Victor Davis Hanson: A Weak U.S. Leads Inevitably To Global Chaos

05/27/2015 04:11 PM ET

Victor Davis Hanson

For
a time, reset, concessions and appeasement work to delay wars. But
finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm and face down
enemies. That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite
believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch
back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks
out.

It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to even
imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the
Soviet Union and the United States. But why not try?

Hitler
figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist.
Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially
collaborated with Hitler.

Hitler met no opposition after
militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled
up Czechoslovakia without opposition. Why shouldn't he be stunned in
1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his
invasion of distant Poland?

Six years of war and some 60 million
dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact
that democracies would not quite commit suicide.

By 1979, the
Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget.
Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign
policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater
to America's enemies.

Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in
Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic
terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection
followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam.

Dictators such as the Soviet
Union's Leonid Brezhnev and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini assumed Carter no
longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they
figured the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond
even had he wished to do so.

Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter
in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America's
friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan's simplistic worldview that
free markets were better than communism, that democracy was superior to
dictatorship, and that in the ensuing struggle, the West would win and
the rest would lose.

Foreign media damned Reagan as a warmonger
for beefing up the U.S. defense budget, reassuring America's allies and
going after terrorists with military force. From 1981 to 1983, Reagan
was caricatured even at home as a cowboy — not the statesman later to be
known for restoring U.S. prestige and global stability, and helping to
bring down Soviet imperial communism.

Barack Obama, like Carter,
came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy.
The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.

Troops were
withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge
quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S.
peacekeepers.

A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous
lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama's speech in Cairo
that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from
the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Terms like radical Islam,
jihad and Islamic terror were excised from the official American
vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms. In symbolic
tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle
East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian
monarchs.

The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin's
Russia assumed the Bush administration, not Putin's aggression in
Georgia and threats to Crimea, caused the estrangement between Moscow
and Washington.

Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an
observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq.
Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents,
surrogates and special forces into Iraq, Syria and Yemen, even as it
pressed on to get a bomb. China stepped up its violations of the waters
and airspace of America's traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same
in Eastern and Northern Europe.

By 2015, America's enemies had
created chaos and defined it as the new normal. The next president will
face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to
convince our allies we are recommitted to their security.

Any red
lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China,
Iran and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist
or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions.

Just as
Reagan's return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical
after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared
as dangerously provocative after Obama's recession from the world stage.

The
Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even
more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as
dangerous. Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back
on will seem riskier.

• Hanson is a classicist and historian at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most
recently, of "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and
Modern."

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Articles: Islam and the 'Great Religions'

Islam and the 'Great Religions'

By Sha'i ben-Tekoa

Political
correctness dictates that all religions are of equal worth; that there
are “Three Great Abrahamic Religions,” and “The Arabs are Semites too,
so they can’t be anti-Semites.” All these clichés need to be buried.

While
Christianity and Islam were both offshoots of the Jews and took from
them the concept of having one’s own Holy Writ, their self-definitions
as new faith communities were radically different. The Coine Greek
language narratives appended to the Hebrew Bible purport to be a
continuation of Jewish history. The Catholic Church even defines itself
in Latin as Verus Israel, the True Israel.

But
Muslims make no such claim. On the contrary, the Koran re-wrote many
of the stories in the Hebrew Bible in the spirit of Islam’s doctrine
that Muslims are Allah’s true chosen people. The early Christians left
Jewish Scripture intact; the Muslims did not. Christianity wanted to
hold onto Jewishness to a degree; Muslims dismissed it as a pack of
lies.

Moreover,
in plagiarizing the Jewish Bible instead of adding to it -- which makes
of the Koran a form of copyright infringement or intellectual property
theft -- Muslims claim that the discrepancies between the two versions
are the result of the Jews’ theft of the Koran. And never mind that the
God of Israel bestowed upon the Israelites the Five Books of Moses in
the year 1313 b.c.e. and the Koran dates to the late 7^th and early 8^th
centuries c.e., almost two thousand years later. When a Muslim is
confronted with the contradictory narratives of the same incidents, he
answers that Musa (the Arabic mispronunciation of the Hebrew name Mosheh)
brought the Koran down from Mt. Sinai but the perfidious Jews then
re-wrote it and called it their Torah until Muhammad came along and
restored the original text. In Islam’s moral universe, the Torah is a
stolen, plagiarized version of the Koran (which tracks with the
contemporary charge that the Jews also stole the Promised Land from the
“Palestinians.”)

Likewise,
the cliché that Islam is an Abrahamic religion must go. To Jews,
Abraham was the kindest of men, which fits his vision of the One G-d Who
tested him by asking that he prepare his son for a human sacrifice in
an era when that was normal religious ritual. But in the end, He
commanded him not to go through with it. Abraham’s G-d, unique in the
world, was opposed to human sacrifice.

Versus
the Muslims whose behavior throughout history and certainly in our time
reveals them to be not of the seed of a kind man, for they are masters
of cruelty; head-choppers, mutilators, skyjackers, kidnappers and
rapists. Their Allah smiles on mass murder and no less the “glorious”
sacrifice of oneself, viz. suicide. Totalitarians, they also
license themselves to slay anyone who does not venerate their prophet.
That’s not very kind. See recent events at the Paris office of Charlie
Hebdo and Garland, Texas.

But
most central to Islam’s ransack of Judaism is the claim that the son
Abraham bound for a sacrifice was not Isaac but Ishmael, and that the
Jews also lie about the location of that world historical event. Jews
say it took place on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Muslims say it
happened in Mecca. By making the hajj/pilgrimage to the “real”
site of the test, the Qaaba in the middle of the Grand Mosque, Muslims
bear witness to their belief the Jews are liars.

And as for the third cliché, viz.
the Arabs as Semites too: no, they are Hamites. Yes, Muhammad was an
Arab descended from Ishmael, one of Abraham’s eight biological sons, but
Judaism also makes clear that Ishmael was not his father’s spiritual
heir. Ishmael is even expelled (Genesis 21:9) from his father’s tents
for being a “wild ass of a man” (16:12). His expulsion at age sixteen
or seventeen came about when he jealously mocked his little half-brother
Isaac at the latter’s weaning party -- whose wise and perceptive mother
Sarah, who had watched Ishmael grow up, realized he was capable of
murdering her son.

Furthermore,
Abraham and Sarah were descendants of Shem, son of Noah (whence the
word “Semite”) but Ishmael was not. While many nations hold that a son
inherits his nationality from his father, the Jews do not. For them, it
passes through the mother. Thus because Ishmael’s mother Hagar was an
Egyptian, and Egypt was one of the four sons of Noah’s other son Ham, so
Ishmael was a Hamite.

The
Bible also records (21:21) that Hagar found him an Egyptian wife, which
only compounds the evidence that his offspring were Hamites too.

And who was Ham? Noah’s “problem child” whose transgression was sexual in nature. (Genesis 9)

Indeed,
to this day, sexually speaking, an abyss separates contemporary
Judeo-Christian society from Islamic, and that is most apparent in the
Judeo-Christian insistence on monogamy versus Islam’s polygamy. It is
part of the Western respect for women, versus Islam’s abuse of them.
(Feminists in the West can complain all they want about men, but
compared to the life of women in Islam, they are living in paradise.)

Osama
bin Ladin’s father sired children with fifty-six separate females. Ibn
Saud, the tribal chieftain who founded the Saudi Arabia where he grew
up, produced today’s four thousand princes who monopolize that country’s
wealth and vie among themselves for power. Polygamy famously leads to
rivalry among wives, among mothers fighting for their sons, and among
half-brothers. One could make the case that Islam’s attitudes toward
women are at the root of its many social pathologies and why it does not
belong in America.

American culture also enshrines Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death”; the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia engraved with the Bible’s Hebrew phrase marking the Jubilee Year, “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land.”

By
contrast, Islam is no friend of liberty. It means “submission,” and
when a Muslim prays, he assumes the position of a slave, face to the
floor. There are fifty-six officially Muslim states, most of them
dictatorships and not one is a liberal democracy that any red-blooded
American man or woman would want to live in.

Until Islam reforms itself or is forced to reform, it cannot be regarded as consistent with American values.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com and www.deprogramprogram.com.

Welcome!

Friday, May 29, 2015