“Washington, DC, Oct. 16 — At the Oct. 15 Fourth Annual Gala of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), the National Security Advisor, General James L. Jones, reiterated the Administration’s commitment to establishing a Palestinian state and determination to move forward with peace talks.
“We are clear, unambiguous and consistent,” said Gen. Jones, “The time has come to relaunch negotiations without preconditions to reach a final status agreement on two states.” The National Security Advisor emphasized that, “President Obama’s dedication to achieve these goals is unshaken, is committed, and we will be relentless in our pursuit of achieving these.” He said that ending the conflict and the occupation is essential because what is at stake is “nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings.” “We must move beyond talking about talks and get to the hard work of addressing the core issues that separate Israelis and Palestinians,” Jones said….”
The National Security Adviser to Barack Obama, and the author of the amazing, nearly crazed, speech above, is General James L. Jones. Like Scott Gration, who joined the Obama campaign and was rewarded with the portfolio for the Sudan because as a young man he had lived in the Congo and Kenya, Jones is a kind of court general. His life in the military may not have prepared him well for the task at hand, but in the calculations of the Obama retinue, it is assumed he will help provide an aura of “toughness” – willingness to use force, that sort of thing – and of lack of hostility to the military that the Obama calculators think he needs.
But there are generals and there are generals. One disastrous military man who served as National Security Adviser — Brent Scowcroft, a chocolate soldier — comes swimmingly to mind. There is mettle more attractive than the medals on a uniform, and the most attractive mettle of all, verso and recto, is the mental mettle of those who know how to recognize what it is they need to find out about, what it is they need to know more about, in order to meet the demands and responsibilities and duties of their job.
What has James Jones, this court general — the one Obama enrolled in his pre-election entourage, along with Scott Gration, in order to protect Candidate Obama from possible political attacks or evident disaffection from almost all the other military men – said or done to show us that he has understand Islam, has grasped the doctrine of Jihad? And when we come specifically to the Lesser Jihad being waged against Israel, why does General Jones accept so unthinkingly the camouflage the Arabs have created for that Jihad – so clear in its ultimate goal, a goal shared by the Muslims of the Fast Jihadist of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, that is, the elimination of the Infidel nation-state of Israel?
Nor does one get the feeling that General James Jones, who has not exactly spent his life immersed in the very complicated details of the relevant Middle Eastern history, and of Islam – two matters each of which could consume a lifetime – is up to the task. For consider his position. He is the National Security Adviser, responsible for learning about, understanding, keeping abreast of, developments all over the world. Every day brings news from two dozen places that have to be dealt with at once, and news from ten dozen other places that will require not immediate but rapid attention. Washington, in this Administration as in the last, is full of people who love to tell everyone that they arrive at 7 a.m. while their bosses – ah, their bosses arrive at 6, or even 5 a.m.! And we are all to conclude that this is truly impressive, when it is merely depressing. For such days, filled with so much hectic vacancy, are not the kind of atmosphere in which, if one does not grasp the nature of a problem, one has the leisure for study, reflection, understanding, thorough assimilation.
Once one has scaled the heights, or been lifted up to them by someone else, it is largely too late to come to an understanding of men and events, and an understanding of and knowledge of history that is sufficient to stand one in good stead, to act as mental ballast, to allow one not to be fooled by temporary fashion or to be taken in by the latest bland assumptions and misled by the shared but unrecognized ignorance, of so many. The mass misapprehension of Islam has already had its effects in Western Europe, where few cared to question the immigration policies that have led to the nightmare that everyone in Western Europe of sense now recognizes. And even those who throw up their hands and claim, absurdly, that “nothing can be done” in the countries of Western Europe will have to agree that the large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has led to a situation that is, for both the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants, that is more unpleasant, more expensive, and more physically dangerous than would be the case without such a large-scale Muslim presence.
Yet the folly of the past few decades brought on by the political and media elites of Western Europe is now recognized by a growing number of those who have recognized that Muslim immigrants pose a permanent problem. They cannot be integrated the way all other immigrant groups eventually can be, and this problem is not one to be found in Great Britain alone, or in France, or in Italy, or in Spain, or in Germany, or in the Netherlands, or in Sweden, or in Belgium, or in Denmark, or in any of the other countries with a population of Muslims beyond 1 or 2%. The reasons for this lie not in those many and varied states, but in the nature of Islam itself, what Islam teaches, what it inculcates.
Now, in this country, the problem is still seen as one locatable in Muslim countries. The threat, we are told, or are encouraged to believe, is one of “terrorism.” But terrorism is only one instrument of Jihad – that word which requires definition. Jihad is the struggle to remove all obstacles, all over the world, to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. Such obstacles can be an army or a Constitution, or a habit of free and skeptical inquiry. They can be any of a number of things. Spinoza and the Enlightenment are obstacles, and so is Locke, and Hume, and Jefferson, and John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, and John Stuart Mill and Michael Oakeshott and thousands of other thinkers, writers, artists, scientists, who have been produced in the non-Muslim world and who could not have been produced by, nor lasted for one minute in, the Muslim world.
And the instruments of Jihad are not, as some of those who presume to protect and instruct us appear to think, the bemedalled and the unbemedalled both, limited either to terrorism or to conventional combat, or qitaal. The main weapons of Jihad today are Da’wa (campaigns to convert non-Muslims, that begin with propaganda on behalf of Islam), and deployment of the Money Weapon (the rich Arabs and Iran supply money to pay for mosques, madrasas, propaganda, academic centers where the Arabs and Muslims will be able to control the appointments of faculty, and what they teach, and an army of Western hirelings, of every kind, who especially in the capitals of the West work to confuse Infidels about what Islam teaches, and to prevent the most obvious parts of it from being considered, much less openly discussed). Jones has come to it all quite recently, in the heady heights of power, when with all the hectic vacancy of Washington life at the top. The government of America, or its biggest shots, neither slumber nor sleep. But their absurdly long hours are an error; they guarantee nothing, save that the time necessary to read and to think and to assimilate the kind of information that would save so much anguish, so much expense, so much folly, is never available, not to the very people who need it most.
Imagine if those at the top of the previous administration had understood Islam, and what’s more, recognized within the Camp of Islam those fissures, ethnic and sectarian and economic, that might best be exploited by not entering Iraq, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, but by staying away and allowing things to take their natural course in Muslim lands where Muslims, unused to the Western spirit of compromise, would naturally in the absence of a despot holding things together (as Saddam Hussein in Iraq) naturally turn on one another because the only outcomes with which Muslims raised on Qur’an and Hadith and Sira are familiar are those of Victor and Vanquished.
Despite his welcome opposition to expanding the American presence in Afghanistan, Jones’ opposition is based not on an intelligent apprehension of the nature of Islam, and the desire to ruthlessly exploit those pre-existing fissures, and to allow Muslim states and peoples to collapse into internal fighting, or ideally, fighting across national lines with other Muslim states, but rather on a spirit of ill-informed appeasement. His appalling, his intolerable, his unacceptable remarks about Israel and about the [Arab-Israeli] “conflict” ignore the nature of the war being made on Israel. He gives every sign of being unaware of the history of that conflict, and of the circumstances in which the former Ottoman domains were assigned not only to the Arabs but to the Jews. That phrase “the Arab world” hides a much more complicated reality, and ignores all the non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. This needs to be held up for inspection.
Does he not know what the League of Nations intended with its mandates system, or what the various mandates in the Middle East were intended to accomplish? Is he unaware of what happened at San Remo in 1920? Does he know the demographic and cadastral history of the Ottoman vilayets (and a separate sanjak for Jerusalem)? Does he know, for example, that the total population of all of Palestine could not, in 1850, have exceeded 150,000, and that a great many of those 150,000 were neither Arab nor Muslim? Does he know the history of the Jews and Christians and others (Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Mandeans) of the Middle East? Does he know Islamic doctrine concerning the duty of Jihad, and what that duty entails, and what the instruments of Jihad have been before 1948, and then after the 1948-49 war, and especially after the Six-Day War of June 1967, when a great and ultimately successful effort was made to re-package the Muslim Arab war against Israel as a “struggle of national liberation” on the part of the just-invented “Palestinian people”?
And does he know the evidence for that invention, including the express admission of such “Palestinian” leaders as Zuhair Mohsen? Of course he doesn’t. The day before yesterday, he hardly knew what the Mandate for Palestine was. Why should he be expected to know when that calculated phrase “Palestinian people” first began to be applied to the local Arabs, the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel?
When the Ottoman Empire crumbled, and Turkey was reduced essentially to Anatolia and a European sliver, the vast lands then left without Turkish rulers were given over to the League of Nations to construct, with an eye to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a new edifice. In a series of agreements and understandings and settlements, it was decided that the main peoples of the Middle East – not just the Arabs (who keep trying to get everyone to believe that they have a divine right, a winner-take-all right, to all of the Middle East and North Africa, and Jews, Kurds, Berbers, Maronites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Copts, and many others have no rights save that of living under Muslim Arab rule) – were entitled to states, to political expressions, of their own.
In the early 1920s, along with the Jews, there were the Kurds and Armenians as non-Arab peoples who were thought to be numerous enough, and with a clear language and culture of their own, to merit independent nation-states. And, too, though there was no express provision, or protection guaranteed, for the many Middle Eastern Christians – Copts, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Maronites, Greek Orthodox – that was understandable, because at the time the British still ran things in Egypt, were about to run things in Iraq, and in Syria-Lebanon the French, the historic protectors of the Christians in that area, were in control. Without stating expressly that there would be a “Christian state” in the Middle East, others besides the Arabs were to have their small states as well, carved out of the vast former lands of the Ottomans. But the Armenians had to endure an Armenian S.S.R., the Kurds are still waiting, and the Jews received not what the Mandates Commission (see Professor William Rappard) had intended them to have, but a much diminished area, with all of Eastern Palestine being turned over by the Mandatory authority, the British, to the Arabs in a unilateral move designed to both placate the Hashemite Abdullah, to become the Emirate of Transjordan. Abdullah was resentful that his younger brother Feisal was being placed on the throne of Iraq, and threatened to move on Damascus — which might have soured French relations with the British, who felt they needed French approval of what the British were doing in Iraq.
I see no signs at all that General James Jones knows very much about any of this, or that he has grasped the nature of – even thinks he has a duty to try to grasp the nature of – Islam. He hasn’t read those excellent guides offered by such apostates as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan. He hasn’t read, I suspect, Bat Ye’or on the status and treatment of non-Muslims under Islam. He is unlikely to have read the guide to the Qur’an that Robert Spencer has produced, nor Spencer’s previous no-nonsense just-the-facts guides to Muhammad (as seen in Islam), and to the ideology of Islam, with copious quotation from the sources. It is amazing how little people think, once they get to positions of power, that they should have to work, really work, as they once did as students.
General Jones never hints, even in the most veiled fashion, at the problem that a particular “ideology” has created. He never mentions the word Jihad. He does not appear to be paying attention to developments within Dar al-Harb, that is, the Lands of the Infidels. I doubt if he is paying attention to developments in Western Europe, the member-states (save for Turkey) of NATO, that is, the countries that constitute our most important allies (along with Israel and Australia and Canada), and civilisationally the heart of the West, without which the continued existence of that West is put into jeopardy. He doesn’t strike one as educated. An education of a certain kind might make him less parochial, better able to connect the American fate with that of Europe.
He may not be enthusiastic about expanding a military presence in Afghanistan, but one doubts he has actually have taken it upon himself to figure out what made the Iraq venture such a silly squandering of resources — of men, materiel, money, morale — and why the Afghanistan venture will be the same. If he is doubtful about adding troops to Afghanistan, it is not because he wants, soberly and even ruthlessly, to exploit the pre-existing fissures, ethnic and sectarian and economic, that exist within the Camp of Islam. I see no signs that he grasps the nature of the war being fought by the Muslim Arabs against Israel, which is not and never was a “national liberation” struggle but remains today what it was forty years ago, or sixty years ago, or even in the Mandate period: a war to prevent the coming into existence, or the continued existence, no matter what its size, of an Infidel nation-state.
As for Jones’s comment that “ending the conflict [that is, the war between Israel and the Muslim Arabs, a “conflict” that has no end because it is based on the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, but can only be contained if the IDF remains obviously, and overwhelmingly, stronger] and the occupation is essential” because what is at stake is “nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings” — it is absurd beyond belief. “Nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings” — can he be serious? The Americans would stop, tomorrow, paying so goddam much attention to dancing to the Arab and Muslim tune when it comes to the war. This is a war without end, a war that can however be managed if Israel is not pressured by its “friends” into giving up even more of the territory it won by force of arms in the Six-Day War imposed on it. Now the territory in question is the very territory that was assigned to the Jewish state by the League of Nations, and that only was, from 1949 to 1967, in Arab (Jordanian) hands because the Jordanian army seized and held onto it.
General Jones thinks that “nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings” is at stake. Yet the Arabs happen not only to be on the receiving end of the largest transfer of wealth in human history, but also now possess 22 states, and want a 23rd not because of the deep belief in a “Palestinian people.” Yet that people was never mentioned, not once, before late 1967 — not once in the thousands of pages, for example, of the U.N. records, never mentioned by a single Arab leader or diplomat. This people was fabricated deliberately as a way to repackage the Arab war on Israel using the language of “anti-colonialism” and “national liberation” and suchlike.
Does General Jones think, with equal fervor, that the denial of a state to the Kurds (in northern Iraq, with possible additions from Syria and Iran) where a state of, by, and for the Arabs occupies Kurdistan, is an outrage, and “ending the [Arab-Kurd] conflict and the occupation is essential because what is at stake is nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings”?
Does General Jones think, with equal fervor, that the denial of a state to the Berbers of North Africa (in Algeria and Morocco, where Arabs rule and Berber culture and the Berber language is preserved with difficulty, despite Arab linguistic and cultural imperialism) is an outrage, and “ending the [Arab-Berber] conflict and the [Arab] occupation is essential because what is at stake is nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings”?
Does General Jones think, with equal fervor, that the denial of a state to the blacks of the Sudan (where Arabs rule and have killed nearly 2 million largely Christian blacks in southern Sudan and over the past few years have managed to kill 400,000 non-Arab, black African Muslims) is an outrage? Hasn’t General Jones been one of those, like fellow (but retired) General Scott Gration, who supports “working with the Sudanese government” — the very government and people responsible for those mass-murderings in the south and in Darfur? Why doesn’t General Jones think that “ending the [Arab-black African] conflict and the [Arab] occupation [of the southern Sudan and Darfur] is essential because what is at stake is nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings”?
Does General Jones think, with equal fervor, that the denial of a state to the Christians in southern Nigeria is an outrage, and ending the conflict and the occupation there is “essential because what is at stake is nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings”? The Ibos have been the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, and the other Christian tribes have suffered for many decades from the Muslims of the North. The Muslim massacres of the Christians in the northern cities such as Kano precipitated the war by the southern Christians to achieve a free and independent state, Biafra. For — as Colonel Ojukwu, leader of Biafra, explained in his Ahiara Declaration of 1969, the Northern Muslims were carrying on a “Jihad” against the South — and, indeed, Egyptian Arab pilots flying MIGS strafed Ibo villages killing tens of thousands of helpless civilians.
Shall I go on? Or do you want to go on for me, asking General James Jones, who does not strike one as up to the task — the task of organizing an intelligent and wide-ranging self-defense for all those states and societies that are threatened from without or within by those who believe deeply in Islam? These Muslims take to heart the duty, required of all Muslims, to engage in the Jihad or “struggle” to remove all obstacles — a state, a people, a constitution, legal and political institutions, a leader who refuses to be silenced, almost anything at all — to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.
Yes, you go on.
I’m amazed — aren’t you? — that more than eight years after the 9/11/2001 attacks we still have people in Washington who do not have a grasp of Islam, do not understand what Islam has to do with the Arab war on Israel, why any further perceived Arab or Muslim victories will whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites, who do not understand the simple concept of divide et impera, and of how we can exploit to our advantage the sectarian, ethnic, and economic hostilities and resentments that could divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. We still do not have anyone in power explaining why removing American troops from Afghanistan, as they ought to have been removed from Iraq in early 2004, makes sense. It and will halt the squandering of men and money and allow us to act in concert with our allies in Western Europe, with Israel (that must be encouraged not to give up any more territory, not to weaken itself but to remain as potent a deterrent to its enemies, who are our enemies, as possible), with Australia, and with other nations that are part of the West, or that, as with India, and Thailand, and the Philippines, are also threatened by the Jihad and should, with that West, make common cause.
So you take over. You offer a few more paragraphs for the consideration of General James Jones. Why, I think you could continue in this vein from here to eternity. Now what made me think of that?