Osama bin Laden was correct when he stated that the United States doesn’t have the stomach for war and that we would lose interest before long and quit. On this anniversary of 9/11 we have witnessed a retreat from Afghanistan that we didn’t like. Our President wanted a quick and complete withdrawal which he accomplished. Twenty years ago we as a people had developed a hatred for Muslims but today I sense a different attitude. At least from our leaders I sense a softening attitude, one of forgiveness and back pedaling.
The Muslim world has never been one to live amicably alongside the Christian world. I remember my grandfather who was born in Hungary 1876 told me stories about how the Hungarians always wound up driving the Ottomans out of Europe. They have not stopped trying. They now use a new approach using population growth s the weapon. In countries like France they are succeeding and they will succeed in the USA also. Muslims are not hung up on birth control and abortion as the caucasian world is. Their current plan is to migrate into a country and then to populate, populate, populate. They have control over their women and thus the poor lady’s cannot say boo about their plight. The males use their four wife limit to the fullest and populate, populate, and populate. Eventually, they will out number caucasians and take over peaceably.
Only the anxious Muslims need to go to war. They are too impatient to do it by population control. they would rather do it by subjugation. Thus we have the likes of ISIS, Taliban, and Al Queda to deal with. Their thrust is to take over by intimidation, killing, and war. It has taken us twenty years to forget the threat of 9/11 and the loss of so many lives, but we have. Even today, the anniversary day there is little being said about the Muslim threat to the world. In the meantime we continue to squander our wealth and resources trying to convince them to accept capitalism and democracy as the way. What we should have been doing, and should do in the future is to squander our resources on never ending bombs that will put an end to the entire scourge. In my gardening world we try not to use radical warfare against the evil weed, but there comes a time when we are forced into using Roundup as the method of eradication. Even with the use of chemicals like Roundup there is always a survivor. It may take a couple of years for it to happen but the survivors again begin spreading around the yard to take it over.
In my world I have learned that if I keep doing the same thing over and over again without a positive outcome that I have achieved the definition of insanity.
Daniel Greenfield is one of my favorite writers. His commentary is almost always spot on with my own philosophy and beliefs. On the occasions where we are not in alignment it is because I don’t understand what he is saying, or don’t understand the background of the politics or country he is commenting on. How any man can be so learned and introspective is a wonder to me. The article below is in total agreement with my own thoughts and has been ever since the Afghanistan debacle began twenty years ago. I won’t even try to embellish his words with mine.
OUR MISTAKEN IDEAS ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS FAILED US IN AFGHANISTAN
America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths.
These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture.
The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people.
This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with.
And even in America there are voices that favor tearing up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and reverting to a hierarchical model. From the Marxists on the Left to the Neo-Reactionaries on the Right, there are those who would turn back the clock to feudalism with enlightened philosopher-kings imposing an “ideal society” on the inferior class of men.
When we say that something is self-evident, it flows naturally from our values and our beliefs.
Consider the two radically different worldviews inherent in Benjamin Franklin writing that, “the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards” is “a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy” and the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaiming “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun” and thus there “is no fun in Islam.”
Both Franklin and Khomeini were expressing a worldview that was self-evident to them.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” came from people who believed that God loves us and wants us to enjoy life. Beheadings, butchery, and the burka came from Islamists who believe that Allah does not like us very much and that we deserve to be miserable.
The respective governments of America and the Muslim world just play out that theology.
America’s approach to individual freedom and meritocratic government came out of broader English and European intellectual trends. Western nations mostly came around to the approach, at least after two world wars, finding that happy people made for a good economy and stability.
Asian First World nations also came around to their own modified versions of a free society while still emphasizing hierarchy and collective morality. And those were the success stories.
Most of the rest of the world is littered with failures.
The American idea was exported successfully by contact with our culture which contained its individualistic, moral, and aspirational DNA. That’s much less true than it used to be. But what is still true is that our efforts to directly export our ideals have failed miserably. Whether it’s trying to explain the Founding Fathers to the Iraqis or funding Women’s Studies in Afghanistan, few were influenced, and many were confused, irritated, or moderately amused by our efforts.
Constructing “governments-in-a-box” in Iraq and Afghanistan was never going to fit their culture. Exporting human rights by explaining our self-evident belief in individual rights didn’t work in cultures that don’t think that people are primarily individuals with agency, but members of a group whose rights come from their role in a rigid hierarchy of ethnicity, gender or race.
Our own political and cultural elites have adopted that worldview making them particularly unfit to spread human rights or individual freedom abroad even as they eliminate them at home.
How can Biden, who decided to pick a black woman as his vice president, before deciding which individual was going to fill that role, credibly tell the Afghans or Iraqis that they shouldn’t pick their leaders based on their gender, tribe, ethnicity, or Sunni and Shiite status?
Before we explain freedom and rights to the Afghans and Iraqs, we need a refresher course.
Our democracy export business is based on a series of intellectual errors dating back to the two world wars which we had defined as fighting for democracy and against tyranny in Europe.
Ever since then our intellectual and cultural elites have stuck to the conviction that the entire world works much like Europe. Every country, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, is in the midst of a struggle between liberal democrats and reactionary authoritarians. All we have to do is overthrow their Hitler or Mussolini, and a liberal democracy will emerge from the ashes.
This fallacy may have hit its peak with the insistence that the Arab Spring was Europe in 1848.
The rest of the world isn’t Europe of the past three centuries. Its intellectual trends, worldviews, and culture have little in common. While western lefties managed to export socialism to most of the world, it takes on very different forms in places like North Korea or Iraq. The “self-evident” assumptions of political ideas are lost in the translation and transition to very different cultures.
The problem with exporting our “self-evident” ideas is that they’re based on the belief in a loving and merciful God, on the value of individual life, and the genius of individual innovation. Most of the world’s cultures are not only not individualistic, many, like the People’s Republic of China or the Muslim world, are actively anti-individualistic and believe morality comes from hierarchy.
Is morality individual or is it collective? Is the role of government to free people to make moral choices or to force them to make the right choice? Where you come down on the answer to that issue is going to determine the sort of society and government you want and will fight for.
If you’re a member of the Taliban, of the Chinese Communist Party, a believer in critical race theory or the neo-reactionary ideology, odds are you will come down on the collective side.
And on the side of tyranny.
Is life basically good or bad? Are most people bad or good? Does God love us or hate us?
You can’t just casually export our underlying assumptions behind human rights to cultures that answer these questions in very different ways.
All of us, in a more tribal America, have experienced the frustration of mutually incomprehensible conversations with our fellow Americans that appear to be about issues, mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, or abortion, but that are actually about culture and values.
If it’s all but impossible to establish common ground on what rights and freedoms are with other Americans, what were the odds that we were going to do it with Afghans or Iraqis?
America can and should export human rights. But the best way to do it is by example.
Whether it’s parents influencing children, teachers acting as role models, or any other mentor relationship, the most vital lessons are not didactic, but personal. From our earliest years, we learn by imitation and we become like the people we want to be. Indeed, in both Judaism and Christianity, goodness comes from striving to learn from and imitate the ways of God.
Tellingly, the concept plays out very differently in Islam where Muslims imitiate Mohammed.
When nations and peoples around the world strived to be like America, it’s because they admired what we had, what we achieved, and how we lived. Most people assume that success is the result of values and behaviors. How people see a successful group, whether it’s Americans, Jews, or Asians comes down to the question of whether they achieved their success fairly through discipline and hard work, or unfairly by abuse and thievery. The answer to that question will determine whether someone is anti-American, anti-Semitic, or anti-whatever group.
These days the loudest voices stating that America is evil, and that everything we had was gained through colonialism and slavery, are coming from our own political and cultural elites.
Why would anyone admire or imitate us when we loudly announce that we’re liars and thieves?
Exporting human rights is not a matter of finding dictators to overthrow. The Muslim world isn’t Europe. It’s not in a state of conflict between tyranny and freedom, but between different flavors of tyranny which all share underlying assumptions about hierarchy over individualism.
Regime change won’t fix the culture.
There are times when America may need to intervene in other countries, when it’s to counter a threat or to prevent an extreme wrong such as genocide, but we cannot and will not fix the world. The vast majority of the planet will go on living under authoritarian regimes. Women in Muslim countries will suffer. And so will various ethnic and religious minorities under their rule.
We should condemn evil where we see it without assuming that we can make it go away and that should drive us to build alliances with nations that share our culture, heritage and values. Instead of spending billions reconstructing enemies, we’re better off strengthening our friends.
Above all else, we should show that our values lead to a good life. The example that we set for the rest of the world will do more to spread human rights than any military interventions.
That’s how it always was.
After a century of ideological cold wars, countering Communism and then Islamism, we have a lot of military interventions under our belt, but have gotten no better at making arguments for our way of life to our own people. While we were trying to convince Africans that Marxism wasn’t for them, our Ivy League institutions adopted it. And while we tried to talk the Afghans and Iraqis out of Islamic theocracy, our own cities, institutions, and governments filled up with Islamists.
If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home.
It’s not just Afghanistan where young girls are being enslaved or sexually abused by Islamists.
The massive influx of Afghans into America will make those numbers worse, not better.
The fundamental lesson of our founding is that we can’t defend our rights without also defending our culture. The self-evident truths on which our freedoms were founded are no longer all that self-evident on a college campus, let alone in Islamist enclaves like Dearborn or Little Mogadishu. If we want to save our rights, we’ll have to defeat the Taliban at home.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
COVID-19 WARRIORIt is a beautiful Good Friday in Frankfort, Illinois today as the COVID-19 Warrior made his patrol around the town. Armed with his trusty bar of soap, face mask, goggles, and gloves, only thing spoiled the day, the temperature is a brisk 40 degrees Fahrenheit. After all it is still only April. Last year around this time we had snow.
I watched the news this morning for just enough time to realize the world is going stir crazy over COVID-19. Two short weeks ago all I heard was how we were going to watch our country die if we didn’t hunker down and hide from the virus. The President was a national hero by reporting daily the efforts being made by all to avert deaths. Hospitals of a thousand or more beds were being constructed, masks were in short supply, then other forms of protective gear also went short. Health workers were the new warriors on the front-line fighting the invisible enemy. I have to agree, nurses and doctors have been working valiantly to maintain order and sanity in our health care system.
I have also been reading many blogs and news sites about how the virus spread and its origination from Wuhan. How the World Health Organization (WHO) told us in the early days that the virus is not spread by people. How they supported China and their efforts to control the spread. Yet somehow, the USA has the virus all across fifty states while China has it only in one geographical area which coincidentally is the home of a biological lab. How can China keep the virus from spreading across its country and we can’t? Either they don’t travel anywhere except to the USA, or their mitigation efforts are much more advanced than ours.
I have conjured two wild conspiracy theories which I want to spread across the internet as food for thought.
It is known that China has set up an area to which they send their muslims. There are over a million muslims now held in limbo in this area. It makes logical sense to me that some radicalized muslim group would inflict the scourge of COVID-19 upon the perpetrators of this atrocity by stealing the virus from the biological lab, and spreading it all about the Wuhan area. They were able to do so with abandon because they are jihadists and ready to die for their cause. By the way, so what if the virus crosses into Europe and to the USA there are infidels everywhere?
China’s ultimate goal to rule the world is widely written about, and this may have been their way of stepping up the plot. What better way to cripple the Western World than to kill the economies of their countries? President Trump zeroes in on China with his philosophy of evening out the playing field of trade. He is right, but the deal he made with China has cost them dearly, and this Pandemic may be China’s answer to slowing or even destroying the American economy. One can never underestimate the extent a communist country will go to to spread it’s stupidity.
I totally agree with the President’s next target the World Health Organization. Why is America paying four hundred and fifty billion dollars a year to support the WHO when China only pays forty billion? A very good question. Gone are the Nixon days of the seventies when China had no way to feed it’s people. It is no secret that the USA and European companies all ran to China to takes advantage of their cheap labor so we could enjoy low cost products. The USA gave up its entire manufacturing capability. My company did the same. The problem is that we are still treating poor China s if they were still poor. They are not. They are a huge economy only a few dollars away from overtaking the United States or the EU. So why should we continue to treat them so favorably like they were poor China. They are fat-cat capitalistic communists. They have learned to adopt capitalism as a tool for spreading their socialist government.
China still has many millions of people who are poor and starving, but they are also very rich and can use some of their wealth to put into practice some of their own socialist ideas. Why are they not leveling the way of life for all their people in the Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer socialist way? Instead they have created two societies, one poor, and one very rich, and they play the world to sympathize with their poor, and control the rich with the iron fist.
Here are some of the things the President and his task force are being accused of:
Not stopping travel to the USA. Not true, Trump banned flights from China as soon as he could in January. This was not an easy decision to make. His mistake was not realizing that travelers from China to the USA would take another route to get here, i.e. via Europe. When he finally woke up he shut off that route also.
The task force refused to recommend wearing masks. Why? Early on the WHO said it wasn’t necessary.
The task force changes the model used to change outcomes to suit their agenda. My opinion is that even if they didn’t use the same model throughout this pandemic it wouldn’t change the result much. The models are all based on mathematics and the formulas are derived from differential equations. Anyone with experienced with differential equations knows that you can incorporate hundreds of variables, and if you don’t know enough about a particular variable you make assumptions. Also, many variables are dropped if the assumption is they are inconsequential. All of us knows that assumptions often make an ASS out of U and Me.
Trump should open the economy and let the virus run its course. True, in that we will not develop an immunity to the virus if we don’t catch it. Is it worth the deaths that might occur to pay for that immunity? If the deaths predicted by the early model calculations occur I would answer no, it is not worth it. If the deaths that occur are no greater or slightly higher than that of a normal flu season, my answer is yes its s worth it. Is the natural (herding) immunity gained worth destroying our health care system worth it? No, not in my opinion but two trillion dollars is huge price to pay. I think we could rebuild the health care system for less than two trillion dollars.
Most of the answers to the questions being posed require a crystal ball. There is only one entity that can answer them with accuracy, that is only God has the answers. Yet, I believe there will be fighting over this matter to change the minds of voters to put the blame of this pandemic on Trump. They will do it just to get their socialist feet in power, and thus give China the upper hand at ruling the world.
One Way To Enforce Stay In Place, Or Maybe It Is Just Poor Planning.
Today is Sunday. I have to remind myself of that. Last week I lost a day and celebrated Friday on Thursday. That means I didn’t eat meat at any meal before I realized my mistake, and then had to abstain again the next day. Not that fish is bad for me it is because I don’t have a stock pile of it my freezer. I have peanut butter, but my KETO diet keeps me from eating bread, and I love peanut butter sandwiches. Does that make sense?
After posting my rant about the stupidity of car companies offering to make medical devices I finally got underway filling the day with more productive activities. By then I developed enough courage to go outside and attack another flower bed clean up. I must have slept through some heavy rain because the leaves were soaking and the soil muddy. I wound up cleaning mud off my heavy shoes several times. I completed another one hour baby step toward a burgeoning upcoming floral season. I photographed the first blooms of spring to make my heart leap with joy. The next project was to strip naked in front of the washing machine to wash my muddy clothes.
After a quick shower and clean clothes I proceeded to cook a batch of KETO stroganoff. Actually, it is the same as regular stroganoff but without any flour as gravy thickener. When it was finished I thought the gravy a mite too runny, so I added some Xanthan gum to thicken it, and it worked. I didn’t have a zucchini to make zucchini noodles, so I decided KETO go to hell for this meal, and cooked up some wide egg noodles. I am not sorry I did that because the stroganoff was great! Today, I’ll have left overs, except I’ll substitute leftover cauliflower mash for the noodles and be totally KETO compliant.
After supper, I went to the TV and found a stupid movie called “Thirteen Going On Thirty”. It starred Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffallo, since they were in it I thought it would be good. I endured it to the end. I’d give it about a half star. The plot grants a thirteen year old girl’s wish to be thirty. The overnight transition from a thirteen year old to a thirty year old was too much to believe.
There was still an hour and a half before my usual bedtime so I turned to watch episodes of my latest series “Homeland.” Three episodes later and long after my bedtime I shut the TV off and forced myself to sleep. There is so much action in this series that my mind continues processing throughout the night. The sleep is not restful and I find myself dragging in the morning. My dreams are all wild with people from the series running and shooting and plotting. The Homeland series is several years old and there are over ninety episodes, and I have watched only thirteen. Either I slow down, watch in the daytime, or ration my watching to one episode per week. As tired as I was from the yard work, which usually makes me sleep like a baby, I woke up with my blanket bunched up and twisted in a roll. I was rockin’ and rollin’ all night long.
Attached is a link to an article in which Pope Francis states that Christians, Jews, and Muslims are the same. What this pope does not know is the difference between right and wrong, black and white. To me, it is clear that all three religions worship one God. They all claim their God to be the one true God. Why then, do the radical Muslims believe in a religion based on death, and the Christians and Jews believe in a faith based on the sanctity of life? Pope Francis obviously has no clue. The logic doesn’t hold up if the premise is correctly stated. It will hold up if stated like this:
Christians believe in one true God.
Muslims believe in one true God.
Therefore, Christians and Muslims believe in the same God.
If I use another premise the logic changes.
Muslims believe killing infidels is the way to heaven.
Christians believe that preserving life is the way to heaven.
Therefore, Muslims are different than Christians.
In previous articles, I have stated that these two paths do not make sense, they are direct opposite and contradictory. God is never contradictory. God is not confused about what is right and what is wrong. He doesn’t need lawyers or theologians to determine which argument holds. On the other hand, we know from Scripture that there are two kinds of angels, good angels and bad angels. Bad angels do not worship God, but good angels do. It is my contention that Pope Francis does not hold the good angel, bad angel theory as valid since he cannot see christians as being good angels and radical muslims as bad angels. Francis sees only good angels. I commend him for that vision, but I condemn the concept. Black is not white, and white is not black. They are two distinct colors. Mix them, and you get something which is a blend of the two, and neither is pure anymore. Perhaps that is what Francis is referring to when he says Christians and Muslims are a blend of humans that we must learn to love, and deal with.
