My 8-year-old son has been struggling in school. Again.
Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school – Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. – have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.
My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.
The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.
Does that sound dramatic to you? Perhaps. After all, most of us go through school and somehow survive more or less intact. But if you really think about it, you might remember what you hated about school. You might remember that it took you years after school to rediscover your own soul and passions, and the courage to pursue them.
The stress of school, of trying to fit into an environment that asks him to suppress the best parts of himself, recently had my son in tears. Again.
He hasn’t been allowed outside at school all week; it’s too cold. Yet this son has spent happy hours outside at home this week, all bundled up, moving snow with the toy snowplow, creating “snowmobile trails” in our yard with his sled and shoveling both our walk and our neighbors. Because he wants to.
This morning, as always, my son was up and dressed before the rest of the household; he likes time to play Minecraft before school starts. But he also cleaned the dirty glass on the woodstove, started the fire and brought wood into the house. Because he wants to.
And it hit me this morning: He would have done great in Little House on the Prairie time.
We’re reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, one of the books in the Little House series, aloud right now. Back then, boys (and girls) primarily learned by doing. Kids between the ages of 5 and 18 weren’t corralled into schools and kept apart from real life; out of necessity, boys worked on the farms and girls helped in the house. Entire families worked together to survive, and along the way, boys and girls learned how to function in the real world.
That’s the kind of learning my son craves.
Kids haven’t changed much over the past 150 years; our society has. So while my son still needs movement, still craves real-world learning, physical labor and ways to contribute to his family and his world, he’s expected to spend most of his time in a desk, in a classroom, with 20-some other kids his age. He’s not allowed to go outside at school when it’s too cold or wet; he’s expected to sit quietly in the library or auditorium during recess time. He’s allowed few opportunities for “real” work; today, when you hand an 8-year-old a saw or allow him to start a fire, people look at you askance.
One hundred and fifty years ago, my son would have been considered a model boy. Today, more often than not, he’s considered a troublemaker due to his failure (or inability?) to conform to the expectations of the modern educational system.
I understand that society today is much different than society in the 1800s. Most of that change is good; I applaud antibiotics and equality. I’m a big fan of the internet and indoor plumbing. But at the same time, I think our current approach to education fails to honor the needs of children, especially the needs of our boys.
Boys today aren’t fundamentally different than the boys of 150 years ago. Yet today, they’re confined to classrooms, expected to remain still for the majority of the day, and barely allowed to tackle meaningful labor or the real world until they reach the magical age of 18. Is it any wonder our boys are struggling?
Statistically speaking, boys now lag behind girls on every single academic measure; they also get in trouble and drop out of school much more frequently than girls. There are fewer boys in college than girls, and far more lost 20-something boys than 20-something girls.
Our boys are not the ones who are failing; we are the ones failing our boys.
My son’s struggles break my heart. I worry that they’ll break his spirit next. For now, I wipe his tears, e-mail his teacher, allow him outside every chance I get and share his story, because I want other parents of boys to know they are not alone. I want them to know that the problem is not their son, but rather a system that is failing far too many boys.
An ISIS e-book on how to accomplish their caliphate goal of sacking Rome stresses enlisting “the Islamic State’s secret weapon = secret white converts” to take on Italy.
Much of the book, “Black Flags from Rome,” is dedicated to laying out a case for why Muslims in Europe should rise up and assist ISIS from within, citing justifications for discontent from modern-day anti-immigration protests back to post-Ottoman creation of Muslim “ghettos.”
The Rome title is one of a series disseminated online that includes Khorasan, Syria, Arabia and Persia, with a forthcoming “Black Flags from Palestine” title promised.
It uses graphics from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life to show Muslim distribution throughout Europe. “Starting in the early 90s, a new era would begin for Islam in Europe,” the book states. “A new quality 3rd generation of Muslims would be born who had given up the victim subservient slave mentality the previous generations had. This generation would be emboldened and more confident in their newly (re)discovered beliefs. They would see the world from a new perspective, and unlike the previous generations who only dedicated on earning money for supporting the family ‘back home’, this new generation would see the world through the eyes of a global Ummah (Muslim nation) which transcended all national boundaries.”
It offers the Irish Republican Army attacks of the ’80 and ’90s as an example of a “ruthless” guerrilla campaign in Europe, and the GIA (Group Islamique Army) in France as emblematic of the 1990s “Islamic jihad revival in Europe.” The GIA, notes the text, also trailblazed in Europe with its magazine propaganda and solicitation of donations to smuggle weapons to jihadists in Algeria.
“No doubt, if a war in Europe is to spark in the future, this whole process will be reversed and weapons will be smuggled in a similar way from the Islamic Maghrib into the heart of Europe.”
The book talks about efforts to spread Sharia law in Europe countered by “right-wing groups” and media outlets that “would spread news that Muslim males were making ‘grooming gangs’ which abuse ‘white girls’, which would make even more people join the right-wing groups.” It includes screenshots of tweets including one from Rupert Murdoch about Muslims needing to destroy “jihadist cancer” in their midst.
The Islamic State, it says, “re-awoke” in the midst of Syrian turmoil and “the exit of American troops from Iraq in 2010.”
“The Western powers would not get involved in physical ground combat because they had just withdrawn from a failed war in Iraq (their public wouldn’t be happy with it.) This opportunity gave the Islamic State to grow stronger, with more fighters and more territory and resources as the world watched on. Those who had left Europe to join the Islamic State would now be able to help other Europeans’ get into Syria… Here they could learn basic armed/shooting combat, assassination techniques, how to make explosives from homemade materials etc.”
The book doesn’t include a publish date, but it discusses the “shocking secret” revealed by the Kouachi brothers’ January attacks in France and subsequent busting up of a terror cell in Belgium: “There were small armies of the Islamic State within every country of Europe by late 2014, and the intelligence agencies didn’t even know about it!”
It states that European Muslims can ally with “a growing population of left-winged activists (people who are against; human/animal abuses, Zionism, and Austerity measures etc)” who “look up to the Muslims as a force who are strong enough to fight against the injustices of the world” in countering a growing divide between Muslims and “right-wing neo-Nazis.” It specifically cites people who are “sometimes” allied with Anonymous or anarchy groups — even though, angered by the assault on Charlie Hebdo, Anonymous is currently carrying out a hacking operation[1] to take down ISIS accounts.
[2]“If you have ever been at a pro-Palestine / anti-Israel protest, you will see many activists who are not even Muslims who are supportive of what Muslims are calling for (the fall of Zionism).
It is most likely here that connections between Muslims and Left-wing activists will be made, and a portion from them will realise that protests are not effective, and that armed combat is the alternative,” the book states. “So they will start to work together in small cells of groups to fight and sabotage against the ‘financial elite’.”
The book predicts such “recruits” sympathetic to their cause “will give intelligence, share weapons and do undercover work for the Muslims to pave the way for the conquest of Rome.”
They’re also counting on ethnic minority soldiers defecting from European armies and passing their skills on to others as they raid weapons caches, while “lone wolves from within the community will rise” including “especially ex-gang members who also have access to weapons.”
The book gives tips on constructing a sturdy Molotov cocktail, using “turf wars” to begin seizing land at the neighborhood level, and consolidating land and armed groups “to finally have a big national armed force of Muslim fighters.”
“Muslim fighters from all European countries will continue the fight, breaking borders until they can reach Northern Rome.”
However, ISIS is also counting on another entity to break down European borders: “Europe’s main enemy” Russia.
“As Russia creeps more and more into Europe, it will project more power and weaken European nation states… militias will form because the government cannot protect all of its own territory.” Then, according to prophecy, states the book, Western Europe will “make a peace covenant with the Islamic State” as Russia “creeps closer” and remains a “threat” to Sunni Muslims as well as Europe.
“Russia has always been defeated when Muslims and Western Romans have allied together. Defeating Russia will allow Sunnis to defeat and take over Persia permanently, and that is when they will turn their eyes towards Rome.”
The book, though, predicts the mob bosses will put up tough resistance: “There is no doubt that if Muslims want to take over Italy, the Islamic State European fighters will have to ally with other militias to fight the Mafia before the conquest of Rome.” It recommends starting the fight in Bologna to choke off supply routes to the south.
It talks about seizing weapons stockpiles after defeating “puppet rulers in Muslim lands,” with an eye on Saudi and Iranian stockpiles, to disseminate to jihadis everywhere. “If AQIM in Tunisia fired missiles at Rome from its coast during the Roman [Armageddon] invasion of Syria, they could reach towards Italy (possibly even Rome) which is almost 160Km away from Tunisia.” Others, they argue, can invade Italy by boat. The country would then be “conquered by armed Muslims from all sides: 1 – European Armed Muslim Gangs from the North and West, 2 – Islamic Eastern European fighters from the Balkans (like Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo etc), and 3 – and Muslim Arab missiles and ships from the South.”
How will they craft their battle plans, including pinpointing targets and sharing missile strike coordinates? Google, the book says. “All the Islamic groups use Google Earth today to plan their attacks…. Usually only powerful countries had power to satellite technology, now everyone can use it for free.”
The strategy expects the defeat of a Russia-Iran alliance, the Roman attack on the Islamic State, and the conquest of Rome by 2020.
After adding that the antichrist is expected to show up seven months after the conquest of Rome, according to what Muhammad reportedly said, the ISIS book recommends an urban survival guide for further reading: theSAS Survival Handbook by John “Lofty” Wiseman.
An Isis fighter in Mosul after the group seized control of the Iraqi city in the summer of 2014. Photograph: Reuters
Last week, the press panned Mr. Obama’s anodyne remarks about “violent extremism.” The next day, the Central Command briefed the press on plans to seize the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, which is currently held by ISIS. For a White House fixated upon imagery, news of an impending offensive projected a resolute commander-in-chief. The briefing elided its subliminal message: Americans in ground combat. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had previously said, “We may need to ask to have our advisers accompany the troops that are moving on Mosul.” However, there is no “may” about it. While the offensive will mainly be launched by the Iraqi Army, it cannot succeed without American forward air controllers and advisers, plus thousands of backup U.S. troops. CentCom did not give its briefing without knowing whether the plan included advisers. In that sense, the briefing was a trial balloon to prepare the public for a change of mind by the president.
The two battles for Fallujah show what would be likely to happen in Mosul. In April of 2004, President George W. Bush ordered the Marines, against their advice, to seize Fallujah. Within days, the ferocity of the battle sparked a public outcry. Mr. Bush lost his nerve and ordered the Marines to pull out. Similarly, if Mosul is attacked, Mr. Obama will be pressured by a dozen nations with competing interests. Given the present circumstances, he must, unlike in past crises, be fully resolved to stay the course. In the Fallujah case, the Islamists took control after the Marines pulled out, forcing a second assault in November. Some 18,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed by 540 air strikes and 16,000 artillery and tank shells. Knee-deep water flooded the shattered city. Seventy Americans were killed and 600 wounded. The coming offensive will be war on a scale without precedent in the past decade. To get to Mosul, 200 miles north of Baghdad, the Iraqi Army has to fight its way through five cities. Once that is done, logistics supply requires holding open a single highway that will be subject to repeated IED explosions and suicide-bomber attacks. Between 30,000 and 50,000 tons of munitions, water, fuel, and equipment must be delivered to the frontlines. Delays and shortages are inevitable. This fight will not be swift. ISIS knows it will crumble if it cannot hold onto territory. If ISIS were to retreat, what happened in Anbar Province in late 2006 would be repeated: namely, the local populace would point out every jihadist and every hiding place. A despised army is most vulnerable as it tries to retreat. Every identifiable enemy vehicle would be a target for air strikes by our forces. When ISIS first attacked Mosul, the Iraqi Army ran away. So ISIS will fight with confidence when the Iraqi Army comes back. The jihadists will hold tens of thousands of civilians as human shields, while hundreds of thousands will flee, guaranteeing confusion. Thousands of fanatical Islamists will be hiding among 150,000 buildings, determined to fight to the death. The part of Mosul on the east side of the Tigris is Kurdish. That likely can be seized. On the west bank of the Tigris, the city is primarily Sunni, and the fighting will be tough. In Fallujah, about 150 squads searched 18,000 buildings, engaging in more close-in shootouts than all the police SWAT teams in history. Iraqi soldiers, lacking the determination of United States Marines, will not battle house to house. Instead, they will stand off and smash the city with artillery and American air power. Mosul is five times larger than Fallujah. More than 2,000 air strikes and 100,000 artillery shells are likely to be delivered, with 50,000 buildings wrecked. The press will show pictures of rubble and misery day after day, week after week. There will be nothing surgical about this offensive. A State Department spokesperson recently repeated a mindless trope: “We cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.” Well, get ready for a lot of killing. President Obama must prepare the public for an operation that will be fierce, long, and messy. Given the enormous costs, the White House must not commit to this operation unless it is convinced that taking Mosul would significantly advance American interests. Now comes the strategic kicker: Who is the winner if Mosul is seized? Iran. Currently, Iran has 7,000 troops and advisers working with the Shiite militias fighting alongside the Iraqi Army. Our bombing and our advisers would be supporting Iranian soldiers and Shiite militias advancing amidst Iraqi Army units. This operation would make America the de facto wartime partner of Iran. If the Shiite Iraqi Army did capture the destroyed Sunni city, Iran would stand out as a winner, having extended its regional power into a Sunni heartland. How would the White House explain that outcome to Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt — already estranged by the administration’s actions over the past six years? By briefing about a military offensive for public-relations effect, the White House and CentCom have posed strategic questions without providing the answers. The war would not stop with Mosul. Seizing that city would still leave ISIS in control of northwestern Iraq, half of Syria, and large swaths of North Africa. Before we again enter this war on the ground, we need to clearly define the final objectives in Syria, Iraq, and across the Maghreb. A coalition of Sunni leaders, mullahs, and warriors must emerge, putting forward a progressive Sunni religious doctrine backed by a terrible swift sword. The U.S. should support that movement with funding, moral approval, arms, airlifts, intelligence, air strikes, and adviser/air-control teams. On occasion, U.S. raids and expeditionary assaults on a battalion or larger scale would be appropriate. A key element is to foster the emergence of charismatic Sunni Arab warrior leaders. The war against Sunni jihadists must be defined, primarily fought, and won by Sunni Muslims. — Bing West, a former combat Marine and assistant secretary of defense, has written three books about the war in Iraq, including No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah.
Oscar winner finds happiness on a new album written in complete solitude BY MELINDA NEWMAN
Ryan Bingham is happy. For someone who memorably sang on his last album, "Some say the angels are all looking down. I only saw vultures circling around," this marks a seismic shift.
That release, 2012's bleak Tomorrowland, dealt with the aftermath of his parents' deaths — his mother from alcohol and his father by suicide. Though their loss still weighs heavily on his mind, Bingham has more good days than bad now, in part due to the upcoming birth of the singer-songwriter's first child with wife Anna Axster. On Fear and Saturday Night, out today, Bingham explores the newfound joy of having someone by his side as he moves from the dark into the light.
Recorded with a new band — Bingham disbanded the Dead Horses after 2010's relentlessly dark Junky Star — Fear and Saturday Night's spirited journey combines Rolling Stones-type swagger on tunes like "Top Shelf Drug" with jubilant Texas Tornados-styled Tejano on "Adventures of You and Me" and shuffling country on the autobiographical opener "Nobody Knows My Trouble." The songs, written while Bingham secluded himself in an Airstream trailer in the California mountains, are often stripped down and spare, keeping the focus on the singer's weatherbeaten rasp.
Bingham recorded the album over the course of a month at producer Jim Scott's (Wilco, Tom Petty) studio in Santa Clarita, California. "He's got fucking drums, guitars, motorcycles and shit that he's been collecting in there for 30 years," Bingham says. "It's like an adult playground. He's got a bar in there and pinball machines, and I was like, 'This is fucking great.'" His favorite distraction? A Dolly Parton pinball machine, circa the 9-to-5 era. (Bingham is a superfan of the country legend — more on her later.)
Most people's introduction to Bingham was "The Weary Kind," the theme to the 2009 film Crazy Heart, that he penned with T Bone Burnett. The tune, performed by Jeff Bridges in the movie, snagged the pair the 2010 Academy Award for Best Original Song.
That shiny hardware didn't change Bingham's life much other than bringing more people in to see his live show. Instead of capitalizing on his sudden fame, he chafed at the spotlight and the intrusion of handlers and hangers-on such attention brings. For him, ever since he released his first major label album, 2007's Mescalito, it's all been about control. While he has nothing but good things to say about his former record company, Lost Highway (they parted ways before the release of Tomorrowland), the Universal Music Group-owned label "still had to play by the rules of the big guys [who] didn't even really know who I was or cared."
Just before his new album's arrival, Bingham talked to Rolling Stone Country about moving past his parents' death, love's restorative power, what kind of tattoo he hopes his child never gets and where he keeps his Oscar.
It's all relative, but you sound positively ecstatic on this album, especially compared to Tomorrowland.How did it feel to come out the other side?
Great. It was just a really heavy time, and I was like, "Fuck, I have got to make it out of this." I was in a bad place, but it was just part of life. It was a time in my life where I had some really serious stuff happen to me. I still remained optimistic throughout it, but it was just like, "Man, I have been digging this hole and digging this hole, and I have not found China yet. If somebody doesn't drop the rope, I can't get back out, so I've got to dig my way out of this motherfucker."
What was your frame of mind when writing this album? It is, at times, unabashedly romantic.
Marriage was the one thing that helped pull me through a lot of that stuff. That's been the one thing in my life that's been so stable. So [the album is about] Anna, the baby and life ahead of me. It's about stuff that's going on — good stuff. The stuff with my parents, that was all Tomorrowland. I had to deal with all that. I even went and talked to a therapist and got professional help, and it really did help a lot.
There are still some dark clouds here, but most songs have silver linings. Were you afraid that you would sound like a Hallmark card on any of the tracks?
No, I was stoked about it, because I've got to get out there and play those songs every night, too. That was the most miserable tour after that last record. I was like, "God, somebody just shoot me."
"Broken Heart Tattoos" is a letter to your child, but you wrote it before you found out your wife was pregnant, right?
Over the past couple of years, we'd been talking [about] if we wanted to have kids or not. We had it in our minds. You start thinking about, "Wow, what would I have to say to my kid if I had one?" And that was kind of how the song began. Then, a few months later, [Anna] told me she was pregnant, so it was like, all right, I got that one down.
When your child gets his or her first tattoo, what do you want it to be?
Something that's spelled correctly. No cartoon animals. Something that at least has some kind of a meaning.
Your parents were not the best role models in some ways, but what are some qualities that you'd like to pass on to your child from them?
My parents were good people. They got into a bad spot and didn't know how to get themselves out of it. But I remember my mom being super witty and fun, and her personality was just amazing. My dad, as well. He would give anybody he knew the shirt off his back. He was always a hard worker, and it was just, unfortunately, the road of drugs and alcohol, and the mix of depression, and all this other stuff they were going through. They couldn't find their way out of that.
You wrote this album in an Airstream in the mountains. You don't like hanging out in a regular studio to write, do you?
I can't stand studios. When I started playing, I kind of lived out of my truck. I had a camper set on the back, and I'd just disappear out in the desert, or find these real desolate places and set up camp for a while and hang out. I still miss parts of that, when I was just rambling around out there.
Do you need solitude to write?
Yeah. I have to be alone to really reflect on what's been happening in my life. I've never really been able to sit down with pen and paper and just formulate a song, or craft a song about it. You know, okay, I'm going to write a song about a baseball player. I've never been able to do that.
How long did you rent the Airstream for?
A couple of weeks at a time. I'd been looking for a cabin where I could lock myself away and write for a few weeks, and Anna actually found it on Airbnb. . .This guy had, like, 50 or 60 acres in the mountains, and he's restored these two old Airstream trailers from the Fifties and rents them out. You felt you were in Mexico, or something. I'd get up in the mornings and go surf, and then go back and just write all day and night. Whenever I got stuck, I would go for hikes and just stomp around in the mountains. There were mule deer and coyotes everywhere. It was great.
What was the first song you wrote for the album?
"Nobody Knows My Trouble." I spent about two days up there before I could write anything. It felt like forever. Nothing was happening, and then, finally, I took some whiskey up there, and I was, like, fuck it, I'm just going to have a few drinks. I got about half drunk up there and about 1:30 in the morning, I grabbed the guitar and that song just came out in about 10 minutes.
You've worked with Jim Scott, T Bone Burnett and Marc Ford. Is there anyone else you'd love to have produce you?
[The Black Keys'] Dan Auerbach. That record he did with Dr. John, I love that record. I've heard some other stuff that he's done that I really like. The guy from Spoon, [Jim Eno], and also the guy from Radiohead that produces and did There Will Be Blood, [Jonny Greenwood]. Jeff Tweedy's another guy that I'd really like to work with.
Let's reverse it. Is there a legend you'd love to produce or work with like how Jack White worked with Loretta Lynn?
If I could write a song with anybody, it would be Dolly Parton. I think she's a fantastic songwriter. She's a very smart, talented woman. "I Will Always Love You" is one of the best songs ever written.
The album closes with "Gun Fightin' Man," which sounds like something straight out of a spaghetti western.
It's a really old song that I've had for a while. I've always loved those old gunfighter movies, and Gunsmoke. I wanted to record that song, but I didn't want to send out the wrong message about gun violence and things like that. I believe in owning guns and everything, and I've grown up on ranches and always had a rifle in the truck, but I don't know if having an AK-47 in my house is something that I need, or that some people should need.
Do you ever pick up your Oscar, or does that time seem like another life to you?
I don't even know where it is right now, to be honest with you. . .Well, I do know, because we're having some construction on our house. We had to move out for a few months. But I don't get attached to things very easy, just moving around growing up, I had stuff taken away from me so much that I got to where I just didn't get attached to stuff anymore.
That seems almost fitting given how future-focused you seem to be on the album, especially on its penultimate track, "Hands of Time," which is about moving in only one direction: forward.
Yeah. Quit looking in the rearview mirror and just start looking out the windshield.
At a Republican dinner event last week, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke the bold truth, something to which the progressive media and politicians of all stripes are unaccustomed, and the media pushback was swift and harsh. “I do not believe that the president loves America,” said Giuliani, something that has been obvious to many of us ever since Barack Obama hit the campaign trail prior to his first election. But this kind of blunt speech about the leftist Messiah simply isn’t tolerated, and so the media pounced.
Giuliani was expressing his frustration that Obama doesn’t praise America like even other Democrat presidents like Kennedy and Clinton have done; instead, he constantly criticizes, constantly apologizes. Giuliani blamed this partly on Obama’s unusual upbringing, echoing Dinesh D’Souza’s view of Obama as a man suffused with anti-colonialist animus.
Leftists commonly disdain patriotism as right-wing jingoism until they have their own love of country questioned by the right. They immediately lashed out to paint the 71-year-old Giuliani as a pathetic, racist nut. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest expressed pity for him: “It’s sad to see when somebody who has attained a certain stature and even admiration tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly.” CNN political commentator Errol Louis called Giuliani’s remarks “ugly, thoughtless, and divisive.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson declared the former mayor’s attitude “racist” and “kind of unhinged.” “If Giuliani’s Obama Smear Wasn’t Racist,” read Jonathan Chait’s headline in New York Magazine, “What Was it?” Giuliani is a “deranged” race-baiter, wrote the angry lunatics at Salon.com.
Even a surprisingly combative Megyn Kelly at Fox News took Giuliani to task for the remark and asked him if he planned to apologize, but he felt that his opinion was “perfectly reasonable” and worth repeating: “If we look at [Obama’s] rhetoric, he has not displayed the kind of love of America… the exceptionalism that other American presidents have displayed. That he has gone abroad and criticized us over and over again, apologized for us. Every time he does it embarrasses me.”
“This is an American president I’ve never seen before,” Giuliani concluded. None of us has seen a president like this before, because Giuliani is correct: Obama is of a different order from previous presidents. He is not merely an awful Democrat president like Jimmy Carter; he is the culmination of the radical left’s movement to dismantle America as we know it and rebuild it according to their vision of a social justice utopia. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said of Giuliani’s remarks that it’s fine to disagree with Obama, “but let’s agree on one thing: he loves this country.” But does he?
In a different interview, Giuliani pointed out that Obama has been deeply influenced by three notably anti-American mentors: communist Frank Marshall Davis, radical strategist Saul Alinsky, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “[Obama] was educated by people who were critics of the U.S.,” said Giuliani, putting it mildly. “And he has not been able to overcome those influences.” Obama has not overcome them because he hasn’t tried; he has embraced those influences. Could it be said of those men that they loved America?
You can love this country and still want it to be better than it is. Patriots can agree that there are many ways we could improve upon its greatness – but the fundamental transformation that Barack Obama has always promised is not an improvement; it is a radical re-envisioning. It requires ditching America’s core qualities and starting from scratch – a page one rewrite, as we say in the screenwriting biz. That’s not loving your country – it’s loving the idea of replacing it with a different one.
Obama doesn’t celebrate American exceptionalism. He proclaimed early on that he intended to recreate this nation into something that, to paraphrase his wife, he can be proud of for the first time in his life. Everything he has done since his first election demonstrates his dissatisfaction with – or even a contempt for – the traditional America that patriots know and love.
He has done everything in his power to knock this country off its superpower pedestal. He alienates America’s allies and empowers its enemies, including poisoning our relationship with Israel and bringing the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House. He has opened the floodgates of our borders. He has no respect for the Constitution or its constraints on his power. He is overloading the economy. He is the most divisive American president in living memory, if not in history, and that includes the despised George W. Bush. Are these the actions and policies and character of a man who loves this country?
Rudy Giuliani said he won’t recant unless he hears the president praise American exceptionalism and admit that Islamic fundamentalism is our enemy. I think we all know what the likelihood of that is. Nonetheless, “somebody has to raise these issues with the president,” Giuliani said. “Somebody has to have the courage to stand up.” Indeed, but few politicians or hopefuls on the right have that courage. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz called on Republican leaders to repudiate Giuliani’s statement, suggesting that bigotry was behind it, and indeed, prominent figures on the right were lukewarm at best in their defense of the former mayor. Governor Bobby Jindal more or less stood with him, but Governor Scott Walker refused to comment on Obama’s feelings for the country. Senator Marco Rubio said he has no doubt that Obama loves America, “but I just think his policies are bad for our nation.”
Obama’s policies are bad for our nation, precisely because he doesn’t love the United States, at least not in its current form.
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Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation
Aside from Alec Baldwin's Tony Bennett impression (which was so spot-on I won't hear a word against Baldwin for as long as he lives), I thought the "Saturday Night Live" 40th anniversary show was pretty much a snoozeroo. But the sight of Bill Murray's ravaged visage reminded me of the latter of his two great Oscar-worthy performances. A week ahead of this year's Academy Award winners, I thought it would be appropriate to salute an Academy Award loser for our Saturday movie date - and a loser who, on the big night, was weirdly humiliated in his loss by the Oscar host (and Bill Murray's supposed friend) Billy Crystal. Nominated in four categories, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost In Translation won in only one - for Miss Coppola's screenplay:
The film begins with a close-up of a young lady's bottom, lying on a bed, sheathed in diaphanous panties. It is a pert and beguiling posterior, and one assumes that it's sitting there giving you the come-hither eye as the usual cinematic shorthand for sexual anticipation. But, as you settle into this marvelous picture, you realize it's about an intimacy far more intense than that. Miss Coppola's title is a pun. It refers not just to cultural dislocation – a Tokyo full of Americanisms that aren't quite right – but also to emotional upending – what happens when you take a jaded, haggard B-list celebrity and a barely-out-of-college girl and you transplant them far from the restraining contours of their daily lives.
I've a fondness for stories that have a clock on them – like On The Town, with its three sailors enjoying 24 hours in New York. Often, the artificiality of the time limit makes the drama all the more natural: because the finish is dictated by the clock, there's no need for one of those over-neat narratives in which characters undergo life-changing events and wrap them up in time for the credits. Thus, Miss Coppola's film is more a mood piece than a plot – Bob (Bill Murray) is a faded star who's getting two million bucks to do a tacky whiskey commercial in Japan; Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is several decades younger and tagging along with a hot hip photographer she probably shouldn't have married. They're holed up in the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, which is like the Park Hyatt anywhere – it has a piano bar and a pool and its very anonymity strips the environment of romance: if you can find love in the Park Hyatt, it's probably the real thing. This is a very different approach to, say, Richard Curtis (Love Actually, etc), whose middle-aged men and young totty require extremely heightened landscapes – bucolic vistas, mahogany paneling, snow-dappled Victorian mews, etc. In Miss Coppola's film, the hotel's lobbies and elevators look as bleary and jet-lagged as Bill Murray feels. Like many chain hotels in foreign capitals, it has a vaguely unreal quality, just the kind of place where a man who despises his reality might slip his moorings.
His Japanese hosts treat him like the bigshot he no longer is. At the shoot, the director asks him for Bond-like sophistication, but by that he means not Sean Connery but Roger Moore. "For relaxing times make it Suntory times," says Bob, holding up his tumbler. Not Connery cool, maybe not even Moore cool - he knows that, even if his hosts don't.
This is a lovely performance by Murray. If I had to find fault with the American reviews, I'd say that they nailed all the sad, rueful qualities in the picture but didn't draw folks' attention to quite how funny it is. Perhaps that's because Murray is scrupulous about never rising to the comedic bait, no matter how absurd the third-rate lounge-acts and self-consciously wacky TV hosts he's beached among. Until he meets Charlotte, he shuffles through the movie with impeccably deadpan eyes: he is the inscrutable Occidental. But we know he must see the comedy and the fact that he can't be bothered being funny about it somehow underlines his weariness.
Murray's performance is the Oscar bait, but Miss Johansson, just 18 years old but playing a little older, is indispensable. It's through her that we understand his loss and his longing; watching her do "Brass In Pocket" on the karaoke machine, you see what he sees, you see why her careless vivacity brings him alive. She's intelligent and naïve and confident and sweet. Maybe she's the one - or she would have been if he'd met her in 1973. Or maybe, after children and the house and a decade or two, he'd be right back where he is now. She has smart eyes and lush lips and that cute butt, which is where we came in, and by the time we see it again somehow giggling over the TV in your room while eating mini-bar snacks in T-shirt and underwear seems potentially far more dangerously intimate than a quick shag. Miss Coppola took one of the most over-mined seams in popular entertainment and somehow managed to make a bittersweet, morally serious character drama out of it. The leads and the movie should all have gotten Oscars
Bonus: The lounge singer's big number is "Midnight At The Oasis", which is just perfect.
(CNN)The Obama administration this week hosted a three-day conference on "Countering Violent Extremism," which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.
Already a predictable tsunami of nonsense has washed over us about the "root causes" of terrorism. We have heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said on Wednesday that "we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances."
He said, "when millions of people -- especially youth -- are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas..."
The President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Saudi construction magnate who attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It's hard to imagine someone with more opportunities. Think the Trump family Saudi-style, minus the bling, and throw in a deep admiration for the Taliban.
But in fact Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take Mohamed Atta, the son of an Egyptian lawyer, who had worked on a doctorate in, of all things, urban preservation at a German university and who led the 9/11 attacks. Or the present leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, a surgeon who comes from a leading Egyptian family that counts ambassadors, politicians and prominent clerics amongst its ranks.
Nearer to home we can also point to the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was not only an officer in the U.S. Army and a psychiatrist, but is also from a comfortably middle-class family in Virginia.
Let's also add to the mix Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square on May 1, 2010. He had obtained an MBA in the United States and had worked as a financial analyst for the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company. His father was one of the top officers in the Pakistani military.
These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.
"Who becomes a terrorist?" turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, "Who owns a Volvo?"
Indeed, New America has studied the backgrounds of some 250 U.S.-based militants since 9/11 who have been indicted in or convicted of some kind of jihadist terrorist crime. They are on average middle class, reasonably well-educated family men with kids. They are, in short, ordinary Americans.
Similarly, in his important 2004 book "Understanding Terror Networks," psychiatrist Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, examined the backgrounds of 172 militants who were part of al Qaeda or a similar group. Just under half were professionals; two-thirds were either middle or upper class and had gone to college; indeed, several had doctorates.
In a 2006 study, Swati Pandey and this author examined the educational background of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks of the modern era -- the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, and the London bombings on July 7, 2005.
We found that more than half of the terrorists had attended college, making them as well-educated as the average American. Two of our sample had doctoral degrees, and two others had begun working toward their doctorates.
None of them had attended a madrassa.
Of course, large-scale insurgent groups such as ISIS and the Taliban recruit foot soldiers who join the cause to get a paycheck. But the people running these organizations are in it for ideological reasons.
An optimistic view
The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.
The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor. This was just as true of the Russian anarchists of the late 19th century as it was of the German Marxists of the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s and of the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo in the 1990s.
Post-9/11 research demonstrating that Islamist terrorism is mostly a pursuit of the middle class echoed an important study about Egyptian militants that was undertaken by the French academic Gilles Kepel during the mid-1980s.
Kepel researched the 300 Islamist militants who were tried in the wake of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Around one in five were professionals such as engineers, a quarter worked as government employees, just under half were artisans or merchants, one in 10 were in the military or police, and only one in 10 were farmers or were unemployed. Of those who were students, around a third were studying in the elite fields of medicine and engineering.
Similarly, the Library of Congress issued a study two years before the 9/11 attacks that asked the question: "Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" The conclusion, based on a survey of all the published literature, was that therewere only a few "major exceptions to the middle- and upper-class origins of terrorist groups."
But for every example of poverty or lack of opportunities as a purported rationale for terrorism, it's easy to supply important counterexamples. The "underwear bomber" Umar Abdulmuttalab, who tried to set off a bomb on a U.S. passenger jet flying over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is the son of one of the richest men in Africa and attended University College London, which routinely rates among the best universities in the world.
Anwar al-Awlaki, the late leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who tasked the underwear bomber to blow up an American plane over an American city, was studying for his Ph.D. at George Washington University before he took up arms with al Qaeda. Awlaki's father was a Cabinet minister in Yemen.
What drives terrorism?
So if it's clearly not deprivation that is driving much Islamist terrorism, what is?
For that we must turn to ideology, specifically religious ideology. And this is where the Obama administration has to perform some pretzel logic. It is careful to explain that the war on ISIS is not a war on Islam and that ISIS' ideology is a perversion of the religion. Fair enough. But the administration seems uncomfortable with making the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist forms of Islam that are intolerant of other religions and of other Muslims who don't share their views to the letter.
ISIS may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is, just as Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the unborn child explain why some Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics and doctors. But, of course, murderous Christian fundamentalists are not killing many thousands of civilians a year. More than 80% of the world's terrorist attacks take place in five Muslim-majority countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria -- and are largely carried out by groups with Islamist beliefs.
This week the United Nations released a report showing that civilian casualtiesin Afghanistan were at the highest level since the organization started counting them six years ago. The Taliban were responsible for three-quarters of these deaths.
The Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups are not, of course, secular organizations. To treat them as if they were springs from some combination of wishful thinking, PC gone crazy and a failure to accept, in an increasingly secularized era, that some will kill in the name of their god, an all-too-common phenomenon across human history.
Indeed, while ISIS and like-minded groups and their fellow travelers are not representative of the vast majority of the world's Muslims, their ideology is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, and indeed they can point to verses in the Quran that can be interpreted to support their worldview.
A well-known verse in the Quran commands Muslims to "fight and slay the nonbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]." When bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against "the Jews and the Crusaders" in 1998, he cited this Quranic verse at the beginning of his declaration.
ISIS' distinctive black flags are a reference to a supposed saying of the Prophet Mohammed that "If you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khorasan then go to them, even if you have to crawl, because among them will be Allah's Caliph the Mahdi." In other words, coming out of Khorasan, an area that now encompasses Afghanistan, will come an army that includes the Mahdi, the Islamic savior of the world. The parent organization of ISIS was al Qaeda, which, of course, was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Last year, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself caliph, which means that in his own mind and in the eyes of his followers he is not only the leader of ISIS but the overall leader of Muslims everywhere. These beliefs may seem like a crazy delusion to most of us, but it's important to understand that they are theological in nature, and this theology is rooted in ultra-fundamentalist Islam.
ISIS sees itself as the vanguard army that is bringing back true Islam to the world. This project is of such cosmic importance that they will break any number of eggs to make this omelet, which accounts for their murderous campaign against every ethnic group, religious group and nationality that they perceive as standing in their way. ISIS recruits also believe that we are in the end times, and they are best understood as members of an Islamist apocalyptic death cult.
What does that mean for policy makers? It means that the only truly effective challenges to this reasoning must come from Islamic leaders and scholars who can make the theological case that ISIS is an aberration. This, too, is an Islamic project; it is not a jobs project.
