Liberals & Evil

It is amazing how out of touch liberals sound when confronted by evil.  It is almost as if true evil doesn't exist in their worldview, and in their mind any action we take to combat evil somehow makes the enemy stronger.  Somehow it's better stick our heads in the sand and do nothing.  I'm amazed by how many articles I've read recently that says ISIS can't be defeated.  Um...we took on the Germans and the Japanese at the same time in WWII.  I think we can handle 5,000 technologically backward thugs in the desert. 

And so what if they recruit more?  Wouldn't certain annihilation serve as a pretty good deterrent?  Certainly it discourages terrorism more than doing nothing (which seems to be the standard Liberal answer to evil).  Why not use this moment to truly unite as a race and say no to Muslim terrorists who kill those with whom they disagree, destroy cultural treasures, and make a mockery of the 'international community' of which the President is so fond. 

ISIS can only succeed if we overreact — so we shouldn’t

Updated by Ezra Klein on November 17, 2015, 1:00 p.m. ET @ezraklein

ISIS can't win. But we can lose.

Amidst a week of fear over what the Islamic State can do, it's worth stopping to be clear about what it can't do. It can't invade Paris. It can't launch an air war against the United States. It can't even hold its ground — ISIS expert Will McCants estimates the group has lost between 20 and 25 percent of its territory in recent months.
The attack ISIS launched against Paris is a horror. But it should take nothing away from its tragedy to say more Americans have died from gun violence in seven days than died in the Paris attacks. That's not to downplay the threat of terrorism, but rather to highlight what makes it different: its capacity to terrorize.
"Terrorism is a crime against the mind," the security expert Bruce Schneier told me after the Boston Marathon bombing. "The message of terrorist attacks is you’re not safe and the government can’t protect you — that the existing power structure can’t protect you."

Fear makes people do stupid things, and it makes countries do stupid things, too. And it is fear that is ISIS's real weapon here.

ISIS can't hope to defeat America or France on the battlefield. It can't turn back our jets or harm our aircraft carriers. It can only hope to make us so afraid that we do something stupid that either helps it or hurts us. ISIS can only succeed if, blinded by rage and terror, we achieve its goals for it. There are at least two ways that might happen — and one of them is already happening.

So far, 27 governors have said they won't accept Syrian refugees (though, for all the bluster, that's not a decision they have the power to make). Their fear is understandable; large refugee inflows seem like an obvious way ISIS could smuggle in foreign fighters. There's been a lot of discussion about the (apparently fake) Syrian passport one of the ISIS operatives carried, but its authenticity is almost beside the point — it's clear that a terrorist could try to enter the country disguised as a Syrian refugee, and for many, that's reason enough to close the door.
But the backlash against the refugees plays into ISIS's hands. As Zack Beauchamp writes:

ISIS despises Syrian refugees: It sees them as traitors to the caliphate. By leaving, they turn their back on the caliphate. ISIS depicts its territory as a paradise, and fleeing refugees expose that as a lie. But if refugees do make it out, ISIS wants them to be treated badly — the more the West treats them with suspicion and fear, the more it supports ISIS's narrative of a West that is hostile to Muslims and bolsters ISIS's efforts to recruit from migrant communities in Europe.

And that narrative benefits ISIS tangibly, not just spiritually.
"If they can spur a backlash against refugees, then they can recruit from that population when the backlash occurs," says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "This was their playbook in 2005 and 2005 when they were known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. They would attack Shias, spark a backlash against Sunnis, and then recruit by posing as the defender of the Sunnis."

How ISIS benefits from a war

If you listen to ISIS's rhetoric, the group is particularly angry over the West's use of airstrikes and drones. In a statement claiming credit for the Paris attacks, ISIS said:

Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris.

ISIS wants to sell its followers on a holy war to defend Islam, kill the infidels, and build the glorious caliphate. What it's getting, instead, is a merciless, impersonal pounding from air-dropped ordnance.
Ideally, ISIS would like to be left alone to build its state. But if that's not going to happen, pulling the West into an endless ground war in a heartland of the Muslim world is a much better recruiting opportunity than inviting young men to sit and around and wait to be bombed. A chance to fight the infidels in defense of your land is more appealing than a chance to die at the hands of their superior technology. For that reason, says Gartenstein-Ross, "inserting ground troops into Syria could play into their hands."

Similarly, ISIS's attack in Paris has led to resurgent sentiment in America that the West is locked in a war not just with ISIS but with "radical Islam" — a formulation that many experts believe ISIS would prefer, as it alienates Muslims and helps ISIS portray itself as defenders of its faith rather than as a gang of medieval thugs, extortionists, and murderers. (Here's a very good rundown of the "radical Islam" issue.)

"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work"

I am not going to pretend that I have the answer to how the West should respond to ISIS. But in terms of how we should think about ISIS, I remember something Schneier said:

The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself. It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded anyway. If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit.

To that end, the best reaction to ISIS I've seen has come from, of all places, a British comedian on HBO. I doubt John Oliver knows what to do about ISIS either, but he does know how to keep them in perspective.
"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work," Oliver said. "France is going to endure. And I'll tell you why: If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck."

ISIS isn't strong. It's weak. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous, or that it can't hurt us. But we shouldn't pretend these are invincible superterrorists. They're murderers fighting a war that they will lose and we will win. Part of how they recruit young fighters is by pretending that's not true — pretending they have a chance in this fight, that they are strong, that they have the West on its heels. We shouldn't indulge their fantasies. We can mourn their victims without believing their propaganda.

The thing you need to remember about ISIS, says Gartenstein-Ross, is it is not just weak in the West, it's also loathed across the Middle East: "America is unpopular in the Middle East, but if we had ISIS's approval rating, we would see that as a very, very serious strategic problem. They have a terrible brand. So part of what we need to do is simply avoid making mistakes that will let them present themselves as a defender of Muslims. We need to make sure Muslims continue to overwhelmingly reject ISIS."

Yale’s Idiot Children

Yale’s Idiot Children Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
By Kevin D. Williamson — November 10, 2015

New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?

It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”

Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .

For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion. 
If you’re wondering about the genocide thing, so were we. Turns out it’s a fairly typical college story — which is to say, a fairly stupid story — the short version of which is that Yale’s sensitivity babysitter sent out a pre-Halloween e-mail reminding all the smart Ivy League kids not to dress up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer; Professor Erika Christakis offered a reply bemoaning that college campuses have become “places of censure and prohibition”; a few students consequently went bonkers because their safe spaces were being invaded; and — here’s where we come in — Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, one of our panelists, remarked that these hysterical ninnies were acting like Professor Christakis had burned down an Indian village.

Which is to say: The idiot children were screaming about Lukianoff because he said they were overreacting to Christakis’s criticism that they tend to scream and overreact.

Well played, idiot children.

Of course, these idiot children aren’t children. These are young adults who can serve in the military, get married, buy firearms, drink alcohol, etc. They are at the beginning years of adult life, but they are entirely unprepared for adult life. It’s fashionable to blame Yale and other elite institutions for this sorry state of affairs, but, while the colleges certainly do their share of damage, the truth is that these children are maladjusted buffoons when they show up in New Haven. Yale doesn’t make them into hysterical ninnies — their families do.

There is a certain strain of upper-middle-class American culture that cultivates an excess of self-importance that grows cancerous when it isn’t counteracted by a deep understanding that the world is full of things that are much more important than you are: God, country, the rest of the human race. That American striver culture has many invaluable aspects — it is the culture that produces the high-achieving students who go to Yale and other elite institutions — but in the absence of transcendent values it turns everybody into a miniature Donald Trump. If your concerns in life are limited to personal economic advancement and status whoring, then everything — literally — is about you. That’s when you see things like Lena Dunham’s dopey political advertisements, which reduce citizenship to another shallow channel of self-satisfaction: Never mind patriotism, never mind history, never mind anything else — what does your vote say about you? How do it make you feel?

I understand why the idiot children at Yale are so sensitive. Really, I do. I sometimes list in my mind all of the poor, suffering people who get a raw deal in this life, and Yale students are always right at the top, with the Bangladeshi orphans and women traded by sex traffickers in Vietnam. Yale isn’t a safe space, Congo isn’t a safe space — it all makes sense, as long as you don’t expect it to make sense.

No, genocide isn’t a joke. I’m sure that the women and children being raped to death by Boko Haram appreciate that the idiot children at Yale are making stern faces and pumping their fists. As for me, I think that they’re clowns, and worse than that, really: They’re bad citizens, and defective people from defective families. They aren’t motivated by good will, but by fear: of the dawning realization that they, as people, aren’t really all that important, despite having been told all their lives how important they are.

We’re all real sorry about your safe spaces and your pacifier and your stuffed puppy, Caitlyn. Really we are. Yet the perpetual revolution of configured stars continues in its indifference, and the lot of man is ceaseless labor, and though you may find the thought terrifying — and thinking itself terrifying — it may turn out to be the case that the screaming in the dark you do on campus is more or less the same screaming in the dark you did in the crib, the same howl for the same reason.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.