The Tragedy of Florence

By ROD DREHER • October 2, 2014, 1:43 PM

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/

Bill Stephany, my Virgil today

I’m pleased to report that I finally found a power adapter that works with my laptop cord, so I’m back online. I’ve been anxious to write about what I saw and heard today.

My pal Casella and I walked to the Baptistery (where Dante and all the greats of medieval and Renaissance Florence were baptized) to meet Bill Stephany, a retired US professor and Dantist, in the Tuscan capital for the time being with his wife. Bill was kind enough to offer to give us a tour of the Dante sights in the city. Bill has been coming here for ages, usually with students, so he definitely knows his way around. Medieval Florence was one of the biggest cities in Europe, but it’s heart is small by modern standards; you can easily see the key Dante sites in a single morning. And we did (except for Santa Croce, to which we will go later).

One of the first places we stopped by was a building that was a medieval guild hall. Bill pointed out that for the Florentines of that era, a man who practiced his craft became a co-creator with God. Bill showed us reliefs on the building’s façade, each one celebrating a different craftsman. I better understood, then, why Dante was so harsh on usurers for being “violent against nature;” in this way of seeing things, the moneylender’s trade is unnatural.

We walked on and soon came to the house of the Guelph Cavalcante, whom you’ll remember sharing a tomb in Hell with his Ghibelline enemy Farinata degli Uberti (see our discussion of Inferno 10). “If this is where Cavalcante lived, I wonder where Farinata’s place was,” I said. Bill pointed just ahead, and led the way.

It was just up the street and around the corner — or would have been, if it were still there. After the Guelphs came back to power, they had the body of Farinata (who, recall, led the Ghibelline army in the Battle of Monteperti, in which they slaughtered 10,000 Florentine Guelphs and seized control of the city) exhumed, burned, and his ashes thrown in the Arno. Bill said they dismantled the Uberti family’s house and used the bricks to help build a city wall. And the city fathers passed a law forbidding anyone from building anything on that land, in perpetuity.

That property is still vacant, all these centuries later. It is now part of the Piazza della Signoria, next to which you’ll fine the Uffizi museum. “Think about it,” said Bill. “These men were literally neighbors in life, but even though they live in the same tomb, they won’t even recognize each other in death.”

On we walked toward the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge, at the foot of which there occurred an infamous murder. It was Easter Sunday in the year 1215. Earlier, Buondelmonte, an arrogant young Ghibelline, had injured someone from the Amidei family, a powerful Ghibelline clan. It was decided that Buondelmonte could make reparation for his deed of dishonor if he married a young woman from the Amidei. On the day he was to ask for her hand in marriage, all gathered on the piazza for the event, but Buondelmonte passed by her, and instead asked for the hand of a Guelph girl. The Amidei swore revenge.

On Easter Sunday of that year, Buondelmonte crossed the Ponte Vecchio on horseback, coming into the city to be married later that day. Assassins from the Amidei and an allied family, the Lamberti, leaped out and murdered him in cold blood, almost at the doorstep of the Amidei family home. Do I even need to tell you that Buondelmonte’s family home was just around the corner from the Amidei? That murder set off the bloody Guelph-Ghibelline wars in Florence, which lasted for generations, and tore the city apart. Dante’s exile came almost 100 years later, as a result of the factional conflict. In the Commedia, Dante writes at length about how the fratricidal and communal hatred within families, between neighbors, and between political factions, destroyed so many lives and so much of the greatness of Florence. In Inferno 10, Dante makes the point that these men, Farinata and Cavalcante, who had been neighbors were so lost in their own worlds on earth that they couldn’t see anything they had in common. Both men were Epicureans, men who philosophically denied the afterlife, and who were therefore committed to believing that this world is all that exists. Consequently, they loved the things of this world unnaturally, to the point of destroying the peace of the city over their own passions.

The point Dante makes throughout the Commedia is that the Florentines had become so caught up in pursuing their individual, familiar, or partisan goods that they ceased to see the humanity of their fellow Florentines. Thus when one faction would fall from power, the rivals taking power would sometimes destroy the houses of the losers. It wasn’t enough for the Black Guelphs to take power in Dante’s Florence; they had to send White Guelphs like Dante into exile and seize their goods.

I knew this before I came to Florence, of course, but I don’t know that anything would have prepared me to understand the magnitude of Florence’s tragedy like coming here and seeing how intimate these associations were, and how physically close these families lived to each other. How could you do these things to someone you knew so well? They did. All of them did.

No one knows for sure where the Alighieri family home was (it’s almost certainly not the so-called Casa di Dante), but Bill says there’s a plausible theory that puts it behind the Donati family tower (Via Corso 31-33), backing up to a small courtyard called today the Piazza Donati. If this is true, then it means that as a boy, Dante Alighieri would have seen Corso, Forese, and Piccardà Donati, all of whom figure prominently in the Commedia, when they came out to play in what was their common backyard. The Portinari family’s tower was in the same street. Dante and Beatrice grew up around the corner from each other.

It’s that kind of place.

I am still a little shaken up by the intensity of all this. No wonder the later Dante, the exile who wrote the Commedia, was so prophetically harsh on factionalism within Florence, Tuscany, and all of Italy. He had seen what loving power, glory, wealth, and clan had done to people who were neighbors. To be here in Florence and to stand outside these places is to feel the pathos of the Commedia‘s moral message to a degree I hadn’t thought possible.

Love — love of God, and more importantly, love in and through God — is the only thing that could have held this place together, and restored lasting peace and unity. But they loved other goods more than the Good, and from those sins flowed an endless river of blood.

Casella and I are so grateful to Bill Stephany for his generosity this morning. His passion for Dante, and for Florence, were such a gift to us. I said to him, “Bill, my wife asked me the other day at what point one becomes saturated with Dante, and can’t take any more. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never known it to happen to anyone.”

Bill Stephany, my Virgil today

Posted in Dante. Tagged Buondelmonte, Cavalcante, Dante, factionalism, Farinata, Florence.

Was the ‘Khorasan Group’ Plotting an Imminent Attack?

There may have been a plot, but Obama can’t acknowledge its real source. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 4, 2014

A TV grab from the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news channel dated 17 June 2005 shows Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri delivering a speech at an undisclosed location with a machine gun next to him. Al-Zawahiri, in a video posted on the Internet 29 September 2006, called US President George W Bush a liar who had “failed in his war against Al-Qaeda”, Al-Jazeera television reported. The previous day, Islamist websites on the Internet had said there would be a new video message posted by Zawahiri entitled ” Bush, the pope, Darfur and the Crusades.” AFP PHOTO/AL-JAZEERA — QATAR OUT & INTERNET OUT — (Photo credit should read -/AFP/Getty Images)

The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake is one of the best national-security reporters there is. Late this week, he made an important contribution to the “Khorasan” debate — the controversy over President Obama’s commencement of an aerial bombing campaign, in the absence of congressional authorization, based on what the administration has portrayed as an “imminent” threat to the United States. The source of the threat was said to be the “Khorasan Group,” a virtually unknown terrorist entity.

The upshot of Mr. Lake’s report is that back in June, U.S. military and intelligence officials assessed that “a shadowy network of al Qaeda veterans in Syria were planning to attack airliners flying to the United States.” The officials thus formulated combat plans for strikes against this terror cell’s key locations. These “targeting packages,” however, were not submitted to the president because, according to an unidentified senior intelligence official, military brass knew Mr. Obama would not authorize the strikes. They did not want to ask if the answer was certain to be “no.”

I have no doubt that this is the case. My focus, however, is on Mr. Lake’s description of the Khorasan controversy. As he frames it,

Some critics on the left and right have questioned whether the White House invented the threat from the so-called “Khorasan Group” in order to justify airstrikes that began in September against al Qaeda and ISIS targets in Syria.

“ISIS,” of course, refers to the Islamic State, formerly, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (meaning Iraq and Greater Syria or the Levant). It is the al-Qaeda spin-off currently rampaging across that region. ISIS is distinguished from al-Qaeda because the two — at least for the moment — are rivals. Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise is Jabhat al-Nusra. Mr. Lake further asserts that this franchise “has been focused on its fight inside [Syria],” in apparent distinction from the so-called Khorasan Group’s focus on attacking the United States.

This is all worth teasing out because there is confusion about what the Khorasan controversy is over. The Lake report, moreover, is a valuable demonstration of how the government’s conscious avoidance of Islamic-supremacist ideology leads to wayward analysis and policy.

It is true that Obama critics have questioned whether the White House invented the threat from the “Khorasan Group.” Still, this conflates two things that should be scrutinized separately: (a) whether there really was a threat, and (b) whether there really is a “Khorasan Group” as represented by administration officials. Many of us who reject the latter are less skeptical about the former.

With respect to the so-called Khorasan Group, the overarching objection here is that we are really just talking about al-Qaeda. No one doubts that al-Qaeda, being an international terror network that has been at war with the United States for about 20 years, has an internal organizational structure as well as both franchises and smaller cells throughout the world. But the units, franchises, and cells are not independent, autonomous operators; they are al-Qaeda. That, in fact, is what separates them from the Islamic State, which has broken away from the mother ship, at least for the time being.

The Obama administration portrayed the abruptly emergent “Khorasan Group” as if it were a standalone terrorist organization — a jihadist-combat entity targeting the United States. In reality, the threat the administration was talking about was from al-Qaeda. The administration does not like to admit that al-Qaeda is still a formidable enemy because President Obama has made a habit of falsely claiming to have defeated it. That is why we are hearing about the “Khorasan Group.”

To the extent such an entity exists, however, it is merely a small group of experienced and trusted al-Qaeda operatives who advise the terror network’s emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and carry out his directives. In this instance, Zawahiri sent some of these top terrorists to Syria, to work with the Syrian franchise, al-Nusra. As I noted earlier this week, and as Mr. Lake also reports, al-Anan Television’s Jenan Moussa has documented that putative Khorasan members were understood within the al-Qaeda framework to be al-Nusra’s elite unit. This is consistent with other reporting I’ve previously cited, which details how Syrian jihadists now said to be part of “Khorasan” were working within, and were indistinguishable from, al-Nusra.

Bottom line: It was all al-Qaeda. Khorasan, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda are one and the same.

Obama’s approach is to atomize al-Qaeda into its separate parts. Politically, this is intended to make it appear that the president has made great progress against a network that, in actuality, has gotten larger and more threatening on his watch. Philosophically, it fits the Obama agenda of miniaturizing the enemy into small outfits, consumed by regional or parochial concerns and largely unthreatening to the United States — nuisances unconnected by Islamic-supremacist ideology and manageable by law-enforcement processes.

Obama implausibly bragged that the killing of bin Laden by U.S. special forces during his first term was a fatal blow to the global terror network. Patently, this has proved not to be the case, so administration officials now maintain that the president was referring merely to “core al-Qaeda” — the hierarchy of al-Qaeda said to be holed up in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is deceptive revisionism: If you review the president’s campaign rhetoric, he was extravagantly claiming to have defeated al-Qaeda, not a small subset of al-Qaeda. But the fraud runs deeper: “Core al-Qaeda” is a term cooked up by our government, not by the terror network. It is useful because the “core” can be sliced as finely as the president needs to slice it in order to depict the killing of this or that terrorist as “decimation.”

The pretense does not end with assertions that the “core” is distinct from the impressive transcontinental network al-Qaeda’s leaders have built, or that even the core is somehow distinct from its own little “Khorasan.” The government draws further artificial distinctions by claiming that separate al-Qaeda entities have unconnected missions.

For example, the “Khorasan Group” was clearly operating within al-Nusra, the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise. Yet, Mr. Lake reports the intelligence community’s assessment that al-Nusra “has been focused on its fight inside” Syria, while the allegedly separate “Khorasan” concentrated on attacking the United States.

This ignores al-Qaeda’s Islamic-supremacist ideology. Al-Qaeda — the whole international network — has an overarching goal of global conquest: placing the entire world under an Islamic caliphate governed by its construction of sharia. Put aside whether you think the goal can be accomplished. The point is that they believe it can — that, in time, it will.

Achieving the goal calls for the accomplishment of several important missions, most prominently including: defeating the United States (“the head of the snake”) and its Western allies; destroying Israel (“the little Satan” — the U.S. being “the big Satan”); overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes said to be “secular” or “infidel” (i.e., non-adherent to al-Qaeda’s construction of sharia even if nominally Muslim); and uniting Islamist factions that control territory into a single jihadist juggernaut.

You can’t pick up a carpet by all four corners at once. Some al-Qaeda units are assigned to one or more of these objectives at different times; but all al-Qaeda units support and work toward the comprehensive, hegemonic program. It is highly unlikely that the so-called Khorasan Group is working on a mission completely distinct from al-Nusra’s mission; but even if there were such a division of labor, they are still one organization with one ideology and one ultimate goal.

Attacking the United States is essential to the goal, which is why al-Qaeda never stops plotting such attacks — many of which have been carried out. As a result, none of us can confidently rule out the administration’s claim that an “imminent” attack was being planned.

As Mr. Lake points out, “U.S. officials have walked back claims in the last week that the strikes on the Khorasan Group were an attempt to disrupt an imminent threat.” Moreover, I have contended that the administration had a motive to exaggerate the threats as “imminent.” A president is not required to seek congressional authorization for threats of imminent attack. Obama did not want to ask Congress’s approval. Doing so would have launched a potentially embarrassing examination of (a) the president’s claims to have defeated al-Qaeda, and (b) the fact that the “moderate rebels” Obama proposes to aid in Syria work arm-in-arm with al-Qaeda.

By claiming to act against an imminent threat, the president sidestepped that problem. Of course, there could still have been an imminent threat — that an assertion is politically convenient does not necessarily make it untrue. However imminent the threat, though, its source is al-Qaeda.

— 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.

Obama’s Éminence Grise

As the Obama administration crashes and burns, insiders begin to blame Valerie Jarrett. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 3, 2014

President Obama with Valerie Jarrett in the West Wing.

Are significant chunks of the mainstream media in despair over Barack Obama? This past week, Obama used 60 Minutes to attempt to shift blame for the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, endured a cover-up of White House security disasters by the Secret Service, and saw a government-agency report that he had skipped nearly 60 percent of his intelligence briefings. 

The reaction from some longtime Obama defenders was swift and harsh. “President Obama this week committed professional suicide,” wrote former CNN host Piers Morgan, now an editor-at-large for Britain’s Daily Mail.

He called Obama’s throwing of the intelligence community under the bus a “shameless, reprehensible display of buck-passing” that will result in some analysts’ exacting “cold-blooded revenge on Obama by drip-feeding negative stories about him until he’s gone.” As for the Secret Service fiasco, Morgan said it was “no wonder the Secret Service gets complacent when The Boss exudes complacency from every pore.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported that Jarrett is an unusual presence in the White House: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, ‘I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”

Everyone expects a presidential spouse to weigh in on issues, but the reference to Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and the first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, is telling. Her outsize role in many presidential decisions is known to insiders, but she remains resolutely behind the scenes. So when Jarrett does enter the news, it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works. 

This week, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business noted that President Obama was back visiting Chicago but “having to share headlines with Valerie Jarrett.” She began the week with a cameo appearance on CBS’s highly rated show The Good Wife. Then a column by Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jarrett “may be the worst abuser” of any executive-branch official with a Secret Service detail, using guards “round the clock” even while she was shopping, at the gym, or visiting friends in Chicago.

At a time when a government report shows the Secret Service is more than 550 agents below its optimal strength, Sneed bluntly asked, “Is this expense justifiable or is it an abuse of power?” Sneed quoted a source close to the White House: “Jarrett is treated as a member of the Obama family, but she’s had no real death threats requiring the constant use of the Secret Service that I know of.”

When Mark Leibovich of the New York Times tried to trace how Jarrett obtained Secret Service protection, he was told by someone close to her that she found such questions “ridiculous and offensive.”

Hinz of Chicago Business has covered Jarrett for years and has decided to offer her some quick advice: “Do whatever it takes to get your name out of the papers. And just watch TV for a while. OK?” He then joked that if Jarrett really wanted “to have some fun, try to figure out who dropped the dime on you.” 

I wouldn’t bet against Jarrett finding out. As I wrote last year, White House aides “went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about Jarrett and other White House staffers. . . . The official had gone so far as to tweet ‘I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.’”

When the bloodhounds uncovered Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council, as the offending official, he was fired — not for revealing any secrets but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players such as Jarrett.

On Capitol Hill, members of both parties are more and more mystified at Obama’s apparent disengagement from parts of his job. Months before he dropped the ball on ISIS, he failed to keep himself properly apprised of the problems with Obamacare’s website. Jarrett appears to exercise such extraordinary influence that in some quarters on Capitol Hill she is known as “Rasputin,” a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.

No one suggests that Jarrett is solely responsible for the administration’s slow response to the crises, contradictory communication, and labored political calculation that have become its hallmarks. But many do think that she has failed to encourage the president to bring in new people with fresh ideas. 

So how has she survived? Not only has she been close to the first couple for nearly a quarter-century, but she clearly makes the president feel even better about himself than he would anyway. Consider this quote from her interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick for his book The Bridge (2010):

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

Journalists who contacted the White House this week and asked to speak with Jarrett didn’t get very far. Maybe she’s decided to follow the advice of Greg Hinz and lie low for a while. But if journalists really want a fuller explanation for how the Obama administration has reached its current low ebb, perhaps they should continue to follow the threads of the Jarrett string that were revealed this week and see where those lead.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

The Oklahoma Beheader’s Radical Environment

Posted By Robert Spencer On October 3, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Alton Nolen, the man accused of beheading a woman in an Oklahoma food plant office, maintained a Facebook page full of disturbing warnings to America and photos of terrorist fighters. (Facebook)

Jah’Keem Yisrael (formerly Alton Alexander Nolen), who beheaded one of his coworkers and was shot while in the process of trying to behead another on September 26 in Vaughan Foods, a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, didn’t live in a vacuum. His mosque, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, worked hard to distance itself from him before its leaders stopped talking to the media altogether, and has denounced his actions. That will probably be good enough for the clueless and politically correct Obamoid FBI, which has forgotten what the “I” stands for in its name, but it leaves too many questions unanswered. Chiefly this one: when Jah’Keem Yisrael went to his mosque, what kind of teachings did he hear?

Unfortunately, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City doesn’t offer tapes or transcripts of Friday khutbas. And while they have been affecting a pose of being as moderate as the day is long, some clues to the contrary have appeared. Last week I received this insider report from a former member of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City:

I went to the same mosque the Oklahoma Muslim who beheaded his co-worker today. I live ten minutes away! 

The Imam was Imad Enchassi the last I heard. He was a friend of mine. He is a Lebanese-born Sunni who hates Israel. He once gave a sermon that the Israelis were trying to collapse al-Aqsa mosque by digging tunnels underneath it. They have no issue with Palestinian suicide bombings because, as it was explained to me, that is the only weapon the Palestinians have. 

They sold Milestones in the book shop while I was there, which as you know calls for replacing all non-Islamic governments with Islamic ones. I remember listening to a tape a friend of mine, Yahya Graff, another white convert to Islam, had that prayed for the destruction of Israel and America. 

The imam when I first converted, Suhaib Webb, is hailed as a moderate by liberals in the United States but he was the one that explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad. They try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.

Then on September 30, I interviewed this man, who has left not only the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City but also Islam as a whole. He gave more details to demonstrate that this mosque was not at all as “moderate” as its leaders claimed in the wake of the beheading:

Among the explosive revelations: Mosque members said that if Osama bin Laden showed up at the door and needed help, he would help him because he is a Muslim brother. Once this former member went target shooting AK-47’s with two other Muslim converts — the targets were labeled George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. 

Has the mosque changed since this man stopped going there? That’s unlikely. The current imam, Imad Enchassi, is a friend of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In a sermon he preached on September 19, just a week before the beheading, Enchassi said that CAIR Oklahoma City Executive Director Adam Soltani “doesn’t do anything without consulting me.”

While CAIR is quite mainstream these days, this self-styled “civil rights group” was actually named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. 

Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.

In sum, Imad Enchassi’s association with CAIR doesn’t speak well of his moderate bona fides.

Enchassi also claimed, just days before Jah’Keem Yisrael’s jihad rampage at Vaughan Foods, that “Islamophobes” in Oklahoma were plotting to behead Muslims. This was the environment in which Jah’Keem Yisrael lived and moved. His Facebook page contained numerous photos of himself at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, and it has since been revealed that he attended frequently, at least once a week. While there, he would likely have heard about the anti-Muslim machinations of the kuffar (unbelievers), and come out seething with resentment and righteous rage. Maybe he even beheaded Colleen Hufford at Vaughan Foods before the Infidels could behead him.

The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City should be thoroughly investigated, and if found to be fomenting hatred, violence and sedition, shut down. Instead, however, Obama’s politically correct Keystone Kops will likely only go there to conduct an “outreach” program.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

---

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-oklahoma-beheaders-radical-environment/

The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil

Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature

By Camille Paglia

http://time.com/

September 29, 2014

Getty Images

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.

The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.

There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.

Denzel makes a bloody good CIA agent in spectacular ‘Equalizer’

By Lou Lumenick
http://nypost.com/
September 26, 2014

Why should Liam Neeson have all the fun? Denzel Washington promisingly launches his own senior action franchise in “The Equalizer,” starring as a lethally skilled CIA agent who comes out of retirement to rid Boston of the Russian Mafia.

Washington, who turns 60 in December, vividly demonstrates that he won’t be ready for “The Expendables” team of has-beens anytime soon in this enormously entertaining, lavishly mounted extravaganza that, incidentally, puts Neeson’s “Taken” series to shame.

Antoine Fuqua, who directed Washington to a Best Actor Oscar for “Training Day” 13 years ago, serves up Tarantino-caliber action sequences in this slam-bang thriller loosely inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same name with Edward Woodward.

Bald and graying at the temples, Washington plays Robert McCall, a softspoken and kindly manager at an enormous Home Depot — er, Home Mart — that will eventually handily serve as the location for the film’s breathtakingly spectacular denouement.

When a Russian pimp severely beats up a prostitute (Chloë Grace Moretz) whom Robert regularly encounters at his favorite coffee shop after work, Washington decides to dust off his old skills to settle the score with her tormentors.

There’s nothing hugely original about the script by Richard Wenk (who cowrote “Expendables 2” with Sylvester Stallone), but Washington is a master at putting his own inimitable and stylish spin on even the most familiar situations.

Marton Csokas makes a splendid heavy as the scary fixer the Russians send to stop Washington’s one-man mob-wrecking crew — after Robert invades a restaurant and makes quick work of Moretz’s beaters.

Our quick-witted hero always stays one step ahead of Csokas, escaping repeated traps while methodically taking down dirty cops on the Russkies’ payroll.

In one bravura sequence, he singlehandedly shuts down their money laundering operation.

And, rest assured, Robert won’t stop until he gets the Moscow oligarch who is pulling the strings — though Washington’s former CIA boss (Melissa Leo), who thought he was dead, assures our hero the head Russian is considered “untouchable” by the Company.

The pulse-pounding pace never flags over two hours, even when Washington is given quieter moments to demonstrate how he’s become a thinking man’s senior action hero.

It’s the latest chapter in a remarkable career that began with a bit part as a teenage mugger blown away by Charles Bronson in “Death Wish” 40 years ago.

Sometimes quite graphic, “The Equalizer” doesn’t sanitize its violence, as so many films do these days, but the mayhem isn’t gratuitous or unmotivated.

The opening chapter in this new revenge franchise is good enough to restore your faith in the much-abased genre — and a lot of fun in the bargain.

'The Equalizer': Vigilante Justice

Denzel Washington plays an old-fashioned avenger

By 

DON STEINBERG

Sept. 18, 2014 2:11 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/

Director Antoine Fuqua, left, rehearses a stunt with Denzel Washington, center, and Alex Veadov on the set of 'The Equalizer.' Columbia Pictures

Vigilante characters who fight for the little guy arise in tough times. The Shadow, Batman, and Superman came to life during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the 1970s, when urban crime seemed rampant, we got Charles Bronson wiping out hoodlums in "Death Wish" and its sequels and imitators. Now, in a world of turmoil, one surprising actor after another ( Scarlett Johansson ! Ben Affleck! Paul Rudd!) is pulling on the Spandex to save us from destruction as a comic-book superhero.

But not Denzel Washington.

"He doesn't have a cape on. He's just a guy doing the right thing," says director Antoine Fuqua, describing Mr. Washington's role in his urban-vigilante thriller "The Equalizer," which opens Sept. 26. Mr. Fuqua previously directed Mr. Washington to his Oscar for best actor in 2001's "Training Day."

In "The Equalizer," Mr. Washington fights on behalf of strangers. But he doesn't fly—or even run. He walks intently, at his own pace, as usual. As Robert McCall, he's a low-key employee at a home-improvement store. He spends his nights trying to read history's 100 greatest novels—a challenge his late wife never got to complete—in a glowing East Boston diner that the filmmakers created to look like Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting. When he sees that a perky teenage prostitute ( Chloë Grace Moretz ) who frequents the diner has been beaten by Russian gangsters, McCall figures it's time to uncloak his past as a trained government operative.

Working like a less-frantic Jason Bourne, he fights using available objects (in one scene he bashes a goon with a hardcover of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"). Mr. Washington, 59, does most of his own moves.

"Denzel boxes every day. We box at the same place," Mr. Fuqua says. "So if you look at some of the movement, he's blocking and punching. He just happens to be using a corkscrew sometimes."

 "16 Blocks," says producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal gave him advice about writing for Mr. Washington.

"They told me, 'Be very sparse with your words,' " he recalls. "When we were in Boston during preproduction, Denzel would sit at my desk, and we'd go through the script, and he would do just what they said he would. He would take out words, take out phrases. He would say, 'I don't need to say that, I can play that.' "

The film is based loosely on the 1980s TV series "The Equalizer," about a former operative seeking to help people, possibly to atone for nasty things he did as an agent. It also comes in the tradition of "Death Wish," which by coincidence was Mr. Washington's first feature film at age 19. (He played a mugger whom Mr. Bronson blew away early in the movie. Jeff Goldblum also made his debut in the film as the punk who murders Mr. Bronson's wife, and Christopher Guest had a tiny role as a city cop.)

Movie crusaders come in different stripes. Most common are protagonists taking the law into their own hands to hunt down just one perpetrator, in it for themselves. In "Taken" (2008) Liam Neeson is desperate to rescue his daughter and punish those who kidnapped her. In "High Plains Drifter" (1973), Clint Eastwood gets cruel revenge on a whole town.

Rarer are good guys who pursue justice for all. In "The Boondock Saints" (1999), twin brothers Connor and Murphy MacManus just want to get the creeps out of their south Boston neighborhood, and the local cops don't mind. Near the start of that movie, a church monsignor preaches that the worst evil is "the indifference of good men" in the face of evil, and Connor says to his brother: "I do believe the monsignor's finally got the point."

Mr. Washington has been down this road before, sort of, playing a mysterious nomad in the post-apocalyptic "The Book of Eli" (2010). In that movie, he's on a particular mission but punishing wrongdoers along the way. "You are gonna be held accountable for the things you have done," he says to a gang member who has been murdering travelers, after smashing his teeth.

Mr. Washington's motivation here isn't so obvious. "I have a whole story in my head of where he came from and what happened," Mr. Wenk says, "but every time I wrote a draft and put anything specific in it, my eyes sort of dulled. I felt like, ugh, this feels like something I've seen in every movie. So I kept cutting things out until there was nothing, just hints of a past." The screenwriter says it goes back to one of his favorite movies, "Shane," the 1953 western where Alan Ladd rides into town and reluctantly ends up helping. "You don't know where he came from. There's no specifics. I loved that mystery to it, so I wouldn't have to explain very much. "

The bad guys here are Russians, including a boss named "Vladimir Pushkin." Russian mobsters and oligarchs seem to be the movie-villain flavor of the year, nudging out urban gangs and Colombian drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.

"Originally there were rogue CIA guys," Mr. Wenk says. "Even as the script left my hands, I kept saying to myself, that feels tired, I've seen it before. And Denzel's only note was: Get rid of the CIA guys. I learned a big lesson from [director] Dick Donner on '16 Blocks,' which is that it doesn't really matter who they are. As long as we know they're bad."