Category Archives: Islam

Sober Up About The Arab Spring

“Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason,” wrote the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Minds ravaged by the rot of romanticism were everywhere on display in mainstream media’s coverage of the “unfinished revolutions of the new Middle East.”

But not only mainstream. The same wishful thinking infected the garden-variety, left-libertarian column. To wit:

“A long-oppressed people finally rises up and braves tanks, secret police thugs, and the inertia of routine humiliation to say: ‘Enough’!”

Tunisia received a more sober analysis from the same source. Still, an analysis that uncouples cultural and religious factors from the events on the ground is bound to end in a disconnect. (“Ah, how the hell did we get from A to B?”)

The missing link: “Democracy was not sprung as Athena was from her father’s head.” Not every person who longs to breathe free is willing to let the other guy breathe (or walk around with a head on his shoulders, for that matter).

Sentimental gushing about THE ARAB UPRISING notwithstanding, those of us who’ve lived in the region have remained skeptical and disinterested, befitting the non-interventionist mindset.

John R. Bradley’s AFTER THE ARAB SPRING, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, will sober up the dreamer in no time:

Consider Tunisia, a small, literate country where abortion is legal and sex education taught in a world-class education system, all thanks to Habib Bourguiba, who led the fight for independence from France and ruled “with an iron fist” for thirty years. The still-beloved Bourguiba held power by limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards.
Here was a “Muslim authoritarian country” that got it right. It might have continued, had Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, been less greedy and arrogant, his wife less ostentatious and her family less thuggish and opportunistic. Tunisians objected, but what did they get? Bradley paints a sinister portrait of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party and head of Tunisia’s elected interim government. When Ghannouchi states “we want a system based on coalitions since only this will protect us from tyranny”, Bradley hears “a power sharing deal”, where liberals have some say in the economy while the Islamists “pursue [their] social agenda of Islamizing Tunisian society from below … [eradicating] the country’s secular inheritance [and] dragging Tunisia, chanting and ululating, back to the Middle Ages”. Far from empowering the people, the Jasmine Revolution was “the dumbest most selfdefeating uprising in history” and the Arab Spring a dismal failure that “socially and economically has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen and Syria by decades”.

Eleven Years Of Terrorizing Ourselves By Myron Pauli

Homeland Security, Islam, Liberty, Terrorism, The State

ELEVEN YEARS OF TERRORIZING OURSELVES – BY MYRON PAULI*

In the early 20th Century, the “Great Powers” played a reckless game of imperialism, competing to control the globe – Germans in Windhoek, French in Zhanjiang, Brits in Lusaka, Turks in Mosul, Italians in Asmara, and Austrians in Sarajevo and Russians in Lushunkuo.

As part of this recklessness, the Russian “intelligence services” helped the Serbian Black Hand who assassinated Serbian King Alexander and Queen Draga (born September 11) in 1903. Later on, the Black Hand assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand that set up the orgy of bloodletting known as World War I. During that war, the German “intelligence services” sent Lenin to Russia to start another orgy of bloodletting. The term “blowback” often describes the whirlwind unleashed by these “intelligence services.”

Following Britain’s World War I “victory,” they decided to control the Arab world with hand-picked corrupt monarchs with names like Farouk and Feisal. After World War Two, the Soviet Empire countered with “secular nationalists” like Gamal Nasser, Assad, and Hussein.

In 1979, America decided to counter the Soviets by backing militant Moslems in Afghanistan and throughout the Moslem world. In this, America was assisted by the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Israelis. The Soviets got suckered into invading Afghanistan which only increased American support of Mujahedin hotheads.

When the Soviets left, the Americans moved in– and became the new target of the hotheads. The ultimate blowback came on 9/11/01. Added to this was the anthrax attacks from some disgruntled Army employee and the “DC Sniper” and you have all the domestic “terrorism” visited on America. I am not counting semi-manufactured “foiled attempts,” where FBI provocateurs find (typically) low-IQ minority misfits to “agree” to do nonsense like shooting fighter planes with Stinger missiles as a real attack on the USA – nor pathetic plots like shoe-bombers, “liquid-mixing”-bombers and underpants-bombers whose nuttiness was only exceeded by the even-nuttier response.

Total damage is a little over 3000 people and a couple of ugly buildings – most assuredly a tragedy. A greater number of lives could be saved by following Mayor Bloomberg’s dietary advice. The money we have wasted since could have built hundreds of buildings. Far greater than the damage caused by “terrorists” in the US has been the response.

The greatest expense have been the idiotic wars (beyond that of just chasing Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan performed by Special Ops working with the “Northern Alliance” in 2001) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan which have left refugees (tomorrow’s terrorists) and instability.

Next comes generally bloated military spending – the favorite of the “Republikeynsians” (bragged about in TV ads throughout Virginia in 2012). But as bad as a wasted aircraft carrier or a gold-plated golf course in Germany might be, even worse is the damage we are doing to our souls.

Far worse is the paranoid surveillance state that we are imposing – first on the rest of the world but also on ourselves. Due process of law, a concept that goes back to the Magna Carta, is utterly discarded. Incarceration without trial, death by drone, Patriot Acts, NDAA, a government that considers the lives of its people to be completely public; but its own machinations to be completely secret; self-serving leaks of lies to increase war fever, groping grandmas at bus stations …. – the list goes on and on ad infinitum.

A new Department, “Homeland Security” – gives billions to arm local police to the hilt. I remember when people debated whether American police should carry guns or be disarmed like the British Bobbies. Now, the police, BATF, DEA and SWAT teams are often armed for a D-Day invasion on your house.

Tasers are routinely used at traffic stops. Laws multiply and their enforcement becomes increasingly arbitrary. Urban neighborhoods and our southern border are devastated by the idiotic “war on drugs” that continues regardless of the evidence of its insanity.

In the hands of an Obama, Bush, or Romney, these powers are frightening enough; should the US suffer bankruptcy, I shudder to think of what USA Fuhrer might arise to abuse such power. The subsequent abuses might make 9/11/01 as forgotten as Queen Draga’s birthday!

As Ben Franklin forewarned, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATED: Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown (Knownothings)

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Middle East, The State

“Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown“ is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you care about Rebels the world over, as Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham think you ought to, consider the fate of one brave rebel. Stacked as they are with The Dictator’s judges, the courts in this Rebel’s country want to place him behind bars for shooting a predator on his property. Ursus arctos horribilis is a wild and extremely dangerous carnivore that thrives in the northwestern parts of this dictator’s dominion.

The tribesman is guilty of no more than aggressively repelling from human habitat a creature that had become brazen, making itself at home near the man’s six young children, as they frolicked.

It used to be that the country’s tribesmen instilled fear in encroaching beasts, animal and human. But due to decades of cultural and legal emasculation, under a succession of like-minded dictators, the queered men folk are no longer licensed to protect home and hearth. If they do, they risk losing their liberty.

One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Our rebel’s plight would never be popularized by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, or the rest of America’s journalistic priesthood. For he is an American, one among many.

‘Jeremy M. Hill, 33, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court to killing a grizzly bear with a rifle on his 20-acre property near Porthill, Idaho, at the Canadian border.’

At least five of Mr. Hill’s six young kids, ranging in age from 14 years to ten months, were home when their dad killed a brown bear that had gone after penned pigs that the kids had been raising.

I wonder how many Syrian rebels or regulars President Bashar al-Assad has arrested for shooting wild animals that had threatened their families.

If given the choice, this scribe would choose the absolute right to defend life and property over the democratic vote, any day.

Fighters for the family and the farm are never “rebels.” Or so Senators McCain, Lieberman and Graham would impatiently insist. Wresting dominion over the distributive state: now that’s the defining battle of an “authentic” freedom fighter.

Speaking of our Syrian soul-mates, the Free Syria Army, aka, “The Rebels.” By now you’ve viewed their handiwork. Purity of arms is not exactly their military or moral motto. …”

The complete column, “Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown,” can be read on RT.

Also available from WND is my book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The paperback edition features bonus material, including an Afterword by Burkean philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. Order it from WND. (Read the editorial reviews.)

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

UPDATE (Aug. 3): As to the state of knowledge in the West about Syria, the TLS reviewer alluded to in the column concludes:

In the end these disparate groups are united by two things: fear and ignorance. They are caught between a state media that lies and a foreign media with its own biases, which relies on unverifiable YouTube videos. The general conclusion is that no one in Syria knows what is going on, either inside or outside their own neighbourhoods. It is therefore a strange kind of enlightenment that this book offers, but probably an accurate one.

‘As Happens With Many Dictators’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Foreign Policy, Islam, Journalism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The State

“As happens with many dictators …they grow comfortable with power.”

So spoke a CNN guest about the leader of … Syria, Bashar al Assad. “The Fall of the House of Assad” was the book under discussion.

For a moment, I thought the interviewed author was discussing creeping tyranny closer to home, but then it slipped my mind. The mandarins of the mighty Managerial State that stalks America, and the Middle East’s tinpot despots: never the twain shall meet, right?

Wrong, in this writer’s opinion.

Nevertheless, the more powerful dictator can easily depose of the lesser despot.

Duly, buried in CNN programing, yesterday, was the news that, “President Obama has secretly authorized American covert support for the Syrian effort to depose dictator Bashar al-Assad. Two U.S. officials tell us the president has signed what’s called an intelligence finding laying things out.”

When he signed that is not known. Nor do we know the exact contents. We do know that it gives the CIA and other American agencies permission to provide covert support to oust Assad. The dictator has not been seen in public for weeks. Today he put out a written statement, again blaming his year and a half war on, quote, “the criminal terrorist gangs.” That’s the phrase he’s been using justifying destroying cities.

Has this item made news headlines anywhere? Naturally not—not as far as I can see. Both political parties are agreed that, as Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, explained, “We should assume, where we have foreign policy challenges around the world, this is what we have an intelligence community to do, right? To go in clandestinely, to support American policy around the world. And so I — it shouldn’t be surprising.”

[SNIP]

Correct. It shouldn’t surprise that The Decider, Republican or Democrat, commits funds not his to causes he fancies. But does the element of surprise cover this debate? Apparently so. At least from the perspective of the malfunctioning media.