Category Archives: Middle East

UPDATED: The Turks, The Turkmen & The American Turkeys Stateside

America, Foreign Policy, Government, Islam, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East

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The US government is too often on the side of the American People’s enemies. (Think closely about the implications of that statement.) I would venture that were a US pilot parachuting through disputed airspace, onto Turkey’s territory, the Turks—great NATO allies of Obama and Bush—would sic their Turkmen proxies on our pilot, and these ethnic Turkmen would have eliminated him, with blood-curdling cries to a vampiric god, as they did an ISIS-fighting Russian pilot. The Kurds—real allies to America and Israel but betrayed by both—our pals the Turks are always killing.

What is the term for a government that’s mostly on the side of its people’s enemies?

UPDATE: There is that tinny robotic libertarian edict to see no evil, hear no evil; some libertarians believe you should pretend to see no evil/ hear no evil, all under the guise of foreign policy neutrality. Not me. Noted here was the fact that there is a sympathetic people in the region. That only the 3, proverbial, see-no-evil hear-no-evil monkeys (and some libertarians) would deny. The post further asked not what we can do for the good Kurds, but why are this government’s interests (ditto Bush’s) the same as those of the bad actors. The paragraph is a rather modest one. So, where is its answer? What is the proper term for “a government that’s mostly on the side of its people’s enemies”? Where are those Founder quotes?

Syria & The ‘Delusion Of The Obama-Dunham-Soetoro Clan’

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

“Obama’s call for the overthrow of the internationally recognized Syrian government and its replacement by Moderate Islam, an outdated delusion of the Obama-Dunham-Soetoro clan,” has been “disastrous,” laments Steve Sailer. Yes, “no President was better familiarized with the Islamic world” than Obama, “yet few have made worse calls than the one Obama made over Syria”:

Obama was educated expensively by his family to be a “Muslimist” working for the State Department, a soft power NGO like the Ford Foundation, or a university (such as the U. of Hawaii’s East-West Center) as a diplomat or other go-between between America and Muslim-intensive regions like Indonesia, Pakistan, or East Africa. …

In fact, “no President before Obama has had so much familiarity with Islam via family, in-laws, residence, vacations, friends (e.g., his ‘Pakistani mafia’ buddies on the fringes of the Bhutto family), and academic study. As he told his biographer David Maraniss in 2011, until he rebelled and moved to Chicago to be a race activist in 1985, he was on a predictable career path toward being employed as a specialist in international relations.

MORE: “Syria and Obama the Muslimist.”

Thomas Friedman: Still Consistently Foolish About Everything After All These Years

Intellectualism, Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Rolling Stone is hardly a place for profound ideas, but even they don’t take Thomas Friedman seriously.

I hoped I had heard the last of this fatuous, smug, celebrity journo when, superimposed upon the program of another “gem” of veracity and virtue, Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer, Friedman could be heard venturing, recently, that ISIS appeals to young men because these are “young men who’ve never held power, a job or a girl’s hand and joined ISIS to get all three.”

For once I agree with John Maynard Keynes, who, in preparation for Bretton Woods, was known to have muttered something to the effect that (and I paraphrase), the Americans have all the money; we British have all the brains.

Friedman still persists in rejecting reality. The failed invasions he once cheered have brought this dolt no closer to the realization that, “Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be; that it can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away, legislated away,” or invaded away.

So many body bags later (ours; theirs), and Friedman is no closer to the intuitive understanding that young men need the anchor of a strong, muscular belief system for which they might consider dying. Why do America’s best and brightest sell their souls (and sacrifice lives and limbs) to Uncle Sam? Heroism (perceived or real) is in a man’s nature. You can’t tweak it out of him like an unsightly nose hair. And you can’t replace it, Mr. Friedman, with an iPad or a subscription to Match.com for Muslim singles. The spiritual nullity that is the West is no inspiration to Muslim men (and increasingly not to our own), many of whom want- and need to be engaged in epic battles.

The truly gifted Myron Robert Pauli quips, “Ah yes, I am going to BLOW MYSELF UP and take other people with me because, (1) my job is non-existent and/or sucks (roughly 95 percent of humanity), and (2) I am horny (roughly 95 percent of men). What brilliant insight into Muslim terrorists—as if atheists and Christians and Jews never have sucky jobs and get horny! Such deep thinking conjures movies like ‘Mars Needs Women,’ with the late Yvonne ‘Batman’ Craig.”

Here is our Friedman File spanning over a decade:

In “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (May 29, 2004), Thomas joined “Christopher Hitchens (who, unlike TF, was undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – as they grab the Bush administration’s Iraq bluff and run with it showing their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities; insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.

In “HIS RHETORIC, OUR REALITY,” Thomas is shown to have bastardized an important, modest principle of Judaism to better comport with his political ends (January 26, 2005). Top be fair, Friedman doesn’t know better.

In “Foul Tom Friedman,” Tom sticks to familiar territory: fouling up the meaning of capitalism.

And, in “Obama’s And Abdullah’s Plans for Israel,” Thomas Friedman joins that intellectual giant Wolf Blitzer in uproarious applause for Abdullah bin Abdulaziz’s suggestion that Israel beat a retreat to the pre-1967 borders.

“Mr. Friedman,” notes a reader (hat tip Allen Cogbill), in response to this post, “has such deep ideas that a couple of fellows actually wrote an op-ed generator that generates columns for him. They did a nice job”:

2015, Tom Friend

Who Employs More Unvettet Egyptians? TSA Or Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport?

Homeland Security, Middle East, Terrorism

BREAKING: A CNN security or aviation analyst said something true, for once. The US is hypocritical to point fingers at Egyptian security at Sharm el Sheikh International Airport, from where a Russian Metrojet took off, and then crashed, last Saturday, killing 25 kids (The Adult Lives Don’t Matter). The (state-managed) security at America’s airport is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Of course, CNN’s expert failed to finger the government home-grown terrorism (& cretinism) program known as the Transportation Security Administrator (TSA), which is probably as dangerous as anything the Egyptians operate and certainly employs as many unvetted Egyptians.