In PJ Media today, I discuss one of the most ludicrous foreign policy recommendations ever to appear in Foreign Policy:
For absurd foreign policy prescriptions, it’s hard to beat the Obama State Department. But Foreign Policy magazine gave them a run for their money: in an article entitled “Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State? A Few — Admittedly Sappy — Thoughts on the Power of #LoveWins,” Rosa Brooks argues that the horrific terror entity can be overcome by the awesome power of the rainbow.
Brooks asks her readers:
Do you want to fight the Islamic State and the forces of Islamic extremist terrorism? … I’ll tell you the best way to send a message to those masked gunmen in Iraq and Syria and to everyone else who gains power by sowing violence and fear. Just keep posting that second set of images.
Brooks is referring to images of gay marriage supporters celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Post them on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and in comments all over the Internet. Send them to your friends and your family. Send them to your pen pal in France and your old roommate in Tunisia. Send them to strangers.
Where did Brooks get the idea that a mass posting of photos of gay marriage supporters would conquer the Islamic State? Because, well:
… that’s the lesson of history: Brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long. The Nazis learned this; the Soviets learned it; the Ku Klux Klan learned it; Pol Pot learned it; the Rwandan génocidaires learned it. One of these days, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda will learn it too.
It is much, much more likely — or certain — that the Islamic State sees the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage as evidence of the United States’ decadence and societal decay, and that this will serve to embolden and encourage them.
There is another glaring fallacy in her “analysis”: if the Nazis and Soviets and KKK and Pol Pot and Rwandan génocidaires ever really learned that “brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long,” they didn’t learn it in the manner Brooks seems to think they did.
It is hard to tell how, exactly, she thinks they learned this. By viewing photos of loving couples of any persuasion? Did a photo of an embracing couple move Adolf Hitler to call his genocidal armies back home and close the extermination camps?
Did some image of happiness make Pol Pot realize his stacks and shelves full of skulls were a terrible mistake, leading him to resign and become a florist?
No rational analysis will find Brooks’ claim to be the “lesson of history.” If the Nazis learned that “#LoveWins,” they must have learned it in the blood and ruin of Berlin, as Soviet troops ran wild and raped every young German woman they could catch. The groups Brooks names learned that #LoveWins — if they ever learned it — at the point of a gun.
They were forced by violence to stop what they were doing. …
Read the rest here.
Champ says
Rosa Brooks argues that the horrific terror entity can be overcome by the awesome power of the rainbow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I dare you to give this a shot, Rosa …why don’t YOU present this idea to IS and see what happens. And hand out flowers, too, since ‘Flower Power’ may work, as well. o_0
Lia Wissing says
Who on earth is Rosa Brooks? How old is she?
particolor says
I think she went to school with Aesop ?
quotha raven says
@ Lia Wissing – Don’t know who she is, but there;s a major street named after her here in Portland. It’s not far from MLK Boulevard and Cezar Chavez highway…Cheers! Quotha R
quotha raven says
Oops…on reflection Maybe it’s Rosa Parks Blvd, not Rosa Brooks Blvd. I’m still finding my feet in Portland. Cheers! qr
djphoenix says
Rosa Brooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Brooks
Jan Aage Jeppersen says
Gay marriage may defeat the Catholic Church, but I doubt the power of love can defeat Islamism. 😉
voegelinian says
“Gay Marriage Can Defeat the Islamic State”?
For this to be even remotely plausible, two conditions will have to be met:
1) Muslims must stop adoring, and start criticizing, their dearly beloved Prophet Muhammad who, among 1,001 other deranged things, directed his followers to kill both the man on top and the man on the bottom in homosexual couplings
2) Western LGBTs and their supporters must remove their heads from inside the asses of Muslims in their perverse, strange bedfellowship.
Jahannam will freeze over before #1 happens in any way remotely approaching critical mass; #2 may occur, though one shouldn’t hold one’s breath waiting for it any time soon.
(For #1 above, cf. the hadith of al-Tirmidhi and Dawood (Book 38, Number 4447), both of them considered “saheeh” or authoritative, quoting Muhammad as saying: “Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Loot [i.e., Lot, referring to homosexual sodomy], execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.” — see: http://tiny.cc/69he0x and http://islamqa.info/en/38622)
Tiredofstupid says
Kudos Robert on exposing this Stupidity. It took the Allies to crush the nazis and Italian facists and the jap shintoists. It took the Vietnamese army to crush pol pot, it took the U.S. and Allies to stop the North Koreans and its chinese allies in 1953. If Eygpts Pres Al-Sisi doesn’t get the muslims to understand the current world situation then my prediction is world war III-1 billion dead by 2050, mostly muslim, 90% taxation on corporations, a 5th column of atheists, aspostates, gays, christians,and other outcasts from muslim society working from within muslim lands to do the most damage to the muslims. The Alawite muslims will kill shi’a muslims, and sunni will kill them all including their own in a great orgy of death for not being muslim enough. We have to avoid Nukes at almost all costs so the rest of the world can try to recover. (although a short nuclear winter will kill 10’s of millions, it would help with golbal warming, don’t you think? In fact, is that the bilderbergers plan?)
Angemon says
Tiredofstupid posted:
“although a short nuclear winter will kill 10’s of millions, it would help with golbal warming, don’t you think?”
Hey, remember when Sagan and the rest of the “Global Cooling” crowd predicted that the burning of the oil fields in Kuwait would cause a wide scale, long-lasting, significant cooling whose repercussions would be felt for decades (like having temperatures on the ground a couple hundred kms away from the burning fields being up to 10ºC lower than average)?
voegelinian says
“Kudos Robert on exposing this Stupidity. It took the Allies to crush the nazis and Italian facists and the jap shintoists…”
The problem is that this war, and this enemy, are not same (although in some ways similar). One difference, for example, is that millions of the enemy are inside their Enemy Camp (i.e., inside the West), most of them hiding in plain sight, considered to be Muslims Who Just Wanna Have a Sandwich (distinguished from the Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Have Nothing to do with Islam). So the conventional warfare we deployed in WW2 would not work. (For one thing, it would logically involve bombing parts of the West in order to kill Muslims — and doing that might target the Muslims who happen to be the precious Native Indigenes whom Angemon is so concerned to protect…)
quotha raven says
@ Voeg readers:
According to New College Edition, The American Heritage Dictionary:
“indigen – also indigene – one that is native or indigenous to an area [Latin indigena; native
Just trying to be helpful))) Cheers! Quotha
Don McKellar says
This is probably the second pillar of surreal insanity for the Obama regime’s attempt to deal with ISIS. The first pillar was Obama blaming global warming, er, climate change for the rise of Islamic supremacists. It’s like a combination of slap-happy delusional insanity disguised as foreign policy.
quotha raven says
@ Don McKeller ” It’s like a combination of slap-happy delusional insanity disguised as foreign policy.”
Unless one experiences a sobering moment when “sinister” and “mendacious” and “treacherous” come to mind. Cheers! Quotha
mortimer says
America’s gay community leaders are too busy kissing the BOOTS of the Islamic thugs who will KICK THEM from high buildings!
Even the photos of gay men plummeting to their deaths or lifted on cranes by a rope are not enough to arouse these determined cultural Marxists.
Muslims are murdering gay men every single day. Why no outcry from the gay organizations?
particolor says
I just Imagine them getting attacked by a Savage Hoard of Gays. And all Fluttering one hand out in front of them !! 🙂
OMG !!
They will drop their guns and run !
I think that plan has Merit ? 🙂
Mo says
@ Mortimer
“Muslims are murdering gay men every single day. Why no outcry from the gay organizations?”
They are too busy suing those oh-so-hateful Christians. (You know, the people who DON’T throw them off buildings, hang them on cranes, or burn them alive.)
Priorities, people!
miriamrove says
Saudi arabia is the gay capital of the world and look it. A s…hole. m
Champ says
lol!!! 😀
Mirren10 says
This ludicrous fool is apparently a law professor at Georgetown. Can’t say I’m surprised.
vlparker says
The stupidity of the left is just amazing.
Nimrod says
Well, gay marriage has been a great way to get people to persecute Christian bakers, so obviously it will be great for getting people to persecute Muslim terrorists. What they don’t seem to realize is that Christian bakers don’t execute homosexuals while Muslim terrorists DO execute homosexuals with widespread public support, especially from the left who seem to place a priority on covering it up.
The followers of the religion of neo-Marxism seem to think that the tactics used to undermine other enemy religions will work just as well on Islam, but they won’t because these tactics all exploit enlightenment era theology that doesn’t exist in Islam.
Kepha says
So, it’s enlightenment era theology that is our weak spot. You may have a point, Nimrod. Long ago, a man named John Warwick Montgomery wrote a book entitled _The Suicide of Christian Theology_, in which he described how the gun was loaded in the 18th century, placed against the head in the 19th century, and fired in the 20th.
I wonder why the author of that admittedly foolish _foreign Policy_ article thought that the pervs would ever be useful against a determined Islamicism. For one thing, sexual perversions are forms of self-destruction. I also suspect that the catamites welcome the Islamic advance because its target happens to be the Western civilization that they despise, while the sodomites welcome it because Islam punished only the poor catamite who gets caught (perhaps his sodomite tires of him and betrays him).
jewdog says
Well sure. Let’s post some gay marriage pictures on some jihadist Facebook pages. When that doesn’t do the trick, then we’ll nuke ’em. As President Reagan once put it, if you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.
quotha raven says
@Jewdog – EXACTLY! There’s more than one way to skin a cat…Let’s get bizzy! Cheers! Quotha R
Atheist Kafir says
This is absolutely unbalievable that someone wrote such a thing in a foreign policy magazine. What the hell is that? I require a definition. Nothing against gays! but in the media and a lot of government agency gays are over represented. I can only assume that gay people gravitate to media and social media activities as careers. Hence the left prodominance of the media. Here I make a second assumption that gay people tend to be left leaning. Jihad apologist and Obama apologists and Islam apologists. Anderson Cooper is finally beginning to be less of a girl and finding out that he actually has balls and asking the right questions. Well there are white gays, black gays, yellow gays, brown gays the whole rainbow. There you go the awesome power of the rainbow.
nacazo says
We all “know” that hitler was stopped by showing him a picture of a gay couple.
/sarcasm off
Linde Barrera says
To Robert Spencer, author extraordinaire. Thank you for this well crafted article. It is easy to see why you are a best selling author.
kay says
I read the Rosa Brooks article. It is a complete joke.
I don’t think an intelligent sixth grader would fall for it. Most kids can figure out that World War 2 was mainly won by America fighting in Europe and across the Pacific, not with cute pictures.
The Ku Klux Klan were effectively defeated by voter registration among blacks and the big march on Washington DC and legislative change. In other words, solidarity and a clear political purpose to empower people.
The Islamists do a lot more with social media than just send pretty pictures. They use Twitter accounts and so forth to actively cultivate jihadis and jihad supporters. They are very serious and they like killing and dying for their dogma, so no one will be swayed by the cute pictures and the happy Americans. After all, the jihadis want to destroy the very idea of America. So we can’t sell it to them. We have to recognize, as Robert Spencer says here, that the topic is war, not negotiation. There is no negotiation with Sharia.
How did a lawyer and professor not understand that this is about war and jihad?
Why did FP publish the stupidest piece on “citizen diplomacy” ever seen anywhere?
Looks like Rosa Brooks has the social development and political skills of a ten year old. How embarrassing. They should have Robert Spencer teach at that school instead.
particolor says
Things will be much better when the only book in the classroom is the Cooran !
Run Amok Kiddies !!
Lioness says
It took 6 years and 50 million dead to defeat Nazism. Too bad they didn’t know at the time that it could have been all avoided, if only the Allies showed warm and loving pictures to Hitler. And Stalin, after starving more than 5 million Ukrainians, did not seem to understand that “you can keep people in fear for only so long”. He kept them in fear until his death of natural causes 30 years later. But that’s because no one showed him any loving photos.
Mo says
Behold, the infantile mentality of liberals. They really do think that happy pictures and rainbow flags can stop genocidal death cult members from continuing their slaughter.
(Just like they think that “No Guns” stickers on buildings will prevent criminals from entering with a gun, taking down flags will end racism, and negotiating with terrorists will turn them into friends.)
It’s a child’s mentality. But this is the mentality we are dealing with, people.
Mo says
@ Patrick White
“Bizarre that you should talk about intellectual dishonesty when you believe in an invisible sky-friend.”
Show me where anyone said anything about a “sky fairy”.
Or are you just an anti-religious bigot?
Provide your evidence.
David wilson says
It would be fun to see Big Gay Al and Jihadi Johnie get together, fun fun fun.They would start off as pen pals of course.
RICHTHOFEN says
So,if we all turned queer, that would do the trick? What an offensive and odious notion – muslims are at it just as much as the 1 to 3% of non-muslims, especially during ramadan when their cult’s mantra forbids contact with women – they just turn to buggery/sodomy
Matthieu Baudin says
Of course there is the alternative, perhaps complimentary, strategy of launching a mega offensive against climate change to bring ISIS back into the fold of peace loving communities. ‘Gays against Climate Change reach out to Islamic State Militants to create a better world.’