Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The radical-moderate continuum that has defined the dialogue on Islam in the War on Terror is not an authentic perspective, it is an observer perspective.
To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.
These descriptions tell us nothing about Islam or about what Muslims believe, but do tell us a great deal about its observers and what they believe. They turn Islam into inkblots that reveal more about the interpreter than the splotch of ink being interpreted.
Muslims are not radical or moderate. The radical-moderate continuum is how liberal countries rate individuals and countries to decide how well they will harmonize with the national and international consensus. Even if that consensus only exists in their own mind. The label of moderate does not mean a rejection of violence. Otherwise it could hardly be applied to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it means is a willingness to collaborate with Western governments and progressive organizations.
The radical-moderate labels are useful for liberals, but useless for anyone who wants to asses reality. It is tied into a number of false notions that are necessary for maintaining the status quo of liberal democracies. Notions such as the equal moral stature and interchangeability of all religions and peoples are key to running a liberal democracy, but they make it impossible to have a rational conservation about Islam.
In liberal democracies, no one really discusses Islam as a religion. That discussion is preemptively aborted by the defense of the general category of religion. To criticize Islam is to challenge the category of protection for all religions, much as to attack Communism during the Cold War was to attack the First Amendment.
The general category makes it necessary to subdivide the specific religion or ideology into a moderate majority and a tiny minority of extremists. This categorization tells us nothing about Islam and everything about the political and intellectual classes that refuse to rationally discuss it.
Islam is neither moderate nor extreme. It simply is. Extremism and moderate are an observer perspective. That does not mean that Islam is all one thing, an impermeable block. But the one thing that it is not, is liberal.
Liberal Islam is secular Islam, in the same way that liberal Christianity and liberal Judaism are both secularized in their subservience to liberal values. There are indeed secular Muslims out there, but they are a tiny minority of secularists even in the secular West. Their influence is minimal. And it likely would be minimal even if the Saudis weren't spending fortunes in oil money to control the expressions of Islam in the West.
Even these secular Muslims are not necessarily non-violent. What they lack is the broader worldview of Islamic nationalism, that some label Islamism. They will support Arab Nationalist terrorism, which defines peoples by nation, rather than the Islamic Nationalism, which defines them by religion.
Islamic nationalism is not a religion. Nor is it a separate branch of Islam. It is influenced by movements within Islam, but those movements are largely reformist efforts aimed at returning to a more uncompromised Islam. And it is not limited to these movements. The majority of Muslims identify with Islamic nationalism to some degree.
Islamism is simply the political implementation of Islam which is already political. Islamism does not politicize an apolitical religion, it applies a political religion to politics. And most Muslims support that for the simple reason that they are Muslims and Islam is their religion. They may quibble over some of the details and they may be fooled by some smooth talk, but the same may be said of many supporters of National Socialism and Bolshevism. What matters is not whether every single German who thought Hitler had some good ideas supported the concentration camps or whether every single Communist supported the Gulags. Certainly not all did. What matters is that they supported the systems and leaders that made those things possible even when the warning signs were there.
No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.
Western observers may label those who identify with Al Qaeda as extremists and those who identify with the Muslim Brotherhood as moderates, but these are cosmetic differences. Islamist organizations are not a separate religion. They are the practical implementation of the religion. If we are to have a truer continuum, it would run from secular to religious, rather than moderate to extremist.
What makes Islamists dangerous are not their means, such as flying planes into skyscrapers, but their ends, which involve a global theocracy that reduces non-Muslims to enemies and slaves. Whether this end is accomplished through bombs or elections makes little difference. Hitler and Stalin would be no different whether they won elections or seized power by force. Not so long as their ends involved war, mass slavery and genocide.
The trouble with Islamic nationalism is Islam. There is no way of getting around that. Terrorism is an aspect of the problem. But the problem is a violent system that views the lives of non-Muslims and dissenting Muslims as worthless.
When Muslim terrorists set off bombs in Boston, Mumbai, Jerusalem or anywhere else, what they are really communicating is not some passionate grievance, but an ideology that has no regard for the lives of non-Muslims. That same message is communicated by the treatment of Western prisoners in Dubai or the treatment of Western hostages in Nigeria. It is a message rooted in the xenophobia of the Koran and it is a warning of the system that these acts of oppression and terror are intended to build.
The extent to which most Muslims are committed to the final ends of Islamism, including a total war with the rest of the world and its subjugation under Islamic law, may vary, but there is no denying the fact that in open elections, Islamists have won again and again. The Arab Spring conclusively demonstrated that the Islamist agenda is more compelling than any other. Indeed it is hard to find any political movements in ascendency in the Muslim world today except Islamist ones.
The tiny minority of extremists are not the Islamists who have dominated the Arab Spring as thoroughly as they have dominated the Islamic institutions of the West, it is the secularists who still cling to forms of solidarity based on national identity or economic class.
If their moderate Islam, which will have co-ed prayers in mosques, female prayer leaders and gay Imams is the solution, then there is no hope for a solution because it has no trajectory. The forces that forged a liberalized Christianity and Judaism in Europe are in decline. And they could hardly impose their worldview on a religion whose centers of power are out of their reach.
Liberal Islam is not in ascendency anywhere. In much of the world, including the Muslim world and totalitarian nations such as Russia and China, the continuum is not that of the radicals and the moderates, but the government clerics who are not moderate, but lack all conviction, and the Islamists who want to overthrow them.
Government clerics are rarely moderate. They often support terrorism, so long as it is aimed at other nations. The moderate cleric in Egypt supports war with Israel, but not domestic theocracy. The moderate cleric in Russia supports terrorism against New York, but not Moscow. The moderate cleric in Saudi Arabia supports war with Syria but not assassinations at home. There are exceptions, but these exceptions, when they are sincere, are the tiny minority.
Everywhere Islam is weaponized to be used against someone else, just as Carter once believed that he could use the Iranians and the Afghans against the Soviet Union. But it is folly to think that the means of religious violence can be directed toward any other ultimate end than religious supremacy.
Islamism is applied Islam. It is not extreme, only illiberal, but then Islam is an illiberal religion. It is a religion built on war and conquest.
The Islamist only reminds Muslims of what their religion stands for. It is not a separate entity from Islam because it is rooted within Islam. Its solutions are Islamic solutions. It may break in some ways with history, but not with theology.
The pragmatic solution of denying this is so to keep Muslims from embracing Islamist solutions to political problems is doomed. Muslims do not define themselves by Western standards of liberalism and extremism. They do not rely on Western thinkers to determine their religion for them. They are outside the consensus of liberal democracies and the best evidence of that is the triumph of Islamists in the political spheres of the Middle East and the West.
Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.
Islamism is not a sect, it is the Islamic consensus. It is the closest thing that the Muslim world has to match the liberal worldview of the West. The Islamist is not radical to his own. He represents the majority view of the Muslim world that power and politics should derive from Islam and that Muslims should assert a collective power based on their common Islamic nationalism,
Islamism won in the Arab Spring. It won the Western Diaspora. The idea that we can detach Islam from its political application by branding its political application extremist has failed. The two are intertwined. We cannot weaken Islamism except by weakening Islam, economically, militarily and demographically.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late.
It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign.
If she does make it into the White House, it is even more doubtful that she will wander it at night in a nightgown crying out for the blood that can never be washed away.
Lady Macbeth may have cried out, "Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this little hand." But the black perfumes of today's Araby are more than enough to sweeten a multitude of appeasements and cover the blood that flows out from them.
Real life villains are closer to Richard III than Lady Macbeth, offering to trade their stolen kingdom for a horse to the very end, rather than seeking some intangible repentance in a fit of remorse. They are more likely to ask what difference it makes; the solipsistic query of the sociopath to whom the feelings of others are abstract things.
The Benghazi hearings featured more hypocritical and trite eulogies than anything Richard III could have imagined. Congressman Elijah Cummings told witnesses that "death is a part of a life." A fact that they were surely unaware of. His colleague, Eleanor Holmes Norton asked, "What's the big deal here?"
"We had Benghazi I with Susan Rice, now we’re having Benghazi II with Hillary Clinton. Enough Benghazi,” Norton declared. It's not quite "Out, damned spot!" or "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" and more "What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?"
The latter is a timeless villain's truth, whether in a fictional 11th century Scottish castle or in the all too real 21st century Capitol Hill.
For Lady Macbeth, power was not a sufficient defense against conscience. A thousand years later, in Foggy Bottom, Capitol Hill and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; there is no conscience, only power. The arrogance of an Obama, a Clinton or a Norton comes from their confidence that none can call their power to account.
Norton and Clinton have more of a point than critics give them credit for. Benghazi isn't a big deal. Not compared to the rivers of blood they shed in Afghanistan. In Benghazi, four Americans were abandoned. In Afghanistan, it was over 1500 soldiers killed and nearly 15,000 wounded many of them denied air support and the ability to fight back under rules of engagement that likely also played a part in the betrayal at Benghazi.
Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, a Shakespearean villain, if there ever was one, who helpfully wrote his own soliloquies, once said that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. The four deaths in Benghazi are also a tragedy. Though we must of course, as Congressman Cummings told us, put them into the context of death being a part of life. Afghanistan however is just a statistic.
The day after Benghazi, the parents of Navy SEALS from Seal Team Six, along with military experts and former military officials, appeared at the National Press Club to demand a congressional investigation. The media responded with a collective shrugs and resumed providing non-stop coverage of the Jodi Arias case. Some Lady Macbeths go to prison. Others are meant to go to the White House.
"Why was there no pre-assault fire?" Karen Vaughn, the mother of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn, asked. "We were told as families that pre-assault fire damages our efforts to win the hearts and minds of our enemy. So in other words, the hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to this government than my son's blood."
"Why didn't they take them out with a drone," Charles Strange, the father of Michael Strange asked. "The Admiral told me, to win the hearts and minds. I says, to win the hearts and minds? How about my heart? How about my mind?" But not all hearts and minds are created equal. And not all blood is valued the same.
If Lady Macbeth had wandered through her Foggy Bottom castle or the Westchester mansion, complete with wine cellar, artist's studio and outdoor fireplace, mourning for a Muslim terrorist killed in a drone strike or a Muslim protester during the September 11 embassy attacks, that would have been a socially acceptable act of regret for a lost mind and heart that could have yet been turned to a moderate appreciation of a country where you can hate it, bomb it and still get an academic posting at Columbia University.
But why bother mourning for one of the expendable human drones who are expected to give their lives to remind Muslims of our respect for their culture and religion?
When a Muslim is killed by a drone, the media gathers its outrage, but when one of our soldiers or diplomats dies in the hopes of softening a Muslim's heart, then the men and women who sent him to die with his hands tied and a target painted on his back cannot see the red spots on their soft palms.
Muslim hearts and minds are the obsession of the policymakers of the dying West, but who cares about the hearts and minds of the men and women who ride Chinooks into danger zones, run marathons in cities where aspiring Chechen boxers feel marginalized and work in skyscrapers that Muslim students fly past on the way from Boston, except on Election Day?
"Under the current Rules of Engagement, if the enemy fires on you then runs behind a rock," Karen Vaughn told a press that was busy pressing its fingers into its ears as deep as they could go, "when he pops his head out from behind the rock, you're not allowed to engage him unless you can verify that he has not laid his gun down... in other words you must be fired on twice."
Today it's twice. Tomorrow it may be three times. And then four. The angrier they get, the more free shots we have to give them to improve their self-esteem and soothe the throbbing emotions in their hearts and minds.
The press release for Hillary Clinton's 14-million-dollar book declares that she "has redefined the meaning of 'trailblazer' in every phase of her career on the world stage." Considering the ambassador she left choking to death on the smoke from a fire set by the militias she helped empower, that might not be the best choice of words. The unnamed book will offer "dramatic moments", "vivid personal anecdotes" and "memories of her collaboration with President Obama and his National Security team."
Again, not the best choice of words. But all too apt.
"Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters," Lady Macbeth advised her lord. But it isn't likely that readers who plonk down their thirty bucks will read any strange matters in this sixth or seventh Clinton book. Those who have already endured "Living History" with her and "It Takes a Village", not to mention "Dear Socks: Kids' Letters to the First Pets" are unlikely to learn anything new from Hillary Clinton's version of Decision Points.
The books after all take the next part of Lady Macbeth's murderous advice. "To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye... But be the serpent under't." The time now is that of the successful career woman whose marriage may be a sham and whose career is littered with more bodies than Lady Macbeth could have aspired to in her most deranged fantasies, but who never lets that get her down or stop her from leaning in to offer some empowering advice for that big meeting.
The serpent is still underneath. And sometimes it comes to the surface, asking what difference it makes it four people died here or fifteen hundred people died there. It's been Benghazi I and Benghazi II and eventually Benghazi III and it's time to MoveOn.org to discussing some offensive thing about the reproductive process that a Republican in Iowa or Idaho said.
There will be no book titled, "Dear Hillary, I'm In a Burning Diplomatic Mission with no Security and Can't Breathe: Dying Ambassador's Letters to Former First Ladies" and no, "It Takes a State Department to Spend Money on Art in Embassies Instead of on Embassy Security" book either. Those books wouldn't look like the time, they actually would be the time. They would be the bloody handprints on the wall and that would distract us from the Jodi Arias 2016 campaign.
The families of Navy SEALS demanding answers will not receive a fraction of the coverage that Cindy Sheehan did for burping in Bush's direction. American hearts and minds only matter when they are being influenced to stop fighting back against all the hate in Muslim hearts and minds. Soldiers will go on fighting and dying with their hands tied behind their backs. Embassies will go on being attacked. And nothing will be done about it because fighting back is insensitive and hurts our chances of winning Muslim hearts and minds.
Lady Macbeth only wanted power, but she lacked an ideology that would allow her to believe that she was doing the right thing. There was no Wellesley College senior thesis about Saul Alinsky on her shelf and she was left unequipped to believe that the ends justified the means and that rivers of blood could be spilled in a good cause.
"If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution," Hillary Clinton wrote in her conclusion.
The social revolution of her 1969 thesis is once again here, and like most revolutions, it's a bloody mess. Once again social values are under attack by radicals while soldiers die overseas without being allowed to fight back. And the radicals care for nothing for the blood that they spill for their radical revolution. Not the blood of a single man or of a thousand men.
"What is a traitor?" Lady Macduff's son asks his mother, before being murdered by Macbeth's assassins. "Why, one that swears and lies," his mother replies. "Who must hang them?" her son asks. "Why, the honest men," she answers. "Then the liars and swearers are fools," he says, "for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them."
The liars and swearers have hung up the honest men from Benghazi to Kabul to Capitol Hill. And the traitors walk through the night with blood on their hands and do not even see.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The media coverage of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has one theme and one tack. Like 30 of the 31 men on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, they were terrorists who just happened to be Muslim.
While the New York Times dispatched its best and brightest lackeys to Boston to write sensitive pieces on how hard it was for the two Tsarnaevs to fit in leaving them no choice but to bomb the Boston Marathon and then send LOL texts to their friends, it fell to a UK tabloid like The Sun to conduct an interview with the ex-girlfriend of the lead terrorist and learn that he wanted her to hate America and beat her because she wouldn't wear a Hijab.
There are all sorts of jobs that Americans won't do. Like pick lettuce, bomb the Boston Marathon and report honestly on the motives of the bombers. The only news network that operates outside the media consensus is owned by an Australian mogul who also owns The Sun.
Americans like to think of their press as freer, but it's only free in the sense that it voluntarily puts on its own muzzle. European tabloids get into bloody brawls with regulators. American newspapers have nothing to brawl about. They will gleefully report anything that undermines national security at the drop of a hat, knowing that they won't be touched, but there is a long list of subjects that they won't touch with a million mile pole.
In Europe, editors risked their lives to publish the Mohammed cartoons. In America, on the rare occasion that they were depicted, they were usually censored. CNN, which could show Kathy Griffin trying to molest Anderson Cooper, without the benefit of pixelation or a suicide button, blurred out Mohammed's face; assuming that Muslims would appreciate the sensitivity of treating their prophet's face like an obscene object.
The American media does not need to be censored. It censors itself.
Did the New York Times really fail to come across Tamerlan Tsarnaev's ex-girlfriend and domestic abuse victim while they were busily interviewing every single person in Boston who ever ran into the future terrorists? Doubtful. The New York Times may be incompetent, but it isn't that incompetent. If it could track down Tamerlan's old coach, it could track down his old girlfriend. It chose not to.
So did every other paper.
Either The Sun is staffed with crack journalists who could do what no American newspaper, news channel and network news program could, or The Sun got the scoop on Nadine Ascencao because no newspaper on this side of the ocean wanted to touch it. And it's easy to see why.
Nadine talks about being beaten in the name of Islam, forced to memorize Koran verses and being taught to hate America. Most journalists on this side of the ocean want quotes on what nice boys the two Tsarnaevs were and how, in true liberal fashion, no one could have expected them to do something like this.
Every background story on them is filled with the same pabulum, because the endless march of “We couldn’t have known” quotes provides the government-media complex with the plausible deniability it needs to continue doing the same thing all over again. If the people couldn’t have known, then it stands to reason that their government or their media couldn’t have known either.
No Islam please, we're American was the mainstream media's unspoken message. We don't do Islamic terrorism. We only report on terrorists who happen to be Muslim.
The only newspaper besides The Sun to do an interview with Nadine Ascencao was the Wall Street Journal; which just happens to be owned by the same tabloid mogul. But there is an interesting difference between The Sun and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece doesn't mention Hijabs, Koran verses or hating America. It doesn't mention Islam at all.
Co-written by a Pakistani journalist, it emphasizes only that Tamerlan was a bully of no particular religion. That reporter's twitter feed features a retweet from another Muslim WSJ reporter who broadcasts that the plans of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to head to Times Square amounted to nothing. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Nothing to see here is the theme of the media's coverage. Like a movie, it begins with inspirational tales of courage, and then just when the villains were about to come on the scene, the credits began to roll. It's only been twenty minutes, but the audience gets hustled out of the theater and told to leave their sodas and popcorn behind.
The "folks who did this", in Obama's patently false folksy parlance, were caught. Or at least one of them was. The sacred liberal ceremony of the Miranda warning was recited by a judge at his bedside and the trial will now move through the traditional phases of expensive lawyers paid for by the taxpayer pleading that their client was traumatized by our foreign policy and the entire story being shoved to the back of the media's coat rack behind the next sports star who comes out of the closet.
This is the surreal world of the American media, which wields its weapons of mass distraction with clinical precision, so that the news hour and the local paper are virtually indistinguishable in content from an old episode of The Jerry Springer Show. But it can't possibly spare the time for a coherent discussion of the real world motives of two men who carried out a major terrorist attack in Boston.
Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America to find out what their own government wouldn't tell them. American citizens have to read The Sun and the Daily Mail, publications whose standards are slightly above that of The Huffington Post and yet, like the National Inquirer, have become one of the few outlets that will chase after the stories that the media has embargoed as effectively as Pravda.
Instead of wasting time on a dead end like Islam, the media has spent its time chasing down every other possible angle.
Did Tamerlan turn terrorist because he took too many blows to the head while boxing? Could the Boston Marathon bombing have been prevented if only we had let him win?
The New York Times assembled a touching story of an aspiring immigrant boxer radicalized by the petty restrictions of a government that wouldn't let him apply for citizenship because of his history of domestic violence and appearance on a terrorist watch list. But how does that jibe with the Tamerlan from five earlier who beat up a boy that his sister was dating because he wasn't Muslim?
When the media must deal with Tamerlan's theology, it keeps him in the category of the troubled man who turned to some wacky extremist version of Islam propounded by a YouTube convert. The man who beat his sister's boyfriend because he wasn't a Muslim and beat his ex-girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab wasn't some brainwashed drone who had his mind stolen by YouTube videos. He was a Muslim.
The Tamerlan of 2007 might not have watched as many Jihadist videos, but it would be a mistake to assume that he would have disagreed with their content. That Tamerlan might not have been looking at bombing targets, but neither would he have been upset and angry if some other Muslim had done what he would go on to do. Like Dzhokhar's two Muslim friends, his first reaction would have been to cover it up.
When it comes to serial killers and mass shooters, the media is conditioned to look for a break that follows some life crisis. But with Muslim terrorists there is no discontinuity, only continuity. A few setbacks might have made terrorism more appealing to Tamerlan, but that would not have happened if it had not already been on his menu of life choices. Or that of his brother.
That angle is the most terrifying one that the media can think of. It's the one that they can't touch. It's the one that they won't let anyone else touch either. If they have to mention the "I" word, they will sandwich it between "extremist" and "radicalization". But it's not Tamerlan who was the radical extremist. Among Muslims, his views were mainstream. The Wahhabis are in ascendance in most parts of the world, including the United States. Islamist parties roundly won the Arab Spring.
What was the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the Syrian Jihadists held up by the media as the epitome of courage and bravery? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the media peevishly contends Israel must make peace with? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the tens of thousands of Muslim terrorists fighting in conflicts around the world?
While the European media, for all its faults, occasionally grapples with the incompatibility of liberal values and Muslim values; on this side of the ocean the topic is all but untouchable. There is no national censorship body that does this. Instead stories are held down by the weight of a consensus that insists the media exists to promote liberal values. All else follows from there.
The stories that promote liberal values are reported. The stories about a future Muslim terrorist beating his girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab are not because those stories create a sneaking suspicion that Muslim multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal values. And the incompatible Muslims, like Mohammed’s face, have been pixelated out of existence in reports on the terrorist attacks by disgruntled boxers, doctors and perfume salesmen who just happen to be Muslim.
These are the Muslims that the media doesn’t see. And it is doing everything possible to make sure that we don’t see them either.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government.
So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At first the Ministry brought some some order to the street fair, but it would periodically launch new "street fair initiatives" to justify another expansion and pay for them by raising taxes on the produce.
At first the taxes were small, but as the ministry grew, so did the Produce Tax. The Ministry of Street Fairs built itself a towering stone headquarters overlooking the street fair. In its shadow, the street fair dwindled as its produce was now more expensive than anywhere else in the city.
The empty fair would once have been a relief to the government, but was now a source of concern because it had grown dependent on the Produce Tax and plenty of its nephews and nieces had picked up lucrative positions in the great stone building.
So after some consultation the Ministry of Street Fairs launched an "Emergency Street Fair Stimulus Plan" to promote shopping at the street fair. The stimulus plan offered people credit for shopping at the street fair, but the credit was paid for by borrowing against the expected returns from an enlarged produce tax. The stimulus plan also piled on new regulations to be enforced by new branches of the Ministry of Street Fairs detailing exactly how many pears can be placed in a basket and the exact shade of green that a Granny Smith apple should be.
A short term burst of shoppers excited by the credit arrives and then fades away. The new taxes and regulations force the fruit sellers to raise prices again. The credit goes away, but the high prices remain.
Worried, senior members of the Ministry of Street Fairs do the unthinkable and consult with some of the vendors at the fair. They learn that their old customers are choosing to shop for their fruit at supermarkets where all the taxes and regulations don't apply because there is, as of yet, no Ministry of Supermarkets.
Tackling the problem head on, the Ministry of Street Fairs demands that supermarkets be classified as indoor street fairs and put under its jurisdiction. The "Supermarkets are now Indoor Street Fairs" bill is introduced and not only puts the supermarkets under the Ministry's authority, but taxes them at twice the rate of street fairs. Supporters of the bill denounce the evil "Supermarket Lobby" for its indoor unregulated street fairs which use a legal loophole to profit at the expense of starving children who need fresh fruit.
The bill passes. The Ministry is congratulated for its commitment to fighting for the right of everyone to buy fruit at vastly inflated prices.
Produce sales fall drastically as fruit becomes a luxury. Most fruit now spoils on the stands with no one to buy it because no one will buy it at the minimum price necessary to turn even the most minimal profit. Fruit sellers and merchants raise their prices again to compensate for decreased sales volume. Many supermarkets and sellers go out of business, so that even fewer people can afford fruit. In a ripple effect, fruit growers and importers also go out of business further destroying the market.
The Ministry of Street Fairs responds to public protests by creating a "Fruit Dole" which entitles every child to one apple a week. This dole comes at the expense of the fruit sellers, which again raises the price of fruit for everyone. Charismatic young politicians demand "Fruit for the People" and denounce the corrupt interests who keep the people from having access to fruit. A radical "Fruit People's Party" is created with a call for nationalizing the orchards to ensure equal fruit for everyone.
The Ministry announces that fruit may only be sold at a fixed low price. The taxes on fruit sellers however remain just as high. Most of the fruit sellers go out of business. The few who remain in business, sell bad fruit at the mandated price to the public, while selling good fresh fruit under the table at much higher prices. Now everyone can afford fruit, but the only fruit they can buy is rotten.
The charismatic young politicians and the "Fruit People's Party" demand to know why the only fruit available to the people is bad fruit. An investigation is launched and several of the sellers are arrested for covertly selling good fruit at much higher prices. The sellers are sentenced to jail, and a new Fruit Inspection Squad is launched to patrol the street fair to see that no one sells fruit at higher prices.
The Fruit Inspection Squad's salary is paid for by an even higher Produce Tax and the fruit sellers are forced to begin covertly selling fruit that they would have once considered bad under the table. The fruit that they sell to the public at the mandated low price is so rotten that it is completely inedible.
Within a few days, the Fruit Inspection Squad members have made arrangements with the fruit sellers to pocket fresh fruit for themselves and their families in exchange for looking the other way at their covert fruit sales. Soon there is an outcry and an investigation. More fruit sellers are arrested, along with members of the Fruit Inspection Squad, who receive lengthy jail sentences for corrupting their high office and taking fruit out of the mouths of children.
A new Fruit Inspection Squad is appointed, with twice as many members. Additionally, a Fruit Secret Police composed of undercover agents who are tasked with rooting out corruption in the Fruit Inspection Squad, is unleashed to watch the fruit watchmen.
All this new manpower comes with an even higher Produce Tax. The fruit sellers are no longer able to meet the demands of the taxes, as well as the bribes expected by both the Fruit Inspection Squad and the Fruit Secret Police to allow them to stay in business. Instead they go over their heads and suborn a few senior members of the Ministry of Street Fairs with fresh fruit. The fruit sold at the street fair and in the supermarkets is now more rotten than ever and draws flies from miles around.
Politicians rise to denounce corruption in the Ministry of Street Fairs, and its Fruit Inspection Squad and Secret Fruit Police. New Ministry members, drawn from the ranks of fruit equality activists, pledge their absolute devotion to the highest standards of ethics. Instead they collude with members of the Secret Fruit Police to create a secret fruit cartel which sells fresh fruit to the very rich at high prices. The Fruit Cartel extends into the highest levels of the government.
The fruit at the street fair is more rotten than ever, but the Fruit Dole is doubled to two apples a week, though employees at the Ministry usually steal and resell the fruit intended for the fruit dole during their inspections. The cartel creates a thriving underground fruit market. Young boys throughout the city earn a few coins by whispering to passerby, "Hey Mister, would you like to buy some fruit."
The fruit cartel transforms into organized crime. Rival fruit sellers engage in knife fights. A number of children are killed while selling fruit.
The public demands that the government do something and the government increases jail terms for illegal fruit sales and doubles the size of the Ministry's budget by doubling taxes on the fruit sellers. The fruit sold at the fair is positively horrifying, but no one is there to notice. In the shadow of the gray Ministry building, the street fair stands empty as the fruit trade has moved into the back alleys.
A major research study is undertaken, its results overseen by a blue ribbon commission, which calls on the Ministry to address the fruit shortage by nationalizing all the remaining fruit sellers and supermarkets promising a new standard of excellent and absolute control over all fruit sales.
The government dithers, encouraging people to grow fruit in their own backyards, for their own use-- which can be sold only after an expensive licensing and approvals process, but this only increases the illegal fruit market, as many citizens begin growing fruit and reselling it on the black fruit market.
The Fruit Cartel, enforced by the Secret Fruit Police, attempts to control this market. Daily radio broadcasts denounce "Fruit Hoarders" and declare a "War on Backyard Fruit." Home fruit growing is banned, but nevertheless thrives. In an attempt to stamp out Illegal Fruit Growing, a ban is introduced on many agricultural supplies which might be used by illegal fruit growers.
The public outrage against crime, the high price of illegal fruit and the low quality of legal fruit, combined with the Ministry's blatant corruption, encourages support for the Fruit People's Party's revolution. The entire government is shot. The Ministry of Street Fairs becomes the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, and promises an end to put an end to corruption and provide "Fruit for Everyone".
As its first act, the People's Ministry demands that the fruit growers and importers provide "Fruit for Everyone." The few fruit growers and importers who have not gone out of business, have gotten used to selling their fruit illegally. The People's Ministry has them tried and executed and their orchards and businesses are nationalized "In the Name of the People." In their place, the government sends unemployed wagon drivers, who know nothing about growing fruit except that it has to be delivered, to work the orchards. A new "Golden Age of Fruit for Everyone" is declared.
The fruit orchards go mostly untended. The new workers know nothing about agriculture, their salaries are minimal and their motivation is entirely absent. At the beginning of each growing season, the "People's Ministry of Street Fairs" sets out a target number for the crop that they expect to grow. When the workers fail to meet that quota, the People's Secret Fruit Police accuses them of economic sabotage and has them executed. Prisoners takes their place working under the rifles of armed guards.
After a few seasons of this, there is still no fruit. In fact there is less fruit than there ever was. The People's Ministry compensates for this by importing fruit from abroad which it distributes in small amounts through the "Fruit Dole". What little fresh fruit is grown goes to the Fruit People's Party, as well as the numerous lackeys of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy that evaluates and weighs the produce for weight equality.
At the end of every harvest, the People's Fruit Propaganda Corps declares that under the wise leadership of the Fruit People's Party, with the insightful guidance of the members of the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, with the tireless efforts of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy, and through the hard dedicated labor of the Fruit Growers (those who hadn't been shot yet), the target for the fruit harvest has been both met and exceeded. Posters depict ripe shining fruit surrounded by shining rays and radio broadcasts exclaim over the great number of fruit grown. Children memorize speeches about how lucky they are to be living in the greatest country in the world where fruit is available to everyone on the Fruit Dole; whether or not they can pay for it.
Meanwhile the only fruit at the street fairs will kill you as soon as you take a bite. The only reason anyone goes there is make a connection with illegal fruit sellers, who resell fruit stolen by members of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy. At private parties, the members of the People's Ministry and the People's Party dine lavishly on pears and apples, and decadently spoon handfuls of grapes into their mouths... little aware that in the outside world any working family could afford what has become a delicacy in the People's Republic of Fruitania.
When families go out for a night at the movies, the only film playing is the impassioned epic FRUIT HARVESTERS OF THE NORTHERN SLOPES, which depicts the struggle of brave fruit growers who battle the elements and greedy corrupt Fruit Gangsters. It took 2 years to film, and it is the first new movie to be released in six months. And the people are happy to have it. They don't remember that before the Ministry of Film-making was formed, several movies used to be released each week.
After the Newsreels which show the brave People's Army preparing to invade local fruit producing nations, whose "fruit hoarding aggression" threatens them, and members of the Fruit Inspection Squad rounding up seedy looking Fruit Gangsters-- the main feature begins.
Even as the film tells the story of Peter, the brave fruit grower, who romances Latya, the beautiful daughter of Lovak, the fruit hoarder, who insists on growing and selling his own fruit, rather than working for the benefit of the people-- the audience pays little attention, focusing on the gorgeous fruit orchards, their mouths salivating furiously at the sight.
At the end of the movie, an official from the People's Fruit Party rises to proclaim that this year's fruit harvest has been the biggest and most tremendous harvest ever. Unfortunately, he says, the first priority of the People's Fruit Party must be to provide fruit to the starving children who go without fruit all the time. Which is why 90 percent of the harvest will go to a special Children's Fruit Dole, to be distributed to starving children, somewhere else. Somewhere they've never heard of.
The remaining fruit will be sold to the filthy Fruit Hoarders abroad in order to buy the weapons that the Fruit People's Army needs to protect the fruit orchards of Fruitania from those who seek to steal their fruit.
He congratulates them for their dedication to the principles of Fruitism, and promises that with their continued hard work and effort, a day will come when everyone around the world will have as much fruit as they want,.. when the World Fruitian Revolution comes.
The audience joins him in singing the revolutionary hymn, "Fruit of My Homeland", their voices rising with impassioned fervor on the verse, "The fruit of my homeland is the sweetest fruit of all. I will die for your orchards and perish for your pears. The fruit of my homeland is dearest to me." That is followed by a chorus of "Fruit-Guardians of Fruitania", "Workers of the Fruit Orchards" and "Death to the Fruit Hoarders".
And then they all go home. The People's Party member to what he considers a lavish repast of a fresh pear. If he moves up in the party, he can expect to dine on many pieces of fruit a day. A few lucky audience members return to suppers of moldy fruit baked into pies that are mostly crust. Others have rice clumped into the shapes of pears, apples and grapes, covered in food coloring and glazed with sugar-- a delicacy that they claim is almost as good as the real thing. Not that any of them have ever tasted a piece of fresh fruit in their lives. And never expect to.
The radio comes on automatically with a stirring broadcast from the Chairman of the People's Fruit Party who announces that the world revolution is now closer than ever. "The decadent Fruit Hoarders abroad are part of a decaying social and economic system that cannot last much longer. Their fruit hoarding has made them weak," he declares, "and ripe for takeover. They cannot conceive of sacrificing their fruits for others as we can. All they care about is their own gluttony. Soon their fruit orchards will be ours. And then they too will live just as we do."
The broadcast, heard by millions of people who have never tasted a fresh piece of fruit, closes with the revolutionary anthem, "Fruit for Everyone".
(Fortunately this is only a fairy tale that could never ever happen in real life. Still it might be worth remembering that when you kill the golden apple of the free market, all that's left are moldy pears. And that "Fruit for Everyone" usually means "Fruit for No One")
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack.
For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflicts with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored.
Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left's task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.
The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people "truly" stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.
Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.
The left's honest response, the one that shows up on its Twitter feeds and in posts on its own sites, is that the country is overreacting. Some leftists will even be bold enough to say that we had it coming. But its public response is more discreet. It exploits the grief for its own ends, diverting shocked city residents into interfaith memorials, some of which are progressive enough to include denunciations of American foreign policy and vigils for the dead on both sides.
But even here, the left generally restrains itself. It waits until the weeks or months have passed to begin deadening the emotion surrounding the event with sarcastic remarks and jokes until the sacred becomes fully profane. It waits somewhat less time to begin lecturing the country on how our foreign policy made them hate us, knowing that in a contest between the establishment's narrative of inexplicable Islamic radicalization for unknown reasons and their narrative of American evil, they have the upper hand because they provide a realistic motive and the establishment does not.
Still this too comes later. The left knows that there is a window on human emotion. There is a time when people need to mourn and a time when they will feel a diminishing outrage and even begin to agree with observations whose thrust is that the United States of America is the real terrorist. And so there are things that the left will say on DailyKos and then on Salon that it will not say on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times.
The editorials explaining how a lack of American support for Chechen independence led to the marathon massacre are coming. They just haven't splashed ashore in mainstream liberal newspapers yet. Timing is everything and the difference between the left of the counterculture and the left of the culture is that it knows what people will be willing to listen to and when. And it knows where to begin.
Against the horror of the bombing, the left juxtaposes the horror of police state. It pits the fear of terrorists depriving us of our lives and freedoms against the fear of the government doing the same. And considering the history of government abuses, it does not take long for this line of argument to make a compelling emotional dent in the responses of even many ordinary people to the attacks.
The left begins by raising all sorts of procedural questions about how law enforcement and the military are treating the enemy. It develops a burning conviction that our civil rights are the only thing about the country worth keeping. It hammers away at any law enforcement or military mistake, no matter how minor, and collects these together to amass a narrative of the police state.
At this stage the left puts on a show of maintaining its objectivity. It pretends that it is the principle that matters, not the perpetrator and most of those gullible people nodding along never notice that there is only one issue and two groups of perpetrators that this principle applies to: terrorists and leftist activists working in support of terrorists.
For months or even years, the left wraps itself in a Constitution that it does not believe in on behalf of those who want to abolish and destroy it.
The attacks on law enforcement and the military prove the left's core thesis that America is the oppressor and therefore deserving of terrorism. Whatever action, no matter how little, we take to defend ourselves proves that the terrorists were justified in attacking us. Even if all we do is lock up terrorists or shoot back at them when they shoot at us, the left will find enough grounds for indicting us as irredeemable monsters who deserve all that we have coming to us.
The left doesn't put it that way of course. It begins by asking us to believe that the terrorists are not attacking us, they are attacking our government, even if they keep murdering people who are by no means in the government. But once we have accepted the notion that the terrorists are justified in attacking our government, the left is then able to argue that we deserve to be attacked because living in a democracy, we elect our governments.
It's a neat trap that the left uses to turn questioning government policy into supporting terrorism.
That line of argument is cushioned at first. The left understands that arguments are won on emotion, not reason. It seeks out any family members of the victims who agree with its views and surrounds its spokesmen with them to give them moral sanction for their vileness. It emphasizes that understanding its theories is the only way to prevent another attack thereby making its negative tack seem positive.
And so the left moves from issues of process to polarity using our defense against terrorism to argue that the terrorists are only defending themselves against us. The arguments that seem initially untenable when the blood is still on the streets slowly sink in as baffled people try to come to terms with what happened.
All this is old hat for the left which has been excusing violence and revising history long before Islamic terrorism was an issue for anyone on this side of the Atlantic. Its tactics are polished and effective; though they would be far less so without the high ground of the media, the arts and the educational system, but the same could be said of any group. If David Icke had the unquestioning allegiance of 95 percent of media outlets and universities, most people would consider the existence of reptilians nothing more than common sense.
It is that very power which makes the narrative so insidious. The views of the streetcorner lunatic handing out pamphlets can be transformed in context without being transformed in content by the simple expedient of being read on the air in a sonorous voice by a news network anchor. But the greater insidiousness of the snake in the bloody garden comes from its ability to break up the narrative into stages to make it more palatable.
The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception. It pretends to grieve, when it is sneering on the inside, and it pretends to want to help, when it is really seeking to destroy. It waits long enough to be able to pit the imaginary suffering of terrorists against the real suffering of their victims. It encourages its own brand of cynicism for the suffering of the victims and the heroism of their rescuers, while defending the sacred nature of the misfortune of its terrorists. It insists that its defense of terrorists in a time of terror invests it with a superior moral power and it uses that power to support terrorism.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog 2 out of 3 governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.
"Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address.
But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that in response to the terrorism, Bostonians won't spend the rest of their lives locked in their homes, at least not until the next time there's a terrorist on the loose. But then again neither are Rwandans or Sudanese. This isn't so much an inspirational message as a pat on the back from a government that once again failed in its duty to keep Americans from being terrorized.
If America had refused to be terrorized, the Tsarnaevs would not have been admitted to this country or would have been shown the door once they started adding terrorist videos to their playlist. Instead Tamerlan Tsarnaev was free to slap around his girlfriend while his brother Dzhokhar was adding classic hits to his YouTube playlist like "We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad."
That ditty, from the hit-master behind “Hey, Shahid”, “The Holy Jihad (Rise Muslim)” and “Insallah, We are Waiting for Paradise” contains lyrics like "Paradise’s rivers softly chime/The 72 virgins lovingly whisper" and "Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture".
But while infidels might still rule the United States, though there are serious questions to be raised about who is ruling Michigan or New Jersey, life was hardly torture for the Tsarnaevs who drove luxury cars, attended good schools and got good media coverage. The good media coverage continued even after their bout of mass murder as the New York Times feature story on them was headlined, "Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying to Fit In." And who can blame them for trying to fit by practicing some of their native customs of mass murder.
At some point refusing to be terrorized looks a lot like refusing to pay attention to what terrorism is. After September 11 the government encouraged everyone to get back out there and shop. The message now is take in an interfaith service and then visit your local mosque for a sanitized tour that explains how peaceful Islam really is. There's a lot of talk about finishing the marathon and MoveOn.orging on our way past the unpleasantness.
But there are two standards on being terrorized. When a mentally ill man shoots up a school, then everyone is obligated to be terrorized all the time. Children can be seized for chewing a pop tart the wrong way and the leading leaders tow around selected parents of victims to demand that the pesky Bill of Rights take a back seat to a special moral superiority vote from a former Democratic member of congress whose great achievement in life was getting shot in the head by another mental patient.
The next Adam Lanza is just around the corner. But the next Tamerlan Tsarnaev isn't worth bothering with. Gun control is an urgent issue, but mass immigration from terrorist countries isn't.
Talk of refusing to be terrorized smacks of governments handing out coping mechanisms for preventable acts of terror. And once we start going down that road, it's worth remembering that the timeless coping mechanism for that sort of thing is Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed the old Stockholm cure is popular in the media which is already beginning to disgorge explanations of alienation that will show that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't kill on their own, we made them killers by not showing them enough love.
It's not the role of governments to tell people how to get over a terrorist attack. Nor is it the role of government to violate the Bill of Rights using the act of a lone madman as a pretext. But it is the role of government to stop an international campaign of terror by a fanatical ideology from reaching these shores using the blunt tool of immigration.
Refusing to be terrorized is as simple as refusing to accept more immigrants from Muslim countries. It's not the least repressive measure ever, but it beats interfering with the civil rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who are not members of terrorist groups.
The difference between refusing to accept terrorism and refusing to feel bad about terrorism is the difference between refusing to be terrorized and refusing to pay attention to terrorism.
There is no need for Obama to play Therapist-in-Chief. It's not his job, even if he is better at it than he is at his real job. His job isn't to praise the attitudes of the people his administration put in danger by refusing to give Tamerlan the boot even after warnings had come in that he was involved with Islamic terrorism. It's to refuse to accept the presence of terrorists in this country.
Obama obviously won't do that job. But neither did Bush. Unlike empty paeans to courage by politicians with none of their own, that topic is not even on the table. The terrorists will keep on coming and after each new act of terror, the politicians who keep the door wide open for them will praise the indomitable spirit of whichever city got targeted this time around.
Americans don't need to be told that they have courage. It's a nice topic for a speech, but an even better topic for a speech is, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation Deporting Amateur Jihadists Who Claim Life Under Infidel Rule is Torture." One is an empty compliment. The other is a practical task.
A refusal to be terrorized should not be the task of the civilian population. It only becomes the task of the civilian population when the government is unwilling or unable to keep them safe. And then come the speeches that say, but don't say, "The bad news is you're going to be blown up, but the good news is you're going to be a good soldier about it."
Muslim terrorism doesn't just happen. It's not random. It's not inevitable. It's a known entity and it has a vector. When bird flu breaks out, flights from affected countries are suspended, but when Islamism breaks out in a country, then the planes keep flying and the refugees get resettled and the infection spreads.
America will refuse to be terrorized when it refuses to admit terrorists or potential terrorists into the country and when it begins aggressively deporting terrorist sympathizers from its cities. Americans will refuse to be terrorized when they demand a government that closes the door to terrorists, instead of praising everyone for their courage once the acts of terror happen.
Terrorism is a function of immigration. Terrorists do not come to this country on parachutes or sneak in by boat. For the most part they arrive here legally. They come through a door that our government opened and keeps open as widely as it can because its allied institutions profit from the traffic. It is more important for the government to keep colleges in the Middle East student business and to keep Democrats in the new minorities business than it is to refuse to allow this country to be terrorized.
We refused to be terrorized after September 11. We went shopping. We got back in the stock market. We fought two wars whose prime purposes was to get two Muslim countries to be able to vote for their leaders. And here we are again facing the same thing all over again. Except this time we get to trade Iraq for Syria and Boston for New York.
While we refuse to be terrorized, those who insist on terrorizing us continue swarming into this country. A hundred Muslim nations have sent their progeny to live their tortured lives here, until they grow tired of infidel rule and decide to do what they do back home. Kill. And then we once again can refuse to be terrorized at an interfaith service in which the clergy of the murderers stand side by side with the clergy of the murdered.
The day may come when we finally refuse to be terrorized. They will not do it by going back to do their part for the next shopping season, the next interfaith service and the next healing speech. They will refuse to be terrorized by closing the door on terrorism for good.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog Somewhere toward the end of "A Few Good Men" comes the only scene from the movie that anyone actually remembers. It's the one where Jack Nicholson in a uniform begins chewing the scenery and turns a dreary Aaron Sorkin adaptation of an Aaron Sorkin play into a memorable movie while inflicting Sorkin on the entertainment industry for the next two decades.
The familiar thesis of Nicholson's Colonel Jessup is that he does what needs to be done and what no one wants to talk about needing to be done. His existence may be "grotesque and incomprehensible to you", but he does the ugly things that make it possible for everyone to go about their day.
The speech is an extended wordy distillation of a familiar quote that was variously attributed to Churchill or Orwell. "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
In the urban battlefield of Philly, one of those rough men doing violence on behalf of liberal ideas was a Thomas Jefferson University grad by the name of Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell was one of those unsung heroes doing the dirty work that allowed the activists putting on another round of the Vagina Monologues sleep safely in their beds at night.
Most supporters of military intervention don't like looking at photos of dead children after a bombing raid. They will contend that they are a fact, but not the point. Gosnell's butcher shop is similarly a fact, rather than the point. Pro-choice activists will argue that it is not representative of abortion clinics. And it isn't.
It is representative of what abortion looks like once you cut through the upper layer of the medical services provided to Sarah Lawrence grads and down to the street level of the lower strata that don't visit abortion clinics to assert their reproductive empowerment, but because the family unit is broken and they are trying to escape the same cycle of broken families that they can never leave behind.
Kermit Gosnell wasn't running an Aaron Sorkin abortion clinic. He was running a Colonel Jessup abortion clinic.
Margaret Sanger got her start setting up shop in Jewish and Italian neighborhoods because those were the two groups that the upper strata of the day thought were having too many children. Back then it was supposed to be about wives overburdened with too many children. Now it's about families that never existed where the abortions don't happen at the clinic, those are just the final expressions of a larger societal abortion that took place when the family died.
Abortion is the final act of the death of the family. It pretends to solve the problem that arises from the absence of the family. The first abortion kills marriage. The last abortion kills the child that might have come from a marriage that never existed.
The family isn't dead everywhere. It's more likely to be dead in the places that men like Gosnell do business than the places where the policymakers and the non-profits who dress up destruction as empowerment do business.
Most arsonists don't set their own houses on fire. Most liberal policies don't affect liberals. And that's true in the family sphere where the liberals in the top 1 percent are more likely to have a stable marriage than the bottom 1 percent bleeding in Gosnell's house of reproductive freedom because their dead baby does not have and will not have a father.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell was doing the dirty work of the liberal state by cleaning up some of the mess. It was bloody and murderous work, but it was made necessary by the sort of people who talk about reproductive freedom while little realizing how little freedom the women who bled, and sometimes died, in Gosnell's offices really had.
The issue isn't as simple as Pro-Choice. Abortion is just the conclusion of the sordid package of social liberalism. The package begins with sex ed, complete with the obligatory LGBT mentions, runs through national STD infestations, hookup culture, single parenthood and packs of young men and women recreating the mistakes of the parents they never had and then flushing those mistakes down the toilet before settling down with three kids, by different fathers who are never around, and a package of subsidies from the welfare state administered by social workers who have seen it all.
It's not the story for everyone, but for many of the women who found and find their way to places like Gosnell's butcher shop, that is their story. It's not a story about abortion. It's a story about what happens when you replace the family with free love that turns out to be neither free nor love. Like teaching first graders sex ed or handing out condoms on the street, abortion is one of the ways that the liberal state tries to limit the fallout from its destruction of the family.
The fallout is ugly and bloody. You can see it in the packs of angry teenage flash mobs smashing through stores. You can see it in the food stamp cards that mothers tote like coupons, the teen domestic abuse hotline posters hanging around neighborhoods "If he respects you, he won't beat you" and the other posters of frightened pregnant teenagers holding their stomachs and whispering, "I don't want to lose my dream."
The end of that long brutal journey through black eyes, plans for a GED and medical tests at the clinic is one of Dr. Gosnell's slabs. The men and women who made Kermit Gosnell's business boom don't want to look at him. Why would they? How many people wanted to look at William Calley? They are satisfied knowing that somewhere rough men in latex gloves are doing violence of the world they made. The world they unmade.
They are beginning to claim Gosnell's story already and remake it into another drama about the lack of access. More money must be given to Planned Parenthood so that no Dr. Gosnell's happen again. Reform and accountability are key. More money must go to groups that promote the lifestyles that lead to abortion and then dispense abortions so that the whole cycle can continue to expand. The babies have to be destroyed to save the next generation of babies from being punished with babies.
But the Gosnells aren't going anywhere. They are everywhere. Sometimes they're Middle Eastern. Other times they're Chinese or Pakistani. Their medical skills are poor, but it's not because they're stupid, it's because they don't care. They set up shop in poor neighborhoods. The philosophy is fast food. In and out. Maximize patients. Maximize cash. The treatment is sloppy but so are the patients and no one cares because there is a separate waiting room for the white patients.
Often they work the Medicaid/Medicare angle where they defraud the government, ordering endless tests from clinics they have relationships with while offering the lowest standard of care possible. And some cash in on the abortion business. Patients aren't people to them. They're wallets or insurance cards with eyes, teeth, bones, genitalia, muscles and any other parts that they can bill for.
It's easy to take a whack at them, but vultures only gather where there is carrion. The Gosnells are vultures. They will eat what they can, gorge themselves on bloody meat and then waddle in the sun. But they didn't make this world where family is becoming an alien concept and a child is an alien fetal parasite. They are just cashing in on it.
Kermit Gosnell is the future. And the future in places like this is ugly and grim. It's broken families living on social welfare creating more broken families. It's dead children whose murder churches and synagogues are forced to pay for. It's living children who grow up hoping to be able to kill. It's feral packs of lost boys who will never be men and the girls who suddenly become women reading an ad and taking a bus down to 3801 Lancaster Avenue because they're lonely and afraid and they're afraid of losing their dreams, even if they don't know what they are anymore.
This is the world that liberalism made. It is small, mean and ugly. Call it Sex Positive Education or Reproductive Freedom or any other euphemism and out of sight of the specialized study sessions at overpriced colleges, it still ends with mothers towing screaming children down the street, going to church on Sundays even though they don't believe and there are hardly any younger men there and others mothers becoming girls again at Dr. Gosnell's hands.
Kermit Gosnell will be locked up. There will be a brief spurt of inspections. And then things will go on as before and the empowerment educators who wear "I Had an Abortion" t-shirts while they drive to the soccer games of their children in some placid suburb will sleep well at night knowing that somewhere in Philly, NYC and LA there are rough men doing violence to the wombs of desperate women and the lives of their unborn children on behalf of their ideologies and policies. Rough men in dark places doing he inevitable dirty work in the world they made.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog
To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.
No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.
Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.
