The Trump Revolution
“Anyone who is so sure of himself is bound to be suspect” [Dr Harry Maisels]
The conflict, 2006 Lebanon War, began on July 12 when 8 Israeli soldiers were killed and a further 2 were captured during a cross-border attack. At 905 AM local time 2006, Hezbollah’s military wing launched a barrage of rocks and mortars on the northern Israeli town of Shlomi, apparently as a diversion.
Hezbollah had made extensive use of human shields, in addition to firing on Israeli civilians in every major city in northern Israel including Haifa, Nazareth, Tiberius, Nahariya, Safed, Afula, Kiryat Shmona, Karmiel, and Maalot. Numerous kibbutzim, moshavim, Druze and Arab villages suffered from Hezbollah rocket attacks.
The usual expressions by the UN and numerous other entities suggesting equal responsibility for the war, otherwise termed moral equivalence prevailed.
In Thomas Sowell’s, “Then and Now” of July 25, 2006, he asks,” What if the people, institutions and attitudes of today were somehow taken back in time to WW2? What would have been the result? Would we have ended up winning or losing that war?” Yet another reminder, “What about the great cry of the hour, a cease fire?”
The ceasefire which is discussed in Shira’s diary [November 19, 1939] lasted for several months causing Sowell to question the value of ceasefires , “like other cease fires, it helped the aggressor.” Sowell’s article concludes with noting that firing did not cease until the enemies, Germany and Japan, were defeated. “Kofi Anan and today’s ‘world opinion’ would not have liked that.”
Writing in National Review Online on August 4, 2006, “The Brink of Madness”, Victor Davis Hanson, he notes that “our present generation “is on the brink of moral insanity. He was alluding to the West’s inability to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek civilians.
At the time when Hanson put pen to paper, it was approximately 5 years since “jihadists from the Arab world” left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon.” He then sets out to demonstrate how radical Muslim terrorists [please excuse me Mr. Obama] were engaged in worldwide events of a similar nature around the same time period:
[a] Apart from the front line in Iraq, the US and Nato had troops were battling ‘the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan.
[b] The daily police efforts in Europe to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing.
[c] The French, Dutch and Danish governments were worried about the sizeable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries who chose not to assume the role of responsible citizens and make demands to accommodate radical Islam.
[d] No longer is it safe for Australians in Bali or a Jew alone in any Arab country and even in France or Sweden.
[e] The Canadian opposition to the Iraq war and their empathy for the Palestinians did not earn the country any reprieve given the plot to behead the Canadian PM.
[f] From Moscow to Besian, Russians had been blown up
[g] India was routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists.
[h] An elected Lebanese minster must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist – not an Israeli bomb- might kill him if he utters the wrong word.
Hanson comments on the US reaction to Hezbollah who have butchered Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia quoting a prominent Democratic Congressman, John Dingell; ” I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah.” Herein lies the very mind of a sick society – ” the amoral Westerner cannot exercise moral judgment because he no longer has any.” When considering demonstrations on behalf of Hezbollah inside the, US routinely carrying placards with the Star of David juxtaposed with Swastikas, as voices praise terrorist killers, he asks; “Does anyone remember our 241 Marines slaughtered by these cowardly terrorists?”
Europe, an entire continent, has returned to the cowardice of the 1930’s. Thanks to its leadership, cartoonists are afraid to offend Muslim sensibilities and instead comfortably portray the Jews as Nazis feeling secure that no offended Israeli might chop off their heads.
For Hanson, the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism and moral equivalence filter down from the media, universities and government ever since Hezbollah attacked Israel. The inability of millions of Westerners, both in US and in Europe to condemn fascist terrorists is the real story. One in which the spreading of racial hatred and the despising of Western democracies. And not the “quarter ton” Israeli bombs which inadvertently hit Lebanese civilians who find themselves among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the world should hope for the election of Donald Trump next Tuesday.” So commences David P. Goldman’s insightful “The Sleepwalkers and Mr. Trump” as published in the Asia Times of November 5, 2016. He correctly explains how American policy “has become a fetid morass” in which ideology and influence peddling jointly, serve to insulate its leaders from the real world. To Goldman, rather than seeing America’s leaders out of touch, he sees them “in continuous touch with a fictitious construct of the world that excludes the possibility of policy course correction.”
While disagreeing with this assertion in the case of Obama, it is the singular instance on my part. Goldman explains his definition of sleepwalkers as presented by historian Christopher Clark when describing Europe’s leaders in August 1914 on the eve of the First World War. His particularly significant statement relates to the fact that 5 years and 500,000 corpses after the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’ and the Libyan coup of 2011, “the American elite still do not understand that today’s chaos in the Middle East is borne of American meddling. The word ‘meddling’ is too broad since it suggests a complete disconnect. Poor judgment would appear to be more appropriate. This is demonstrated in stating that destroying the old dictatorships, the US opened the field to ethnic and sectarian war.
“Syria is in civil war, Iraq is close to it, and even Turkey is at risk.” Syria is in civil war because its secular and not religious leader Assad has not been removed while instead Obama supported the elimination of Kaddafi. Obama supported Egypt’s religious fanatic Morsi while threatening Al Sisi with sanctions.
That Sunni insurgents would rally to the call of an Islamic State was clearly quite obvious. Yet another failure on the part of Obama is noted in an experience by General Michael Flynn, a career officer and lifelong Democrat who headed Defense Intelligence Agency during 2011 and 2012, tried to “warn the Obama Administration that ISIS had become a major threat.” In commenting on having his reports ignored, Flynn said, “I think they did not meet a particular narrative that the White House needed.” Further America’s errors forced Russia to reenter the region as a major player.
Flynn is now Donald Trump’s main national security adviser, and his views are on record in a 2016 book co-authored by Michael Ledeen He has emphasized Russia’s support for Iran as evidence its ideological affinity to the Islamic Republic; It’s the old nostrum: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Victor Davis Hanson concludes by observing the central moral issue of our times whereby “a human democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists who find psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.” For those who had an interest in what had occurred in Europe in 1938, they had only to look around what was taking place in modern times.
For the most part America’s foreign policy elite has chosen to eschew responsibility for its blunders.
Upon reflection, it is extremely difficult to comprehend Trump’s childish, amateurish behavior at the commencement of his quest to become the President. What was the point in his becoming his worst enemy by insulting individuals who were not objectionable or not even adverse to him? We may never know this and one feels that his current presence will prevail. Fact is, he has clearly identified the ills beset on the nation by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Kerry et al.
In the matter of identifying enemies from allies, we can look forward to a sound foreign policy on Trump’s watch. He well understands that “those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind.” [The Talmud], becoming with clearly identifying our major enemy as Muslim radical terrorists. It is hoped that the revolution he has brought about will lead Israelis to do the same. Without a constitution and representation, an Israeli citizen can only experience 3rd world existence.