Jonah and VDH give two cheers to The President

November 30, 2011 4:00 A.M. Victor Davis Hanson @ NRO Obama 101 Few presidents have dashed so many illusions as Obama. In the last three years, the president has taught us a great deal about America, the world, and himself. Before Obama, many Americans still believed in massive deficit spending, whether as an article of fairness, a means to economic growth, or just a lazy fallback position to justify an out-of-control federal government. But after the failure of a nearly $800 billion “stimulus” program — intended to keep unemployment under 8 percent — no one believes any more that an already indebted government will foster economic growth by taking on another $4 trillion in debt. In other words, “stimulus” is mostly a dead concept. The president — much as he advised a barnstorming President Bush in 2005 to cease pushing Social Security reform on a reluctant population — should give it up and junk the new $500 billion program euphemistically designated as a “jobs bill.” The U.S. government is already borrowing every three days what all of America spent on Black Friday. Obama has also taught us that prominent government intervention into the private sector often makes things worse, and invites crony-capitalist corruption. Nearly three years into this administration, it is striking how seldom Barack Obama brags about Cash for Clunkers, the Chrysler and GM bailouts, or Solyndra. He either is quiet about them or sort of shrugs, as if to say, “Stuff happens.” Even creative bookkeeping cannot mask the fact that the auto-company bailouts (begun, to be sure, by the Bush administration, but made worse under Obama) will prove a huge drain on the Treasury. No one even attempts any more to convince us that we will like Obamacare once we read the legislation, or that it will save us costs in the long run, or that it will cheer up businesses so that they will invest and hire. All that was dreamland, 2009, and this is reality, 2011, when we hear only “It could have been worse.” Obama has also taught us that a president’s name, his father’s religion, his ethnic background, loud denunciations of his predecessor, discomforting efforts to apologize, bow, and contextualize past American actions — none of that does anything to lead to greater peace in the world or security for the United States. And by the same token, George Bush’s drawl, Texas identification, and Christianity did not magically turn allies into neutrals and neutrals into enemies. Israel, Britain, and Eastern Europe are not closer allies now than they were in 2008. Iran is still Iran — and may be even a more dangerous adversary after the failed Obama outreach. Putin’s Russia, despite “reset” (a word we no longer much hear), is still Putin’s Russia. China still despises the U.S., and feels in 2011 that it is in a far better position to act on its contempt than it was in 2009. North Korea never got the “hope and change” message. Europe is collapsing, reminding the world where the United States is headed if it does not change course. Outreach didn’t seem to do much for the Castro brothers, Hugo Chávez, or Daniel Ortega. We are helping Mexico to sue our own states, but that does not seem to persuade its leaders to keep their citizens home. Muslim Pakistan went from a duplicitous ally to a veritable enemy. The more we bragged about Turkey, the more we could feel it holds us in contempt. We hope that the Libyan rebels and the Cairo protesters are headed toward democracy, but we privately admit that they seem to have no more interest in establishing it than we have in promoting it. In other words, Professor Obama reminds future presidents that the world will transcend their rhetoric, their pretensions, and their heritage. Other nations always calibrate their relations with the United States either by their own perceived self-interest, or by centuries-old American values and power, or both. Barack Obama has taught us a great deal about dealing with radical Islam, an ideology not predicated on what presidents do or say. There will be no shutting down of Guantanamo as promised, and no end to either renditions or preventive detentions and tribunals. Khalid Sheik Mohammed will never be tried, as promised, in a New York courtroom not far from the scene of his mass murdering. The so-called Ground Zero mosque — once so dear to sanctimonious members of the Obama administration — will never be built; either liberal New Yorkers will quietly prevent it, or the architects of the scheme will be exposed as financial as well as cultural con artists. Obama will never again give an interview to Al-Arabiya expanding on how his own heritage will ameliorate relations with Arabs. The Cairo speech will go down in history not as a landmark creative effort to win over Muslims, but, to the extent it is remembered, as one of the most ahistorical constructs in presidential history. The Obama legacy in the War on Terror is as Predator-in-Chief — boldly increasing targeted assassinations tenfold from the Bush era, on the theory that we more or less kill the right suspected terrorists; few civil libertarians care much, apparently because one of their own is doing it. We have learned from Obama that the messianic presidency is a myth. Obama’s attempt to recreate Camelot has only reminded us that JFK’s presidency — tax cuts, Cold War saber-rattling, Vietnam intervention — was never Camelot. We shall see no more Latinate presidential sloganeering (“Vero Possumus”), no more rainbow posters. Gone are the faux-Greek columns, the speeches about seas receding and the planet cooling — now sources of embarrassment rather than nostalgia. Chancellor Merkel won’t want another Victory Column address from someone who ducked out on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama himself will not lecture crowds any longer about the dangers of their fainting when he speaks; Michelle will cease all the nonsense about “deign[ing] to enter the messy thing called politics” and finally acquiring pride in the U.S. when it nominated her husband. Even Chris Matthews’s leg has stopped tingling. There will be no more Newsweek comparisons of Obama to a god. Even the Nobel Prize committee will soon grasp that it tarnished its brand by equating fleeting celebrity with lasting achievement. “Green” will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore’s hucksterism, and Van Jones’s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the U.S. government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America’s economic recovery — vast new gas and oil finds — will soon turn out to be America’s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped. One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama’s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the U.S. Senate eight years later, sealed divorce records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates’ campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like “typical white person,” the clinger’s speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous. Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions as has Barack Obama. And for that, we owe him a strange sort of thanks. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Jonah Goldberg on NRO November 30, 2011 12:00 A.M. Courting Joe the Puppeteer Democrats have abandoned all pretense of winning the white working class. Earlier this month, the left-wing magazine The Nation highlighted Joe Therrien as a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A New York City public-school drama teacher, Therrien was frustrated with the shortcomings of the school system. So he quit his job and “set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion — puppetry.” Three years and $35,000 in student-loan debt later, Therrien returned home, only to find he couldn’t land a full-time job. Apparently, a master’s in puppetry doesn’t provide the competitive edge in the marketplace he’d hoped for. Therrien joined Occupy Wall Street, constructing giant puppets and “figuring out how to make theater that’s going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It’s what I’m driven to do right now.” I think I speak for everyone when I say: Good luck with that. One other thing: He may not realize it, but Joe the Puppeteer may be for Democrats what Joe the Plumber was for the GOP. (Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher was the Ohio man who confronted candidate Barack Obama about raising taxes on small business.) Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times that the Democrats have made a fateful decision: “All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up . . . of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers, and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African American and Hispanic.” After decades of trying, the white working class is now “an unattainable cohort,” according to Edsall and a slew of Democratic strategists. The most common explanation for this failure is a self-serving and mossy tale about a racial backlash. The most recent version holds that the “tea parties,” which are about as white as the Occupy Wall Street movement, amount to a bigoted reaction to a black president. Never mind that the leading Tea Party contender for the GOP nomination is Herman Cain. [Funny how all of Herman’s “women” are from Chicago? I’m just saying.] In a less-charged environment, the differences between Obama and Cain would be seen as a continuation of the great philosophical rivalry between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, a socialist intellectual, favored promoting a “talented tenth” — a black progressive elite focused on state-run, top-down reforms — while Washington preached self-help and entrepreneurialism from the bottom up. Today’s Democratic party has an ingrained cultural aversion to the Booker T. Washington school. Liberal elites see themselves as a multiracial talented tenth, planning the economy and guiding society. In power, they lavish support on fashionable but unproductive sectors of the economy, such as green-energy boondoggles, and they buy off big constituencies invested in ever-larger government, such as public-sector unions, the “helping professions,” and even too-big-too-fail businesses. Their arguments sound economic and empirical, but ultimately they’re cultural in nature. The upscale white professionals the Democrats are courting disproportionately share a cultural affinity for government and faith that statist interventions are for your own good. They also believe government needs to help people succeed — or escape – the rat race of the private sector. (Remember Michelle Obama’s advice to working-class women? “Don’t go into corporate America . . . become teachers. Work for the community.”) In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama mocked the Booker T. Washington concept of self-reliance: “In Washington, they call this the ownership society, but what it really means is, you’re on your own.” Later, Rep. Nancy Pelosi sold health-care reform as a “jobs bill” because “if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent . . . your aspirations because you will have health care,” she explained as if speaking straight to Joe the Puppeteer. “You won’t have to be job-locked.” That might be a compelling message to the white left represented at Occupy protests. The question is whether it sounds condescending or aloof to the rest of the Democratic coalition that wouldn’t mind being “job-locked” right now. — Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can reach him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 TribuneMedia Services, Inc.

When I was 14 I was an atheist, it was easy then.

That 1%

It's never too late for a Veteran's Day tribute and Micheal Yon says it so much better than I can.

11 November 2011

Iraq 2005

It has been an honor these seven years to cover American and British troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippines and elsewhere.  It is said that only about 1% of Americans serve in the armed forces.  Many of our troops are not even American citizens.  I see them in combat regularly.  Many veterans are in hospitals or have fresh scars and are recovering from recent wounds.  A message just arrived from the military in Kabul that we just lost another service member in Southern Afghanistan.

Many of our finest will be in combat as you read these words.  They will cope with their losses and continue to fight.  Mostly they are very young.  It is common to meet a young combat trooper who has fought for several years overseas.  He doesn’t make much money.  A heartfelt “thank you” goes a long way.

They have lost friends.  Many of our young veterans have been wounded more than once, and yet they are out there right now.  Some have more Purple Hearts than stripes.  Their strength and dedication is inspirational.  Their courage seems bottomless.

Tonight, many will sleep on the ground, their ears ringing from the nearby bullets and blasts that they have experienced so many times.  They have killed the enemy, and watched their buddies die in their arms.  They have seen and smelled and heard things that most of us rather would not.  They will carry these things forever as Veterans.  Tonight they will fight. We’ve already lost at least one today, yet most Americans seem to have forgotten that many of our men and women are still out there.

This is the longest war in the history of the United States.  It’s far from over.  I have not forgotten.  I never will forget.

Thank you, Veterans.

#Occupy Plymouth Rock

The Real Story of Thanksgiving

By Rush Limbaugh

November 23, 2011

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now time for a tradition, an annual tradition, and that is The Real Story of Thanksgiving from my book that I wrote back in the early nineties. I wrote two of them, actually. In one of the books I wrote, The Real Story of Thanksgiving. And reading from it has become something we do every year on the program because it's still not taught. The myth of Thanksgiving is still what is taught, and that myth is basically that a bunch of thieves from Europe arrived quite by accident at Plymouth Rock, and if it weren't for the Indians showing them how to grow corn and slaughter turkeys and how to swallow and stuff, that they would have died of starvation and so forth. The Indians were great -- and then, in a total show of appreciation, we totally wiped out the Indians!

We took their country from 'em. We started racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia; spread syphilis; and, basically, destroyed the environment. That is the multicultural version of Thanksgiving, and it simply isn't true. The real version of Thanksgiving is in my second best-seller, 2.5 million copies in hardback: See, I Told You So. "Chapter 6, Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving -- The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century ... The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs." In England. So, "A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.

"After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example.

"And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found -- according to Bradford's detailed journal -- a cold, barren, desolate wilderness." The New York Jets had just lost to the Patriots. "There were no friends to greet them, he wrote." I just threw that in about the Jets and Patriots. "There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims -- including Bradford's own wife -- died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.

"Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of" the Bible, "both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well." Everything belonged to everybody. "They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

"Nobody owned anything." It was a forerunner of Occupy Wall Street. Seriously. "They just had a share in it," but nobody owned anything. "It was a commune, folks." The original pilgrim settlement was a commune. "It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the '60s and '70s out in California," and Occupy Wall Street, "and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way." There's no question they were organic vegetables. What else could they be? "Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage," as they saw fit, and, "thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism.

"And what happened? It didn't work!" They nearly starved! "It never has worked! What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years -- trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it -- the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future." If it were, there wouldn't be any Occupy Wall Street. There wouldn't be any romance for it.

"The experience that we had in this common course and condition,'" Bradford wrote. "'The experience that we had in this common course and condition tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing -- as if they were wiser than God,' Bradford wrote." This was his way of saying, it didn't work, we thought we were smarter than everybody, everybody was gonna share equally, nobody was gonna have anything more than anything else, it was gonna be hunky-dory, kumbaya. Except it doesn't work. Because of half of them didn't work, maybe more. They depended on the others to do all the work. There was no incentive.

"'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense,'" without being paid for it, "'that was thought injustice.'" They figured it out real quick. Half the community is not working -- living off the other half, that is. Resentment built. Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself? That's what he was saying. So the Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.

"Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? 'This had very good success,' wrote Bradford, 'for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.' ... Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes," it did. "Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians." This is what happened. After everybody had their own plot of land and were allowed to market it and develop it as they saw fit and got to keep what they produced, bounty, plenty resulted.

"And then they set up trading posts, stores. They exchanged goods with and sold the Indians things. Good old-fashioned commerce. They sold stuff. And there were profits because they were screwing the Indians with the price. I'm just throwing that in. No, there were profits, and, "The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London." The Canarsie tribe showed up and they paid double, which is what made the Canarsie tribe screw us in the "Manna-hatin" deal years later. (I just threw that in.) They paid off the merchant sponsors back in London with their profits, they were selling goods and services to the Indians. "[T]he success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans," what was barren was now productive, "and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.'

But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering-in-socialism Pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod. That's where the original Thanksgiving story stops, and the story basically doesn't even begin there. The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God," the pilgrims giving thanks to God, "for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony," for surviving the trip, for surviving the experience and prospering in it. "The bounty was shared with the Indians." That's the story. "They did sit down" and they did have free-range turkey and organic vegetables. There were no transfats, "but it was not the Indians who saved the day. It was capitalism and Scripture which saved the day," as acknowledged by George Washington in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, which I also have here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to quickly tell you about one passenger on the Mayflower, a guy named Francis Eaton. He was a carpenter. He was not one of the Pilgrims. He was another passenger. He was a carpenter. He died in 1633, 13 years after they landed at Plymouth, and here's what he left in his will: "One cow, one calf, two hogs, 50 bushels of corn, a black suit, a white hat, a black hat, boots, saws, hammers, square augers, a chisel, fishing lead, and some kitchen items" and his season tickets for the Redskins-Cowboys game. No, no, seriously. This is the estate of one of the men who probably built many of the houses for the first settlers. Very modest. But it shows what he saw as wealth back then. By the way, the life expectancy back then was not much.  Not compared to today.  And just remember, they were not eating trans fats, and they didn't live as long as we do today.

END TRANSCRIPT

Some musings on the condition of our thought ten years after 9/11.

While passing through a series of writings on the anniversary of 9/11, either the entire piece or just the headline I was stuck by one consistency, whether conservative or progressive we seldom look at Islam. We have a series of euphemisms ranging from Islamist to the now discredited Islamo-fascist to fundamentalist to “man caused disaster,” now all shoveled under the rubric of Islamaphobia. For ten years now we have been calling Islam the religion of peace, or saying that the Abrahamic religions have so much in common that all must be guilty of violence in the past, therefore all must be searching for peace in the present. Yet the differences between the three monotheisms are not in the person of the patriarch Abraham, but in their approach to, or lack of theological thinking

To start maybe I should try to find a useful definition of theology. In Webster’s New Collegiate (1975) the definition given is; The study of God and his relation to the world esp. by analysis of the origins and teachings of an organized religious community (as the Christian Church). It is interesting that the dictionary uses the Christian Church as its standard, since if we are going to study all of the Monotheisms and their various theologies Christianity is the easiest one for Americans, with our natural bias toward the Protestant churches even among our atheists. For Christians the questions of theology are what is the nature of Christ’s divinity, how much is human, how much divine? Also what is the individual worshiper’s relation to Jesus? These questions go back to the beginning of Christianity in all its forms, those that still exist and those that don’t. These questions still haunt us in our post Christian world.

In Judaism, if a non believer may be so bold as to present an argument, theological questions are those that define the relationship between God and his people and how this relationship may manifest it self in the world. The history of this relationship is presented in the Bible and the commentary on the history of that relationship is at the center of the Talmud.

What is the theology of Islam? I don’t think there is one, or at least that the relationship between the believer and Allah is one of such distance that the believer is left without any personal relation to the deity beyond that of Master and Slave. The profession of the faith, La Illah Illa Allah, or There is no God but God, known as the Shahadah, is not only impersonal but ahistorical as well, in the sense that this phrase exits out side of history. Allah or God is simply there, he gives you a law which must be followed, and judges you at the end of your life. For the simple Muslim this profession, plus the other pillars of the faith are enough. Those pillars are the daily regimen of prayer, the Ramadan fast, the paying of the Zagat to aid poor Muslims, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his lifetime. However if this is all that is needed then why a lifetime devoted to study?

Islam is a religion based on writings, the foundation being the Quran. The Quran is a book on a table in Paradise and is perfect in form and content, and has existed outside of time. It is not written by Allah, though it speaks of Him. It is not written by Muhammad, though it speaks to him. Through a series of revelations the Surahs, or verses, of the Quran were dictated by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Muhammad from 610 until his death in 632. It is through these revelations and his subsequent teaching that Muhammad gained his reputation of Prophet. It is the perfection of the Quran that proves that Muhammad is the final prophet. Though Muhammad preached these Surahs they were only written down and codified during the reign of the third Caliph Uthman (650-651). The profession of the faith may be the start of Islam for the average Muslim but depth of understanding requires guided study of the Quran based in the works of credentialed scholars and the first step on the road to understanding the religious sciences is the memorization of the Quran in the language of God, Arabic.

The Hadith is also an important part of this road; it is the collected sayings and acts of Muhammad, his Companions and Helpers and gives much aid in finding the way that the true Muslim should live. Since Muhammad was the perfect man he must have led the perfect life.

Over the centuries these two sets of writings have been studied and commented on resulting in the Shari’a, or God’s Law. This is the job of the ulama, the community of the trained and credentialed scholars. Through the process known as fiqh these men will study any new ruling in the light of precedent and metaphor, the use of reason and any philosophy outside of the basic writings having been abolished with the crushing of the Mu’tazilisites in the ninth century by the Hanballi school. The ulama, literally “Those who know”, will then find if a new ruling can be added to the corpus of the law. Since there is no Pope in Islam, and four schools of jurisprudence, this area of study can be contentious.

With the importation of the Shari’a into our courtrooms our politicians, state and local judges increasingly feel they must make exceptions to our local laws, in favor of Shari’a rulings when they pertain to marital and property cases involving Muslims even when local law is plain. In a recent example, a judge in New Jersey acquitted a man on charges of spousal abuse when he presented into evidence the Shari’a passages that justified his actions. Another developing problem is the Abumattalab underwear bomber case. Since he is acting as his own council he demands to be tried as a Muslim warrior under the rules of Shari’a as they pertain to the conduct of Jihad. He therefore feels that he stands above the laws of the United States, these laws being Jahiliyyah, or the equivalent to the laws of medieval Arabia before the cleansing of the Kabba at Mecca and are therefore beneath the Law of God.

Another real problem, however, is what is, or what is not, Jihad. For most of our intellectuals the problem can simply be written off as a personal struggle to become a better Muslim, or relegated to the time of the great conquests of the seventh century. Until we return to the position of the average Muslim. This person has only the most rudimentary understanding of the religion, the Five Pillars being enough for him. For our pundits desperately searching for a way out of this war all that is necessary for a true definition of jihad more to their liking is for some group of scholars, or just a clutch of average Muslims to write that Jihad does not mean war or any other type of violence; except Islam don’t work like that.

Jihad is worked through the warp and woof of the Quran so deeply that the five pillars are irrelevant to its definition. Although there is some dispute as to the number there are about 164 Quran verses dedicated to Jihad; how it is be fought by Muhammad and his community against their enemies, how Allah requires it against unbelievers and those that don’t submit to his worship, how the booty taken (valuables, land and slaves) is to be distributed, how those Muslims that shrink from the field of battle face the fires of hell, and those who die in the way of Allah will be seen as martyrs as the gates of Paradise are opened by their swords. Therefore no one who is not a member of the ulama has anything relevant to say about the concept that can hold any sway with the community of scholars, and it is this community that defines the life of a good Muslim. Thus the aspiring Mujihadeen, the soldier for Allah, has many verses to refer to that justify any type of violence. Here are some of the many references in the Quran on the subject from one Surah, Number 2, The Cow:

Surah 2:190 Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.

Surah 2:191 And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.

Surah 2:192 But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

Surah 2:193 And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.

Surah 2:194 The forbidden month for the forbidden month, and forbidden things in retaliation. And one who attacketh you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you. Observe your duty to Allah, and know that Allah is with those who ward off (evil). [From the Pickthal translation of the Quran.]

Certainly doesn’t sound like the Sermon on the Mount with its admonition to turn the other cheek does it. What it also means is that there is no rational way to end this war, as if there was ever any rational way to end any war. If the war is to go on till all “religion is for Allah” then the entire world is a battle field, and everyone in the world is on a side, whether he knows it or not.

Even when the war is won and the Shari’a is imposed over the defeated people it doesn’t end there. Those People of the Book, Christians and Jews, are degraded to the status of dhimmis, those who are disarmed and protected by the Muslims. In this degraded state they must pay a poll tax known as the jizya. Under some Muslim rulers the tax was on the community, under others it was on the individual and it was never standardized. The Quran verse that calls for this tax is 9:29:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book (The Bible in other words, Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

The feeling of submission took may forms from the wearing of certain clothes, never riding horses, giving up parts of their houses of worship and not being allowed to repair older ones or build new ones, and stepping into the gutter when a Muslim walked by. For worshippers of the old religion, the polytheists, it was simpler, convert or die. For apostates from the religion of Allah the same choice is given, reconvert or die. So began Islam’s march across the world. Considering its lack of theology, but richness in writings the more interesting area of study might be why it was quiescent for the last three centuries rather then why it is expansive now.

It doesn’t seem to matter who makes the statement George W. Bush or Barrack Obama, Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, Michael Scheuer or Sally Quinn that we are not at war with Islam. The question is whether Islam is at war with us, and until we answer that question satisfactorily none of this is going to make much sense.


JimG33

How the last great slave traders get to cry racism is beyond me.

I don't read Mr. Steele as much as I should. As always he turns the fantasy of oppression on its head by asking how can a basically tribal society tied to rules of honor/shame and power sharing can ever look it self in the face. When it does this war will start to be over. But too many make their living off the status quo.
JimG33

The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood

by Shelby Steele
November 14, 2011 at 5:00 am

Shelby Steele, Robert J and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference "The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III," sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, is not really a conflict, it is a war – a war of the Arabs against the Jews. In many ways, this conflict has been a conflict between narratives. We who strongly support Israel have done a poor job in formulating a narrative which will combat the story spun by the other side. We can do better.

The Durban conferences, the request for UN recognition of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, and the general animus in the Middle East and elsewhere toward Israel and toward the Jews, what are they really about? Is the Durban conference and the claim that Israel is a racist nation really about reforming the people of Israel and curing them of their racism?

I think their real interest is to situate the Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization. This is their ulterior goal: to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.

Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.

I will give you one example of a poetic truth that comes from my group, black Americans. We make the following claims: America is a deeply, intractably racist society. It may not be as conspicuous today as it was before. Nevertheless, it is still there today structurally and systemically, and it still holds us back and keeps us from achieving the American dream.

To contradict this claim, one can come forward with evidence to suggest that racism in America today is about 25^th on the list of problems facing black Americans. One can recount one of the great untold stories of America, namely, the moral growth and evolution away from that problem. This is not to say that racism is completely extinguished, but that it no longer prevents the forward progress of any black in the United States. There is no evidence to suggest that it does. Yet, this claim is still the centerpiece of black American identity – this idea that we are victimized by a fundamentally, incurably racist society.

Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.

Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.

The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.

The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? [And how do they use it as an excuse for perpetual war, a war they continue to lose?] One reason why they get away with it in the Middle East is that the Western world lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said "your real problem is inferiority. Your real problem is underdevelopment." That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on. [As they guilt trip the West, they strut as mighty warriors among themselves. For example, a contingent from Hamas has returned from Iran after being trained on Russian handheld anti-tank missiles. The range of these missiles is four kilometers. What is their first target in Israel, a school bus.]

International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.

Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth. 

What would such a narrative look like?

It would begin with the presumption that the problem in the Middle East is not white supremacy but the end of white supremacy. After World War II, the empires began to contract, Britain went home, France went home, and the Arab world was left almost abandoned, and in a state of much greater freedom than they had ever known before.

Freedom is, however, a dicey thing to experience. When you come into freedom, you see yourself more accurately in the world. This is not unique to the Middle East. It was also the black American experience, when the Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964 and we came into much greater freedom. If you were a janitor in 1963 and you are still a janitor in 1965, you have all these freedoms and they are supported by the rule of law, then your actual experience of freedom is one of humiliation and one of shame. You see how far you have to go, how far behind you are, how little social capital you have with which to struggle forward. Even in freedom you see you are likely to be behind for a long time. In light of your inability to compete and your underdevelopment, freedom becomes something that you are very likely going to hate – because it carries this humiliation.

At that point formerly oppressed groups develop what I call bad faith. Bad faith is when you come into freedom, you are humiliated and you say, "Well you know the real truth is I am not free. Racism still exists. Zionism is my problem. The State of Israel is my problem. That is why I am so far behind and that is why I cannot get ahead."

You develop a culture grounded in bad faith where you insist that you are less free than you really are. Islamic extremism is the stunning example of this phenomenon. "I have to go on jihad because I am fighting for my freedom." Well you already have your freedom. You could stay home and study. You could do something constructive. But "No, I cannot do that because that makes me feel bad about myself." So I live in a world of extremism and dictators. [That is not the classical reason to take the path of Jihad, but it is good enough for now. I'm sure I'll take up this in the future.]

This is not unique to the Middle East. In black America we had exactly the same thing. After we got the civil rights bill and this greater degree of freedom, then all of a sudden we hear the words "black power." Then all of a sudden we have the Black Panthers. Then we have this militancy, this picking up of the gun because we feel bad about ourselves. We feel uncompetitive and this becomes our compensation. It is a common pattern among groups that felt abandoned when they became free.

This is the real story of the Palestinians and of the Middle East. They will never be reached by reason until they are somehow able to get beyond bad faith, to get beyond this sort of poetic truth that they are the perennial victims of an aggressive and racist Israeli nation.

Challenging their narrative with this explanation will enable us to be more effective. Until now, we have constantly used facts and reason and have not progressed.

Durban is a perfect example of bad faith because Durban is way of saying Israelis are racist and they are our problem. Durban really is a way of saying I am not free. I am still a victim. That is the real purpose of Durban. The Palestinian unilateral claim for recognition from the UN is also a perfect example of bad faith. If Palestinians proceed to the Security Council, they will very likely be turned down, and will respond by saying: "I told you we were victims. I told you the West is racist," and so on. It refuels the same sad identity.

The irony and the tragedy of all this is that it keeps these groups in a bubble where they never encounter or deal with the truth. This becomes a second oppression for all these groups. They have been oppressed once, now they are free and yet they create a poetic truth that then oppresses them all over again.

How are you going to have good faith if you are raised being told that the society in which you are trying to compete is against you, is racist? It is always the Palestinians who suffer, and will continue to suffer, because all of their energy is going into the avoidance of their situation rather than into being challenged by it and facing into it.

The strength of our argument is that it gives the Palestinians a way out. Development is the way out. The West can help you to compete. It may take a little while. But the alternative is a cycle of violence and hatred and poetic truths about constant victimhood.

The pattern of bad faith in certain places comes to embrace a kind of ethic of death. As Osama bin Laden claimed: in the West, you are all afraid of death, but we love death. Why would you love death? If you are not afraid of death then you are aggrandized; all of a sudden you are a big man. You are not a little, recently freed, inferior. Instead, you are somebody who manages, who conquers his world, who has power. For terrorism is power, the power of the gun. This poetic truth leads to a terrible, inconceivable fascination with death and violence and guns and bombs. [It turns them into fetish objects.] It consumes a whole part of the world every single day – rather than the boring things that good faith requires, like going to school, raising your children, inventing software for instance, making money.

This is the way the narrative must be retold.

Cain's gaffe.

In an interview earlier this week, Mr. Cain seemed to stumble over a question about the late unpleasantness in Libya. He recovered and went on with the interview. Yet many of our conservative pundits immediately decided he was hopeless and would never be up to snuff to handle the great BHO. The same with Perry's brain freeze, or where Newt buys his wife's jewelry. We have yet to get to Iowa and the search for the perfect is driving these pundits to bury the good.

Over the past half century we've been working to weaken the political parties and close up the "smoke filled rooms." The idea was to weaken the Party Men thereby allowing the best men to come forward and run for office. As if the Party Men held a sword of Damocles over elected officials, as if the man in office never made his own decisions, for the good and the bad, as if he didn't hold the actual powers of the office. Now all that's left of the parties are the shells that run the primaries and hold the mainly ceremonial conventions.

So people now present themselves for president from all sorts of backgrounds, from First Lady to Pizza Guy, yet the only Presidents with foreign policy credentials in my lifetime were Eisenhower, Nixon, and G.H.W. Bush. Their cred was based in WW2 and the Cold War, yet the world still bilndsided them. Such is the march of History. Since the collapse of the USSR, let's face it, we've been winging it. When GW was running he was asked who was the leader of Kazakhstan, when he didn't know everybody thought he was useless, though it didn't stop Osama. When BHO was running he had all sorts of ideas on how he would change our foreign policy, none of which seemed to work, to the point that now he's running on his fidelity to GW's regimen.

As it is most people don't care about foreign policy or whether we have some sort of grand strategy at all. Which is why we seem to be backing into wars as if tripping over stones, then they take notice. But was ever true of Americans, we look at the world with a mix of realism and idealism. Tired of our world girdling power and responsibility, yet knowing that no one else will carry the load with the level of morality that we have.

China anyone?

JimG33

The same old crew.

PATRICK BRENNAN

National Review Online

NOVEMBER 16, 2011 4:00 A.M. The OWS Legal Team The radical lawyers who sought to bring occupiers back to Zuccotti Park Yesterday, lawyers for the Occupy Wall Street movement successfully filed for a temporary restraining order with a New York court. On paper, at least — the Bloomberg administration did not comply — Justice Lucy Billings’s ruling allowed the protesters to return to Zuccotti Park between yesterday morning’s eviction and yesterday afternoon’s full hearing. She temporarily barred the city and the private owners of the park from preventing the occupation or keeping the occupiers from setting up tents. Justice Billings is perhaps the ideal enabler for the occupiers. Her liberal credentials are sterling: She graduated from the University of California–Berkeley’s law school in 1973, was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1974, and went on to spend 25 years working for the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked, according to her official biography online, “to enforce new rights for minority, disabled, and low-income persons” and “forged new legal remedies by litigating issues not previously addressed in housing, environmental justice . . . public health, child welfare, education, and employment.” And her role may not have been coincidental; the Daily News reports: “Asked why they called her first, protest lawyer Daniel Alterman wouldn’t say, remarking that he’s not a ‘gossip guy.’” Speaking of the protest’s lawyers, most of them are affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild, a group of explicitly progressive lawyers whose mission calls for the “reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property rights.” That philosophy runs throughout much of their work, which has consistently championed the preferences of “marginalized” groups over the rule of law. Here is a guide to Occupy Wall Street’s legal counsel. Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, formerly spouses, are the authors of Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century.  [Their radio show on WBAI on Monday mornings is called Law and Disorder.]   One of their favorite forms of dissent, it seems, has been a significant amount of anti-Israel advocacy, including the charge of Israeli “apartheid.” Ratner has accused Israel of “massive violations of Palestinian rights” and “inhuman [sic] treatment of Palestinians.” He has written that Americans have not widely condemned Israel because of “ambivalence about condemning the actions of a people that have experienced pervasive antisemitism and the holocaust.” Alan Levine, another OWS lawyer, has also publicly expressed anti-Israeli arguments. In light of the confirmed presence of anti-Semitic sentiments at OWS and other occupations, the choice of several prominent critics of Israel as counsel is somewhat disturbing — Jewish people appear to be one minority group that neither the occupiers nor human-rights lawyers have much interest in protecting. Another OWS lawyer, Michael J. Boyle, has an even more worrisome history of advocacy: He has represented no fewer than four men with connections to terrorism, basing his arguments on legal technicalities. Most appallingly, he represented Pakistani terrorist Shahawar Matin Siraj in an appeal of his conviction for plotting to bomb Manhattan’s Herald Square subway station. There was no dispute over Siraj’s guilt; Boyle appealed the decision on the grounds that Siraj had a right to access police records of his own oral statements — an argument that was legally unjustified and rejected. In 2008, he secured the overturning of a conviction of two Yemeni men, cleric Ali Hassan al-Moayad and his assistant, Mohsen Yahya Zayed, for conspiracy to support al-Qaeda and Hamas. Their conviction was overturned because a witness’s description of a Hamas bombing in Tel Aviv was ruled “inflammatory testimony.” He also defended Osama Awadallah, an associate of two 9/11 hijackers, on perjury charges — Awadallah claimed he didn’t know one of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar, despite material evidence that he did. Boyle secured Awadallah’s release, via a dramatic jury reversal, by arguing that Awadallah had unintentionally denied knowing al-Midhar to the FBI. Boyle has also defended a number of members of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. He attempted to win parole for Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, a so-called “political prisoner” who was convicted of murdering two New York City police officers. Daniel Alterman and the late William Kunstler — a radical lawyer who married Margaret Ratner Kunstler after she divorced Michael Ratner — were involved in the defense of several rioters from the 1971 Attica prison riots in New York. Alterman includes his work for the convicts involved in the riot as “among his proudest achievements.” At Attica, there was a brutal riot that involved prisoners’ taking ten guards hostage, and the New York State Police became overly violent in response, but Alterman sees a problem with only one side: In his view, his work was “a story about justice” and “the legitimate complaints of the inmates.” Michael Ratner also attempted and failed to secure a writ of habeas corpus on appeal for Pedro Gutierrez, a Bronx man convicted of “assorted crimes arising from a fatal shooting incident among rival drug dealers,” on the grounds that a piece of evidence had not been available to his defense. The appeal was necessary because a lower court had already refused the writ — the type of evidentiary mistake that had been made was, according to other precedent, “harmless in view of the overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt.” Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Ratner was still insistent that Gutierrez had been unfairly treated by the criminal-justice system. More amusingly, in 2009, attorney Yett Kurland worked to ban tour buses from her neighborhood in the West Village, arguing that their “noise pollution” was greatly compromising the residents’ quality of life, and promising an investigation into “all the environmental hazards that these tour buses may pose.” Surely if buses using public streets for their intended purpose must defer to the community’s quality-of-life concerns, protesters have no right to occupy a private park and damage the neighborhood’s environment without being held to the same standards. It is not surprising that Occupy Wall Street has chosen a slate of far-left lawyers to defend it against the demands of the city and the park’s owners. The legal team fancies itself a defender of the oppressed and marginalized; the occupiers now claim that label for the “99 percent.” — Patrick Brennan is a 2011 William F. Buckley fellow

High flying over the Earth

From Micheal Konig

Dr. Dalrymple on David Horowitz's latest.

When I was a College Commie David Horowitz's Ramparts Magazine was a monthly stalwart. I only found out about his neo-conservatism later on when I came across his writings about the Second Thoughts Conference and his book Destructive Generation which spoke directly to me and my own political journey. In this review of David's latest book, A Point in Time Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, another favorite commentator, takes up the question of facing death, the meaning of impermanence and how close can reason take us to God.
JimG33

Theodore Dalrymple
Here and After
Political warrior David Horowitz reflects on life and death.
4 November 2011

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 128 pp., $24.95)
Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs rather than as an existential limit to our brief earthly sojourn. For many, death has become anomalous rather than inevitable, something to protest against rather than accept. For them, the concept of a good death is entirely alien or antipathetic.

David Horowitz tries to stare his own death in the face. Now 71, he has had cancer of the prostate, and he has diabetes and angina; his diplomatic immunity from death, which we all grant ourselves, has been unmistakably withdrawn. His short new book, which it is both necessary and a pleasure to read in one sitting, is a meditation on the meaning of life, sub specie aeternitatis.

Horowitz begins by reflecting on the nature and character of his dogs, whom he takes for regular walks. Perhaps those who don’t love dogs will think this an odd way to begin a book on the meaning of life, but it seems entirely natural and fitting. Indeed, I was struck by how Horowitz’s meditations paralleled mine, occasioned by my relationship, and walks, with my own dog—a relationship intense and happy, at least on my side and, if I don’t delude myself, on his also. The dog, of course, has no intimation of his own mortality, while the owner’s pleasure in the animal’s company is increasingly tinged with a melancholy awareness of his swiftly approaching dissolution. Yet the dog maintains his passionate interest in the little world around him, his small-scale curiosity in his immediate environment. In the face of the physical immensity of the universe and the temporal vastness that both preceded and will follow his oblivion, is a man in any fundamentally different situation?

As far as we know, we are the only creatures to demand of their existence a transcendent meaning. This can be supplied by various means, most commonly religious belief. Horowitz is unable to accept belief in a personal God, but wishes he could and, unlike many in his position, does not scorn those who do. He is decidedly not the village atheist.

More than most, however, he has reason to know that politics can also give, or at any rate appear to give, transcendent meaning to life. The secular religion of Marxism was particularly adept at supplying this meaning, though nationalist struggles could do the same. To believe that one was a soldier in history’s army, marching toward the predestined final victory when mankind would become terminally happy, and that one’s participation would help bring forward that consummation, was to know that one did not live in vain. Even personal suffering can be lessened by adherence to a political cause: either such suffering is experienced as a consequence of the struggle, or it is at least ameliorated by an acceptance of its pettiness by comparison with the greater goal.

Horowitz offers brief but moving glimpses of his father, a true believer in the ability of Marxism (in what he considered its indubitably correct form) not only to interpret the world but to change it. The preposterous intellectual grandiosity of this belief contrasted comically, and sadly, with Horowitz senior’s position in the world. His son’s depiction has an elegiac quality, portraying the tragicomedy of a man who thought he had penetrated to the heart of existence’s mystery but was really quite weak. Though he embraced a doctrine that had done untold evil in the world, he himself was a gentle soul. His son writes in sorrow, not anger.

The author has reason to know better than most the religious nature of the revolutionary creed. In 1971, when still under the influence of leftism, he edited a book of essays dedicated to the life and work of the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Like Horowitz’s father, Deutscher kept his faith in the immaculate conception of the October Revolution, a revolution that was, alas, subsequently to be corrupted—just as Rousseau thought naturally innocent mankind was corrupted by society. One of the essays in this book, by the Economist’s former Paris correspondent, Daniel Singer, contains the following passage:

Could one trust the statement of a Komintern ready to distort in such a fashion? Isaac was driven to question all authorized versions, to go back to the October revolution, to study the conflicts that followed Lenin’s death. The German heresy thus led him logically to an understanding and rejection of the Stalinist system.

The religious nature of Deutscher’s belief in revolutionary Marxism could hardly have been clearer. Authorized versions give rise to, or at least are the precondition of, heresies. Deutscher went back to the October Revolution, and to Lenin’s words, as Muslim fundamentalists go back to the Koran, for a source of undoubted and indisputable truth. Inside every heretic, it seems, a dogmatist is trying to get out.

Horowitz has put the pseudo-transcendence of a purpose immanent in history completely behind him so completely that he can now write about it calmly and without rancor. His masters are now Marcus Aurelius, the stoic Roman emperor, whom he likes to quote, and Dostoyevsky, who was among the first to grasp the significance of the perverted religious longings of the revolutionary intelligentsia, and the hell on earth to which they would inevitably lead. But the temptations of ideology are always present: Dostoyevsky, so aware of the dangers of the revolutionary intelligentsia, himself subscribed in entries in A Writer’s Diary to an ideology at least as absurd: that of Slavophile millenarianism. It is wrong to oppose one ideology with another, but it is by no means easy to escape the trap of doing so.

If neither formal religious belief nor secular religions like Marxism gives meaning to Horowitz’s life, what does? In large measure, it is his work: a lifetime spent in the crucible of political thought and struggle, first on the left, and then, over the last quarter century or so, as a devout conservative. It is vain to suppose, of course, that any human achievement, even the highest, could possibly be of a duration that would entitle it to the word “eternal.” No literary fame, for example, has so far lasted longer than 3,000 years—not even the blinking of the universe’s eyelid. But we humans must live on a human scale and measure things accordingly. The journalist, while he writes his latest article, thinks it of the greatest significance, though he knows perfectly well that it will be forgotten the day after tomorrow, if indeed it is read or noticed at all. Often I have thought to myself, as I write articles, “If only I can be spared until I have finished it,” though I am aware that even I will have forgotten its content by the week after next.

Significance and importance, however, are not natural qualities found inhering in objects or events. Only the appraising mind can impart such meaning. That is why, in my view, the neurosciences are doomed to failure, at least in their more ambitious claims. A mysterious metaphysical realm exists beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated of scanners, even if we cannot specify exactly where that realm is or how it came to be. The physiologist Moleschott, in the nineteenth century, declared that the brain secreted thought like the liver secreted bile; those neuroscientists who tell us that we are about to empty life of its mystery will come to seem as ridiculous, as absurdly presumptuous, as Moleschott seems to us now.

Horowitz tackles these problems in an indirect and gentle fashion. When he talks of the meaning that his work gives to his life, he is not saying to all his readers “Go and do likewise,” because it is clearly not given to everyone to do so (and thank goodness—a world composed of only one kind of person would be unbearable). The satisfaction of work is not, or at least should not be, proportional to the amount of notice it receives in the world. Perhaps the worst effect of celebrity culture is that it makes fame the measure of all things, and thus devalues or renders impossible not only satisfaction from useful but unglamorous labour, but precisely the kinds of pleasures and deep consolations that are to be had from walking a dog.

David Horowitz’s book is a small but important contribution to the revival of the art of dying well, an art from which most of us, both the living and the dying, would benefit. And to die well, we must know first what we have lived for.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.