The Derek Jeter nobody knows

Yankees captain lets fans in Monday and reveals he's not the man we thought

By Johnette Howard

http://espn.go.com/new-york/mlb

September 23, 2014

NEW YORK -- The 700 or so people had paid from $125 to $2,000 per ticket to squeeze into the Hudson Theatre, a little jewel box of a venue in midtown Manhattan, early Monday afternoon. Now, for the better part of an hour, Derek Jeter was being interviewed by Brandon Steiner, a longtime friend who runs a memorabilia business that is so efficient at confiscating collectibles, Jeter joked if he wants to keep any mementos from this last week of his career, "I'm going to have to walk out of the stadium in full uniform."

And the audience laughed.

"I'm not making this up," Jeter needled, his voice almost plaintive now.

The Jeter farewell tour has been alternately nostalgic and heartfelt, awkward and funny, over-merchandised and occasionally underwhelming if the measure is waiting for Jeter to cut open a vein and bare his soul about what he expects to feel like by Thursday, when he plays his last game at Yankee Stadium. Or by Sunday, when he says goodbye for good in the Yanks' regular-season finale at Fenway Park.

[+] Enlarge

Michael Priest PhotographyFans saw a rare side of Derek Jeter Monday at Hudson Theatre.

"No, that ain't right! Fenway? C'mon," joked former Yankee Bucky Dent.

Dent, who was seated at one of the tables of honor Monday along with former Yankees Hideki Matsui and Chris Chambliss, added: "Can't they turn it around and play his last game here?"

But Jeter said he's fine with it. As he sat on the stage Monday in a sharp white shirt and black suit, happily away from the usual sports media types who stand two or three deep around his locker most nights, Jeter fielded Steiner's questions and gave fans a little glimpse of the Jeter nobody knows. And, like the New York magazine article that posted online earlier in the day ("Oh? Didn't read it," Jeter shrugged), it turns out Jeter has had some surprises up his sleeve all along. And not just, as he told the magazine, the fact he didn't like that story way back when that suggested he gives his romantic conquests a gift basket as a parting gift the morning after sleepovers.

For starters, how about the wide presumption that they'd have to tear the uniform off Jeter to get him to go? How about the way Jeter is considered a New Yorker now to the bone, an iconic part of the city fabric, same as DiMaggio or Mantle? The real truth is, everything about this last year of Jeter's smacks of impermanence, not clinging to each precious moment: He sold his longtime East Side apartment a while ago and has been living all season in a West Village rental. He often flies to his newly built mansion in Tampa for the day during the season when the Yanks have an off-day. And when asked if he could play another year, he told Steiner, "I feel like I could.

"But I don't want to."

Wait.

Derek Jeter has had enough baseball?

"I'm making no plans in the beginning," Jeter said. "I've been on a schedule my entire life. I'm looking forward to not being on a schedule."

Jeter went on to talk about other things beyond the field. He reached back into his childhood and said he very much liked basketball as a kid but, "I was scared to play football. It was just too much." He tweaked what the media has said about him at times ("Don't believe everything you read."). Several times he stressed how he always thought the way a player comports himself is as important as what he does on the field. But when asked what influence his parents had on how well he has turned out, Jeter deadpanned, "They've had nothing to do with it." Then he laughed and went on to praise what terrific people they are, and how he expects to be a "strict dad," same as his dad was.

Jeter has long been one of sports' most active bachelors. But as it turned out, he said there was something else at work all these years in which he's dated starlet after starlet: He never tried to settle down and start a family sooner, because "I just know that I personally couldn't have done it while I was playing. I was you, know, too selfish, I guess.

The Captain's Greatest Hits

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"I was too selfish to be able to juggle a family and kids. But I look forward to it happening."

What else does he see himself doing in 10 years?

"I'd like to own a team some day," he said.

Jeter's answer as to why he's not married with kids at 40 was not the answer you expect from the city's most tracked playboy since Joe Namath. Isn't Jeter the same man who made a Visa commercial with George Steinbrenner spoofing his late-night habits?

"I go to bed by 9 and I get up at 5:30 a.m. every day to work out," Jeter insisted.

So, to recap: Derek Jeter, star of the Yankees, the man whose just-released sports drink commercial is scored to Frank Sinatra's rendition of "My Way," is actually a man who doesn't even own a home in Manhattan. He often bolts town on off-days the first chance he gets. He has played two decades and is often considered one of the great gamers of all-time -- he said yesterday he kept the seats he famously crashed into from old Yankee Stadium when it was torn down -- but he is more than ready to walk away from baseball, thanks. And he would've settled down sooner if he hadn't betrothed his life to baseball first.

Jeter was fine with all of that coming out in the course of Monday's conversation.

But when Steiner explicitly asked Jeter if there was anything more he could tell the crowd that "someone might not know about you," the Jeter we're used to came back. The shutters slammed shut again.

"Well, if you don't know, it's by design, so ... I don't want you to know," Jeter smiled.

Then, his face growing serious, Jeter added: "I just think that your private life is private. What I do [as the Yankees' shortstop] is obviously public. I get that. I get the fact that people are interested. I'm interested in what people are doing.

"But I've chosen to stay private."

Jeter was long ago assured of heading to the Hall of Fame. His baseball legend will always be gilt-edged. People will always talk about what a winner and a class act he was. How that home run he hit for his 3,000th career hit was just more proof of his flair for the moment. And yet, he also took pains several times Monday to insist the wonder of it all has never worn off for him. And he never, ever took a bit of his journey for granted.

The Jeet Index

As Derek Jeter plays out his final season in Yankee pinstripes, ESPNNewYork.com will be there every step of the way.
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People keep asking Jeter, as his career has funneled down to this last week, to pick a few moments that stand out to him as more "amazing" or "surreal" than the rest.

And Jeter just keeps stubbornly insisting he doesn't think that way.

"It's all of it -- [but] I'm trying not to reminisce yet, you know?" Jeter said. "I play a game where you're supposed to control your emotions. It's a game of failure and success. And you have to be able to control it. That's why at times this year it's been difficult, because you go places and they're showing video montages and you feel like, like, you're dying or something."

Again, the crowd laughed.

"It's the whole thing," Jeter repeated. "When you're a kid, it's like, 'I dreamed of playing shortstop for the Yankees.' But that's where the dream stopped. Then you just want to make it to the major leagues. And everybody pictures themselves hitting a home run in the World Series. But everything else that's come along with this, I never could have dreamt this."

Nobody has to tell him he has seven games in these next seven days to go, starting Monday night against Baltimore. Jeter was in a horrible 0-for-24 slump just before the Yanks got back to town. He seemed to be playing on fumes. It was said he picked the right time to quit, all right. Then -- what do you know -- his clutch gene seemed to kick in, as if he refused to go out like that. He began this last homestand at the Stadium hitting 6-for-13, with his first home run at home in ages.

The Jeter nobody knows will deal with whatever roiling feelings he's fighting inside. But that was the same damn Jeter of old down on the field these last few nights. And he doesn't need any reminders that the end is near.

As Jeter said before he left Monday to head out to the Stadium, "I don't have to wake up for a few more games, so ..."

http://espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/story/_/id/11571633/new-york-yankees-derek-jeter-knows

Related:

Derek Jeter Opens the Door:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/derek-jeter-private-photos.html

Book Review: 'Agent Storm' by Morten Storm

By Joshua Sinai - Special to The Washington Times - - Tuesday, September 16, 2014

http://www.washingtontimes.com/

AGENT STORM: MY LIFE INSIDE AL QAEDA AND THE CIA
By Morten Storm with Paul Cruickshank & Tim Lister
Atlantic Monthly Press, $26, 404 pages, illustrated

In the 1949 book “The God That Failed: A Confession,” prominent ex-communist intellectuals recounted their disillusionment with and abandonment of communism. What also made that book noteworthy was its running concept of “Kronstadt” as the defining moment in which these ex-communists decided not merely to leave the Communist Party, but to actively oppose it as anti-communists.

“Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the CIA” is Morten Storm’s authoritative account of how he was radicalized as a young Danish convert to Islam into ultimately becoming a trusted member of al Qaeda’s inner circles and how his subsequent disillusionment with its genocidal ideology and violent tactics led to his own “Kronstadt” moment, in which he decided to become a double agent on behalf of the Danish, British and American intelligence services.

Although there are other examples of European Muslim extremists who lost faith with jihadi Islam and al Qaeda and its affiliates and became prominent critics of radical Islam, Mr. Storm’s is the most recent case. Moreover, while the others were at the margins of al Qaeda’s operations, Mr. Storm represents the most high-level Western intelligence penetration of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — considered al Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate. His assistance to American intelligence, according to his account, helped lead to the targeted killing in late September 2011 of Anwar al-Awlaki, one of al Qaeda’s top spiritual and operational leaders in Yemen, who had inspired many Western jihadi terrorists, including Maj. Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood murderer, and the Tsarnaev brothers, who conducted the Boston Marathon bombings.

The book is filled with many dramatic accounts of Mr. Storm’s involvement in these Western intelligence penetrations of al Qaeda and its affiliates, whether in Yemen or Somalia, as well as with its extremist adherents in Europe. Written by Mr. Storm and his two collaborators, Paul Cruickshank, a top CNN investigative journalist on al Qaeda, and Tim Lister, who has worked for CNN and the BBC in the Middle East, the book reads like a first-rate spy thriller, but it is in fact a stunning and true inside account of the workings, personalities and mindsets of the leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and its worldwide operations.

In one of the book’s most dramatic segments, in September 2009, Mr. Storm was asked by al-Awlaki, his “mentor” — who had a history of procuring prostitutes while earlier living in America and at the time in Yemen was married to two wives, one older and the second much younger — “to find him a wife in the West.” Mr. Storm, who had divorced his first Muslim wife and was living in England with his second, found in a radical Muslim Facebook forum a suitable potential bride for al-Awlaki: a beautiful, blonde 32-year old Muslim convert from Croatia named Aminah, who was willing to travel to Yemen to meet and marry the already married al-Awlaki, whom she had idolized. At this point, no one in his family knew about his double-agent status.

What neither Aminah (real name Irena Horak) nor al-Awlaki knew was that this “matchmaking” was being orchestrated and financed by the British and American intelligence services who had planted tracking devices in her suitcase and an electronic Arabic pocket dictionary that they hoped would lead them to al-Awlaki’s whereabouts in Yemen’s lawless tribal areas. The details of how Mr. Storm arranged for Aminah’s travel to meet al-Awlaki, how American intelligence eventually located al-Awlaki’s whereabouts (this time via a different courier in a later meeting arranged by Mr. Storm) to kill him, and her ultimate fate in Yemen (she was unaware of Mr. Storm’s involvement in setting the trap for al-Awlaki) are riveting. All is backed up by extensive evidence in the form of travel and financial documents and videos Mr. Storm provided his co-authors, including the actual video of al-Awlaki proposing marriage to his prospective Croatian bride.

Aside from bringing readers close to the workings of high-stake intelligence operations, Mr. Storm’s book is important for other reasons. It is a first-rate account of how a troubled young Danish Christian, with a history of petty criminality, incarceration and drug use was drawn to convert to Islam and was radicalized into its most extremist jihadi circles in Denmark and Britain. It illustrates how recruiters in such jihadi circles in Europe identify and send their promising convert adherents to “study” at jihadist religious schools such as the Dammaj Institute in Yemen, where, upon their return to their countries of origin, they are expected to further radicalize others into pro-al Qaeda violent extremism and martyrdom.

In what is the book’s most telling and hopeful segment, Mr. Storm discusses his “Kronstadt” moment in early 2007, when he rejected radical Islam’s “justifications made for the murder and maiming of civilians,” and the steps he took to contact PET, the Danish intelligence service, to offer his services to counter and betray his former comrades in European jihadi circles and al Qaeda around the world because, as he writes, “I knew the murderous worldview of al Qaeda, and I wanted to play a part in stopping them.”

While today Mr. Storm is relieved to have given up jihadism (as well as Islam) and is proud of his previous work in support of Western intelligence in fighting al Qaeda and its sympathizers, these undercover activities took a toll on him and his family. He currently resides in undisclosed whereabouts in England under the protection of British authorities (or others operating on their behalf) because of constant death threats against him by his former jihadi comrades.

The drama of “Agent Storm” will no doubt attract Hollywood’s attention (it’s already an hourlong CNN documentary), but bright lights aside, the book is an indispensable guide to how the West can counter the appeal of violent jihadism. Today, when so many young Western Muslims are flocking to Syria and Iraq to join the ranks of genocidal insurgents, this book’s insights could not be more important.

Joshua Sinai is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on terrorism and counterterrorism studies. He is the author of “Active Shooter: A Handbook on Prevention” (ASIS International).

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/16/book-review-how-a-former-western-jihadi-renounced-/#ixzz3E2zS14YJ 
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The Crumbling Climate-Change Consensus

Extremists’ rhetoric heats up as their case falls apart. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 22, 2014

People's Climate March.  (Jennifer Mitchell/NY Daily News)

The United Nations Climate Summit will begin in New York this Tuesday, but environmental activists didn’t wait. All day Sunday, they filled the streets of Manhattan for a march that featured Al Gore, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and various Hollywood actors.

But they certainly didn’t act like a movement that was winning. There was a tone of fatalism in the comments of many with whom I spoke; they despair that the kind of radical change they advocate probably won’t result from the normal democratic process. It’s no surprise then that the rhetoric of climate-change activists has become increasingly hysterical. Naomi Klein, author of a new book on the “crisis,” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, said, “I have seen the future, and it looks like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.” In her new book she demands that North America and Europe pay reparations to poorer countries to compensate for the climate change they cause. She calls her plan a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” and acknowledges that it would cost “hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” But she has an easy solution on how to pay for it: “Need more money? Print some!” What’s a little hyperinflation compared to “saving the planet”?

Nor is Klein alone in her hysteria. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a new film in which he warns that the world is threatened by a “carbon monster” that is treated like a kind of Godzilla that must be killed off by ending the use of carbon-based fuels.

One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims. As physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute puts it: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea-ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.” He points out that there has been no net new global-warming increase since 1997 even though the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 25 percent since then. This throws into doubt all the climate models that have been predicting massive climate dislocation.

Other scientists caution that climate models must be regarded with great care and skepticism. Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Obama’s first term, wrote a pathbreaking piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which he concluded:

We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influence. . . . The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high. . . . Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties, but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Even scientists who accept the conventional scientific treatment of the subject by the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change increasingly question just how much it would help to curb emissions or to radically redistribute wealth, as activists like Klein urge us to do. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told me that all of the carbon-reduction targets advocated by the U.N. or the European Union would result in imperceptible differences in temperature, at enormous cost. “We would be far better off and richer if we did simple things like painting roofs in hot climates white and investing in new technologies that could help us adapt to any change that is coming,” he says. Even the U.N.’s own climate panel admits that so far, climate change hasn’t included any increase in the frequency or intensity of so-called extreme weather.

At the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change last July, I ran into scientist after scientist who felt that the debate was finally going against the climate extremists. Several noted that the conference’s organizers were on the offense and gaining real ground. Roy Spencer, a former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, described the shift in opinion on his blog:

For many years we had been hearing from the “scientific consensus” side that natural climate change is nowhere near as strong as human-caused warming . . . yet the lack of surface warming in 17 years has forced those same scientists to now invoke natural climate change to supposedly cancel out the expected human-caused warming! 

C’mon guys. You can’t have it both ways! They fail to see that a climate system capable of cancelling out warming with natural cooling is also capable of causing natural warming in the first place. . . . To me, it feels like a climate skepticism tipping point has been reached.

Maybe that’s why the climate-change extremists are basing fewer of their appeals on fact and more on hysteria. You scream the loudest when the opposition is about to tip over on you and pin you down.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Roll of the Dice (Live May 2014)

College freshmen women targeted for sexual assault

BY JOHN DRESCHER

jdrescher@newsobserver.comSeptember 19, 2014 

http://www.newsobserver.com/

For young women, the first semester of college can be a perilous time.

Older college guys target them as inexperienced drinkers and, therefore, less likely to resist sexual advances. One University of Massachusetts male student explained the strategy, as reported in Time magazine: “They were easy prey, and they wouldn’t know anything about drinking or how much alcohol they could handle, so you know they wouldn’t know anything about our techniques.”

The technique: Invite younger female students to a party. Have plenty of beer but also a sweet-tasting punch loaded with alcohol. When a young woman is impaired, get her alone and make your move. The UMass student admitted to pinning down a young woman by placing his arm across her chest so he could force her to have sex.

Sexual assault on college campuses is getting a lot of media attention these days. We recently published two front-page stories on back-to-back days about the subject.

There’s good reason for all the coverage. Various studies provide conflicting evidence about whether first-year women are more vulnerable in a “red zone” from August to Thanksgiving. What’s not in dispute is that sexual assault is widespread at colleges and universities – and that administrators aren’t sure what to do.

Women sharing stories

Jane Stancill, who covers higher education for The News & Observer, reported recently about a 2007 survey at two large universities. It found that 19 percent of female students experienced an attempted or actual sexual assault. Other surveys have reported similar percentages.

Universities have been criticized for minimizing crime reports about sexual assault to protect their images. U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, recently surveyed 350 colleges and universities. She found that 41 percent hadn’t conducted a sexual-assault investigation in the past five years.

As of late August, 76 colleges are being investigated under the federal Title IX gender equity law, including UNC-Chapel Hill and Guilford College. Universities are required to have grievance procedures to respond to reports of sexual violence.

Stancill cites two reasons why there has been so much coverage recently.

First, the federal government is taking a stronger stance. Many colleges, such as UNC-CH, also face allegations that they failed to report accurate crime statistics required by federal law.

Second, students who have been sexually assaulted have become empowered to share their stories publicly, especially through social media.

“They have formed networks with other victims across the country to get the word out about how they believe universities mishandled their cases or swept the problem under the rug,” Stancill said.

Colleges ill-equipped

The schools are compelled by federal law to respond to sexual misconduct. But Stancill points out that in many ways they are ill-equipped to do so.

Until recently, sexual-assault cases were sent to student honor courts or disciplinary hearings, where students sometimes sat in judgment of other students. Accused assailants were rarely found responsible or punished.

On the other hand, some students who have been expelled after guilty findings have later sued universities, saying the process was unfair. Universities can face lawsuits on both sides.

UNC-CH has adopted new policies that say a student who is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs can’t give consent. Consent has to be an affirmative choice. Only faculty and staff (not students) would serve on panels that hear the cases.

All of this media attention has been disruptive for university administrators. But this conversation needs to happen. If it leads to a better awareness of consent and a reduction in assaults, it is a conversation worth having.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/09/19/4164966/drescher-college-freshmen-women.html#storylink=cpy

The Islamic State . . . of Saudi Arabia

Between beheadings, they’ll help train the “moderate” Syrian rebels. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

September 20, 2014

Secretary of state John Kerry with Saudi king Abdullah on September 11, 2014.

The beheadings over the last several weeks were intended to terrorize, to intimidate, to coerce obedience, and to enforce a construction of sharia law that, being scripturally rooted, is draconian and repressive.

And let’s not kid ourselves: We know there will be more beheadings in the coming weeks, and on into the future. Apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and perceived blasphemers will face brutal persecution and death. Women will be treated as chattel and face institutionalized abuse. Islamic-supremacist ideology, with its incitements to jihad and conquest, with its virulent hostility toward the West, will spew from the mosques onto the streets. We will continue to be confronted by a country-sized breeding ground for anti-American terrorists.

The Islamic State? Sorry, no. I was talking about . . .  our “moderate Islamist” ally, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But the confusion is understandable.

Islamic State terrorists have infamously decapitated three of their prisoners in recent weeks. That is five fewer than the Saudi government decapitated in August alone. Indeed, it is three fewer beheadings than were carried out in September by the Free Syrian Army — the “moderate Islamists” that congressional Republicans have now joined Obama Democrats in supporting with arms and training underwritten by American taxpayer dollars.

The Obama administration regards the Saudi government as America’s key partner in the fight against Islamic State jihadists. The increasingly delusional Secretary of State John Kerry reasons that this is because the fight is more ideological than military. Get it? The world’s leading propagators of the ideology that breeds violent jihad are our best asset in an ideological struggle against violent jihadists.

Aloof as ever from irony, Mr. Kerry gave this assessment while visiting King Abdullah in Riyadh on, of all days, September 11 — the thirteenth anniversary of the day when 15 Saudis joined four other terrorists in mass-murdering nearly 3,000 Americans in furtherance of the Islamic-supremacist ideology on which they were reared. The 19 were, of course, members of al-Qaeda, the jihadist network sprung from Saudi Arabia and its fundamentalist “Wahhabi” Islam.

Secretary Kerry and President Obama, like British prime minister David Cameron, insist that the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda-launched jihadist faction, is not Islamic. Evidently, this is owing to the terrorists’ savage tactics. In essence, however, they are the same tactics practiced by our “moderate Islamist” allies.

Saudi Arabia is the cradle of Islam: the birthplace of Mohammed, the site of the Hijra by which Islam marks time — the migration from Mecca to Medina under siege by Mohammed and his followers. The Saudi king is formally known as the “Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques” (in Mecca and Medina); he is the guardian host of the Haj pilgrimage that Islam makes mandatory for able-bodied believers. The despotic Saudi kingdom is governed by Islamic law — sharia. No other law is deemed necessary and no contrary law is permissible.

It is thus under the authority of sharia that the Saudis routinely behead prisoners.

I happen to own the edition of the Koran “with English Translation of ‘The Meanings and Commentary,’” published at the “King Fahd Holy Qur-an Printing Complex” — Fahd was Abdullah’s brother and predecessor. As the introductory pages explain, this version is produced under the auspices of the regime’s “Ministry of Hajj and Endowments.” In its sura (or chapter) 47, Allah commands Muslims, “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks.”

The accompanying English commentary helpfully explains:

When once the fight (Jihad) is entered upon, carry it out with the utmost vigor, and strike home your blows at the most vital points (smite at their necks), both literally and figuratively. You cannot wage war with kid gloves. [Italicized parentheticals in original.]

Sura 8 underscores the point with another of Allah’s exhortations: “I am with you: Give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks and smite ye all their fingertips off them.”

Following the 9/11 attacks, Americans Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg were among prisoners notoriously decapitated by al-Qaeda. Reacting to their beheadings, Timothy Furnish, a U.S. Army veteran with a doctorate in Islamic history, wrote a comprehensive Middle East Quarterly essay on “Beheading in the Name of Islam.” As Dr. Furnish recounted,

The practice of beheading non-Muslim captives extends back to the Prophet himself. Ibn Ishaq (d. 768 C.E.), the earliest biographer of Muhammad, is recorded as saying that the Prophet ordered the execution by decapitation of 700 men of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina for allegedly plotting against him.

As is always the case, the prophet’s example has been emulated by Muslims through the centuries. When Muslims conquered central Spain in the eleventh century, for example, the caliph had 24,000 corpses beheaded; the remains were piled into makeshift minarets atop which muezzins sang the praises of Allah. In more modern times, Furnish adds, “The Ottoman Empire was the decapitation state par excellence” — employing the practice to terrorize enemies for centuries, including, to take just one of many examples, beheading hundreds of British soldiers captured in Egypt in 1807.

A pity Sheikh Cameron was not around back then to correct the caliphate’s understanding of Islam.

The Saudis behead prisoners for such “offenses” as apostasy. You see, our “moderate Islamist” allies brook no dissent and permit no freedom of conscience. In this, the world’s most identifiably Islamic regime is no different from its Shiite counterpart (and regional competitor) in Tehran — to which President Obama respectfully refers by its preferred name, “the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Sharia is the law there, too. While the regime is said to have repealed the punishment of decapitation, it still prescribes stoning, flogging, and amputation for various violations, such as adultery and petty theft.

Such cruel — but not at all unusual — punishments are designed to enforce a societal system that, as I’ve previously outlined, degrades and dehumanizes women, while subjecting apostates and homosexuals to death and non-Muslims to systematic discrimination.

As night follows day, young Muslims schooled in the ideology promoted in Saudi Arabia gravitate to jihadist networks such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. As recited in Reliance of the Traveller, an authoritative sharia manual endorsed by scholars at the ancient al-Azhar University in Egypt and the Islamic Fiqh Academy in Saudi Arabia, “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.” They are simply acting on what “moderate Islamists” have been teaching them.

And now Republicans in Congress have joined Democrats to support President Obama’s hare-brained scheme to train 5,000 “moderate” Syrian rebels. As every sentient person knows, a force of that size will have no chance of defeating the Islamic State or al-Qaeda — even if we charitably assume that many in its ranks do not defect to those organizations, as they have been wont to do. The rebels will similarly have no chance against the Iran-backed Assad regime. In sum, our government, nearly $18 trillion in debt, will expend another $500 million to school 5,000 “moderate Islamists” in military tactics that cannot win the war in Syria but could eventually be used in the jihad against the United States. Welcome to Libya . . . the Sequel.

Oh, and did I mention that the training of these “moderate” rebels will take place in “moderate” Saudi Arabia?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.