

William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, First Things, the National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report, World, Jihad Watch, and Investor’s Business Daily.

Apparently former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn isn’t the only Obama admirer with an affinity for Maoist methodology.

On Hardball Monday night, Chris Matthews began a week long rant about the BP oil spill that had him calling for the imprisonment of the whole BP board, possibly their execution, and for the President to nationalize the oil industry.

MATTHEWS:  Yes.  In China, it‘s a more brutal society—a more brutal society, Kate, but they execute people for this, major industrial leaders that commit crimes like this, failure like this… Why doesn‘t the president go in there and nationalize that industry and get the job done for the people?

Environmental activist writers Abrahm Lustgarten of Propublica and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones were left gasping for air as Matthews vociferously displayed an appalling ignorance of anything having to do with reality.

MATTHEWS:  Yes.  In China, it‘s a more brutal society—a more brutal society, Kate, but they execute people for this, major industrial leaders that commit crimes like this, failure like this …

SHEPPARD:  Well…

MATTHEWS:  This is a serious, serious problem.

SHEPPARD:  Look…

MATTHEWS:  It is not over.  It continues to destroy a part of our planet, basically, part of our habitat, our American habitat!  And everybody just sits and watches television every night, and say, oh, well, that‘s interesting.

Later, Matthews spun a wild, completely illogical conspiracy theory as to why the leak has not been fixed yet.  Matthews’ complete lack of a grip on reality continued to befuddle his guests, who patiently tried to explain to Chris that a mile deep in the ocean is an impossible environment.  (more on this in a future post)

MATTHEWS: I have a hunch that the reason they don‘t want to fix this mess down there is because they would admit who did it if they fix it. Nobody is down—if this was a nuclear bomb ready to go off, we would be down there.  I‘m so—I don‘t even want to talk about it.  I get so mad at this oil company!  Why aren‘t they fixing it, first of all?

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN, PROPUBLICA:  Well, I think they‘re doing the best they can, honestly.  I mean, drilling at the bottom and operating at the bottom of the ocean or 5,000 feet down maximizes the—the technological capabilities of the oil industry.  It‘s been likened to space exploration.  And I  think it‘s quite similar.  So, at this point, they—they may want to hide blame, but at this point I don‘t think there‘s much motivation not to fix the problem, if they know how to do that.

MATTHEWS:  Really?  You know, I have a suspicion—I will go back to it again—I don‘t think they‘re doing their best.  I don‘t think there‘s—the government is doing its best.  Why doesn‘t the president go in there and nationalize that industry and get the job done for the people?

KATE SHEPPARD, “MOTHER JONES”:  Well…

MATTHEWS:  There‘s a national interest in this, not just a BP interest.  We‘re letting BP fix a national problem.

In fact, after Lustgarten and Sheppard, who are incidentally both completely AGAINST offshore drilling, tried to talk reality to Chris, he burst out:

MATTHEWS: You‘re very compliant here for environmental watch dogs, Kate.  I don‘t understand you guys!  You seem to understand their predicament.  It‘s a mile down.  Well, they went down a mile to get the oil.

A few nights later, Chris was still frothing, going even farther in condemning the company than Salon’s Joan Walsh was willing to go, as she conceded she thought that everyone, including the company, was doing their best to contain the oil leak.

MATTHEWS:  What do you think we should do?  The CEO—who else should go to jail?  The board of directors?  The management?  Who? Somebody decided not to follow the regular procedure.  It‘s management. I‘m tired of hearing technology being blamed.  Management presides over the use of technology.  Everything that‘s ever gone wrong in this industry has gone wrong before, and they have set up protocols to deal with it.  They didn‘t follow the protocols.  They didn‘t follow the management procedures.  That‘s what happens when things go wrong.  This idea this is the first time this has ever happened is crazy. This happens around the world.  Joan, this is a political problem for the president.  I don‘t like his laissez-faire attitude for this.  I don‘t like him stepping back and letting the heat go on the oil company when the damage is done on us, not the oil company.

Later, Matthews went on another tirade to Walsh, which could be construed as another recommendation for a death sentence to BP execs– except it is blatantly obvious that Matthews is too stupid to know that humans have never operated at more than 2,000 feet down, much less 5,000.

MATTHEWS:  I‘d like to take those CEOs and put them down there a mile and make them stay down there until the problem‘s fixed. I know that sounds a bit extreme.  But nothing seems to be getting done here.  They‘re sitting at home chomping on their steaks and  their profits.  And this is still getting worse.  And it‘s getting worse and worse.

Matthews has been thoroughly radicalized since the election of Obama, first with the Wall Street meltdown, and now his apocalyptic vision of an oil well that is about to ruin the East Coast forever.  Here is his real point:

MATTHEWS:  It is maddening that our government is—everybody says, capitalism is great. Unbridled free enterprise is great.  Look at it.

Sure, Chris, socialist countries never have environmental disasters…

So much has been said and written about Barack Obama that, barring some shattering revelation, very little remains to be rehearsed. As columnist Barry Rubin bemoaned, “I don’t want to keep writing every day about the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy. There are many other topics I’d prefer, but the problem is that they keep doing things.” I could not agree more, and not  concerning the Middle East alone. Yet the issues continuing to swirl about the president need to be revisited, not only because Obama is arguably the most polarizing figure of our times, but because he is also the most potentially catastrophic.

This statement will be regarded by many as rhetorical overkill, but I would contend that the election of Obama to the most powerful office in the world is  quite possibly the most significant political—and dangerous—event of recent times. By being proactive and making informed decisions, he has the ability to create a slightly safer world. By misreading the historical text, making bad  choices, engaging half-heartedly in certain conflicts (Afghanistan, Iraq), coming down on the wrong side of another (Israeli/Palestinian), and flinching before  yet another challenge of far greater urgency (Iran), he invites retribution. This latter direction is plainly the one he has taken. As such I believe that intense concentration on the man and his compliant administration, and its public reiteration, is both warranted and necessary.

Indeed, the presidential dilemma we are facing is complex and far-ranging. Leaving aside the ongoing “birther” controversy focusing on the vexed issue of the president’s legitimacy, the “Obama problem” really has to do with the conundrum of his political identity. Is he a bone-stock socialist or a far-left radical determined to impose a neo-Marxist regime upon republican America,  or merely a “person of advanced views and reactionary feeling,” as Theodore Dalrymple says of Virginia Woolf? Perhaps, as Jonah Goldberg suggests, coining a phrase, he is a “neo-socialist” who believes “in the power of government to extend its scope and grasp far deeper into society”? Is Obama a closet Islamist, as some have alleged? Is he a media artifact, the digital remastering of an epic hero enacting an ancient fantasy of salvation? Is he a volatile prevaricator, saying one thing, then saying another, making solemn promises and regularly breaking them, whose erratic behavior must leave us bewildered before an ever-widening credibility gap? Or is he a university-educated postmodernist for whom the concept of truth has been relativized beyond recognition? Is he just a political rookie whose lack of executive experience shows up alarmingly in a capricious and anemic foreign policy? An old KGB hand like Vladimir Putin must look at him and think, “What a patsy.” Ditto Hugo Chavez, King Abdullah, Bashir Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Castros and a host of other shrewd manipulators and world-wise autocrats.

Who really knows? Perhaps, as Pajamas Media founder Roger Simon proposes, he is frankly deranged, meriting the title of President Weirdo? Children’s author Sarah Durand concurs, diagnosing Obama as suffering from liberalomania,  archly defined as a “degenerative form of dementia” evidenced in his highly skilled capacity as a blame gamer, his extreme narcissism and his delusions of grandeur. Or is he merely an updated version of tall-tale artist and windy opportunist Christy Mahon in John Millington Synge’s comic drama The Playboy of the Western World, “the laughing joke of every woman [read: person] where four baronies meet”—the man who flies Air Force One to dinner, practices his golf swing while a national crisis is unfolding, and throws Budweiser-like parties in the White house, as if to “keep the good times going”? Or is he none of these but, quite the opposite, the “sort of god” whom Newsweek’s Evan Thomas worships, “The One” venerated by Oprah, Louis Farrakhan’s “Messiah”? Who? What? Searching for Obama is like mining for unobtanium.

Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri is troubled by Obama’s lack of identifiable character. Commenting on Obama’s casting himself as a bridge between America and the Islamic world (Al- Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009), Taheri notes that “Obama appeared unsure of his own identity and confused about the role that America should play in global politics. And that is bad news for those who believe that the United States should use its moral, economic and political clout in support of democratic forces throughout the world.” Obama himself admitted in The Audacity of Hope, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Pretty damaging, this confession. And when it comes to Obama’s famous “hope,” among the most antiquated of imaginable pieties whether audacious or sentimental, American poet C.J. Sage has it about right: “Solve for this: where x is hope/and y is your future, what is surely finite?” Something worth keeping in mind when listening to a political mesmerist.

The question remains open. Who is this guy? And what does so enigmatic a figure augur for the United States and, indeed, for the future of us all? No matter what hypothesis or conviction one espouses concerning his definitive DNA, it seems fair to say that a shadow of the clandestine—or if one prefers, the inscrutable—envelops this president.

Even Obama’s most avid supporters, if they are honest, must allow that, compared to his POTUS predecessors, unambiguously little is known about his antecedents or, for example, the salient facts of his academic career—many of his records are still under seal, his college and university transcripts have not been released and, broadly speaking, his significant documentation is rather flimsy. There is not much of a paper trail here; for that matter, there is scarcely a Hansel-and-Gretel bread crumb trail. How such a man could be elected to the presidency boasting a curriculum vitae with more blank pages in it than a Danielewski novel remains a riddle for the sphinx. Nor should it surprise us that it is precisely a blank page, like the blank screen Obama mentions, that solicits conjecture or projection, much of it skeptical or unfavorable.

In any event, there can be no doubt that the dossier is scanty and that this is a truly amazing deficiency. We simply do not have a clear portrait or a crisply factual biography of the president. But what we do know about his close affiliates—America-and-Jew bashing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, hysterical and racially divisive Cornel West, unrepentant Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, unscrupulous entrepreneur Tony Rezko—is profoundly unsettling. To adapt Obama’s ringing slogan, borrowed or plagiarized from African-American poet June Jordan, are they the ones we’ve been waiting for? But on the whole, the asymmetric relation between what we know and what we don’t know must distress any rational person curious about so influential an actor on the current political scene.

That Louis Farrakhan, like millions of others, feels that Obama was “selected” for our times should give us further pause. On the contrary, it may not be out of place to suggest that we are now afflicted with the worst possible president at the worst possible time, with Iran darting toward the nuclear finish line, the Palestinians as intransigent as ever, the Russians moving back into the Caucasus region, negotiating with Venezuela and solidifying ties with Iran, Syria and Turkey, terrorism (oops—“man-made disasters”) on the rise and U.S. citizens increasingly at the mercy of the jihadists, China holding massive quantities of American Treasury notes, Obama considering ruinous cap-and-trade legislation at a time when the AGW consensus is collapsing, the American debt estimated to hit 100% of GDP in 2011 and its unfunded entitlement liabilities totaling over $US 100 trillion, leading to the prospect of monetary collapse. None of these critical issues have been substantially addressed by the president, except insofar as his actions in some cases, lack of action in others, have only exacerbated them. The collateral fact that we really have no valid and comprehensive notion of who exactly is leading us at this crucial historical juncture boggles the mind.

It should be added, however, that we do know something about the ideas which govern his policies: the redistribution of wealth, the expansion of state control at the expense of the private sector, extensive regulation of more and more aspects of quotidian life, bureaucratic bloat, a paternal administration accompanied by the leveling of individual initiative to a lowest common denominator—all very old doctrines gussied up with a defensive terminology like “social justice,” “progressivism,” “equality of outcome,” “only the people will save the people”—which have been tried before and failed spectacularly. The best that can be said of Obama is that, in the realm of political theory, he does not believe in granny dumping, though the dogmas and paradigms he embraces should long ago have been put out of their misery.

We might have twigged by now. Each new measure he introduces or intends to introduce is a camel’s nose presaging future debilities. But the president’s youthful vigor, toggle-switch charm and exotic presence seem to apply a veneer of novelty to ideological obsolescence. He is like the word “proverbial” which we insert into a tired simile in order to avoid the skank of platitude, as in “smart as the proverbial whip” or “dumb as the proverbial ox.” America is saddled with a proverbial president, a man whose principal function is to renovate clichès and make them palatable.

This appears to be as far as we can go for now, with more to come to a political theater near us. One thing, however, seems undeniable: so far, not so good.

There’s a school of thought among conservatives and libertarians that liberals knowingly seed and fertilize phony crises in order to cultivate even more big government. While I don’t wholly discount that point of view, I think the sky-is-falling mentality that permeates the Obama administration’s approach to environmental issues is more the result of living within the liberal echo chamber for so long.

Environmentalists and their Democrat allies spent eight years screaming that the Bush administration and corporate America were destroying the environment and putting our lives at risk. Having been handed the keys of state, Obama naturally embraces those voices that offer “solutions” to a problem that never actually existed. Democrats being Democrats, those solutions naturally involve benevolent government intervention.

It’s a chicken and egg argument in any case. Does the liberal desire for socialism consciously create phony problems, or does it merely exploit crackpot ideas that fit in with the program? Either way, this administration hasn’t yet met an environmental “crisis” it isn’t willing to address by rolling up its sleeves and getting down to the dirty work of drawing up more rules that will protect the ignorant masses who have been exploited by big businesses for so long. The latest example of this phenomenon is a report from the President’s Cancer Panel which attributes cancer to the supposed poisoning of America. Entitled “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” the report was prepared by a couple of academics: LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., M.D. of the Howard University College of Medicine and Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D. of the University of Texas. A couple of paragraphs from the letter that accompanies the report, signed by Leffall and Kripke, gives you the flavor:

“The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), is still found in many consumer products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA and several diseases, including various cancers.

Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer. However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program. The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

When somebody trots out bisphenol A as their showpiece problem, what follows isn’t going to be pretty. The evidence linking BPA to adverse health effects of any kind is remarkably weak, much less to cancer. But this is a chemophobic administration and Leffall and Kripke dutifully deliver a report that raises chemophobia to new heights. The report was so hysterical and full of unsubstantiated conjecture that even the American Cancer Society rolled their eyes. Consider this from a New York Times’ piece that was surprisingly critical of the Cancer Panel’s report:

“Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist from the cancer society, said in an online statement that the report was “unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of cancer,” and had presented an unproven theory — that environmentally caused cases are grossly underestimated — as if it were a fact.”

Leffall and Kripke’s underlying assumption – that the 80,000 chemicals in use in America are “unregulated or virtually unregulated” – is utter nonsense. Every chemical is evaluated by the EPA as part of the Agency’s obligations under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in order to determine if the chemical presents a possible threat to the environment or human health. If the Agency determines that there is a potential problem, it is charged with regulating said chemical appropriately. Further, the vast majority of those 80,000 chemicals are used in small quantities and could not therefore effect the environment on a macroscopic scale in any case. The EPA goes beyond the requirements of TSCA when it comes to the 3,000 or so chemicals that are used in large quantities. The Agency has gathered and continues to gather even more information on the health and safety effects under its “High Production Volume” chemicals program.

Beyond that, we have EPA rules covering chemical discharges to the air, to surface water, to ground water and in the soil. We’ve got OSHA, NIOSH and the American Conference of Governmental and Industrial Hygienists, all of whom spend a great deal of time looking at the effects of chemicals on human health and environment. Rather than proposing new studies, new restrictions and new regulations, Leffall and Kripke would do better to propose a study that would study the huge pile of studies we already have. That would serve the dual purposes of keeping academics happily engaged in a pointless task, and allowing the rest of us could to avoid further benevolence from Big Brother.

We haven’t even gotten to cap and trade yet and already Obama’s EPA is working up the most restrictive air quality standards in history, creating new ways to regulate vast swaths of oceans, pushing for sweeping new stormwater regulations and now this. A rational president would take one look at the President’s Cancer Report and quietly deposit it in the circular file. But Barack Obama? This kind of hysterical alarmism is just the kind of excuse this president needs to regulate, well – everything.

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I put this question to my investor friend, whom I’ll call Angel Ware, about the situation in Europe:

Any insights into the ramifications of the Greek crisis?

Here is his answer:

“Well, it depends. The first question is whether or not the EU (i.e.   Germany) will successfully be able to bail out the Greeks. There are  some significant forces conspiring to screw this up. 1. The Greek people  and their massive sense of entitlement. Even the threat of an austerity program has caused deadly riots and crippling strikes (including the  internal revenue department going on strike). 2. The German people and their sense of fairness. The retirement age in Greece (as subsidized by  the government) is 54. The retirement age in Germany is 67. You can imagine that bailing out the Greeks, so that they can preserve their retirement plan is not something that sits well with the German people. So, the EU & the IMF have temporarily stopped the bleeding, but will they be able to save Greece? Most people seem to be betting against that. Given that the Republicans have made major hay railing against the contagion stopping bailouts in the US (despite the fact that most were initiated by a Republican president), it’s hard to imagine that any politician will be able to sell contagion stopping bailouts of foreign countries.

The problem with Greece failing isn’t Greece (they are actually a very small economy). The problem is, as I alluded to above, contagion. It  turns out that Greece is hardly the only socialist country in Europe who has been funding massive social programs via massive debt. Specifically, if the bond market learns that the EU does not have the political will to bail out tiny Greece, then it follows that the EU will not have the political will to bail out the larger Countries (Spain being the scariest). As a result, the world may stop buying Spanish bonds. If the Spanish can’t sell massive amounts of new debt, they too will default. If Spain defaults, it’s virtually guaranteed that Portugal, Italy, and Ireland will default in short order. If that happens, all of these countries are the primary lenders to Eastern Europe, so look for a rash of defaults there too. If that happens, the UK is in deep trouble. If that happens, the US may be in serious trouble — if you thought the Lehman failure sucked, just wait for the Barclay’s and the Royal Bank of Scotland to fail as a result of the UK failing.

Now, the good news is that there is plenty of time between here and there for governments to get their acts together and keep the game alive (the game being that people buy bonds from countries with bad balance sheets due to the implication that they will be bailed out by larger governments with bad, but larger and better balance sheets). However, it could get considerably uglier. The other thing to keep in mind is that the last time that large European countries defaulted and couldn’t pay for their social programs, Hitler rose to power and we had WWII.”

Well, there’s a happy thought. It may turn out that the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century is that people failed to learn the lessons of the 20th. But then what else is new?

Critics of my recent Sarah Palin post miss my point. My point is not that Sarah Palin should have refrained from endorsing California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina. My point, instead, is that Palin’s endorsement of Fiorina confirms that she (Palin) is not all that conservative.

Fiorina, however, may well be a great conservative; I don’t know. I’m undecided in the California Senate race, though decidedly against the more liberal and dovish Tom Campbell.

Moreover, as some commenters have observed, prudential political concerns may well have shaped Palin’s endorsement. She might view DeVore as a political loser and Fiorina as the only viable candidate able to unseat the far-left incumbent senator, Barbara Boxer, in November.

So I certainly can understand why Palin has endorsed Fiorina. Again, my argument is not with Fiorina; it is with Palin. People like FrumForum’s Tim Mak blithely assume that Palin is a conservative. However, Palin’s public-policy pronouncements, and her record as governor of Alaska, show that’s not yet really the case.

In my post, I cited specific positions that Palin has taken, a specific high-profile senate candidate whom she has endorsed, and specific public utterances of hers to lay bare the myth that Palin is a political conservative.

For example, I noted, Palin has heartily endorsed John McCain, even though McCain has taken very liberal positions on taxes, amnesty, free speech, and the defense budget—and even though a more conservative candidate, former Arizona congressman J.D. Hayworth, is running against McCain for the GOP senate nomination.

What’s more, Palin has appropriated left-wing populist rhetoric to bash so-called predatory lenders and oil companies. She has championed “windfall profits” taxes and more money for the education bureaucracy. Her interest in military and defense issues doesn’t appear to be very deep or profound.

Palin’s problem, I think, is that unlike say, Ronald Reagan, she’s not a philosophically grounded conservative. She’s not well read and doesn’t appear to have thought very deeply about the great and pressing issues of our time.

This is a problem because unless a politician is philosophically grounded in conservative political thought, he is likely to move or “grow” leftward while in office. The political and cultural zeitgeist, after all, leans in a decidedly strong left-wing direction.

I say all this with regret, because at one time I was Sarah Palin’s greatest fan and strongest advocate. I criticize her now only because Sarah Palin has it within her the ability to change and to become a more serious-minded and credible political leader. I for one am rooting for her: Because America needs the Sarah Palin that can be, not the Sarah Palin that now is.

John R. Guardiano is a writer and analyst in Arlington, Virginia. You can follow him on Twitter: @Guardian0

State Senator Leland Yee, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, wants to bar California from adopting any new material from curriculum changes in Texas, which he and other critics view as right-wing revisionism. Though much publicized, the charge fails to stand up, but some textbooks do need correction. Those would be California textbooks, and this is not a new problem.

“They’re all horrors, and there is no reason for them.” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that in 1988 about California’s watered-down texts. Honig, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, duly invited scholar Diane Ravitch to revise California’s history curriculum, which had been tasked to instill pride in accredited victim groups.

“Telling publishers that their books must instill pride only guarantees a phony version of feel-good history,” Ravitch wrote. “Publishers, as a result, bend over backward to be positive, whether writing about the genocidal reign of Mao Tse-tung (presumably to avoid offending his admirers) or the unequal treatment of women in Islamic societies (to avoid offending Muslims).”

Texts should be accurate, Ravitch wrote, “but to impose contemporary political requirements on how the events are portrayed only ensures that the history we teach our students is inaccurate and dishonest.”  In California, it certainly has been that.

The textbook An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600 showed Sikh founder Guru Nanak wearing a crown instead of a turban, and a beard that was trimmed instead of long, as alert Sikhs pointed out. At the time, the California Department of Education had no mechanism for ensuring that textbooks were “factually accurate.”  Little wonder that errors became commonplace.

“Studies have found hundreds of errors in California textbooks,” says the website of the Textbook Trust, a watchdog group. The mistakes include geography, such as the notion that California’s southern border is the Rio Grande. It isn’t, and that river ventures nowhere near the Golden State, whose textbooks also fail to get math right.

A second-grade math text used in 79 schools in California’s capital city of Sacramento contends that five times three equals five. The book, fully approved by the state, is part of a series published by MacMillan/McGraw-Hill and used through the sixth grade. In the nearby Folsom Cordova district teachers have students hunting for errors as part of a learning exercise. The eager fourth-grade students documented 90 errors in the math series, for which the district paid $1.9 million.

So the kids shape up as smarter than the publisher’s fact-checkers and anyone in what the Sacramento Bee calls the “labyrinthian process” of approving the books for the classroom. So do the teachers who are correcting the errors with red pen.  Many other state-approved California textbooks could be marked up.

Meanwhile, the “Texas Curriculum Massacre,” (Newsweek ) that so disturbed Sen. Yee and other liberals, is overblown. As David Upton, assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, noted, this may not be the best curriculum, but “no one has pointed to a particular significant error of fact.” And contrary to accusations, Upton writes, “the curriculum is replete with specific references to Jefferson, religious freedom, the civil rights movement, and the achievements and struggles of women and minorities.”

These will never be enough to assuage critics on the left, argues Amity Shlaes, of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.  “Whatever lines it inserts about church, state, hip-hop or the Alamo,” writes Shlaes, “the board will not restore true balance. It will merely manage to make the curriculum a little less skewed to the left.” In a more general way, she adds, “the left also hijacked American culture” so the Texas social studies issue makes sense as a “small check on a larger problem.”

Yet another problem lurks in the background, the government education system itself, an unreformable collective farm of ignorance and mediocrity. This system encourages mass purchase of textbooks, with large states like Texas and California setting the pace. The books may be politically correct, and instill pride in Maoists and Muslims, but that is not the same as accurate. That is why Guru Nanak gets a crown instead of a turban, the Rio Grande gets misplaced, and five times three equals five. Call it the stupidity inherent in the system.

Arizona lawmakers, led by Senator Russell Pearce, have once again shown courage and boldness in their efforts to protect their citizens from the brutal consequences of an open border.  Their latest measure is so tough and effective against illegal immigration that, if it is upheld in the courts, it could be the beginning of the end of massive illegal immigration in this country.  Where Washington lacked the will to enforce the immigration laws of the country, Arizona may have come up with the means by which local communities will have the tools to do the job themselves.  And there is no question; they do have the will.

So it is no surprise that La Raza and the open-border crowd in Washington are up in arms, demanding their President pass a “comprehensive immigration” bill this year.  It is their last hope.  Americans are outraged at the failure of the federal government to do its job—and state and local governments have stepped in where the feds have feared to go.   Arizona has raised the standard for laws against illegal immigrants—they have made it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally.  They no longer need Washington to solve this problem.

President Obama had the audacity to call Arizona legislators “irresponsible” for passing the law, claiming it will lead to racial profiling.  What about the massive invasion along our border that exposes Americans to ever-increasing levels of violence, including murder and kidnapping?  What about their civil rights?  Not so much as a footnote for them.

Their first goal is to give all illegals amnesty so none of those restrictive state and local laws against illegal immigrants apply anymore—they will have been made legal. But there is also a second aspect to their efforts.  It is to open our country to even more foreign workers—an unlimited supply to come to this country and compete with Americans for American jobs.

The latest version of “comprehensive immigration reform” that Obama and the Democrats hope to shove down our throats this summer is the one proposed by Congressman Luis Gutierrez.  Even its name is a lie–“Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act.”  What it does is put even more Americans out of work.  Gutierrez has created a bill that takes great care of Mexican and other foreigner workers at the expense of Americans.  His bill would grant amnesty to millions of future illegal immigrants after giving the current illegal aliens amnesty. It also creates a special visa to “prevent unauthorized immigration” by giving extra visas to the countries that are sending the illegal aliens here.

Lindsay Graham and Chuck Schumer have indicated that they will introduce their own immigration bill soon.  Though they have not released the text, they’ve indicated that their bill will also increase legal immigration.

It is not just Democrats and RINOs who push this line.

In an op-ed for the Mercury News titled “Amnesty isn’t the problem, it’s our immigration limits,” Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that the only reason that the amnesty of 1986 failed to stop illegal immigration is that “the flow of illegal immigrants continued because legal immigration opportunities were not expanded.”

A lot of well-meaning Americans who are sympathetic to people who want to come to this country in search for a better life and who follow the rules are tempted to fall for this trap.

What they don’t know, and what open border fanatics try to hide, is that America is letting in more legal immigrants than ever before.  Currently one out of every six workers in the country is foreign born.

The Department of Homeland Security recently released its legal immigration figures for Fiscal Year 2009 (October 2008 through September 2009). During this period, over five million people lost their jobs. Amazingly, we increased the number of green cards from 2008 to a staggering level of 1,130,818, over 800,000 of whom can compete against American workers.  Outside of the 1986 amnesty, which led to millions of illegal aliens taking green cards, this is the second highest number of green cards we’ve issued since 1914.

While a few Republicans are talking about the problems of illegal immigration, not one politician in Washington has the guts to stand up for the American worker and say that we need to stop importing foreign workers until Americans get back on their feet.

We cannot let the politicians tell us we have a choice between importing foreign workers or being swamped with illegal aliens.   Instead we have a choice between standing up for the American worker or betraying them for the business and ethnic lobbies.  Any politician who claims to side with the former needs to call for securing our borders, cracking down on employers on illegal aliens, and instituting a moratorium on foreign workers.

Bay Buchanan is a conservative activist, author, and pundit. She served as US treasurer in the Reagan Administration and then as a senior adviser to Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, and Mitt Romney. She is currently president of the American Cause and chairman of Team America Pac.

Islam, despite its claims of being eternal, unchanged, and handed down in perfect form from on high, did not come up in a vacuum. It is utterly suffused with the baggage of Muhammad's culture, place, and time -- seventh-century Arabia -- not to mention his personal biases and hangups. All of this baggage is made sacrosanct via Qur'an 33:21, which calls Muhammad a "beautiful pattern of conduct" for believers.

Thus, the obsession with virginity described in "Arab cultures" here is tremendously reinforced and encouraged by several major aspects of Islam: the severity of punishments for sexual crimes, the uneven responsibility conferred on women to protect their and their families' "honor" through veiling and seclusion, and the sanction found in Qur'an 4:34 for attempting to "control" women with violence.

Of course, that doesn't stop the author of this report from avoiding the Islamic issue, and tacking on the usual tu quoque boilerplate, noted below.

"The virginity industry," by Najlaa Abou Mehri and Linda Sills, for BBC Radio 4, April 25:

Young Arab women wait in an upmarket medical clinic for an operation that will not only change their lives, but quite possibly save it. Yet the operation is a matter of choice and not necessity. It costs about 2,000 euros (£1,700) and carries very little risk.

The clinic is not in Dubai or Cairo, but in Paris. And the surgery they are waiting for is to restore their virginity.

Whether in Asia or the Arab world, an unknown number of women face an agonising problem having broken a deep taboo. They've had sex outside marriage and if found out, risk being ostracised by their communities, or even murdered.

Now more and more of them are undergoing surgery to re-connect their hymens and hide any sign of past sexual activity. They want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.

The social pressure is so great that some women have even taken their own lives. [...]

Noor is a trendy professional who works in Damascus. He's fairly representative of young Syrian men in a secular society. But although Noor says he believes in equality for women, underneath the liberal facade lies a deep-rooted conservatism.

"I know girls who went through this restoration and they were caught out on their wedding night by their husbands," he says. "They realised they weren't virgins. Even if society accepts such a thing, I would still refuse to marry her."

Muslim clerics are quick to point out that the virginity issue is not about religion. "We should remember that when people wait for the virgin's blood to be spilled on the sheet, these are all cultural traditions," says Syrian cleric, Sheikh Mohamad Habash. "This is not related to Shariah law."

But killing for adultery (Sahih Bukhari 8.82.816), and demanding four witnesses to "prove" sexual crimes such as rape (Qur'an 24:4) most certainly are related to Sharia.

And now, some hastily tacked-on moral equivalence:

Christian communities in the Middle East are often just as firm in their belief that women should be virgins when they marry.

Arab writer and social commentator, Sana Al Khayat believes the whole issue has much to with the notion of "control"....

But where did that come from?

When President Obama spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo last June, a large portion of his guests were leaders and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The speech was designed to please them more than supporting the reformist movement in Egypt and across the Muslim world.

The Obama administration has hired the first White House Muslim advisor, Dalia Mogahed, who helped with writing Obama’s speech. Mogahed is herself an Islamic ideologue who supports Islamic Sharia and denies any connection between radical Islam and terrorism. Mogahed, who was born in Egypt, has also been a firm defender of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Both of these US groups are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As an American of Egyptian origin myself, I can tell who is a reformist and who is a radical Muslim sympathizer, and I do not think that Ms. Mogahed’s views are in any way supportive of a reformation in Islam or of its concept of jihad. To the contrary, she denies the existence of any problem with Islamic ideology and she acts in total harmony with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. Her excuses are the same old excuses we Egyptians learned day in and day out in defense of Islamic jihad and in blaming others for misunderstanding of Islam. Her answers are always given with total confidence and conviction, as she tells her audience that any violent actions by Muslims have nothing to do with Islam. Never mind that Islamic mosques, education, art and songs all glorify jihad as a holy war for the sake of Allah.

Mogahed brings nothing new to Islamic propaganda but she certainly sounds interesting to Americans who are unfamiliar with this same old Islamic propaganda and who find it hard to question a religion. The truth about Mogahed is that she combines the good old Muslim sheikhs rhetoric with a better presentation that Americans can understand. Sheikhs never take any kind of criticism of Islam and they ridicule those who question Islam with statements like: “Who are you to speak for Islam? Leave the analysis to the experts on Islam.” Mogahed’s logic is very similar and, coincidentally, her book is entitled: “Who Speaks for Islam.” It is a meaningless title showing statistics that are designed to show that Muslims are different and are not all terrorists, which is no news.

Of course among Muslims there are good and bad people, like in any other group. What Mohahed refuses to admit is that reputable critics of Islam have nothing against Muslim people, but they correctly decipher that the problem stems from the ideology of Islam and its scriptures and commandments. What Mogahed refuses to discuss are the actual laws of Sharia, the history of jihad, the ideology and education that produced 9/11, Islamic imperialism, oppression of human rights, women and minorities. Her answers are usually simplistic, such as the argument that Sharia cannot be bad to women because the majority of Muslim women allegedly support Sharia? The bottom line of Mogahed’s propaganda is the same old complaint: that Islam is misunderstood and that Muslim people’s anger and violence is triggered by politics and not by religion. The problem with the West is all a misunderstanding, she argues, and with some education and sensitivity training the West will accept Islam as a religion of peace. Her position in the White House has given her a powerful opportunity to enhance the standing of radical Islamist groups in the eyes of our government instead of the reformists and anti-Sharia Mulsims.

I have recently heard a former Muslim critic of Islam state that he is no longer confident that the US government will protect his civil rights as long as there are people in our government such as Mogahed and others.

The empowerment of Radical Islam under the Obama administration has also emboldened the Muslim Student Association (MSA), which is merely an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood. The MSA has recently accelerated their efforts to silence any speakers who criticize jihad, Sharia or Radical Islam. Anti-Semitism is on the rise on our college campus, resulting in total disregard for freedom of speech aiming and the silencing of any pro-Israel speakers. This is achieved through constant unruly disruptions, such as what happened to the Ambassador of Israel, Michael Oren, at UC Irvine last February. Last October, students opposed to my views went as far as setting a fire in a bathroom next to the hall I was supposed to give my presentation in at Boston University. As a result, my lecture was cancelled.

To show more support to the Muslim brotherhood, last January, Secretary of State Clinton quietly signed an order admitting entry to the US to the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan. The controversial Ramadan was formerly banned from entering the US by the previous administration. Among those who welcomed Ramada and participated in his first public appearance in the US was none other than Dalia Mogahed.

While the Obama administration went out of its way to show goodwill to radical Muslim groups, it has consistently ignored extending any support to the reform movements across the Middle East and that includes the student reform movement in Iran. The message from the US to reformists and pro-democracy and peace groups in the Middle East is not encouraging.

I am in contact with some Muslim reformists in Egypt who believe that the Muslim Brotherhood now has a friend in the White House. Totalitarian radical leaders such as Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, calls Obama ‘our son’ and urges support for Obama as a wise leader who is of Muslim descent. I guess it is nice to have the support of radicals and dictators in the Middle East, which might temporarily save us from another 9/11, but at what cost could that be? They will never abandon their jihadist aspirations. Radical Islamists will not accept anything less than for the US to abandon Israel and they now believe that Obama will do nothing if Israel is attacked. Because of this change in US policy, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa (from Egypt), has recently suggested improving relations with Iran as a new strategy in the region. This confirms that American power in the region is diminishing. America’s perceived weakness in the region brought by Obama will have serious and lasting consequences.

The Mulsim Brotherhood in Egypt has been empowered. This does not look good for Egypt’s future, especially at a time when Mubarak’s health is deteriorating. Egypt could fall to the Muslim Brotherhood rule, which will cement radical Islam in the whole region and which will empower Iran and radical Islam for generations to come.

President Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah, which paved the way for the radical Islamist regime to take over. Obama is falling in the same footsteps of appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood and empowering it to take over Egypt.

The next US administration might find it very hard to please the Muslim world after the pro-Islamic Obama policies. How can an American Republican President be viewed in the future by the Muslim world when he does not bow to the Saudi King like Obama? If he or she has a policy with America’s best interests being a number one priority, will he or she be called Hitler by Islamists and by our media? Are we going to cheer when Islamists throw their shoes at our future American President simply for not supporting radical Islam? Will Western media call those U.S. leaders who want to protect America racists and bigots for not accepting the Muslim Brotherhood and welcoming them to shape policy in the White House? In terms of what Obama is doing today, that is something real to think about.

An update on this story. "Yemen: Islamic lawmaker decries child marriage ban as part of 'Western agenda'," by Alexandra Sandels for the Los Angeles Times, April 18:

The recent death of 13-year old Yemeni child bride Elham Assi, who reportedly bled to death last week after being tied down and forced to have sex with her 23-year-old husband, has sparked outrage among rights activists in Yemen.

They are now stepping up their lobbying efforts to push for the implementation of a child marriage ban.

But that may prove a daunting challenge since fierce opposition against a ban on child brides still runs high among some religious leaders and conservatives.

Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party Islaah and the imam of the Al-Rahman mosque in the Yemeni capital of Sana, is one of those who staunchly opposes a legal ban on child marriage.

Although he emphasizes that a woman should not get married before she is physically and mentally ready and that she herself needs to accept the marriage, he believes a law that prohibits child marriage constitutes a rights violation.

"I am against the child marriage law because it restrains the freedom of others. When a certain age [for marriage] is set, it violates the rights of others. For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex. ... This is a violation of his rights," Sheik Hamzi told The Times in an interview at his Sana home last week. [...]

From this point on in the article, he's "Hazmi."

But Hazmi dismisses claims by rights groups that there is a problem with child marriages in his country. He said the child-bride cases that have been reported in the media were merely isolated incidents.

"Just ask my mother and sisters how many times they've found a little girl getting married at the marriages they've attended," he said. "Not many."

The country's Ministry of Social Affairs, on the contrary, says child marriages are common in Yemen. According to a 2009 report by the ministry, a quarter of all females in Yemen marry before the age of 15.

To Hazmi, however, women's- and children's-rights activists are putting a few isolated cases of child marriage in the spotlight to rally support for the law.

"There is no problem here with child marriage," he said. "These cases of young girls getting married are exceptions. These organizations that are promoting for this law couldn't find any examples except for those of Nujoud and Elham."

Hazmi said the groups that are campaigning for the law were harmful to the country, trying to promote a "Western agenda" in Yemen.

"It's all a Western agenda they are following," he said. "They get paid from the West to make us to believe in Western culture. This is very bad because our culture is different here."

The best that could happen, in his opinion, is that the government shuts them down.

"No one wants to marry these women's-rights activists anyway," he said. "They're just depressed that they are not married and jealous."

Would he allow his own young daughters to be married?

"No," he says and looks at the two as they're scurrying around in the room. "At this age, I don't want them married."

The reporter would do well to check back in a year, and again in five.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and the author of 25 books, including best-selling, prize-winning novels and influential works on strategy. He is also an opinion columnist for the New York Post and a regular contributor to Armchair General Magazine. A popular media guest, he became Fox News’ first strategic analyst in 2009. He is the author of the new book, Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization.

FP: Ralph Peters, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about your new book.

Peters: Thanks Jamie.

My new book focuses on cutting through the ideological nonsense perverting our national discussion of war, peace, terrorism and justice.  My fight is to force people to deal with facts, rather than allowing them to make up cozy myths about humanity–or the inhuman creatures we call “terrorists.”  Really, the key to the entire book lies in the introduction, which lays out the terrible price we’re paying for allowing the left to take over our education system and destroy (and virtually eliminate) the teaching of history.  That means we get legislators who vote in an intellectual vacuum, journalists who can’t put the things they witness into context, and voters susceptible to wild lies.  As the book says, those who do not know history will die of myth.  And nowhere in the current yelling contest that passes for a national debate is myth more powerful than in the refusal to accept that Islamist terrorists really do exist and really do believe that they’re doing their god’s will.  So I try to base my judgements and make my cases on historical facts–the sort that are not subject to dispute (except by the left’s myth-makers, of course).

Beyond that, the book’s a world tour of our problems–not merely recounting them, but trying to understand why the problems have emerged and why it’s so difficult for us to combat them.  It may sound self-contradictory, but I’d describe the book as a work of “impassioned rationality.”  And by the way: I don’t toe anybody’s line.  I want to challenge independents and conservatives to think for themselves, too, since we’re so terribly susceptible, as a species, to group-think.  The herd mentality is an even greater enemy than al-Qaeda.  So I’m willing to risk unhappy readers–as long as I can spur them to think for themselves.

FP: Why your subtitle?

Peters: (He said with a laugh) Every non-fiction book has to have a sub-title these days, doesn’t it?  For example, Nancy Pelosi’s forthcoming autobiography, NANCY!  How I Turned a Bad Date With America into an Awful Marriage While Turning Men Into Mice on Capitol Hill…

Seriously, it’s an interesting question, since, in a sense, this book could have been written at any point since the seventh century, when Islam began its endless jihad.  Of course, the details would have been different, but not the overall theme: That you have to fight Islamist fanatics to the death, there’s no alternative.  That said, had the book been published at any time prior to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the sub-title would have been different, it would have been “Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Christian Civilization,” rather than “Western Civilization.”  But the West, overall, is no longer Judeo-Christian, except in heritage.  The USA excepted, we’re a secular civilization, with all the good and ill that brings along.  So that’s one more asymmetry in the current struggle: We fight for values, our enemies fight for faith.

The first third of the book recounts the high points (and low points) of the long military struggle with Islam, as I try to arm the reader with facts to refute the utter nonsense that “Islam’s a religion of peace.”  I document some of the most-important battles and campaigns–exciting to read about, but often grim in their results–over the centuries, looking at Islam’s centuries of military triumphs that almost destroyed our civilization, then the recent centuries in which the tide turned as Islam failed to compete as a civilization.  Those tales from history are fun to read (God knows, the left hates the thought that history might offer interesting stories that teach us something), but they’re also essential to understanding the deep roots of today’s wars.

FP: What is wrong with the U.S. approach toward our enemy? How must we change it?

Peters: We refuse to recognize our enemy or call him by his name (I think, always, of Goethe’s line from Faust, “Wer darf das Kind beim rechten Namen nennen?  “Who dares to call the child by its true name?”).  Recently, President Obama promised a Muslim audience that he’d eliminate any reference to Islamist terrorists or the like from our national security documents.  Good Lord!  It’s as if, in World War II, we decided we couldn’t utter the word “Nazi,” since it might hurt our enemy’s feelings.  Our mortal enemies are jumping up and down, screaming that they’re terrorists in the name of Islam.  Our response?  “Oh, they don’t really mean it…”  Yeah, well, they do mean it.  Not every Muslim is a problem, but some Muslims certainly are.

How can we effectively combat an enemy when we’re even afraid of the enemy’s name?  This is political correctness beyond the bounds of sanity.  So another thing the book does is to dissect the twisted language our government and even our military now uses to avoid acknowledging that fanatical religion is the crucial factor in our current struggles.  It’s astonishing: We have generals who insist that Islam isn’t involved in any of this, and doctrinal manuals that ignore religion.  We refuse to apply common sense: If you could subtract Islam from the problem, you just wouldn’t have al Qaeda or the Taliban.  They’re fighting for other factors, too, of course.  But Islam is the primary motivator, the primary sustainer, and the primary objective.  Pretending otherwise just kills our troops for nothing…although, sadly, both political parties are fine with that, as long as we don’t offend anybody.  (And this is a key point: While the Democrats are the worst offenders, plenty of Republicans in Washington are outright cowards on this issue.)

The book makes it clear that Islam was born by the sword, spread by the sword, and still reverts to the sword when under stress.  And it makes the case using historical facts, not rhetoric.

All that said, I do want to make it perfectly clear: I don’t believe that each and every Muslim spends each and every day dreaming up ways to kill us.  The problem lies among those who find their faith a spur to violence, the fanatics, the true believers who want to return the world to a “pure Islam” that never really existed (Wahhabism is an eighteenth century Bedouin heresy posing as the one true Islam).  But we don’t understand them, either.  For example, the book dissects our idiotic counterinsurgency doctrine–our guidebook for Afghanistan–which not only doesn’t mention Islam, but can’t tell the difference between ideological revolutionaries and religious reactionaries.  In Afghanistan–which is discussed at length–we’re the revolutionaries, the ones trying to bring change.  Our enemies are fighting for traditions, myths and darkness.  We’re muddled, befuddled and failing.

FP: Obama appears to be bullying and abandoning Israel. Meanwhile, we have the horror of a nuclear Iran on our hands, and their first target will be Israel. What must Israel do, now that, it appears, it is alone?

Peters: On a recent Fox broadcast, I made the point that I don’t believe the Obama administration would respond militarily even if Iran popped a nuke on Israel.  The situation’s hateful to me, but this administration will not defend Israel.  Obama is already resigned to the advent of an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability.  The sanctions nonsense is just window dressing, at this point.  So what does that mean?  At some point, Israel will feel compelled to act pre-emptively…but Israel only has the capability to set back, not to destroy, Iran’s nuke program (which is widely dispersed, buried deep and/or located in heavily populated areas).

The Israeli strike will be a bloody mess, the Iranians will respond asymmetrically by closing the Straits of Hormuz and hitting Gulf oil fields and infrastructure, and we’ll be stuck defending Arab autocracies–while avoiding resolute military action against Iran.  At best, the situation would be catastrophic.  Obama’s just hoping it doesn’t happen on his watch–and he’ll do all he can to discourage Israel from defending itself as long as he’s in the White House.  At this point, it’s clear that Obama finds Israel distasteful and that his sympathies lie with the Arabs.  The US now has a president with a Third-World outlook locked in the 1970s campus prejudices of his youth.  But, then, at no time in his past has Obama had a pro-Israel friend I can identify.  Throughout his lifetime, his public associates have been pro-Palestinian.  He is who he is.

FP: Your thoughts on the Obama administration and how it is or isn’t dealing with the terror war and protecting U.S. national security.

Peters: I do give the Obama administration credit for continuing and even expanding the Bush administration’s use of drones and other means to target terrorists on foreign soil.  Obama knows he can’t afford–politically speaking–a major terrorist attack on the US during his presidency.  He’s not protecting America, he’s protecting his career and the historical legacy his acolytes are already engraving in marble.  Beyond that, Obama’s actions across the board amount to a negative for our national security.  He’s a leftwing ideologue who prefers developing-world thugs to our traditional allies.  And he’s a narcissistic fool.  Obama’s most dangerous quality is his unbounded faith in his own charisma.

The next few years will be interesting.

FP: You’re a hardworking writer, every five seconds or so you have some new piece of work out. What’s your next book?

Peters: This one will be very different.  I recently finished another novel, The Officers’ Club, set on an Army post in the early 1980s.  It’s scheduled for publication next January.  It’s R-rated, and it could as readily have been called Lieutenants Behaving Very, Very Badly.  It’s set at a time when the Army was still recovering from Vietnam, our society was still reeling from the excesses of the 1970s, and Reagan had just taken the helm.  That was the battered Army in which I grew up…strait-laced on duty, but wild after hours…  On one level, the novel’s a murder mystery–it begins with the murder of a female lieutenant–but, really, it’s my memorial to a bygone Army, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Today’s military is much, much better (and certainly better-behaved).  But I’ve just never seen a well-written book about “my” Army.  The book will surprise those who know me only through my writing on strategy and security–but, fair warning, the next book after that will be even more surprising.  Writing’s an adventure.  Just like life.  When you become predictable, it’s time to pack it in.

FP: Well, I’m very much looking forward to reading this book for sure!

Ralph Peters, thank you for joining us.

The policy adopted was to favor those from "Francophone" countries. The definition of Francophone countries obviously gave pride of place to France, but also included all those places that had once been French colonies. In the Western hemisphere that meant the Antilles (Guadeloupe, Martinique), French Guiana, and Haiti. In Africa it meant Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa - Gabon, Togo, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (or is it the People's Republic of Congo? I forget which) -- in short, all of the states hacked out of what was formerly French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa.

Language trumped all other considerations. But in the end, what happened is not that Montreal was flooded with French people who had decided to seek their fortune in the New World, but by French people who were unhappy with France. And the main reason French people right now are unhappy with France is the Muslim population, and how it has changed French well-being, French schools and the elaborate system of preparations and competitions needed to get into them at all levels, French employment practices, French everything.

And not too many people had the money, even, to show up from far-away Gabon or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Chad.

So who did show up? It was maghrebins, in the main, from Morocco, from Tunisia, from Algeria, but also people from Lebanon and Syria. Now those from Lebanon, which had once been part of a French mandate, consisted of both Muslims and non-Muslims, chiefly Maronites. The Maronites leave Lebanon for North America for the same reason that some - not many as yet, but some - French leave France: they leave because of what resurgent Islam, and the burgeoning Muslim presence, has done to Lebanon. It is hard to believe that just a half-century ago, Charles Malik was Lebanon's most eminent representative, and that he could wish assurance walk the corridors of power in Beirut as he did those of the U.N. in New York, where he was one of the careful formulators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Muslims find so objectionable. The Maronites and other Christians have seen a steady decline in their power, and the Maronites - speaking the best French of any Lebanese, for the Muslims tend not to study or care about it in the same way - have arrived in French-speaking Quebec only to be horrified by the influx of Muslims, the very people they were fleeing. They left Lebanon just as other Maronites, late in the 19th and early in the 20th centuries, left it because of the Muslim threat, the harbinger of which was the pogrom by Muslims against Maronites in Damascus in 1860.

They, who sent their children to French-language schools, who kept French alive in the Middle East (the ancien regime of the Shah also looked to France, and there were lycees in Teheran under the Shah, who had gone to school at Le Rosey in Switzerland and, like his Shahbanou, knew French extremely well), were chagrined to discover along St. Catherine Street the very Muslims whose mental makeup they understood as the locals did not, or did not yet.

There have been terrorist cells already connected to Montreal. The Arab who tried some years ago to enter the United States through Washington State, but was stopped by a female guard who became suspicious, the one who had been planning a terrorist attack, originated in Montreal. The Arab Muslim who killed nearly a dozen girls - he went by the adopted name of Lepine - because they behaved not as women should behave, in his Muslim view, was a resident of Montreal. And there are other Montreal connections to atrocities planned for North America, and with connections to well-known Arab and Muslim terrorist groups aside from Al Qaeda too.

Now what has happened in Quebec with the new Muslim presence? Have the fears of those who had most reason to know what this Muslim presence would sooner or later mean for their own well-being been proven right, or have they been shown up? You have heard of the attempted machete attack on two students, for their pro-Israel stand, at Carleton University (see here). You know about the successful barring, by maddened Muslims and their useful local idiots, of Israeli and pro-Israel speakers, as happened to Prime Minister Netanyahu at Concordia University. You know about the many aggressive demands of individual Muslims, such as the women who have insisted on wearing the burqa, or turning their backs when reciting so that male students in the class cannot see them, and then been enraged when they were expelled from the class unless they were willing to end their practice.

But you also know of how forthright and firm French Canadians have been. You have read, for example, at this site, about Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who unapologetically banned the niqab.

You can find many stories about Muslims in Canada, in Quebec and outside Quebec, who have run afoul of the laws on terrorism. Here's one.

The main point is that the French speakers of Quebec, out of a desire to shore up the position of French and French speakers in that province, chose to adopt an immigration policy that would make mere knowledge - or in too many cases not even knowledge of, but an imperfect acquaintance with - of French their main criterion. They did not, several decades ago, realize what they were doing, what madness it was to think that Moroccans would fit in better than, say, immigrants from the Abruzzo. They have learned, to their great and permanent sorrow, otherwise.

But now they are showing, these same French-speaking Canadians in the Province of Quebec, that they are not willing to bend to Muslim demands and, indeed, are going to aggressively uphold their own ways, their own social arrangements and understandings. And to judge by the various news stories, they may be better prepared mentally to do so than are the Canadians who live outside of Quebec, and who may not have a keen sense of a particular culture to protect. This is a pity. It is a pity that English Canada should not consist of people who have a deep interest in and desire to assure the cultural continuity of their own, large share of Canada, who have accepted, and even elevated to the status of a state religion, such notions as "Diversity" and "Tolerance," that "diversity" being the predictable kind of one-of-each "diversity" that we see nowadays on the covers of private school and college catalogues - those photographs of smiling yet sober students, or on Benetton ads, where the "diversity" itself is what is being celebrated, though for no particular or articulated reason. And when the spoilsports such as Robert Putnam at Harvard come along and show just what damage to social cohesion is done by "too much diversity," such people are simply ignored, and instead we get assertions of the "everybody knows" variety: Everybody Knows That Diversity Is A Good Thing. Oh no we don't. And we especially don't know, and have no reason to know, judging by the evidence presented all over Western Europe today, that Muslim immigrants integrate in the same way as non-Muslim immigrants. They have quite a different conception of loyalty. Theirs is to the Umma and to Islam. Why should we not simply recognize that, instead of pretending otherwise? And once we have recognized it, we can then discuss and even argue over the likely consequences, and over what we should do once we have sensibly recognized, rather than avoided, reality.

And the observable problem with one particular group of immigrants - Muslims - is not limited to this or that country, but exists everywhere, and perhaps most painfully so in the very countries that are most akin to Canada in their elevation of that Diversity, of that Tolerance, to the status - just like Canada - of state religions. These two countries are Denmark and the Netherlands, and in both the number of people who have become aware of their own imperilment because of the large-scale Muslim presence steadily grows.

Canada has a problem that sometimes gets in the way of Canadians. The problem is that felt need to distinguish themselves from citizens of that Colossus of the South, the United States. In Canadian eyes, if those eyes are those of the Canadian herd (and every country has its local herd), the U.S. is vulgar, it is a rich, stupid, politically troglodytic country. "We Are Not Americans" can sometimes, as a motto, if taken too seriously, lead to all kinds of bad things. And among those bad things is the notion that if Americans are worried about Muslims, all the more reason for us, the reasonable Canadians, not to be upset, not to worry, and to behave as Defenders of the Faith, that faith being Islam. For we must show that we are not at all like those Americans. The same problem can be observed in Oceania, where people in New Zealand like to make clear that "We Are Not Australians" (like Americans with Canadians, seen as "vulgar, rich, stupid, politically troglodytic" etc.).

But Canadians of French descent do not have that problem. They see quite clearly that they are easily distinguishable - linguistically - from the Americans. It is English Canada that worries them, not English-speaking America, which consists only of dollar-bearing tourists and trading partners. A major source of what causes some Canadians to overlook or underestimate the danger from Islam, from those who take Islam seriously, is not present in French Canada. No need to ostentatiously demonstrate how unlike Americans they are; no need to be deliberately skeptical about claims that Islam poses a threat. The French in French Canada know that.

And one of the ways they know it is because they have Maronites and Sephardic Jews, who endured life in Muslim-ruled lands, and lived to tell about it. And recently those Maronites and Sephardic Jews have been joined by some outspoken refugees from France, such as the writer Maurice Dantec. Speaking not only perfect French, but French with the greatly-admired, highly-desired metropolitan accent, the true, le vrai, Dantec - and others who have been arriving from France, some as tourists (who share their observations on Islam in France with the French Canadians they meet), some as immigrants -- may help the learning curve turn upward faster.

The keen self-consciousness about identity that caused French Canadians, for cultural and political reasons, to favor francophone immigrants without carefully distinguishing between those who are Muslim from those who are non-Muslim, is what now may, and very likely will, save them. For they are now not afraid to protect themselves from a threat posed by those who take Islam to heart, that is a hundred or a thousand times greater than any threat once perceived as coming from o'erweening English-speaking Canadians.

The one worry is a recent bill, one that sounds innocent, by which French-speaking immigrants will be encouraged to spread out, to go outside Quebec, to other provinces, to towns where there is an existing community of French-speakers, but where their numbers need to be bolstered if they are not ultimately to be swamped by English. Where might these towns be? Not in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia. They are surely towns in the nearby provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Thus I call this policy, with deliberate mischievously misleading mumpsimus, the policy of "Et In Acadia Ego." But what, in practice, would this settlement policy do? Would not this be to encourage, as government policy, the settlement of Muslim "French-speaking" immigrants in communities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia heretofore innocent of Muslims, and without the immune system that, thanks in part to others - Maronites, Copts, Sephardic Jews, Hindus, French from France - at least is starting to work in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. But that is a new policy, and I'm not sure how it is to be implemented, or with what vigilance it will be monitored. Nor do I know what changes in the favoring-francophone immigration policy are contemplated to accord with what is understood now in Quebec, but was not understood twenty or thirty years ago.

There is a line from the Russian playwright Griboyedov's "Gore ot uma," or "Woe From Wit." In English, it goes roughly like this: "He fell down badly, got up well."

With its immigration policy that inadvertently favored Muslim Maghrebins over immigrants from Italy, Greece, Spain, Latin America, Eastern Europe, French Canada made a colossal error. But now it is recovering. The willingness to ban the niqab or even the hijab, and to do so firmly, without any toleration of nonsense, is a good sign.

Quebec fell down badly, is getting up well.