Monday, December 21, 2015
From Ian:
Nick Cohen: Shame On The Liberals Who Rationalise Terror
Nick Cohen: Shame On The Liberals Who Rationalise Terror
John Kerry’s liberalism, and the liberalism of millions like him, ignores Chesterton’s warning not to be so open-minded that your brains fall out. Kerry wanted to understand radical Islam and to seek the root causes of its apparently psychopathic violence. Not for him the knee-jerk condemnations of a red-state redneck. When Kerry applied his nuanced and expensively educated mind to the corpses in the magazine office, he discovered that the dead had provoked their own murders. The assassins had, well, if not quite legitimate reasons, then certainly a “rationale” which explained why they were “really angry because of this and that”.WaPo Ed: Iran provokes the world as Obama does nothing
Charlie Hebdo mocked the prophet Muhammad, Islamic State and Boko Haram. Its editor Stéphane Charbonnier (aka Charb), the cartoonists and columnists who wrote for him, and the police officers who died protecting their freedom (and ours) knew the risks and paid the price. They went looking for trouble and we should not be shocked that they found it.
All the rest of us had to do was to moderate our behaviour. If we were careful not to make terrorists “really angry” about “this and that”, we would be safe.
Perhaps I am being too kind to Kerry. But I assume even he must have had one doubt buzzing around his empty head like a dazed bluebottle. An associate of the Islamist gang that pumped bullets into the staff of Charlie Hebdo also took hostages at the Hypercacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes in the 20th arrondissement. There he murdered Philippe Braham, a sales executive, Yohan Cohen, a student, Yoav Hattab, another student, and François-Michel Saada, a pensioner. The dead had provided no “rationale” and created no “particular sense of wrong”. They were ordinary citizens, shopping for food, as we all do.
But when Kerry and those like him looked at their bodies closely perhaps they noticed that appearances deceived. They were not like the rest of us, after all. Hypercacher was a kosher supermarket and the dead were Jews. Few people were prepared to say what they were thinking openly, but a BBC reporter, Tim Willcox, showed no restraint. A Jewish woman in the crowd near the crime scene told him, “The situation is going back to the days of 1930s in Europe. Jews are the target now.” Willcox could not let the suggestion that Jews were innocent victims go unchallenged. “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands,” he said, interrupting her.
If you were a Jew, it was Israel’s fault that you were murdered, and possibly your fault too for not trying to pass as a gentile, or avoiding synagogues, and Jewish shops and restaurants, or changing your name and ditching your kippah.
IRAN IS following through on the nuclear deal it struck with a U.S.-led coalition in an utterly predictable way: It is racing to fulfill those parts of the accord that will allow it to collect $100 billion in frozen funds and end sanctions on its oil exports and banking system, while expanding its belligerent and illegal activities in other areas — and daring the West to respond.Negotiate with the Islamic State?
Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s response to these provocations has also been familiar. It is doing its best to downplay them — and thereby encouraging Tehran to press for still-greater advantage.
We’ve pointed out how the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has unjustly sentenced Post correspondent Jason Rezaian to prison and arrested two businessmen with U.S. citizenship or residence since signing the nuclear accord. There have been no penalties for those outrageous violations of human rights. Now a United Nations panel has determined that Iran test-fired a nuclear-capable missile on Oct. 10 with a range of at least 600 miles, in violation of a U.N. resolution that prohibits such launches. Moreover, it appears likely that a second missile launch occurred on Nov. 21, also in violation of Security Council Resolution 1929.
The U.S. response? “We are now actively considering the appropriate consequences to that launch in October,” State Department official Stephen Mull testified at a Senate committee hearing Thursday. In other words, there have so far been none — other than a speech by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations blaming the Security Council for the lack of action. As for the second missile launch, the administration claims to be investigating it, though it likely has in its possession the intelligence necessary to make a judgment.
It’s not hard to guess the reasons for this fecklessness. President Obama is reluctant to do anything that might derail the nuclear deal before Iran carries out its commitments, including uninstalling thousands of centrifuges and diluting or removing tons of enriched uranium. The same logic prompted him to tolerate Iran’s malign interventions in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, along with the arrest of Mr. Rezaian, while the pact was under negotiation.
Call it the diplomatic delusion. Last June, I asked rhetorically who might be the first Western official or academic to suggest serious negotiation with the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh). After all, whatever the outrages a terrorist group commits, time seems to legitimize its tactics in the minds of career diplomats or Track II activists who view dialogue with near religious conviction.
Once upon a time, it was unthinkable to negotiate with Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat. After all, Arafat (who was actually born in Cairo and not in Jerusalem, as he often claimed) was an unrepentant terrorist responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and the kidnapping and execution of Cleo Noel, the US Ambassador to Sudan. In Years of Upheaval, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted, “Before 1973, the PLO rarely intruded into international negotiations. In the 1972 communiqué ending Nixon’s Moscow summit, there was no reference to Palestinians, much less to the PLO… The idea of a Palestinian state run by the PLO was not a subject for serious discourse.” And yet, just six years later, Carter confidant and UN Ambassador Andrew Young was talking to the PLO and, less than a decade after that, diplomats like Robert Oakley and Dennis Ross were advocating talking to the PLO about just that. The PLO might look moderate in juxtaposition to Hamas and the Islamic State. Even after the 1993 Oslo Accords, however, its actions did not show that it had internalized the change of attitude that diplomats claimed to see, and that was used to justify talks.
Then there’s Hamas. In 2003, Richard Haass, at the time director of policy planning at the State Department, dismissed any notion of talking to Hamas. “There are some groups out there you can negotiate with. You have to decide whether there are terms you can live with,” he explained. “But groups like Hamas … have political agendas that I would suggest are beyond negotiation. And for them… there’s got to be an intelligence, a law enforcement, and a military answer.” Just three years later, however, he suddenly began to push for engagement with Hamas. It is a philosophy which Secretary of State John Kerry—perhaps the most politically radical man to ever hold that post — apparently agreed. Less than a month after President Obama’s presidency began, Kerry — at the time, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — traveled to the Gaza Strip that was at the time run by Hamas. “This administration is different from the previous administration. We believe Hamas’s message is reaching its destination,” Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’s chief political advisor in the Gaza Strip, commented.
