Navigating the Absurd Things Said about Islam and Terror

Donald Trump has taunted both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for avoiding the term “radical Islam” in describing the motivations for Islamic terrorism; meanwhile, the president has defended his policy, claiming that using a particular term won’t “accomplish” anything. Michael Totten points to the deficiencies of both positions:

Trump says that [President Obama’s stance, and his rhetoric on this subject in general, stem from] political correctness and that it’s killing us, but [the president’s stance in fact stems from] something else. It’s diplomatic correctness. . . .

[During the 2006] Anbar Awakening . . . in Iraq, . . . every tribal leader in the western Anbar province aligned himself with American soldiers and Marines against al-Qaeda. . . . [Much of Anbar is] painfully, even brutally, backward. Not every Muslim who lives there is a fanatic, but virtually none can be described as liberal or cosmopolitan with a straight face. Then there is Saudi Arabia. . . .

So, yes, we have fanatical as well as moderate and liberal Muslim allies, and Obama, like George W. Bush before him, is reluctant to alienate them. . . . [But] people don’t like or trust leaders who appear disconnected from reality. And Obama is far more worried about this than he needs to be. All he needs to do is be honest and reasonable. . . .

Middle Easterners are among the least politically correct people in the entire world. . . . And they know damn well that Islamic State is Islamic. We’re not earning any points with our allies in the Muslim world by denying this, nor would we alienate any of them by acknowledging it.

The United States government surely would alienate our friends and allies over there if we had a bombastic bigoted blowhard in the White House, but calling the Islamic State “Islamic” isn’t even in the same time zone as bigoted or bombastic.

Read more at World Affairs Journal

More about: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, Radical Islam, Terrorism

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society