The End of Appeasement is Not Yet

Ever since the disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s wise heads have said “Never Again.”

So President Bush crafted a forward strategy to combat the Islamicist movement’s threat to advance Islam by the Prophet’s method, by fire and the sword.

Only, of course, because Islam is politically, militarily, and economically weak, its strategy is a strategy of terror, the chosen strategy of movements without an army, without a country, and without an economic base.

It ought to be easy to isolate and eliminate the terrorists. But the problem is that appeasement is alive and well. The cultural elite of the West is not willing to sign up for a war on terror. It prefers to appease.

So we have the “quagmire” in Afghanistan, the opposition to the Iraq adventure, the hyping of every setback, the validation of the Muslims-are-victims strategy of western Muslim organizations, and now the piling-on over the alleged Haditha massacre.

You can see how appeasement worked in the 1930s. There were always people—educated, sophisticated people—available to argue against the hawks like Winston Churchill. And not surprisingly, people listened to both sides and took the easy way out.

So it is today, with sophisticated opinion relentlessly dripping scorn upon the forward strategy of George W. Bush, and characterizing the inevitable setbacks of his noble endeavor as incompetence and criminality.

In her book Londonistan excerpted in the London Times Melanie Phillips shows how the new appeasement works in London.

It started in the 1990s with the

“gentlemen’s agreement” that if [Islamic radicals] were left alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them.

Well, so much for that. The attacks of 7/7 showed up that little error. But the problem goes into the very attitude of the cultural elite in Britain, “its intelligentsia, its media, its politicians, its judiciary, its Church and even its police.”

The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or “Islamophobia”. They simply ignore the statements and signs that show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicise the West.

They don’t want to face up to this because it requires admitting that we are in a real war, with real costs, and real uncertainty. But it requires admitting something even more difficult. It means admitting that we are in a religious war. Religious wars, remember, went out with the Enlightenment and the end of religious superstition.
How can we be in a religious war if we are sophisticated elites who are beyond religion?

So the elites choose the easy way out: appeasement.

And it doesn’t help that the Muslims have learned how to exploit the “victim culture” by which militant minorities can mau-mau the majority culture with the support of the leftist elite.

Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. So when radical Islamists refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.

If we step back and think clearly about this we can see that the West will not stop its appeasment until the “invasion of Poland” moment. We know what that will be. It will be an appalling outrage involving a use of nuclear materials.

Only then will the West be able to end its appeasement and go onto a true war footing. The elites will have to end appeasement. The people will demand it.

Conservatives should understand that there is a huge opportunity in this. We have said, from 9/11 onwards, that we are in a war, a long war, a World War IV. Our lefty friends have equivocated. The extreme left is in bed with the Islamists; the moderate left just doesn’t like America, and believes that violence never solves anything. They are caught because their secular religion tells them that nothing is worth dying for.

And if that is not enough, their culture of abortion and selfish creativity means that nothing is really worth living for either.

The coming conflagration will discredit the secular religion of Marxism/socialism/postmodernism once and for all. We conservatives will say that the left was wrong. It had always been wrong, and always will be wrong.

Because our Judeo-Christian-Anglo-Saxon democratic capitalism at which they sneer is worth dying for. And it is also worth living for.

Little Rich Kids Now Have Tutors

Forget home schooling. Now it’s private tutors for little rich kids, according to a trend-spotting article by Susan Saulny in The New York Times.

You see, the rich are on the move, shuttling between their houses, and so they find it more convenient to hire personal tutors for their children.

[It’s] an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor.

You know what is coming next, don’t you? Socialization, of course.

Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.

Ah yes. The vital importance of children all becoming savages together at a monopoly government school. "Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," says Dr. Snyder.

Actually, let’s tell the truth here. Public education has political goals, going back to the founding of public education by Horace Mann. Public education has always been about elite special interests wanting to control the education of children. They wanted then, and they want now, to control what is going into little minds. And parents need to be elbowed out of the way.

So this trend among poor little rich kids is probably a good thing. Any kind of education has to be better than liberals force-feeding our children with their hateful politics and their cruel welfare state.

It could be, of course, that imams force-feeding children with Islamicist hate in Saudi-funded madrassahs is worse. More research is needed.

Harvard Doesn't Get It

You gotta love those liberals at Harvard. Reality is staring them in the face and they don’t see it.

You can’t really blame them. We are all like that. We set up our model of reality, and we stick to it. Even as the model of reality is breaking up before our very eyes.

Carrie Lukas went to a class reunion at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a place where they believe that government service is something special, something morally superior to business or the professions.

But they got to listen to a scholarship recipient from Africa. He was really glad to have his scholarship because he was not getting any income from his apartment in Chicago. Why? The renter stopped paying. Good luck getting the tenant evicted or getting a look in at any back rent.

All the laws, he said, favored the tenant over the property owner. So far he’s out more than $20,000 in foregone rent, with thousands more for legal bills and plane tickets from Boston to Chicago. Yet the tenant still was living in his home, rent-free, with no penalty.

The Harvard folks tut-tutted and sympathized with this worthy young man. But none of them connected the dots. It is their politics and their power that is denying this young man the income from his apartment.

Instead the Harvard alums contributed to the scholarship fund and patted “themselves on the back for helping a victim that they helped create.”

You gotta love ’em.

Archie Drake, Opera Singer

We celebrate and we fawn at the feet of the opera greats: the Pavarottis and the Domingos. But what about the also rans, the singers who never made it to the top but who toiled away as journeymen, grabbing the best roles they could find and somehow finding a living at the opera house?

One such was bass-baritone Archie Drake, who started out as a merchant seaman from Britain and ended up as the “soul of Seattle Opera.”

Archie Drake sang his last role last month. After singing a minor role in Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth he was driven home after the last performace, and collapsed at his apartment door with a massive heart attack. He was 81.

Since joining Seattle Opera in 1968 he had sung over 109 roles including the Rocco in Fidelio, Wotan in Die Wälkure, and Dr Bartolo in Barber of Seville. In later years he sang minor bass parts, always turning up in some role or another. You'd say, by golly, there is Archie Drake. How does he do it at his age?

Last month Archie Drake must have known the end was coming. According to John Marshall he knew it was going to be tough to make it through Macbeth.

On several occasions, he expressed concern about whether he would "make it through" the production. On Friday, the next-to-last night of the run, Drake sat backstage and told fellow singer Byron Ellis that "all I need is 30 more hours."

He made it through, but only just.

Canadian Spy Agency Connects Some Dots

Of course, it could be just coincidence, or a dreadful case of mistaken identity. As Alvin Chand said to reporters
outside the Toronto courthouse where 17 terrorist suspects were making their first appearance in court, according to Beth Duff-Brown:

"The people that were arrested are good people, they go to the mosque, they go to school, go to college."

One suspect was a health sciences graduate, and another a computer programmer. And they are indeed innocent until proven guilty.

But officials reported that they had acquired over three tons of ammonium nitrate and other bomb-making materials. Aly Hindy, Toronto imam, knew nine of the suspects:

"It's not terrorism. It could be some criminal activity with a few guys, that's all," said Hindy. "We are the ones always accused. Somebody fakes a document and they are an international terrorist forging documents for al-Qaida."

Quite so. Couldn’t agree more, old chap. The authorities have only released the names of the adult suspects.

The adult suspects from Toronto are [Steven Vikash] Chand, alias Abdul Shakur, 25; Fahim Ahmad, 21; Jahmaal James, 23; and Asin Mohamed Durrani, 19. Those from Mississauga are Ghany; Abdelhaleen; Zakaria Amara, 20; Asad Ansari, 21; Saad Khalid, 19; and Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43.



Mohammed Dirie, 22, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, are from Kingston.

As we said, these suspects are innocent until proven guilty under Canada’s Anglo-Saxon system of justice.

I wonder if any of these folks were overheard by the NSA’s evil “domestic-spying” program?

Cheer Up On Employment, MSM

Today’s employment report from the Department of Labor came in with a disappointing 75,000 increase in payroll employment. The MSM is shocked. “US Employment Growth Stalled in May” “Employment Growth Misses Estimates” are the headlines from Google News.

But a quick look at the Department of Labor press release shows a mixed story. The Establishment Survey of businesses shows the 75,000 number. But the Household Survey (from which the headline unemployment rate is obtained) shows a 288,000 gain in employment.

So come on fellahs. Just cool it why don’t you. Employment is growing briskly.

On the other hand government bonds soared as the 10 year US Treasury Note yield declined to 4.995 percent. But then the dollar declined to 0.774 to the Euro.

What do you make of that, you experts in the mainstream media? What should we do: Buy or sell?

Do We Need the CIA?

Over the years the CIA has provided a useful role. It has been the face of the US intelligence community, the symbol against which all good lefties rebelled.

In fact the CIA is just one of a constellation of intelligence agencies within and without the Department of Defense, and maybe not the most important.

And the CIA is infamous for its cloak-and-dagger arm: The spy-novel side of things.

According to Derek LeeBaert the CIA has always made a mess of this side of its business, the covert and clandestine operations like the Bay of Pigs.

The agency bloodily botched its airdrops into the occupied Baltic republics during the late 1940s. It impeded commando work during the Korean War. It parachuted Tibetan patriots smack among the brutal Chinese occupiers. It mismanaged the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation... And, as the Red Army crushed the Afghans during the early 1980s, CIA refused to deliver the Stinger shoulder-fired missiles that - after Congress overruled it - turned the war around.

Since 9/11 the Special Operations Command has started to move in on the CIAs covert/clandestine turf. The Special Operations Command includes the Green Berets, the SEALs, and those bearded guys that were pictured riding across Afghanistan on horses a few years ago.

Unlike the CIA, Special Operations Command has a culture of stern accountability and severe self-criticism, of focus and rapid adaptability - the culture of a profession that lives with death.

With the controversy surrounding the CIA recently, with the Plame affair and the leaking of secret anti-terrorist activities, comparison with the Special Operations guys is stark. The CIA exhibits a culture that is more interested in playing Washington power politics and Vanity Fair covers than sternness, accountability, and getting on with the job.

Not that that’s anything unusual. The failures of the federal government in everything from the War on Poverty to the combined governmental operations failure in Hurricane Katrina tell us something.

They tell us that bold, persistent, deep reform of the governmental structures in the US is long overdue.

But meanwhile the US economy throws off huge revenues and the governments at all levels feed hungrily off it.

But it would be nice if they did either something useful and productive with it—with sternness, accountability and severe self-criticism—or had the decency to give it back.