In Search of a Strategy

Obama isn't the only one who needs a coherent approach to the worldwide jihad. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

August 30, 2014

Is it better to have no strategy or a delusional strategy?

The question arises, of course, after President Obama’s startling confession on Thursday that he has not yet developed a strategy for confronting the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-rooted terrorist organization still often called by its former name, ISIS – an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to Greater Syria.

You may have noticed that President Obama calls the group ISIL, preferring the acronym that refers to the Levant to the one referring to al-Sham. After all, anything that invokes Syria might remind you of red lines that turned out not to be red lines and the administration’s facilitation of the arming of “moderate rebels” who turned out to include, well, ISIS. The fact is that the president has never had a Syria strategy, either — careening from Assad the Reformer, to Assad the Iranian puppet who must be toppled, to Assad who maybe we should consider aligning with against ISIS — ISIS being the “rebels” we used to support in Syria . . . unless they crossed into Iraq, in which case they were no longer rebels but terrorists . . . to be “rebels” again, they’d have to cross back into Syria or cruise east to Libya, where they used to be enemy jihadists spied on by our ally Qaddafi until they became “McCain’s heroes” overthrowing our enemy Qaddafi.

Got it?

No? Well, congratulations, you may have caught mental health, a condition to be envied even if it would disqualify you from serving as a foreign-policy and national-security expert in Washington. In either party.

The Islamic State’s recent beheading of American journalist James Foley is not the only thing that captured Washington’s attention of late. The Beltway was also left aghast at the jihadisst’ rounding up of over 150 Syrian soldiers, forcing them to strip down to their underpants for a march through the desert, and then mass-killing them execution style.

Shocking, sure, but isn’t that what the GOP’s foreign-policy gurus were telling us they wanted up until about five minutes ago? Not the cruel method but the mass killing of Assad’s forces. Nothing oh nothing, we were told, could possibly be worse than the barbaric Assad regime. As naysayers — like your faithful correspondent — urged the government to refrain from backing “rebels” who teem with rabidly anti-American Islamic-supremacist savages, top Republicans scoffed. It was paramount that we arm the rebels in order to oust Assad, even though “we understand [that means] some people are going to get arms that should not be getting arms,” insisted Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Turns out that quite a lot of people who shouldn’t have gotten arms have gotten quite a lot of arms. And that is because Syria is not the only place as to which Republicans urged Obama to ignore federal laws against arming and otherwise supporting terrorists. They did it in Libya, too.

We have several times documented here that influential Republicans led by Senator John McCain were champions of Moammar Qaddafi before they suddenly switched sides — along with President Obama — in campaigning to oust the Libyan regime they had only recently treated (and funded) as a key American counterterrorism ally. The resulting (and utterly foreseeable) empowerment of Islamic supremacists in eastern Libya directly contributed to the Benghazi Massacre of four Americans on September 11, 2012; to the rise of the Islamic State and the expansion of al-Qaeda franchises in Africa, all of which were substantially strengthened by the jihadist capture of much of Qaddafi’s arsenal; and to what has become the collapse of Libya into a virulently anti-American no-man’s land of competing militias in which jihadists now have the upper hand.

The disastrous flip-flop was no surprise. When Mubarak fell in Egypt, Senator McCain stressed that the Brotherhood must be kept out of any replacement government because the Brothers are anti-democratic supporters of repressive sharia and terrorism. He was right on both scores . . . but he soon reversed himself, deciding that the Brotherhood was an outfit Americans could work with after all — even support with sophisticated American weaponry and billions in taxpayer dollars. The Brothers were in power because, in the interim, McCain’s good friend Secretary Clinton pressured Egypt’s transitional military government to step down so the elected “Islamic democracy” could flourish. When the Brothers took the reins, they promptly installed a sharia constitution, demanded that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (convicted of running a New York–based terror cell in the 1990s), rolled out the red carpet for Hamas (the terror organization that is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), and gave free reign to terrorist leaders — including the brother of al-Qaeda’s leader and members of the Blind Sheikh’s Egyptian jihadist organization — who proceeded to foment the violent rioting at the U.S. embassy in Cairo the same day as the Benghazi Massacre.

I could go on, but you get the point. While ripping Obama for having no Islamic State strategy, Republicans are now reviving the inane strategy of supporting the illusory “moderate Syrian opposition.” Those would be the same forces they wanted to support against Assad. The only problem was that there aren’t enough real moderates in Syria to mount a meaningful challenge to the regime. The backbone of the opposition to Assad has always been the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most effective fighters against the regime have always been the jihadists. So we’re back to where we started from: Let’s pretend that there is a viable, moderate, democratic Syrian opposition and that we have sufficient intelligence — in a place where we have sparse intelligence — to vet them so we arm only the good guys; and then let’s arm them, knowing that they have seamlessly allied for years with the anti-American terrorists we are delegating them to fight on our behalf. Perfect.

There is no excuse for a president of the United States to have no strategy against an obvious threat to the United States. But at least with Obama, it is understandable. He is hemmed in by his own ideology and demagoguery. The main challenge in the Middle East is not the Islamic State; it is the fact that the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebears have been fueled by Iran, which supports both Sunni and Shiite terrorism as long as it is directed at the United States. There cannot be a coherent strategy against Islamic supremacism unless the state sponsors of terrorism are accounted for, but Obama insists on seeing Iran as a potential ally rather than an incorrigible enemy.

Moreover, the combined jihadist threat is not a regional one merely seeking to capture territory in the Middle East; it is a global one that regards the United States as its primary enemy and that can be defeated only by America and its real allies. This is not a problem we can delegate to the basket-case governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, or to the “moderate” Syrian “rebels.” Yet the Obama Left’s relentless indictment of American self-defensive action in the Middle East has sapped the domestic political support necessary for vigorous military action against our enemies — action that will eventually have to include aggressive American combat operations on the ground.

But the GOP should take note: The jihad is not a problem we can delegate to the Muslim Brotherhood, either. We will not defeat our enemies until we finally recognize who they are — all of them.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.

S’long, Jeet

BY ROGER ANGELL

http://www.newyorker.com/
September 8, 2014 Issue



We know Derek Jeter by heart, so why all this memorizing? The between-pitches bat tucked up in his armpit. The fingertip helmet-twiddle. The left front foot wide open, out of the box until the last moment, and the cop-at-a-crossing right hand ritually lifted astern until the foot swings shut. That look of expectation, a little night-light gleam, under the helmet. The pitch—this one a slow breaking ball, a fraction low and outside—taken but inspected with a bending bow in its passage. More. Jeter’s celebrity extends beyond his swing, of course, but can perhaps be summarized by an excited e-mail once received by a Brearley School teacher from one of her seventh graders: “Guess what! I just Googled ‘Derek’s butt!’ ”

This is Derek Jeter’s twentieth and final September: twenty-seven more games and perhaps another hundred at-bats remain to be added to his franchise record, at this writing, of 2,720 and 11,094. He’s not having a great year, but then neither are the Yanks, who trail the Orioles by seven games in the American League East and are three games short of qualifying for that tacky, tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the post-season. It’s been a blah baseball year almost everywhere, and, come to think of it, watching Derek finish might be the best thing around.

Jeter has just about wound up his Mariano Tour—the all-points ceremonies around home plate in every away park on the Yankees’ schedule, where he accepts gifts, and perhaps a farewell check for his Turn 2 charity, and lifts his cap to the cheering, phone-flashing multitudes. He does this with style and grace—no one is better at it—and without the weepiness of some predecessors. His ease, his daily joy in his work, has lightened the sadness of this farewell, and the cheering everywhere has been sustained and genuine. Just the other day, Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon groused about the rare sounds of cheering offered up to Derek by his customarily sleepy attendees.

At every stop, there have been replays of Jeter’s famous plays and moments up on the big screens—the no-man’s-land relay and sideways flip to nab the Athletics’ Jeremy Giambi at the plate in the 2001 American League Division Series; that horizontal dive into the Yankee Stadium third-base stands against the Red Sox in 2004. I don’t expect further dramatics—he’s forty and often in the lineup as d.h. these days—but closings have been a specialty of his, and it’s O.K. to get our hopes up one more time. I’m thinking of the waning days of the old Stadium, in 2008, when Derek’s great rush through September carried him to the top of the all-time career hits list at the famous crater, each fresh rap of his coming as accompaniment to the deep “Der-ek Je-tuh!” cries from the bleachers that the new restaurant site has pretty well silenced. The next year, up there, he passed Lou Gehrig for Most Yankee Base Hits Ever. Two years after that, he delivered his three-thousandth career hit: a home run that touched off a stunning five-for-five day at the Stadium against the Rays.

All right, I’ll settle for one more inside-out line-drive double to deep right —the Jeter Blue Plate that’s been missing of late. It still astounds me—Derek’s brilliance as a hitter has always felt fresh and surprising, for some reason—and here it comes one more time. The pitch is low and inside, and Derek, pulling back his upper body and tucking in his chin as if avoiding an arriving No. 4 train, now jerks his left elbow and shoulder sharply upward while slashing powerfully down at and through the ball, with his hands almost grazing his belt. His right knee drops and twists, and the swing, opening now, carries his body into a golf-like lift and turn that sweetly frees him while he watches the diminishing dot of the ball headed toward the right corner. What! You can’t hit like that—nobody can! Do it again, Derek.

It’s sobering to think that in just a few weeks Derek Jeter won’t be doing any of this anymore, and will be reduced to picturing himself in action, just the way the rest of us do. On the other hand, he’s never complained, and he’s been so good at baseball that he’ll probably be really good at this part of it too.

Happy Birthday, William Wilberforce

By Jeanneane Maxon and Clarke Forsythe

http://www.realclearreligion.org/

August 29, 2014

255 years ago, a "force" was born into this world. The aptly named William Wilberforce would prove to be instrumental -- not just in ending legalized slavery in England, but sparking unprecedented social reform in the Western World, and also in setting a framework for future generations to follow his path of persistence, faith and sacrifice for others.

Wilberforce still inspires generations of social reformers and political leaders over two and a half centuries since his birth.

Wilberforce has lessons for pro-lifers. One of the most important is an acute understanding of the obstacles that block success and how to combat them -- an understanding of the nature of social evil and the forces that sustain it. The campaign against slavery was much more complicated and difficult than portrayed in the familiar movie, Amazing Grace. While the movie is stirring, it provides only a snapshot of Wilberforce's taxing campaign, just the first 20 years of Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade, from 1787 to 1807.

Wilberforce's work took more decades, including the next 25 years of his struggle against slavery itself (not just the trade of slaves), which was not abolished by Parliament until 1833, years after Wilberforce's retirement from Parliament and just a few days before his death. And after the full abolition of slavery in 1833, the struggle took many more years to effectively enforce the laws on the high seas and throughout the British Empire.

There were no silver bullets, though there was healthy (sometimes heated) debate about the right solution to the obstacles and the right road to success.

Wilberforce battled tremendous odds throughout his life. His greatest virtue was perseverance in the face of constant illness and many setbacks, while mastering political rhetoric and seeking cordial relations even with his most strident adversaries. Strategically focused, he combined long-term goals with short-term objectives. These included limiting the slave trade and reducing it as much as possible, and then regulating slavery (through e.g., registry laws) before it could realistically be prohibited.

One urban legend that needs to be dispelled is that Wilberforce "repented" of his "instrumentalism," or step-by-step approach. There's no historical record of this. The fact is that Wilberforce pursued abolition of the slave trade and the full abolition of slavery along with short-term objectives that would limit it. It was not either/or; it was both/and.

This unfortunate myth is apparently based on one passage from Wilberforce's diary: After the 20 year fight against the slave trade (1787-1807), Wilberforce and his allies refocused on the full abolition of slavery itself.

They encountered tremendous obstacles, domestic and foreign. In his book Amazing Grace, author Eric Metaxas writes that

Britain's horrendous domestic situation in 1818 prompted [British Foreign Minister] Castlereagh to strongly advise Wilberforce against pushing for emancipation just then. But Wilberforce was unhappy about waiting. That April, feeling ill, he poured out his feelings in his diary: 'I feel more and more convinced of the decay of my own faculties both bodily and mental and I must try to husband the little that remains. Alas how grieved I am, that I have not brought forward the state of [the] W. Indian slaves.' His guilt over the situation grew when the next day, again obviously sick and weak, he fumbled an opportunity to bring the subject up at a meeting of the African Institution...

This disappointment, during one of his recurring illnesses, hardly suggests repudiation of his strategy. In fact, a great victory that advanced governmental involvement in the fight against slavery was a law that at first may have seemed incremental.

When England was a war with France, Wilberforce's allies quietly put forth a bill that would allow the Royal Navy to commandeer the cargo of foreign ships captured. This innocuous bill allowed Britain to seize the cargo of slave ships that sailed under a number of national flags.

Writer David Perrin observed, "This meant that, over a period of time, English slave-traders were deprived of their ships and profits...This disabling of the slave trade meant that they could not pay off their supporter-MPs. Hence, Wilberforce's legislation to abolish the slave trade eventually passes in 1807."

Wilberforce's prudence and success should inspire us. Prudence is practical wisdom, which requires deliberation about concrete opportunities and obstacles in the specific context of our day. Under great pressure, Wilberforce discussed and debated tactics and strategies with a spirit of humility and goodwill. That may be the most important lesson that we can learn from him.

And we will follow the example of one of the greatest heroes ever born. Happy Birthday William Wilberforce, and thank you for living a life that exhibited timeless lessons.

Jeanneane Maxon is Vice President of External Affairs and Corporate Counsel for Americans United for Life. Clarke Forsythe is senior counsel at Americans United for Life and author of Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade.

Rotherham’s — and England’s — Shame

The Muslim men who tortured more than 1,400 girls are criminals.
So are the authorities who covered it up. 

By John O’Sullivan

http://www.nationalreview.com/

August 29, 2014

Shaun Wright, South Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner, is refusing to resign over the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. Photograph: South Yorkshire Police/PA

We often read or hear from the media that a nation is “shocked” or “horrified” by the revelation of some crime or government scandal. It is almost never true. At best, most people are disapproving or mildly interested in the shocking news. Since Tuesday afternoon, however, Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.

Some of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another, a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action on his complaint.

It is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and called for further investigations and arrests. The police and child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed, they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions, intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the general public was innocently ignorant.

If these events were occurring in a film noir or a paperback novel set in a midcentury American city, the Philip Marlowe character would eventually unravel a complicated plot in which a corrupt administration and police force were helping a criminal gang run child brothels for fun and profit. That is in fact the most rational interpretation of what took place. But it is not the true explanation.

What happened is explained by two additional facts: The 1,400 girls were all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus “worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so. Still worse, the police also treated the girls as worthless when they bravely ignored the physical threats against them (one man poured petrol over a girl and threatened to light it) and sought police help. As a result, some of the girls came to believe they were in fact worthless, which, of course, made them more tractable to the gang. Others committed suicide. Many of the survivors will experience, perhaps for the rest of their lives, prolonged bouts of depression, self-contempt, shame, and other psychological disorders.

This scale of criminality and victimhood is vast for a country that has traditionally regarded itself as law-abiding. Worse, the report concedes that the estimate of 1,400 victims is a conservative one. (It is the equivalent of about three girls’ schools.) Some of the girls were as young as eleven. And since other (more or less identical) cases of criminal exploitation of young Christian girls by Pakistani Muslim men have been uncovered in cities such as Oldham, Birmingham, and Oxford in the last decade, the total number of victims must be staggering. 

The motives of the exploiters, though vile, are not hard to understand. They plainly include both racism and sexism alongside the lust and cruelty enabled by their misogynistic culture. But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist.” Most people in the Muslim community were unaware of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention of  “community leaders,” they too played the race card to suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.

The Labour member of Parliament for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, Dennis MacShane, admitted yesterday that as a Guardian-reading left liberal, he had shied away from looking into such topics as the oppression of women in “bits of the Muslim community.” He ought to have done something about it, but, well, you understand . . . “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”

That kind of official response is worse than outright bigotry, but it has unfortunately been not uncommon in recent years. Anxious to avoid the “racist” taint, the police frequently ignore the appeals of young Muslim women fleeing from forced marriages or genital mutilation; instead, they work with community leaders to persuade the women to return to their families. This shameful collaboration is gradually being brought to an end. But it still shapes many official attitudes.

Official attitudes to the young white girls in Rotherham were different — but, if anything, worse. They combined sexism with a contempt for the white working class that is now common in both the progressive intelligentsia and the lumpen-intelligentsia whose members respectively lay down and enforce social policy under uncomprehending or cowardly political leaders. Thus the police shared the opinion of the criminals that their victims were little better than “sluts.” They were powerless, without influential parents or friends, lacking an ethnic support group that would rally to their defense. If racism is a weapon that can be used only by the powerful, as the progressive mantra holds, then the girls were victims of racism. But they were the wrong victims just as the criminals were the wrong pedophiles. Their plight had never been a topic in lectures on diversity. In short, they certainly weren’t worth risking a reprimand for disrupting good community relations or undermining diversity.

The authorities’ contempt was ill deserved by any standard. Many of the young women victims have proven to be brave, decent, and articulate. All of them were bullied, deceived, and beaten into submission by their tormentors and betrayed by those legally obliged to protect them. But the moral character of the victims is irrelevant in any case. So-called sluts deserve the same police protections as the rest of us — arguably they deserve more since they are at greater risk. Instead, these girls were seen by officials not as children in need of protection but as powerless pieces of meat who scarcely deserved the rights of British citizens and who could be safely ignored to avoid embarrassment.

Another element in official attitudes is hostility to the family and a hatred of the notion that families might instill traditional moral values in their children. Such hostility proved very convenient for the criminal gangs, who probably had to overcome a weaker moral resistance on the part of their grooming victims. To be sure, this hostility arises from a very different source than sexism or contempt for the white working class: a sense among progressives in the public sector that intact families undermine equality and that even etiolated Christian beliefs obstruct multiculturalism. If that sounds a trifle paranoid, recall that it was the same Rotherham social-work department that wanted to remove children from foster parents whose support for UKIP indicated an impermissible hostility to multiculturalism. You couldn’t make it up.

No one can deny that many families in Britain’s new underclass neglect their children and, in the worst cases, abuse them almost as much as the criminals did. But exactly the same is true of social workers. They too have been guilty of the worst possible scandals (leading at times to murder), some of which are rooted in quasi-sophisticated “anti-racist” nonsense about the proper ethnic culture that young children should enjoy. They increasingly show a contempt for natural families and their rights that is plainly contrary to almost any theory of human rights and that allows them to break up families on slight pretexts. Late last year, the British courts forced a young Italian tourist to have a caesarean operation and hand over her newborn to foster parents on the grounds that she was bipolar and might not always take her medication. And to put the top hat on it, these social-work interventions have a very poor record of success. As Colin Brewer, a distinguished psychiatrist, points out in the current London Spectator, it is increasingly plain that social work simply doesn’t work. And that makes intact families with religious commitments even more of a threat — because they do work.  

A final factor is that Rotherham and South Yorkshire have been Labour “pocket boroughs” for 80 years or more. Until the last local elections — when UKIP broke through to win ten seats — there has been no effective opposition to hold Labour to account. The threat from UKIP in recent years has made Labour still more determined to hold the Muslim vote and even more reliant on those Muslim Labour councilors who were its missionaries to Muslim voters. So Labour kept the lid on the scandal as long as it could and discouraged interest in it. (You may hear certain American echoes there.)

What can we do? Given the scale of horror in this story, governments and politicians will propose to do a great deal between now and the election. But will their proposals pass the tests of serious effectiveness? There are two:

First, will anybody apart from the “Asian” criminals themselves go to prison for what has happened? What penalty, for instance, will be imposed on the current police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire who, in his previous position as a Labour councilor, shared responsibility for the council’s treatment of the young victims? At the moment, he is offering weak apologies and refusing to resign. But he and his official colleagues are guilty of something like conspiracy to facilitate and conceal crimes such as rape, sexual assault, grievous bodily harm, etc., etc. A competent lawyer could probably run up a dozen formal charges on such lines overnight. Mere resignations and dismissals will not fit this bill. Nothing short of prison sentences for senior officials in the police and local government will meet the needs of both justice and public opinion. People are tired of official scandals for which no one ever pays a price.

The second test is whether the British government will reform the broad-brush multiculturalism and “anti-racism” that have grievously distorted government policy nationally and locally. One way of advertising such a change would be to repudiate the official definition of “institutionalized racism” that the Macpherson report introduced a decade ago. The Commission on Racial Equality, a quasi-official body, defines it as follows:

If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs, or practices, that institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial intentions.

And the Macpherson Report itself gave a further explanation as to how it works:

[Institutionalized racism] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes, and behaviour which amount to discrimination throughunwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

These arguments are fatuous and cannot withstand serious intellectual criticism — though there is a huge inverted pyramid of intellectualized nonsense resting on them. Once intentionality is removed from the concept of racism, it becomes the accidental result of policies or structures adopted for legitimate reasons, and almost anyone anywhere can be shown to be guilty of it. But in Britain and (under the term “disparate impact”) in America, these arguments have carried the day in law and politics. That explains why the police and local authorities in Rotherham and elsewhere have been willing to conceal or ignore crimes that involve race, ethnicity, or religion.

If racism is a mysterious airborne virus that shapes people’s behavior without their realizing it, then why should an ordinary copper take the risk of even noticing a case with racial overtones? If he cannot avoid involvement, why not take the side of the “disadvantaged ethnic minority” — especially when it has such advantages as powerful friends and helpful pressure groups? And if the powerful friends sense that police intervention might threaten their ethnic electoral support, then a quiet word in the right place will ensure that the problem “goes away.” In reality, however, the problem metastasizes — until, as in Rotherham, it becomes so massive, toxic, and embarrassing that the authorities join the criminals in concealing it, to the continued detriment of its victims.

Ultimately, this mess is the result of progressive official policies. It will recur endlessly until the policies are changed. Ordinary citizens — especially working-class “Old Labour” voters — realize this. The only good aspect of this scandal is that this time they seem enraged enough to insist on real change.  

— John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review.

Lower corporate tax rates. Now.

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
August 28, 2014

The Obama administration is highly exercised about “inversion,” the practice by which an American corporation acquires a foreign company and moves its headquarters out of the United States to benefit from lower tax rates abroad.

Not fair, says Barack Obama. It’s taking advantage of an “unpatriotic tax loophole” that hardworking American families have to make up for by the sweat of their brow. His treasury secretary calls such behavior a violation of “economic patriotism.”

Nice touch. Democrats used to wax indignant about having one’s patriotism questioned. Now they throw around the charge with abandon, tossing it at corporations that refuse to do the economically patriotic thing of paying the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

Odder still because Democrats routinely ridicule the very notion of corporations as persons. When Mitt Romney suggested that corporations were people in 2011, Democrats mocked him right through Election Day. In the Hobby Lobby case, they challenged the very idea that corporations can have religious convictions. Now, however, Democrats are demanding that corporations exercise a patriotic conscience. Which is it?

Moreover, corporations have an indisputable fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ interest. Surely Walgreens betrayed this responsibility when it caved to administration pressure and canceled its plans to move its headquarters to Switzerland. The inversion would’ve saved it billions of dollars. Its cancellation caused an instant 14 percent drop in Walgreens shares.

But the Democrats’ problem is deeper. Everyone knows why inversions are happening. America’s 35 percent corporate tax rate is absurdly uncompetitive. Companies are doing what they always do: try to legally lower their tax liabilities.

What is maddening is that the problem is so easily solved: tax reform that lowers the accursed corporate rate. Democrats and Republicans agree on this. After the announcement of the latest inversion, Burger King buying Tim Hortons and then moving to Canada, the president himself issued a statement conceding that corporate tax reform — lower the rates, eliminate loopholes — is the best solution to the inversion problem.

It’s also politically doable. Tax reform has unique bipartisan appeal. Conservatives like it because lowering rates stimulates the economy and eliminating loopholes curbs tax-driven economic decisions that grossly misallocate capital.

The appeal to liberals is economic fairness. By eliminating loopholes, tax reform levels the playing field. Today, the more powerful companies can afford the expensive lobbyists who create the loopholes and the expensive lawyers who exploit them. Which is why the nominal corporate tax rate is 35 percent but the effective rate for some of the largest corporations is about 13 percent.

So why not attack the inversion problem with its obvious solution: tax reform? Time is short, says Obama. He can’t wait. Instead, he wants legislation to outlaw inversion.

No time? Where has he been? He does nothing about tax reform for six years (during two of which Democrats fully controlled Congress), then claims now to be too impatient to attempt the real solution. Instead he wants to hurry through a punitive anti-inversion law to counterbalance the effects of our already punitive tax rates.

This is nuts. But amusing, given that a major financier of the inversion-célèbre of the day, the Whopper-to-Canada deal, is none other than Warren Buffett, Obama’s favorite plutocrat.

Buffett’s demand that the rich be required to pay more taxes made him a hero to the president. In 2012, Obama repeatedly held up Buffett as a champion of economic justice. What does Obama say today about his 2012 class-war comrade in arms — now become, by Obama’s own lights, an economic traitor?

And more such Benedict Arnolds are being minted every week. One of the reasons for the recent acceleration of inversions is that corporations want to move before Obama outlaws it, locking them into America’s anti-competitive corporate tax rate.

The Wall Street Journal cited a Buffett confidant as saying he likely wouldn’t have backed a deal like Burger King if it were purely for tax reasons. Indeed, there are other considerations that can always be invoked. Which makes some of the contemplated anti-inversion proposals even more absurd: They would outlaw only those mergers done for tax reasons. How do you prove motivation? Lie detectors?

A real political leader would abandon this sideshow and actually address corporate tax reform with a serious revenue-neutral proposal to Congress. There would be hearings, debate, compromises. We might end up with something like the historic bipartisan tax reform of 1986 that helped launch two decades of nearly uninterrupted economic growth.

But for that you need a president.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this from Opinions: 

Katrina vanden Heuvel: If Congress won’t, Obama may have to address inversion

Jacob J. Lew: Close the tax loophole on inversions

Orrin Hatch: How to deal with corporate inversions — without the politics

Charles Lane: Another tax reform solution: taxing consumption

George F. Will: In a stew over inversions

The Rotherham Rapes’ Muslim Connection

Political correctness prevented authorities from recognizing the community’s sexual-abuse problem. 

By Ian Tuttle

http://www.nationalreview.com/

August 27, 2014

About eight miles from Sheffield in central England, the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham is home to just over 258,000 residents — for comparison, about as many as reside in its transatlantic “twin town,” Buffalo, N.Y.

It’s also home to a local government, child-social-services agency, and police department that effectively countenanced at least 1,400 instances of “child sexual exploitation” (CSE) between 1997 and 2013 — and that is a “conservative” estimate, according to the “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham,” just released by Rotherham’s Metropolitan Borough Council. How could police and local leaders ignore the victimization of so many children? In part, thank political correctness.

Authored by Professor Alexis Jay, an expert and government adviser on social work, the inquiry was based on 988 children known to have been victims of sexual exploitation, defined by the United Kingdom as involving young people under the age of 18 in “exploitative situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person or persons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, affection, gifts, money) as a result of performing, and/or others performing on them, sexual activities.”

Jay and her fellow researchers read 66 case files, some of which remain under investigation. What they discovered were not just instances of all-too-common sexual abuse, but sex trafficking networks, gang rape, and terror:

It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

Reports of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham were known to social workers by the early 1990s, but many of those reports were incorrectly identified as “child prostitution.” Not until 1997, when the Council’s Youth Services launched the Risky Business youth project, did child sexual exploitation become a separate concern. Risky Business aimed to identify persons ages 11 to 25 who might be at risk, often recommending them to children’s social-care agencies, but those agencies were regularly derelict in their duties.

In 2000 a twelve-year-old girl was plied with drugs and raped by five men. The Criminal Investigation Department representative handling her case argued that every incident had been “100% consensual.” Two men who admitted to intercourse with the girl received “police cautions.”

In 2001 a serial predator threatened his victim, a 15-year-old girl, with forced prostitution — then threatened her family, vandalized her home, and used his other victims to assault the girl. She was hospitalized, and members of her family went into hiding. The girl and her mother refused to cooperate with police, convinced that law enforcement was helpless to protect them.

A twelve-year-old girl found in 2008 drunk in the backseat of a vehicle with a suspected predator — who had obscene pictures of the girl on his cell phone — was assessed by local authorities as being at no risk of child sexual exploitation, and her case was closed. “Less than a month later,” the inquiry reports, “she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested.”

The consequences of government mismanagement perpetuated the cycle of violence: “One of the children who failed to meet the threshold for social care went on to become a serious sex offender, convicted of the abduction and rape of young girls.”

Many of the victims were not unknown to the system: “In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and child neglect. There was a history of domestic violence in 46% of cases. Truancy and school refusal were recorded in 63% of cases and 63% of children had been reported missing more than once.”

So why did Rotherham fail to protect its children? Consider the background of the perpetrators.

“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims,” the inquiry reports — by which they mean members of Great Britain’s “Pakistani-heritage community,” with which Rotherham officials reportedly never engaged “to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue” of child sexual exploitation.

In her 2006 report on child sex exploitation in Rotherham, Dr. Angie Heal, a strategic drugs analyst, wrote, “It is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators.” She also noted, in Jay’s words, that “the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry.”

The current inquiry reports, in agreement with Heal:

Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police. . . . One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Of course, the issue is not only race, but religion. According to 2011 census figures, 91 percent of Pakistanis in England and Wales are Muslim. According to Dr. Heal’s 2006 report, child-sexual-exploitation suspects also commonly hail from Iraq and Kosovo — both nations where Muslims constitute upward of 90 percent of the population.

Additionally, although the majority of victims have been “white British” children, child sex exploitation is also dishearteningly common within the Pakistani-heritage community. In September 2013 the U.K. Muslim Women’s Network released a report on child sex exploitation, primarily among Muslim victims. The Inquiry quotes it at length:

“Offending behaviour mostly involved men operating in groups. . . . The victim was being passed around and prostituted amongst many other men. Our research also showed that complex grooming ‘hierarchies’ were at play. The physical abuse included oral, anal and vaginal rape; role play; insertion of objects into the vagina; severe beatings; burning with cigarettes; tying down; enacting rape that included ripping clothes off and sexual activity over the webcam.” This description mirrors the abuse committed by Pakistani-heritage perpetrators on white girls in Rotherham.

The “Rochdale gang” was sentenced in May, 2012

Recent trials would seem to corroborate the Inquiry’s findings — and suggest that the problem is not contained to Rotherham. In November 2010 — the same month that five Rotherham men were jailed for sexual offenses against girls ages 12 to 16 — nine men from Derby were convicted for their part in “systematically abus[ing] and rap[ing]” girls as young as 12. Twenty-seven girls claimed to be victims of the gang. In May 2012, nine Rochdale men were sentenced for similar crimes against girls as young as 13. In June 2013, seven men who together groomed, raped, and trafficked girls as young as 11, were convicted and sentenced in Oxford. The defendants in each case were almost exclusively Muslim.

Professor Jay and her researchers performed interviews with a small number of Rotherham-area victims. “One young person told us,” they wrote, “that ‘gang rape’ was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham in which she lived.”

That is life under the tyranny of senseless taboos: The most vulnerable end up the victims.

— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Kenneth Timmerman On "The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi"

By Sarah Jean Seman
http://townhall.com/
July 19, 2014

Kenneth Timmerman has reported from the Middle East for 35 years. He was one of the first journalists on the scene after Iranian terrorists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.

When the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi left four Americans dead, Timmerman recognized the pathetically inadequate coverage.

“Iranians have been killing us for the past 30 plus years and the U.S. government has never done a thing,” Timmerman told Townhall. “I think it’s about time we stood up to the Islamic fascist government in Iran and made it clear that their continued murder of American citizens will not be tolerant any longer and we will make them pay a price for it.”

Timmerman utilized his contacts from the Middle East and his knowledge from time spent reporting on the ground in the countries to write “Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.” Last week, Timmerman joined me for an exclusive interview.

Q: You write in the book that the Benghazi attacks were a culmination of a shift in U.S. policy that was set in motion by President Obama. What were the key moving points that led up to what happened in Benghazi?

Timmerman: The administration right in the beginning set off on a path to quote “improve relations with the muslim world.” This was an announced policy shift, it included also, an outreach toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama claimed, inaccurately, that the Bush administration had no diplomatic contacts with the Iranians when, in fact, there had been 28 high-level meetings between Bush administration officials and the Iranian government that led to nothing.

Obama came this new stated policy and put it into effect immediately. He goes to Istanbul in April, he invites the Muslim Brotherhood to Washington to the White House for secret meetings also in April of 2009. In June, shortly after his speech at Cairo University, the pro-freedom demonstrations erupted in Iran after their failed, or stolen presidential elections, and there were 3 million people in the streets of Iran holding up signs in English: “Obama are you with us?” and he showed, very quickly, that he was not, and he was on the side of a radical Islamist regime in Tehran, rather than the people of Iran.

Fast-forward from there, to the ousting of Ben Ali in Tunisia, the ousting of Mubarak in Egypt, and ultimately the ousting of Gaddafi, and what you have is a systematic reversal of American policy. The shift goes to essentially enhance radical Islamist regimes around the world, or to create them, as happened in Egypt and later in Libya. And that, I think, is what led directly to the Benghazi attacks. It showed weakness, and in the Middle East and the Muslim world, where I’ve been reporting from for the past 35 years, weakness invites attack.

Q: How did your knowledge of the Middle East add to the book?

Timmerman: Many of the players I know personally; I’ve met them, I’ve interviewed them. I’ve been to most of the countries that I describe. I was in Libya, witnessing Gaddafi’s submission to the United States in 2004. We actually got his weapons of mass destruction loaded onto a ship in Tripoli Harbor while I was there in March of 2004; brought back to the United States, both the uranium enrichment centrifuges and his ballistic missiles. This was a tremendous victory for the Bush administration.

Gaddafi also cut off his support for international terrorist organizations, and he truly did. He was an ally in the global War on Terrorism, he was cracking down on the al-Qaeda fronts in his country, and he was accepting Libyans that we had detained (either in Gitmo or Pakistan, or elsewhere) in his jails and treating them relatively humanely. And I can say that, because Chris Stevens was going into the jails to actually interview these prisons to make sure that they were not being tortured.

Gaddafi had become a de facto ally in the war against global terrorism and what do we do in response? We throw him over, in exchange for the terrorists we were trying to fight.

Q: Do you think Obama’s actions result from design or ignorance?

Timmerman: This was a policy of conviction on the part of the president and his closest advisors. He believed, for whatever reason, that the United States was at fault. That the hostility towards the United States that led to the September 11, 2001 attack was America’s fault and that we had to correct the image that we presented around the world, by kowtowing to dictators, by kowtowing to Islamic fundamentalists, and by pretending that radical Islam was as acceptable as...um...I don’t know, democratic socialism in Europe.

Q: You discuss how former White House press Secretary Jay Carney played a part in the cover-up, and even more recently he criticized the GOP for politicizing Benghazi. What is the proper response to that claim?

I’ve notice that Jay Carney has since resigned, perhaps because telling lies on a daily basis just got too much for him. We only know the bare minimum of the facts, of what happened in Benghazi, that’s why I wrote this book.

I am only one person. I did not have big think tank people behind me, I did not have any major news organization behind me. I did have 35 years of experience in the Middle East and a pretty large rolodex of contacts. I went to defectors for the Iranian terrorism organization, for example, to ask the fundamental question: “Was Iran engaged at all in Benghazi?” The information that came back was astonishing. That should have been accessible to other reporters and other researchers, as well as to the U.S. government. I found out, also through my contacts, about an absolutely astonishing arms smuggling operation out of Libya to radical jihadi groups around the world, that appears to have been authorized, or at the very least explicitly tolerated, by John Brennan, who at the time was the president’s counterterrorism advisor. That is in violation of so many U.S. statutes it’s hard to number them on my hands and my feet.

Q: What would you like to see moving forward?

Timmerman: It’s time to tell the truth. It’s time to get the facts out. It’s time for the American people to understand and be told, authoritatively, that what happened in Benghazi was a state-sponsored terrorist attack by the Islamic people of Iran. And it’s time for the U.S. government to stand up to that very uncomfortable truth and do something about it.