If This Is War, Then Fight Like It Is One

by Avi Davis

In January of this year, after the horrific attacks on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris, I wrote several pieces in which I predicted that the attack was only the beginning of the war in which the citizens in Western capitals would become directly  and irrevocably involved.

Of course it was not the true beginning at all.  That distinction belongs to the French riots of 2005 and the Danish cartoon riots of 2006  in which the depravity of Muslim-European conduct was put on full televised display.

What I did not foresee in January this year  is how rapidly my prophecy would transform into reality by November.  Only eleven months and Paris,  the gleaming jewel of Europe, is again the victim of a massive assault.  Yet this time  a far more sophisticated and damaging  one than almost anyone could have expected.

Why Paris yet again?  Because it is a soft target and difficult to defend; because it is a symbol of western hedonism with its theaters, concert halls, side walk cafes, rock concerts and galleries; And because, along with Berlin, it represents to the Islamic fundamentalist mind the core of the European experiment in Western unity.  To inflict pain on Paris is to blast a hole through western confidence  –  an objective that the attacks on Friday have surely achieved.

So now what?  French president Francoise Hollande has labeled the attacks an act of war, and has vowed vengeance. And indeed over the weekend the French air force in Syria carried out a range of sorties against Islamic State targets in Syria. The G20 meeting in Turkey also committed itself to greater coordination in the assault against Islamic State.

But since the Charlie Hebdo attacks there were plenty of crises to remind us of the continuing war against the West waged by Islamic terrorists. In April, Garissa University in Northeastern Kenya was the victim of a merciless assault by terrorists associated with al Shahab – an African offshoot of al Qaeda, which resulted in the deaths of 147 students.  This was followed with massacres by Boko Haram in Nigeria, a powerful suicide bombing earlier this month in Beirut and of course the downing of a Russian airliner in Sinai on November 1st – both claimed by Islamic State.

The fact that these events are occurring around the world and not just in France should remind us of the global nature of the conflict.

In other words, this newly declared war, if anyone IS still truly in doubt, is nothing less than a world war between an atavistic death cult and what we know as Civilization.  It is not a clash, in Samuel Huntington’s famous epigrammatic conception, of civilizations.  It is rather a true Manichean struggle between the forces of life and the forces of death.

And how is such a world war prosecuted?  Well perhaps we should  think back to the last one and consider how it was successfully waged.

It was waged unconditionally and ruthlessly, so that the full weight, power and resources of the countries whose civilian populations were in direct peril, was brought to bear against the enemy. This included military force leveled at the the enemy’s territorial strongholds;  Intelligence services which were freed from all constraints in order to gather as much information as they needed, from whatever sources were available and employing whatever technology was then current, in order to interdict enemy plots; And, of course, the operation was governed by a united command, under the aegis of the United States, whose civilian leadership was absolutely committed to the task before them and would not flinch nor be deterred from the mission of achieving unconditional surrender.

But that would be only the measures to be taken against the enemy in its lair.  What about the enemy at home?  How can any citizen of the West fail to be alarmed by reports from the survivors of the Bataclan Theater that  the perpetrators of the killings spoke fluent, unaccented French and were later revealed to be French citizens?

The French, British, Swiss and German governments can no longer afford to speak blithely about the politics of inclusion and lean on the excuses of poverty and ill-education as the source of the incipient terror igniting in their suburbs.  Undercover agents must penetrate the banlieus of France, the outer suburbs of Malmo and the breeding grounds of terrorism in Birmingham and Manchester.  Mass arrests of Imams preaching violence must be conducted and their cohorts and congregations should be made fully aware that further incitement to violence will no longer be tolerated.  And European immigration policy must be completely overhauled to prevent young Muslim males from gaining entry to European countries without first having committed unequivocally to the democratic values of those nations.

And one more thing:  Isn’t it time for  the Europeans to recognize that the State of Israel, which has been fighting the same war on its own turf and its under own terms for decades, is not the nemesis of  Europe but rather its ally and perhaps even its savior?  Israeli counter-intelligence, Israeli security technology and Israeli cyber skills – all among the best resources of their kind in the world, should now be graciously accepted  by the Europeans in their struggle to defeat a common enemy.

Is any of the above likely to happen?  Regretfully, I have little hope for it.  The titular leader of the West, the American president, has no stomach for such engagements and has staked his presidency and its legacy on the idea that only a small band of malcontents, whom he won’t even label as Islamic, are responsible for the horrific events which have roiled world capitals for the past ten years.  No other world leader, besides perhaps Vladimir Putin, seems prepared to take the draconian steps necessary to destroy the scourge which threatens the lives of their citizens.  Neither David Cameron in Britain, nor Angela Merkel in Germany, nor Francois Hollande in France will ever be true or effective war time leaders.

And so, at a time in history when the civilized world cries out for fiery, determined  leadership, we are saddled with lack luster also rans, schooled in politically correct nostrums and the traditional liberal aversion to military engagement who have fostered a climate of passivity in the face of unrelenting aggression.

It is not a prescription for victory.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles and the editor of the Intermediate Zone

On Columbus Day, Are We Celebrating the Wrong Italian Explorer?

by Avi Davis and Michael Lotus

Every second Monday in October in the United States, the banks close, the post office shuts down, federal services are unavailable and many local public services cease to operate. It is the day in the calendar designated by our government to celebrate Christopher Columbus’  first landing in the New World.

Many American citizens believe that the public holiday marks the discovery of the land mass which would come to be known, three hundred years later, as the United States of America.

This is not true. Christopher Columbus, in none of  the four Atlantic  voyages of discovery he undertook from the Kingdom of Spain, ever set foot on the continent of North America.  The date October 12, 1492 only marks the day upon which he discovered an island off the coast of Cuba in the Caribbean – which some consider present day San Salvador Island and others consider Samana Cay.

What, in fact, we truly celebrate on the second Monday of October each year is not the discovery of the American continent(s) but rather the joining of the Old and New Worlds –  for this essentially marks the modern beginnings of what was to become known as the Western world.

The sudden opening to Europeans of the Western Hemisphere, and the contemporaneous discovery of sea routes to Asia, is one of many links in the chain of causation that led to the modern world. These sea voyages were essential early steps on the near-miraculous steps by which agrarian mankind  escaped from the Malthusian trap of pre-industrial civilization which offered a finite consumption of resources and no exit.  The once-in-history escape from this fate is therefore referred to by Ernest Gellner and Alan Macfarlane as’ The Exit,’ which originated in England and was then adapted to local conditions and replicated around the world.

Another way to describe this unique and world-transforming change is, in Jim Bennett’s words,” the triumph of production over predation.” In a post-Exit world, exploitation of other humans beings, by slavery and other more subtle means,  no longer became the primary path to wealth and power.

Would the Exit have occurred without the linking of the Old World with the New?

We can never be sure. Similarly, we can’t say for certain that the particular combination of history, technology, and geography that led the British Isles to become the driving force for the European Exit was either inevitable or would never be duplicated in another place or time.

What is clear, however , is that the chain of events set in motion by Columbus, Cabot, Verrazzano, Cartier and Jolliet and the other European explorers, resulted in a shift of populations from one hemisphere to another  – populations which would inevitably be linked by common heritage, law and language and creating a network of trade and cultural exchange which has survived to this day.

A further detail worth mentioning on Columbus Day is the observation that we in the Anglosphere may be celebrating the wrong Italian. That is because there were really four European discoveries and settlements in the Western Hemisphere –  a Spanish one -in the Caribbean and Mexico ( as well as points further south); a Portuguese one in Brazil;  a French one in the valleys of the St. Lawrence and  Mississippi Rivers and an English one along the eastern coast of North America.  In this regard, we should not forget that the explorations of John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), on assignment from the King of England in 1497 were the first recorded English commissioned incursions into North America.

So, while giving Columbus his due for uniting the Old and New Worlds, let us also celebrate the achievements of the Venetian sailor John Cabot, commissioned by Henry VII of England, whose discoveries led to the planting of the Anglosphere in the New World — which, in turn, led in turn to America 1.0, America 2.0 and then America 3.0, which is now struggling to be born.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance. Michael Lotus is a fellow of the American Freedom Alliance and  a founder and senior researcher of the American 3.0 Institute.

Netanyahu Delivers a Warning

 

The National Prayer Breakfast Presents a Savior

by Avi Davis

The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual event held in Washington, D.C., hosted by the United States Congress on the first Thursday of February each year.  The event is  held in the Hilton’s International Ballroom with invitees from over 100 countries. It is designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships.

Every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 has participated in this annual event.

 

President Barack Obama was there on Thursday and addressed the gathered crowd.  Among the many words spoken by him that morning, was this gem:

 ” But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon.  From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

 Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.  

So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try. And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.”

In case the comparison is lost on anybody, the President, in his expression of a piece of naked politically correct nonsense, was making a direct analogy between the depredations of 21st Century barbarians who decapitate and immolate their victims with 12th and 15th Century Christians who were engaged for their own defensive and political reasons in the protection of their realms.

One would have hoped that the President of the United States would have had a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of history. One would hope that he could express a little more faith in his own civilization, founded incontrovertibly on the principles of the Christian faith and seeded with Judeo- Christian humanistic values and ideals.

 

But before jumping in to address the President’s obtuse and dangerous moral relativism, lets get some important historical facts straight:  The Crusades were largely defensive campaigns, sanctioned by the Pope to turn back the tide of Muslim aggression and imperialism.   The Inquisition was largely political in motivation, an attempt to secure Christian Spain against the resurgence of the Islamic caliphate which had previously governed Spain for 300 years.  And the campaign to destroy the institution of slavery was mostly led by devout Christians such as William Wilberforce in the U.K. and former President John Quincy Adams in the United States  – and without their moral force, slavery would never have been abolished.

This is not to say that there were not attendant evils associated with all of these campaigns and institutions.  But it is important to grasp the reasons they occurred – and not just their outward manifestations.

The President’s high school level appreciation of history might have been bad enough. But in addition he seemed to embrace the notion that there is no absolute truth to which we all can subscribe –  that in fact, there are many varieties of truth which can compete against one another.  This is of course a rephrasing of the same cant which appeared in the President’s Cairo speech in June, 2009  and in his embarrassing statement before the United Nations in September, 2012 in which he declared, among other things that ” the future does not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”  It is all a piece with the President’s penchant for defending Islam and offering himself up as such an expert on that subject that he can confidently declare ISIS and the assorted other Jihadist factions rampaging across the Middle East and Africa as somehow opposed to the genuine tenets of that faith.

Of course as a Muslim apologist – and defender of their faith, he fails to reveal that the handiwork of Islamic State is vouchsafed by Muslim clerics from London to Sydney.   And that sanction for the decapitation of infidels can be found deeply and consistently embedded throughout Islamic scripture.

The canard that Christians can be just as bad as Muslims however flings a shocking insult at the thousands of Christian communities which have been attacked and viciously put to the torch by jihadists who are conducting their campaigns in the name of Islam.  Let the President be aware that there are no counter offensives from Christian communities against Muslims; there are no midnight burnings by Christian insurgents of mosques with their desperate congregations still trapped inside; no mass beheadings  by Christians of Muslim townsfolk; no Muslim children buried alive by marauding Christian militia and no sudden assaults on innocent villagers who run the risk of evisceration if they fail to convert to the Christian faith.

The Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, was therefore correct in declaring that the Medieval Christian impulses to rampage and pillage are well under control.  Perhaps it would be appropriate to also remind the President that Christianity has evolved somewhat since the Crusades and Inquisition – having passed through a reformation and intense periods of self reflection and contrition.  Since at least the 19th Century, Christianity has overwhelmingly operated a civilizing influence on the societies wherever it has been introduced –  earning its credentials as a true religion of peace.

Can the same be said for Islam?

The President of the United States, leading a Christian nation, something he unashamedly admitted himself in his same 2012 speech before the United Nations, needs to stop talking about extremism among all religions, and focusing on the depredations of one – Islam, which threatens the lives and welfare of peoples all over the world as no Christian Crusade, Spanish Inquisition or  even the institution of slavery itself ever did.

The reality is that he is unlikely to ever consent to do this this since he has staked his presidency on the same moral relativism which equates America’s role in the world over the past sixty years with the Communists of the U.S.S.R. and the mass murderers of China.  His entire foreign policy is actually driven by the notion that the United  States has not entirely been a force for good in the world but has often perpetrated the same kind of evil as the regimes it opposed.

That kind of rhetoric may get him standing ovations at the United Nations and in the lecture halls of many of our America-despising universities, but it is no way to inspire and lead a country which has unquestionably, over the past 225 years, provided a guiding light for humanity, propagating values and ideals which have been uncompromisingly drawn from the well of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of  the Intermediate Zone

 

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Jonathan Sacks: Right on Western Civilization; Wrong on Islam

by Avi Davis

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is almost certainly one of the leading religious figures in the world today.

As the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, he commands attention -not only for his former illustrious position, but equally for his erudition in Jewish law, his undoubted grasp of the dynamics of the political world and for his vast store of secular knowledge which embraces the disciplines of philosophy, literature, psychology and sociology.

He is beyond question one of the most worldly Jewish leaders to emerge since the polymath Maimonides took up a pen in the 12th Century and he is deeply admired for it.

I have read a number of Rabbi Sacks’ books including To Heal A Fractured World, The Dignity of Difference and Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning- all of which have fascinated me with their insights into the modern world and its challenges for both Jews and non-Jews alike.

Most impressive to me has been his understanding that the fate of Israel and the Jewish people is tied inextricably to the fate of western civilization.  In book after book, article after article, he propounds this same point  – our futures are bound together and those who attack Israel and the Jewish people are in fact attacking the very idea of civilization itself.

So I greeted with some anticipation Rabbi Sacks’ essay in the  Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review titled The Return of Anti Semitism  which sought to address the recrudescence of antisemitism in the 21st century.

As usual I learned a great deal from this essay.   Among Rabbi Sacks’ many insights are that antisemitism is only contingently, even accidentally, about Jews.   Jews die from it, but they are not its only victims.   The elimination throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia of hundreds of Christian communities is an incontrovertible extension of  antisemitism.   Thus he can assert: “ The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

 

Traditional Christian antisemitism, from the time of the Crusades onward objectified the Jews as having “mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others”.  They were suspected of being actively involved in destroying the foundations of civilization.

Why, then, such a focus on the Jews?  Sacks posits that it always amounts to a peoples’ sense sense of their humiliation.   Societies which have suffered military defeat, widespread plague or the onset of the collapse of self confidence learn to externalize their pain by focusing on an explanation which provides clear and simple answers for it. Thus:

“By turning the question “What did we do wrong?” into “Who did this to us?”, it restores some measure of self-respect and provides a course of action. In psychiatry, the clinical terms for this process are splitting and projection; it allows people to define themselves as victims.”

This of course goes a long way to explaining what happened to the Muslim world after careening into its rapid decline in the 17th Century.

So far, so good.   It is when we reach the end of the essay that  we might find ourselves startled by an awkward conclusion. In pointing out how imbedded hatred destroys civilizations the author makes an impassioned plea for amity:

“Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions of love, not of hate…… All of us—Jews, Christians and Muslims, brothers and sisters in Abraham’s family—must choose another way.”

The implication in this final paragraph (although not implicit in the essay itself) is that both Judaism and Christianity, in their purest form, exist on the same moral plain as Islam – as if they all profess the same fundamental values.

Is it political correctness which impels Sacks to make such a lachrymose and nonsensical statement?

For surely this thoroughly erudite and omnivorous scholar knows that Islam, from its very founding was not a religion of love or of peace;  that Islam did not acquire its anti- Jewish animus only in recent times but it was implicit in the religion from from its very inception. Muhammed set the example for what was to become a long tradition of Islamic antisemitism.  The oldest extant biography of Mohammed, that by Ibn Ishaq in the 8th Century, is replete with the Prophet’s evident hatred of Jews. He had individual Jews  asssasinated if he felt they had either insulted or disobeyed him;  When Muhammed gave the command to “kill any Jew who falls in to your power,” one of his followers, Ibn Mas’ud, assassinated  Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant.  The Jewish tribe the Banu Qurayza consisting of between 600 and 800 men was exterminated while the Banu’l Nadir were attacked and dispossessed of their wealth.

Besides these specific acts of atrocity perpetrated against Jews in the 1400 years since Muhammed began his ministry, one can see how Jew hatred gained its foundation in the Koran, the hadith and in the sira (the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammed) to the point where the existence of a virulent antisemitic thread in Muslim scholarship becomes undeniable.

This was conclusively summed up in 1996 by Sheikh Muhammed Sayyid Tantawi who became (and remains) the Grand Imam of Al- Azhar University in Cairo:

” The Quran describes the Jews with their own degenerate set of characteristics ie: killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting his word by putting it in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously , refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do and other characteristics caused by their deep seated lasciviousness….only a minority of the Jews keep their word….all Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims. the bad ones do not.”

There could be no more poignant an example of Islamic Jew hatred emanating from the heart of Islamic scholarship today than this.

Isn’t it time then for our religious leaders to take off their rose colored glasses and begin to comment on this world for how it really is?  While Jonathan Sacks has provided us with a very accurate analysis of why antisemitism emerges and how it wreaks damage on the societies where it gains its firmest foothold, it is counterproductive for him to keep pretending that the scourge is a phenomenon that only becomes evident in broken, humiliated civilizations.

Antisemitism should be recognized as dangerously inherent within Islam itself – infecting the societies that revolve around it – and that without a total reformation of the precepts and tenets of Islam it is likely to continue to exist not just as a cancer eating away at the core of the Muslim world but as a contagion which will eventually envelop humanity.

Shying away from this reality and pretending that Islam seeks only peace and exhibits love lends it just more cover for its continued propagation of the oldest of the world’s hatreds and enables it to attract even more adherents to its destructive force.

 

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of the Intermediate Zone 

 

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Remembering the Battle of New Orleans and the Conclusion of the War of 1812

By Avi Davis

The first thing you learn about the War of 1812 is that it didn’t take place in only that year.  In fact the war between the British with their Indian allies and the United States lasted right into 1814 and the first month of 1815.

The second thing you learn is that it was an inconclusive war with neither the British nor the U.S. scoring knock out victories.  The resulting peace treaty (The Treaty of Ghent) was brought about not because one party had surrendered to the other but because both sides were exhausted and could not see not much point in continuing hostilities.

What the conflict is mostly remembered for in our present day was the burning of Washington D.C., the writing of the Star Spangled Banner and the faint beginnings of a proud American nationalism.

But perhaps what we should really remember about the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans which concluded it, is that it ended any doubt that the English speaking peoples of the world would ever again become involved in a violent conflict with one another.  From 1815 onward they would forge a partnership which would bring unparalleled prosperity, technological advancement and political stability to their dominions and most of the rest of the world.

We are used to looking back on the history of the late 18th Century and the early 19th as a time when the American colonies fought off British tyranny and began to beat an independent path in history.

But this does not begin to assess what really happened in that forty-five year time span.

For as Daniel Hannan has described it in his seminal work  Inventing Freedom, the American Revolution was in reality a civil war between British citizens, with the rebellious colonies merely attempting to assert their rights, not as Americans but as loyal Englishmen who had become habituated to the liberties available to them as free men.

The very idea of Britain and America forging an unbreakable bond which would later carry the two nations to victory through two world wars, has been central to worldwide progress and to implanting a consciousness of the rights of the individual, the value of representative government and the sanctity of human life in the mind of humanity.

It might not seem much to celebrate, given how far apart the two nations have drifted on any number of issues.  But we should never forget how deeply the bonds of language, values and political tradition still unite the two nations at their very roots.   As Western civilization prepares to confront the most serious challenge in its history, it is good to recall that the leadership of the West – at least since 1815  – has always seesawed between one or the other of these two nations.

In the challenging years ahead those bonds will need to grow tighter than ever before.

Let us hope we elect leaders who understand it.

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

Don’t Worry France, the Obama Administration Loves You

by Avi Davis

I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was not viewing an SNL spoof.

Here was John Kerry, Secretary of State of the United States, speaking to a gathering of French dignitaries in the wake of the most deadly Islamic terrorist attack in France in modern times, an atrocity which took the lives of 17 and whose shock wave has not yet even receded.

After sounding the obligatory notes of condolence and emphasizing  America’s steadfast support for France, Kerry turned the stage over to twee voiced troubadour James Taylor who proceeded to croon the Carol King song ” You’ve Got a Friend” for the assembled Frenchmen.

Earlier Kerry had said: “I really wanted to come here and share a hug with all of Paris, with all of France.”   There was more awkwardness when Mr Kerry, several inches taller than the French president, did attempt to hug Francois Hollande in the courtyard of the Elysee presidential palace.

Is it just me or others utterly perplexed by this abdication of good sense and absence of seriousness on the part of the Secretary of State and the Administration he represents?  Already reeling from criticism that the United States could not bring itself to send a senior member of the U.S. government to the 3 million person solidarity march in central Paris last week, the Obama Administration had an opportunity to demonstrate forthrightly that it was prepared to resume the war against Islamic terror and to make all of its resources available to European countries to execute it effectively.

Instead it resorted to banal and trite words of condolence, the kind of tribute that high school students in the United States would offer one another.

I have nothing against James Taylor, nor the song.  But can anyone say, in the light of the devastating massacre in France last week, that singing this song (in English, mind you, not French) with a microphone that was way too short for the 6′ 3″ Taylor  –  whose thin voice hardly carried for the first 30 seconds of his performance –  was any way to express rock solid solidarity with the French people and mourn their very significant loss?

It would be as if the French had sent us a box of chocolates after  9/11 with a casual note reading ‘Get Well Soon.’

The episode betrays a fundamental problem with the West’s response to the events of January 7th and 9th in Paris.  There is still no evidence that French or American leaders get it: they continue to fall back on old prescriptions for dealing with their internal Muslim problem – including better education for Muslims and reaching out to Muslim leaders in an effort to have them control the epidemic of extremism which has spread throughout their communities.

Meanwhile it should not be lost on anybody that the 3 million person crowd last week contained proportionately very few French Muslims;  that the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo – featuring a teary eyed Mohammed on its cover was widely condemned by Muslims around the world who did not voice their approval, as expected, of the exercise of French free speech but condemned it;  that the spotlight has been shone of Belgium, which interdicted a terrorist attack last week  – and Sweden and Norway, where Muslims have been celebrating the massacres as just retribution for  the defamation of the prophet.

It should lead to a thorough questioning of why French leaders’ search for answers for the racial problems which have beset their country consistently leads back to the French peoples’ own bigotry – a situation which can only be addressed by a greater level of openness and tolerance.

Or why the French still remain so mystified by the riots of 2005, which ransacked France for three entire weeks, and was met then with resolutions by the government to simply increase funding for the banlieus that ring Paris and other major French cities?

In this willful blindness, they truly do have a friend in the White House – a man who insists that his underlings never speak the words ” Islamic”  and ” terrorism” in the same sentence and who has gone to tremendous lengths throughout his Presidency to avoid any sense that Islam – not ‘radical’ Islam nor ‘militant’ Islam – poses the greatest threat to the survival of the civilization of which he is the reputed leader.

Four years years ago, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers upon resigning his office, commented that from his perspective there did not seem to be any grown ups running things at the White House.

From John Kerry’s juvenile attempts to console a grieving France to his and his bosses’ adamant position that Islam itself remains a religion of peace and could never condone the depredations we witness daily on our television screens, we have more proof than we have ever needed that his assessment is correct.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of  The Intermediate Zone

 

 

Duke University and the Politics of Inclusion

The last time Duke University made national headlines was when members of its lacrosse team were cleared of all charges regarding an alleged sexual assault said to have occurred on that campus in 2006.

By the time the North Carolina Attorney General got around to dropping all charges against the three men, Duke’s reputation for fairness and even handed dealing with all its students was in tatters.

Its professoriate, many of whose members had signed paid advertisements decrying the lacrosse players’ racism and misogyny, was revealed as thoroughly riddled with prejudice.  The University administration, which had failed to pay even the scantest lip service to the notion that the three students were innocent until proven guilty, was pilloried for having failed to protect the students’ rights and siding, unapologetically, with their discredited accuser.

In all, it was a black day for the University  – a stain on its credibility as an open institution which seeks both truth and to foster harmony between all its students.  One could hardly imagine it getting much worse than this.

But it has.

On Tuesday, January 13, the University announced that a Muslim weekly call to prayer will be heard on campus.  Members of the Muslim Students Association would chant the call, known as the adhan or azan, from the Duke Chapel bell tower each Friday at 1:00 pm.   The university decided upon the new allowance in the spirit of religious pluralism:

” This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission,” said Christy Lohr Sapp, the chapels’ associate dean for religious life. “It connects the University to national trends in religious accommodation.”

 The response to this decision, issued while the Western world is still reeling from the massacres in Paris by Islamic assassins, was immediate.  Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse was livid. He systematically took to the airwaves and social media to denounce the decision and to urge donors to withhold their support from the University until the policy was reversed.  On Thursday, January 16th, the University, bowing to enormous pressure and outrage, cancelled the policy deciding that the Muslim students, rather than issuing the call to prayer from the bell tower, would instead meet in the quadrangle in front of the chapel.   No word has been given on whether the adhan will still be amplified.

What is most interesting is the logic Lohr Sapp employed to justify the University’s decision:

”  The chanting of the adhan communicates to the Muslim community that it is welcome here, that its worship matters, that these prayers enhance the community and that all are invited to stop on a Friday afternoon and pray. From ISIS to Boko Haram to al Qaeda, Muslims in the media are portrayed as angry aggressors driven by values that are anti-education and anti-western.”

Duke University was founded in 1838 by Methodists  and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity. Since the 19th Century it has had many names – Brown School, Union Institute, Normal College and Trinity College before adopting the name Duke in 1924 in honor of Washington Duke who had  begun the University’s endowment fund with a substantial donation.  Its original charter called for “the establishment of a Christian college which would promulgate values consonant with the  Christian belief.”

How different that mission looks today.  If Lohr Sapp is to be believed, the University has an obligation not just to propound Christian values but to aggressively defend and protect Islamic values as well – even when those values might be in conflict with its own.

No doubt the university believes that in allowing the Muslim group to broadcast the adhan – or to gather in the quadrangle outside the chapel as is its wont- it is conforming to the institution’s proud tradition of openness, tolerance and inclusion.

But are they aware that what  happened in France was a direct consequence of the same multicultural policies adopted by universities, governmental institutions, entertainers and the media in that country?

For years it was believed that if France allowed other cultures within it to flourish, the mother culture would be rewarded in return with the flowering of diversity and enriched by the exchange of cross cultural values which would eventually shave off Islam’s rough edges.

How naïve those policies look today.

Muslims in France were happy to take the license Europe lent them to live with their own customs and norms – which included misogyny, wife beating, female circumcision, honor killings and summary execution for those who defamed the name of  the Prophet  – without being prepared to give back anything at all.  They came to despise the very freedoms they had been given to advance their own civilization and then used the eventual separatism that this engendered to plot the means by which Islamic culture and values would one day overwhelm – and eradicate –  secular French culture itself.

This is the tragedy of multicultural France which began with twee liberal sentiments as expressed by Lohr Sapp and ended last week with the bullet riddled corpses of the Charlie Hebdo editorial staff and dead bodies lying on the floor of Hyper Cacher supermarket in East Paris.

Perhaps the administration of Duke University does not believe that by simply allowing students to publicly announce the Muslim call to prayer it is doing anything other than reaching out a hand to a defamed and misunderstood minority.  Unfortunately, as Frenchmen, Englishmen, Swedes, Norwegians and dozens of other Western populations have discovered, the hand so enthusiastically extended is not only bitten in return, but savaged and mutilated.

Duke University has no obligation to shield Islam from the calumnies heaped against it;  nor does it have any responsibility to rebut the negative stereotypes pouring forth out of Europe, Africa and the Middle East as armies in its  name commit atrocities that we in the West regard with revulsion.

That responsibility rests exclusively with Muslims themselves.

They can do this, not by announcing themselves a religion the equal of any other on the campus, but by forthrightly and adamantly distancing themselves from anything to do with the decapitations, sex slavery and violent conquest we witness repeatedly in our media, while at the same time acknowledging that, sad as it is to admit, this behavior derives from the religious precepts  and current practices of their own religion.

They can also use their newly granted platform to demand reform of Islam and demonstrate to their fellow students that the religion they wish to practice so publicly is capable of propounding the same values of openness, tolerance and inclusion as their host civilization.

Seven years ago Duke failed the test of defending its own students against accusations that proved false.  It does not make up for that lapse by now excusing accusations which happen to prove true.

Perhaps, then, no one expects the Muslim students of Duke University, with their new license to practice their religion so openly, to transform overnight into savages rampaging through the campus and eviscerating anyone who refuses to abide by their cultural norms.

But as the unfortunate example of Europe has proved, the call to revolt can often begin with a call to prayer and we would be fools not to heed this warning.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

 

 

European Governments and the Rise of the Far Right

As the blood is mopped from the floors of the editorial meeting room of Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher grocery store in East Paris this week, the socialist government of François Hollande must be looking nervously over its right shoulder.

For there it will see standing Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, nodding furiously that she had predicted this mess for years and that no one had been listening.

Of course she is right.  Le Pen and other nationalist leaders in Europe have vociferously pounded out a persistent drumbeat concerning the collapse of national identity and the apparent willingness of French politicians to surrender to multicultural demands.

But the prescription she is offering to cleanse the country of its Muslim problem is not one that her countrymen have been willing to hear and the government has responded by practically sentencing Le Pen to an inner exile.   She was barred from joining in the 3 million person strong gathering in the Place de la Republique on Sunday and was forced to conduct her own memorial in the country’s south.

Across France, however, there is a painful awareness the growing  fearlessness of Muslim attacks and a impatience with the weakness of governmental response.   After the events of January 7th and 9th in Paris, no one can ignore the fact that the French Fifth Republic is itself wobbling under its failure to adequately address the growing restiveness of its Muslim population.  A general consensus is emerging that a lawless population in the country’s heart is no longer an issue to be debated but one to be confronted.

Which leads to the question of what happens now?  If an even bigger event is on the horizon (something intimated by the terrorist Ahmed Coulibaly to his hostages in the super market on Friday) then Hollande’s socialist government will come under unrelenting pressure to resign and the ensuing elections  will almost certainly bring the Far Right into contention as a significant electoral player.

So liberal France faces one of its dystopian nightmares – the possibility that the country may swing hard right, which might lead, if history is any guide,to the steady erosion of democratic values and the rise of some form of autocracy.

It is not as if there is no precedent for it.  The Directory of France in late 1799 turned to a thirty-year-old general to restore a level of order and a semblance of normalcy to Revolutionary France.  Within a year, Napoleon Bonaparte had transformed his shared power arrangement into a virtual dictatorship.  Fifty years later the Second Republic elected his nephew, under similar circumstances, to the Presidency and merely shrugged when he crowned himself Emperor in 1852.  The defeated Third Republic collapsed in 1940 when it preferred the autocratic puppet regime of Marshal Petain to the direct rule of Nazi Germany.

Over the past 225 years there have been five republics in France – while only one in the United States – and for a very good reason:  the French have never been entirely comfortable with the exercise of democratic principles and have struggled to shake off an addiction to autocracy as modeled by the ancien regime.

The Russians and Germans are not much better: the Weimar Republic in Germany folded from an economic failure and social dysfunction allowing a convicted criminal to take power in 1933. Vladmir Putin took advantage of social and political malaise in Russia to win power and cement his eventual dictatorship over the course of several years.

Are there other nascent Bonapartes and Putins waiting in the wings in Europe to take up the ultra-nationalist cause?

Quite possibly.  Desperate situations bring out the inner autocrat in most ambitious men.

But while these men and women of destiny might feel compelled to apply very draconian measures to address the dangerous demographic problems and security threats of Europe, we would be mistaken to believe that they would not come without a steep price: the assault on individual freedoms and liberty, the institution of witch hunts and the ineluctable rise of anti-Semitism.

The soft democracies of the European continent will be looking to France in the coming twelve months to see how it handles the very complex problems posed by Muslim separatism.   Anything less than an aggressive stance, which sends an unequivocal message that force will be met with brutal force, will only encourage the attraction of voters to the far right and the likely drift of the electorate in that direction.

If you want a sense of what this might eventually mean for  France – and Europe – remember this:  One of Napoleon’s first actions upon his appointment as First Consul under the Directory was to shutter over 300 newspapers and periodicals.

If this ever happened again the rather endearing refrain “Je Suis Charlie” will echo down the decades as a symbol of deep irony rather than one of calibrated resistance to the assaults on a free press and the challenges to western liberties.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

Paris Attacks Prove that Anti-Semitism and Anti-Western Sentiment Are the Same Thing

By Avi Davis

How did Ahmed Coulibaly, the Muslim gunman who invaded the Hyper Cacher grocery market in East Paris on Friday and killed four Jews shopping there, choose his target?

 

Only two days before, 10 members of the staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hedbo had been assassinated in cold blood by the Kouachi brothers – Muslim jihadists.

So why a kosher market?   Surely, there are far more visible and significant targets in Paris at which to have taken hostages.

Coulibaly, who is now known to have been a co-conspirator with the brothers, aimed to use the hostage crisis as a means of leveraging assistance to the two assassins on the run.

But the choice of the attack on the market in East Paris, conducted in such close proximity in time to the horrific events of only two days before, was an explicit statement to the West: that  the Jews and the citizens of the West are the same thing –  we are against them both –  and we will kill them both indiscriminately in order to advance our cause.

It is no secret that anti-semitism runs deep in the Muslim banlieues of Paris. It has been in evidence repeatedly in the past few years – and most particularly over the summer of 2014  when the Don Yitzchak Abarbanel Synagogue in the 11th arrondissement became the target of a near pogrom led by a mob of Palestinian supporters, angered by Israel’s incursion into Gaza.   From the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2005, to the killings by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse in 2012,  and the repeated brutal gang attacks by Muslims on Jews, there  is consummate evidence of a raging storm of anti-semitic animus swirling in Muslim society which will not be quelled by polite words requesting calm or by calls for unity.

It dovetails, in many ways with the rising antisemitism of  secular French society itself which masquerades under the guise of anti-Zionism.   Antisemitism, of course, has had a long history in France, reaching its peak 120 years ago during the infamous Dreyfus trial, when throngs of protestors (none of them Muslim, mind you) could be heard screaming the words “Death to the Jews.”

Perhaps that antisemitic animus, which still curdles in the French breast, is best expressed today  by France’s coddling of the rejectionist, terror sponsoring Palestinian Authority and as well as the French government’s flat refusal to outright condemn genocidal terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah who attack Israeli citizens indiscriminately

But the gunman who killed the staff of Charlie Hebdo and one who killed the four victims in the hyper market did not make these distinctions:  both Jewish and non-Jewish Frenchmen are now being targeted  in an explosion of hate, the like of which the French have never seen.

The Paris atrocities therefore prove that the attempt to snuff out free speech –  a key pillar of Western civilization,  is exactly the same thing as the attack on Jews and Zionists.    Jews/ Zionists/French journalists/Frenchmen  – these labels are interchangeable because all these identities stand in the way of the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate.

Isn’t it then about time that the  French government  dropped its hypocritical, even handed stance towards Israel and the Palestinians  and unite with the Jewish state in an effort to confront  a common enemy?  What more pressing alliance could there by than being enjoined to defeat the forces that wish to destroy their mutual civilization?  Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS,  Boko Haram, al Qaeda  – it doesn’t matter what the name –  they all  drink from the same ideological trough, share the same values and preach the same hatred of Israel, Jews and the West.

But you still wouldn’t know this if you listen to the French foreign ministry.  When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed a willingness to fly to France this week to express solidarity with the French, he was discouraged by a senior official close to the French President on the pretext that it would stir animosity.  However when Netanyahu insisted on traveling (considering that two of his ministers – Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett, would be attending), the same officials told him that if he did, they would be compelled to also invite Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

Even in the face of the most devastating evidence of Muslim treason and rejection of French civilized norms, the French leadership still feels compelled to placate their restive Muslim population with a sycophantic policy of even handedness that will return them nothing but greater hatred.

Coulibaly, upon bursting into Hyper Cacher on Friday morning apparently shouted to the terrified shoppers: “Do you know who I am?”

The answer from Frenchmen, Israelis and all freedom loving people around the world  should now be thunderously thrown back at him:

” Yes, you are Death but we are Life and are united now to destroy you.”

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate  Zone