The Crisis of World Order: Robert Kagan, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2015 — For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East…
Paris and the Fall of Rome: Niall Ferguson, Boston Globe, Nov. 16, 2015— I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard.
For Israel, a Ray of Sunshine Through the Gloom: Jonathan Adelman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 16, 2015— There is a great amount of bad news for Israel these days.
It Can’t Happen There: Graham Hillard, Weekly Standard, Nov. 2, 2015 — That Submission, the sixth work of fiction by the French provocateur Michel Houellebecq, was published in France on the day of the Charlie Hedbo assassinations feels like something out of a publicist’s morbid daydream.
Yad Vashem Presents Online Exhibition: the Festival of Light during the Holocaust: Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2015
California Killings: What Kind of Mother Would Do This?: Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail, Dec. 7, 2015
Yemenite Government to Jews: Convert or Leave Yemen: Sam Sokol, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 10, 2015
Robert Kagan
Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2015
For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizable numbers to the region; and second, undergirding the first, the U.S. has no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. There might be bloodshed and violence—even mass killing, in Syria and Libya and elsewhere, and some instability in Iraq—but the fighting, and its consequences, could be contained. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened so long as good intelligence and well-placed drone strikes prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Even Islamic State could be “degraded” and “contained” over time.
These assumptions could have been right—other conflicts in the Middle East have remained local—but they have proven to be wrong. The combined crises of Syria, Iraq and Islamic State have not been contained. Islamic State itself has proven both durable and capable, as the attacks in Paris showed. The Syrian conflict, with its exodus of refugees, is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan and has put added pressure on Turkey’s already tenuous democracy. It has exacerbated the acute conflict between Sunnis and Shiites across the region.
The multisided war in the Middle East has now ceased to be a strictly Middle Eastern problem. It has become a European problem as well. The flood of refugees from the violence in Syria and the repression of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime have rocked the continent and overwhelmed its institutions. The horrific attacks in Paris, likely organized and directed by Islamic State from its base in Syria, and the prospect of more such attacks, threaten the cohesion of Europe, and with it the cohesion of the trans-Atlantic community, or what used to be known as the West. The crisis on the periphery, in short, has now spilled over into the core.
Europe was not in great shape before the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks. The prolonged Eurozone crisis eroded the legitimacy of European political institutions and the centrist parties that run them, while weakening the economies of key European powers. The old troika—Britain, France and Germany—that used to provide leadership on the continent and with whom the U.S. worked most closely to set the global agenda is no more. Britain is a pale shadow of its former self. Once the indispensable partner for the U.S., influential in both Washington and Brussels, the mediator between America and Europe, Britain is now unmoored, drifting away from both. The Labor Party, once led by Tony Blair, is now headed by an anti-American pacifist, while the ruling Conservative government boasts of its “very special relationship” with China.
The spillover of the Middle East crisis into this weakened Europe threatens to undermine the continent’s cohesion and sap the strength of trans-Atlantic ties. The refugee crisis has further weakened centrist parties and strengthened the right wing in France and elsewhere; now the terrorist attacks, which these parties have unfairly linked to the refugee crisis, have given them a further boost. The idea of Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front, as France’s next president is no longer far-fetched.
There is a Russian angle, too. Many of these parties, and even some mainstream political movements across the continent, are funded by Russia and make little secret of their affinity for Moscow. Thus Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has praised “illiberalism” and made common ideological cause with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In Germany, a whole class of businesspeople, politicians, and current and former government officials, led by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, presses constantly for normalized relations with Moscow. It sometimes seems, in Germany and perhaps in all of Europe, as if the only person standing in the way of full alliance with Russia is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Now the Syrian crisis has further bolstered Russia’s position. Although Europeans generally share Washington’s discomfort with Moscow’s support for Mr. Assad and Russia’s bombing of moderate Syrian rebels, in the wake of the Paris attacks, any plausible partner in the fight against Islamic State seems worth enlisting. In France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy has long been an advocate for Russia, but now his calls for partnership with Moscow are echoed by President François Hollande, who seeks a “grand coalition” with Russia to fight Islamic State.
Where does the U.S. fit into all this? The Europeans no longer know, any more than American allies in the Middle East do. Most Europeans still like Mr. Obama. After President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, Europeans have gotten the kind of American president they wanted. But in the current crisis, this new, more restrained and intensely cautious post-Iraq America has less to offer than the old superpower, with all its arrogance and belligerence.
The flip side of European pleasure at America’s newfound Venusian outlook is the perception, widely shared around the world, that the U.S. is a declining superpower, and that even if it is not objectively weaker than it once was, its leaders’ willingness to deploy power on behalf of its interests, and on behalf of the West, has greatly diminished. As former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer recently put it, the U.S. “quite obviously, is no longer willing—or able—to play its old role.”
Mr. Fischer was referring specifically to America’s role as the dominant power in the Middle East, but since the refugee crisis and the attacks in Paris, America’s unwillingness to play that role has reverberations and implications well beyond the Middle East. What the U.S. now does or doesn’t do in Syria will affect the future stability of Europe, the strength of trans-Atlantic relations and therefore the well-being of the liberal world order…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Niall Ferguson
Boston Globe, Nov. 16, 2015
I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud President Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilizations fall.
Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410 AD: “In the hour of savage license, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless . . .”
Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’’ represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn over a millennium. But a new generation of historians, such as Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody —rather than smooth: a “violent seizure . . . by barbarian invaders” that destroyed a complex civilization within the span of a single generation.
Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognize them for what they are. Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.
The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from South Asia — but this time they have come in their millions. To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northward and westward without some of that political malaise coming along with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
It is conventional to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent, and that is doubtless true. But it is also true that the majority of Muslims in Europe hold views that are not easily reconciled with the principles of our modern liberal democracies, including those novel notions we have about equality between the sexes and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilization within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together in fact meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic pose.
I do know that 21st-century Europe has only itself to blame for the mess it is now in. For surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term of my first year I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learned nothing that mattered. Indeed, we learned a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation-states worse, and empires the worst things of all.
“Romans before the fall,” wrote Ward-Perkins in his “Fall of Rome,” “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.” Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.
FOR ISRAEL, A RAY OF SUNSHINE THROUGH THE GLOOM
Jonathan Adelman
Jerusalem Post, Nov. 16, 2015
There is a great amount of bad news for Israel these days. Israelis are getting killed daily, largely by young Palestinians in Hebron, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank in a pale imitation of the second intifada. On Israel’s Egyptian border there is the rising power of Islamic State (IS), which recently proclaimed that Israel should be destroyed and may have last week blown up a planeload of Russians bound for Saint Petersburg. Next door on the western border there is Gaza, where Hamas has already fought three wars against Israel and has thousands of rockets prepared for the next.
To the north, in Lebanon, there is the growing threat of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which has over 100,000 missiles aimed at Israel. It also has several thousand precision missiles that could reach everywhere from Metulla to Eilat. On Israel’s Syrian border, there is ever increasing activity from Al Nusra and IS. Next to Syria there is Iraq, where IS occupies over one-third of the territory. Further east there is Iran, on the verge of having nuclear weapons and missiles that could hit Tel Aviv in 11 minutes. Beyond the Middle East, Russia has confirmed that it will deliver the S-300 anti-missile system to Iran to protect its military and perhaps nuclear program.
There is strong anti-Israeli sentiment in the world. A 2013 BBC World Services poll found that Israel is the fourth most hated country in the world, after North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. Only 21 percent of the world’s population favors Israel while 52% dislike Israel. A 2014 British poll found that more British adults disliked Israel than Iran.
Even in the United States, the country that most likes Israel, the younger generation and the Democratic Party show considerably less support for Israel than in the past. The power of the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has grown steadily on college campuses in recent years. Relations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama, although now mildly on the upswing, have been among the worst between Jerusalem and Washington in the 67 years of Israel’s existence.
So, where is the fabled good news? Strikingly, everywhere. Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s said that Israel’s survival was threatened by the “inner circle” of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Some combination of these three powers were involved in five wars with Israel from 1948 to 1973. Ben-Gurion could never have imagined that someday two of these countries would not only have signed peace treaties with Israel but would openly be seeking an alliance against the looming Iranian threat. Syria, once a strong threat to Israel, by 2015 was so divided up into Alawite, Kurdish, Islamic State (IS) and secular rebel sectors that it posed almost no threat to Israel.
Too, for the first 40 years of its existence Israel was not even recognized by China or India or, most of the time, by Russia. Who could have imagined that by 2015 Israel would be recognized by over 160 countries, including all three great powers and have billions of dollars of trade with each of them? The University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that Israel is one of the top hightech powers in the world. Its level of innovation in hightech rates first in the world. It recently hosted the world’s leading conference in water technology with over 100 countries represented. Israelis in recent years have won almost a dozen Nobel Prizes, more than China or India, both countries with populations vastly greater than Israel’s eight million people.
The waning days of the Obama administration holds hope for a more friendly American administration in January 2017. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, has a long pro-Israel record while the most likely Republican candidates are as pro-Israel or even more so than Hillary. This is even more likely as the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini, far from moving toward the United States after the recent Iran Deal, stridently attacks the United States and continues to call for “death to America.” Israel then in many ways encapsulates the fate of Jews in the last century – moving fast toward modernity and accomplishment while still threatened by significant elements of the world.
Graham Hillard
Weekly Standard, Nov. 2, 2015
That Submission, the sixth work of fiction by the French provocateur Michel Houellebecq, was published in France on the day of the Charlie Hedbo assassinations feels like something out of a publicist’s morbid daydream. It considers a near-future in which the French Muslim Brotherhood finds common cause with the socialists—and in a darkly comic twist, Sarkozy’s center-right UMP—and takes control of the government. What follows is at once outrageous and eerily plausible. Over the ineffectual protests of Marine Le Pen’s defeated National Front, the new regime moves quickly to Islamize the nation’s educational system, remove women from the workforce, and secure European Union membership for Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, with Lebanon and Egypt soon to follow. The left, paralyzed by multicultural orthodoxies, swiftly capitulates, unable to “fight . . . or so much as mention [the] name” of the charismatic president Mohammed Ben Abbes. Many convert. Others flee. France changes irrevocably.
All of this is trenchant satire, of course, and frightening enough. Yet Submission means to do more than merely terrify the nativists. Houellebecq, widely known in his homeland and lauded by the Guardian as “France’s most celebrated controversialist,” has woven into an otherwise national narrative the smaller (and ultimately more important) story of François, a bored university professor who lectures to empty halls, flits between prostitutes, and wishes for nothing more than to “do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon.” Though his work, a lifelong study of the French novelist J. K. Huysmans, has been “marked by real intellectual achievements,” François nevertheless feels “close to suicide, not out of despair or even any special sadness” but because “the mere will to live [is] clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.”
It is as that Western man—faithless, morally exhausted, and shorn by the brutal 20th century of any functional heritage—that François begins to reveal the deeper work of the novel. Relieved of his duties by President Ben Abbes’s declaration that all teachers must be Muslims, François wanders the countryside in a state of detached dread, unable either to accept the end of his professional life or to follow his Jewish girlfriend out of the country. (“There’s no Israel for me,” he tells her in a biting scene.) Returning resignedly to Paris, he is offered a startling choice: accept a pension and permanent dismissal, or become a Muslim and enjoy the spoils of conversion—a wildly remunerative post at the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne, a gaggle of teenage brides, and a teaching assignment guaranteed not to “interfere with [his] real work,” as a senior administrator promises.
That Submission presents the decision that follows not as an occasion for suspense but as an inevitability is exactly the point. Bereft of any countervailing values, François has nothing to hold on to. He happily takes “the chance at a second life, with very little connection to the old one.” To put it another way, he submits.
The question posed by this novel, then, is whether or not we—not only France but the broader West—are François. The verdict, alas, is not good. Among Submission’s many indictments of the West is its utter demolition of the notion that liberal democracies, faced with existential threats to their identity, will ultimately shake off their torpor. In Houellebecq’s view, such a project is not only unlikely but impossible given the extent of the West’s self-loathing: its masochistic assurance, as François tells himself, that “nations [are] a murderous absurdity” and that “anyone paying attention [has] probably figured this out.”
In an irony as bleak as it is widely applicable, however, François clearly isn’t paying attention, despite his status as a member of the educated, cosmopolitan elite. As the novel progresses, François confesses, shamelessly and explicitly, his ignorance of history, of political life, of his own native France, and even of Islam itself. Unanchored to the past, adrift in the present, and lacking even a basic geopolitical awareness, François fears the death of his way of life—and believes himself, somehow, to deserve it. Overcome “by the feeling that everything could disappear”—not only the unveiled women whom he passes in the street but the vibrant, pluralistic society that protects them—François nevertheless convinces himself that he “would have nothing to mourn” were it all to vanish.
Is all of this too much, too extreme, to be believed? And what of Christianity, whose residual power alone might provide the necessary counterweight? Here, too, Houellebecq is a pessimist: “Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives,” the same senior administrator tells François, “the Church [has] lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights, and women in the workplace. The facts [are] plain: Europe [has] reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it [can] no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom,
Chag Sameach, Happy Hanukkah Holiday!
Yad Vashem Presents Online Exhibition: the Festival of Light during the Holocaust: Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2015—In honor of the festival of Hanukkah, Yad Vashem presents a fascinating online exhibition of photos, artifacts and testimonies from the Yad Vashem Collections.
California Killings: What Kind of Mother Would Do This?: Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail, Dec. 7, 2015 —What kind of mother would say goodbye to her six-month-old daughter, then drive with her husband to his workplace one morning to calmly, deliberately slaughter as many of his co-workers as possible?
Yemenite Government to Jews: Convert or Leave Yemen: Sam Sokol, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 10, 2015—Yemen’s remaining Jews have been given a stark choice by their government: Convert to Islam or leave the country.
