Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy.

She doesn't.

The left has been denouncing her as an interventionist, the second coming of George W. Bush. They just can't explain how Hillary is any more of an interventionist than her old boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria. Other places he's bombing include Yemen and Pakistan. And all that is without taking account of his attempt to implement the Arab Spring's regime changes across the region with tragic and disastrous results.

The closest thing to a disagreement between them was over Syria and considering that Obama was days away from getting into Syria, that's not much of a firewall.

Hillary took a cheap shot at Obama. The media spent so much time discussing the cheap shot and their hugging summit that it completely ignored the fact that it was a cheap shot with no substance to it. Hillary and Obama have the same ideological DNA and get their ideas from the same narrow circles. Hillary doesn't have a better or worse foreign policy. They both have the same foreign policy.

Underneath the manufactured political reality show drama that happens when a candidate of the same party as a lame duck administration tries to explain why she's so different than the miserable failure now holding down the job is the sober reality that they're both reading from the same scripts.

How could they not?

Hillary Clinton is trying to distance herself from the foreign policy of an administration in which she served as Secretary of State. Hillary is trying to distance herself from her own approach to international relations That's a level of schizophrenia that is a bit extreme even for a woman who sheds accents, identities and sports team affinities the way that a snake sheds its skin.

Hillary isn't disavowing Obama. She's disavowing Hillary.

The newly reinvented Hillary is suddenly pro-Israel after spending years berating the Jewish State. She suddenly realized the importance of having a coherent foreign policy after having the same confused position on Iraq as John Kerry. She is suddenly full of the wisdom that was missing until last year. And she's somehow more of an interventionist than Obama even though they were both intervening in the exact same places.


Hillary is an interventionist. But so is Obama.

The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn't however to be found in the vicinity of Washington D.C.

Break down the arguments of the non-interventionist and you will find a set of conspiracy theories explaining why every previous intervention was motivated by bad faith, secret agendas and racism. The non-interventionist doesn't reject intervention; instead he contends that every previous intervention failed because it was carried out at the behest of the banks, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the Jews, American arrogance and the oil industry.

But the non-interventionist who makes it into the White House is free to intervene as much as he likes because his motives are pure. He isn't trying to secretly build oil pipelines or put money into Haliburton. He won't be a unilateral cowboy launching new crusades for no good reason. And so he becomes the non-interventionist interventionist, the multilateral unilateralist, the good invader.

The fake interventionist is a lot more dangerous than the real interventionist because he thinks that he has learned all the lessons from history when all he has done is filled his head with idiotic conspiracy theories. By assigning evil underhanded motives to all his predecessors, he passes up the opportunity to actually learn from their example and instead operates under an unrealistic sense of self-confidence in his own judgement. Because he is certain that they were evil and he isn't, he believes that he can do no wrong. 

A true non-interventionist would reject intervention wholesale. Our fake non-interventionists turn up their noses at it when their political opponents do it. But once they have the power, they intervene out of entirely pure motives such as helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over entire countries.

Obama is a non-interventionist because he spends a lot of time hesitating and apologizing for each intervention. He doesn't however bother getting permission from Congress or even UN approval.

Why should he? His motives are pure. Process is a way of slowing down men with impure motives such as George W. Bush. But pacifist saints can bomb as many countries as they want without the requirements of process getting in the way.

Hillary's crime is that she currently sounds somewhat less apologetic and uncertain about intervention, but that's not policy, that's pose. Hillary's husband boasted on the day before September 11 that he passed on killing Bin Laden because of the collateral damage. And Bill Clinton is, if anything, more of a hawk than his wife.

Anyone who thinks that Hillary is a hawk has forgotten how American personnel in Benghazi were left in a precarious security situation on her watch. It's quite possible that Hillary might decide to bomb Syria. But don't expect her to bomb in defense of American national interests.

She's not that kind of interventionist.

Hillary knows that many voters are unhappy about American weakness. They don't actually want war, but they want someone in the White House whom Putin will take seriously. And they know that isn't Obama.

Hillary is temporarily talking tough to win them over encouraging them to forget her Reset Button pandering to the Russians and instead convince them that she's the woman to make Vladimir respect America again. And to do that she has to sound more assertive in foreign affairs than Obama.

That doesn't mean that Hillary Clinton can stand up to Putin any better than Obama. Or that she will. But she needs uncertain Democrats to believe that the new boss will be different than the old boss, when the new boss is really the old boss in a pantsuit and with worse posters.

Unfortunately Democrats and Republicans don't currently differ very much on foreign policy. Where they differ is orientation. And that's more significant than it sounds. Both Obama and McCain would have backed the Arab Spring, but McCain would have done it out of a misguided sense that it was in America's national interest, while Obama did it to undermine American national interests.

The significance of the difference is not so much in the outcome as in attitude and in the tools that they use.

Obama and McCain would have both bombed Libya, but Obama holds the military in contempt and treats it that way. Obama and McCain would have both endorsed the Arab Spring, but Obama did it in a way that signaled American weakness. That is why Obama's approach has weakened America even more than the actual outcome of his policies.

A country can survive bad policy. We've had bad foreign policy for much of the 20th century. But a leader who communicates that the bad policy is a symptom of national weakness is a disaster on a whole other scale. Both Carter and Reagan made mistakes, but Carter and Reagan sent two very different messages about American power even while they made their mistakes.

Leadership isn't always about what you do. It's about how you communicate your priorities and values.

Hillary Clinton is trying to package her old Obama policies with a new attitude, but underneath the attitude is the same old lefty radical who smooched Arafat's wife, brought a Reset Button to Russia and apologized to Pakistan for a YouTube video.

We've already seen Hillary's foreign policy on display in Pakistan, Russia and Benghazi. All the cheap shots at Obama won't change the fact that Hillary's foreign policy is another Obama rerun.

If you fear being killed by a Muslim terrorist, you may have come down with Islamophobia.




THE VERDICT IS IN

In August 2012, James Foley retweeted a link to a CNN story asking “Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?”

The article concluded that indeed it was.

Three months later, Foley had been kidnapped. Two years later, on another August, a former branch of Al Qaeda chopped off his head.

A Beheading Ends All Illusions About Islam




“We’ll Love Muslims 100 Years” say Useful Idiots




SHARIA FOR THE UK

Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP for Rotherham, told the BBC: “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.”

“Perhaps yes, as a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.”

In Rotherham the “majority” of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, the report says, which led to police and council workers “tiptoeing” around the problem.

Equally horrifying is the suggestion that certain Pakistani councillors asked social workers to reveal the addresses of the shelters where some of the abused girls were hiding.

The report heard of two cases where fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused only to be arrested themselves when police were called.

UK Police Arrested Parents Trying to Stop Muslims from Raping their Children





Rape Jihad: Inside ISIS’ Harem for Captured Non-Muslim Women




NOT AS DUMB AS YOU THINK

Obama has no strategy for ISIS, but he does have a strategy for shutting down every coal plant in America.

Obama has no strategy for dealing with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but he does have a strategy for mass illegal alien amnesty.

Obama has no strategy for defeating Islamic terrorism, he does however have a strategy for defeating the Republicans in the midterm elections.

Obama has a Strategy for the Things He Cares About




Gazans Celebrate Hamas “Victory” by Firing into Air, Killing Each Other




WEAPONS OF FASHION DISTRACTION

It looks like the gimmick box is really running low. If Iran nukes Israel, expect Obama to come out wearing clown shoes in the hopes of distracting everyone from the mess.

Obama has a New Suit, No Strategy for ISIS or Russian Invasion





ISIS Laptop Found w/Bubonic Plague Bomb Documents




THE MUGGERS AWAIT THEM

A Democrat in City Hall has managed to turn back the clock on 20 years of crime reductions by championing criminals and waging war on the police. Elect a Dinkins errand boy and you get the second term of David Dinkins.

His fellow Democrats should benefit from the crime wave has brought back to New York.

NYPD Warns NYC Too Dangerous for Democratic Convention




THE PAST IS THE FUTURE

Then he picks up the sword and says, “We want to return to the era of the swords and fight.”

“We don’t want your machine guns or RPGs,” Husam declares. “Let the Arab peoples use these swords. I am certain that the Arab and Muslim peoples want to support Gaza. They will march with their swords. If you find a single Zionist in Israel after that, get back to us.”

To which the Arab peoples say, “You first, you fat idiot.”

Fat Hamas-Loving Sword-Wielding TV Host Calls on Arabs to March on Israel w/Swords




 THE OBVIOUS

Hassan did everything possible before and after the attack to announce that he was a Muslim terrorist.

Nevertheless Obama, the new judge and the media refused to listen to him. Hassan became so desperate that he resorted to sending FOX notes announcing that he killed Americans at Fort Hood in support of the Taliban.

And still nothing.

Now he’s trying to join ISIS.

Fort Hood Killer Applies to Join ISIS, Desperately Trying to Remind Obama He’s a Terrorist




Hamas Negotiator Gets Legs Broken by Hamas




IT'S LIKE THIS EVERYWHERE ELSE TOO

No matter how much white liberals agonize about white racism, the Muslim world is roughly a million times more racist than an entire Neo-Nazi town in Idaho after its cable package was reduced to just BET.

It was on Saturday, late in the evening, when a group of “Lost Boys” and “Lost Girls” gang members took to the streets of Cairo armed with machetes, pangas and knives in the realm and characteristic manner of what they call “rob and slaughter” to ostensibly make a living due to the scarcity of jobs and constant exposition to racism in Egypt.

Instead, hundreds of Southern Sudanese youths are willing to either live the dangerous gangster-ism or take the risky trip to Israel for the sake of a more affluent life.

“N Word”: Egyptian Paper Warns of “Black Terror Gangs in Cairo”




Gaza Kids Hope Hamas Rockets Land in America




ANOTHER FOR THE ISIS REEDUCATION PROJECT

Hamas’ continuation of the armed resistance is a way of telling Israel and the world that their spirit is not broken after 56 years of living as refugees without a country in a small area that is that one of the most densely populated places on earth…

Hamas Supporting Yale Chaplain Blames Anti-Semitism on Jews Refusing to Surrender to Hamas




1 in 6 in France Support ISIS



KING MOB

We think of Democracy as a means of empowering the individual and yet it’s difficult to look at the shapeless masses weeping over Obama’s election and see the individualism. The epithet of “mob rule” is often seen as an elitist critique of democracy, but it should instead be seen as an individualistic critique.

There is no room for the individual in the ranks of the mindless mob. Mobs operate on a hysterical consensus. They are as intolerant of the individual as any tyrant.

Mob Rule and Free Stuff from Athens to Obama




HAMASBARA

The media has accepted the Third World radical left narrative in which Israel is a foreign colonizing body. That means that Israel is covered as if is were European even while its impact is covered as Middle Eastern.

The media acts as if the Middle East doesn’t impact Israel, but Israel impacts the Middle East, framing Israel as not only a dominant force in relation to the Arabs in ’67 Israel, but to the entire Middle East.

Former AP Jerusalem Editor Reveals Hamas Coverup and Anti-Israel Bias




NO ONE MENTION THE WAR!

So it is more important than ever to say that this is not a struggle between “our values” and those of medieval fundamentalism, or Islamist extremism. The contest is not modern liberal democracy versus the Dark Ages. This is to impose meaning on what is, in truth, meaningless.

Indeed, it may be worse than counterproductive to deal with Isil as if it were a rational force with established roots and a comprehensible set of demands capable of political solution. Just as this is not about religion, it is also not about politics

There is not even anything particularly Middle Eastern in the Isil mode of operation.

This is What a Politically Correct Mental Breakdown Over ISIS Looks Like

... from the comments

 IslamDownpressesHumanity • Am I a liberal dreaming islam is a butterfly? Or a butterfly getting beheaded?



BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

“Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future,” said Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona in an interview by Corriere della Sera. “I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.”

“Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”

Exiled Iraqi Archbishop: Muslim Immigration a Threat to Western Christians




New York and California Migration is Helping Liberals Take Over America



OWN THE AMORALITY

If abortion isn’t wrong or a difficult decision, then why not abort babies for having Down’s syndrome? Why not abort them because they’re the wrong gender or race?

Those examples will upset abortion supporters who at the same time find nothing wrong with aborting a baby to make it easier to finish college and live an “independent” life promoting leftist candidates for Emily’s List.

If we’re going to be killing babies, why quibble over the motive. It’s like arguing that it’s moral to shoot a man on the subway because he’s sitting in a seat that you want but not moral to shoot him because of his race or gender.

Why is it Wrong to Abort Down’s Syndrome Babies, But Not Other Babies?




FOR ONCE...

The US has been involved in conflicts with ISIS, in its various forms, for nearly a decade. No new authorization was needed when the US bombed Al Qaeda targets in Yemen or when it went deep into Pakistan after Bin Laden.

Does Obama Need Congressional Authorization to Hit ISIS in Syria? No




LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

“I was told that I could make a quick 200 bucks. And basically I went up there and I made like $800” on the first day, said Lorine Hawthorne, of Houston. She had been recruited as a marketer for a Houston scam in those go-go days, finding elderly people and delivering them to a handpicked clinic.

“The most I ever made in one day, probably, was like $20,000,” she said. “That’s a lot of money for one day.” Hawthorne pleaded guilty to one count of fraud in 2005.

How One Nigerian Nurse Stealing $4.3 Mil from Taxpayers Shows What is Wrong With Health Care

If there’s a problem in America or anywhere in the world, inflicting the media on it can only make it worse. By some accounts there are more reporters in Ferguson than there are protesters. That may be why the protesters ran for cover behind the media after throwing bottles of urine at the police.

There are so many reporters in Ferguson that the rioters and looters can use them as human shields.

You just wouldn’t know it because they don’t take pictures of each other.

The occasional photos of media scrums around a crying woman in the Middle East or an angry protester in Ferguson reveal the artificiality of the event.

It’s okay to have one reporter in front of a camera, but when there are so many reporters at an event that they outnumber everyone else, the whole thing starts looking like a movie set on which events are staged for the entertainment and profit of the producers.

Remember that every time you see a masked protester caught in the act of throwing a rock or a loving couple huddled in fear of dark masked shapes in riot gear, these images are as artificial and posed as anything in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. They show you what is in front of the camera, not what is behind it.

Look through the news reports of riots anywhere and you’ll see the same poses repeat across continents and generations. The rioters are different people with different causes and agendas, but the photos of them are being taken and selected by the same people from the same news agencies.

There is never anything new on the news because the media has a pre-existing formula for handling any event. What we think of as the newspaper or the evening news just plugs actual news into its formula and turns it into propaganda.

The national news network and the newspaper of record tell the same few stories just like Hollywood makes the same movies, even if they seem to feature different characters and places. That’s because the formula doesn’t change. The formula is what we are getting from Ferguson’s mob of professional and amateur reporters each fighting for the chance to retell the same story to the same audience.

Calling the packed masses of angry leftists in Ferguson “reporters” is a little unfair. Even the term media is mostly meaningless. Ferguson is packed with reporters from national and local news networks. Alongside them are crews from enemy state propaganda outlets like Al Jazeera and RT. And they’re the cream of the crop compared to Vice, Infowars and activists with digital cameras selling what they shoot to anyone who will buy it.

Every young leftist who is afraid of going Syria or Gaza has come down to Ferguson to pad his Instagram with something besides photos of last night’s dinner. Activism is to today’s privileged liberal youth what taking a year off to tour Europe used to be to their parents and grandparents. Instead of backpacking through France, they pop some camera gear into their messenger bags and head down to Ferguson to link hands with another Evergreen or Vassar grad while shouting about justice before posing for selfies.

This groundbreaking activism will be a jumping off point for their actual careers in the media where all the Evergreen and Vassar grads will meet once again, except they’ll be wearing suits or power suits and reading from a prepared script and reminiscing about the good times shouting at the cops back in 2014.

The problem in Ferguson revolves around the media the way that the earth revolves around the sun.

There’s no point in marching around and shaking your fists if no one is paying attention to you. The riots and looting will continue for as long as there are correspondents there to shove cameras into angry faces while asking them what it is that they are so angry about. And if they aren’t angry yet, they’ll find something to be angry about if they want to be on the evening news.

Your evening news is no different than reality television. The impromptu performers know what is expected of them and the producers and writers know the story that they want to tell. The rest is improvisation which will be polished and assembled into a more coherent story in post-production.

Most in this media savvy age already know what is expected of them. If they meet Jay Leno with a camera, they know that giving the dumbest possible answer to his questions about history is the way to get on television. If they’re cast on a reality show, they know that behaving like unhinged lunatics will keep the camera on them as long as possible. And if they’re in Ferguson, they know to shout about justice and peace while making death threats because that’s what will get them on television.

Whether it’s reporting on race riots or mass killings, the media perpetuates the behavior that it’s decrying because it delivers ratings and serves its political agenda. Most of the time its talking heads denounce a problem that has always existed and then move on to the next topic. That’s destructive because we are constantly “rediscovering” problems that have never gone away. But it’s even worse when the media camps out and refuses to go away.

Just ask the Israelis.

Thirty years ago international correspondents were paying small boys to throw rocks at Israeli tanks. These days the rocks have been replaced by rockets and the media carefully edits the footage to show the Israeli response not the Hamas attack. The ratings go through the roof and so do the rockets.

The conflict is an open wound because, like Ferguson, it attracted every reporter, stringer and random activist with a camera and a sociology degree to chronicle it. And if there’s no violence, then there’s nothing to chronicle. When terrorists attack Israel, they know that a media army will be there to tell the world their side of the story giving them every possible reason to use violence to control world opinion.

When the media colonizes a conflict, it turns into an open wound that can never heal because healing is a nice short term story, but conflict is an even better long term story. That’s what it is doing in Ferguson.

If Ferguson had never become a national story, the violence would already be over and the kids would be headed to school. But the violence can’t end as long as the media keeps rewarding the violent with attention and encouragement. The very presence of the media encourages protests by promising that an extra-legal option to shortcut the process will give them what they want. And Governor Nixon has already all but promised it to them. And that too is just another way of perpetuating the violence.

The media can be defeated. Its mass of scribblers, photographers and teleprompter readers follows the smell of blood. If a wound is open, they will tear it open and keep it from closing. But if the wound is closed, they have to pack up their tents and go find another bloody mess to feast on.

Don’t reason with them. Making the mistake of trying to win the media over is even more useless. All you can do is cut off their supply by shutting down the conflict as hard and fast as possible. The short term publicity will be ugly, but an ugly media day is better than a bad media month or year.

Conflict is the vital fluid of any narrative. Take away the conflict and there is no longer a story. Without a bleeding wound, the swarming media mobs toting cameras, microphones and iPads will follow the trail of blood to their next story. And then they will become someone else’s problem.

Media conveys immediacy, but it doesn't convey culture. Its famous flattening effect makes shoppers at a Staples in D.C. or a Whole Foods in Berkeley feel like they're right among the toppled buildings of Aleppo or Gaza, without actually giving them any insight into the motivations of the players.

They're watching foreign movies in a language that they don't understand and attributing their own motivations to the main characters. They assume that the differences are incidental, but if the differences really were incidental, America would look a lot more like Iraq.

It's been a while since Westerners lived in a society in which human life was truly worthless, in which no one trusted anyone else and it was easier to kill than not to kill.

Outside of a few urban centers in the Middle East where the elites start the revolutions that end up stringing them from the gallows, life is cheap and worthless. Men kill their wives and daughters over petty suspicions. Clans murder each other in vicious brawls. Wedding celebrations begin with firing guns into the air and end with bodies on the ground.

Everything is worth more than people. A camel has value. A pickup truck has value. A smartphone has value. All these things are hard to make.

People are easy to make.

The birth rates are high. Everywhere there are too many people. Too many sons to inherit. Too many daughters to marry off. 

The UN and a whole bunch of international organizations slop in enough aid to keep hunger and disease away, but not enough to make life livable or worthwhile. The wealthy have satellite dishes on which they watch American reality shows and Turkish soaps. The poor kidnap them and hold them for ransom. It's not just life in the Middle East. It's the whole Third World experience.

About the only reliable source of wealth comes out of the ground and the countries that have it are usually too lazy to get it themselves. That's what the armies of Western engineers are for. They don't build their own skyscrapers with the oil money. That's what the disposable Asian workers are for.

Killing is the easiest solution to most problems. Men kill over honor. Women kill themselves out of desperation. Children grow up torturing animals.

Clerics settle religious questions with murder. It's just easier that way.

Theological debates are complicated and impossible to settle, but fly the black flags, seize a village, kill the men and force the women to convert to the true faith of the machine gun and the sword and the debate is over.

ISIS is how Islam has been settling questions of theology since the 7th century. Why stop now just because you can order takeout from your smartphone? Westerners are innately fascinated by new technology. For the Middle East, technology is a tool for settling medieval disputes. Twitter is just a way of showing off your latest crop of severed heads. The pickup truck substitutes for a camel.

Politicians settle political debates with more murders. Elections are complicated. Democracy is messy. It's easier for a colonel to take everyone out back and shoot them. And then spend the next twenty years building palaces with his people's wealth. And the people mostly like it that way too.

The question isn't why should they kill, it's why should they stop? The peace proposals never get anywhere. If you reward violence with concessions, there's no reason for it to ever stop.  And if you don't, what else is there to do?

When life is worthless, everyone has a gun and a grudge, it's easier to kill than not to kill. You can see that phenomenon as readily in Chicago as in Iraq. Why not shoot the guy next door because he owes you money, because your daughter looked at him twice, because he's on your turf or because he's a Kurd.

Or because it's Thursday.

Under crowded conditions, life is cheap but honor is expensive. Fights start over the pettiest things and escalate into relentless violence. You can see it in Yemen or in Ferguson. Everyone is just waiting for an excuse to be angry about something and to take it out on someone else.

The Western Urbanites who helicopter parent their 2.5 children into a Prozac prescription and lament their disposable society don't understand what a truly disposable society looks like even though they probably live less than a mile away from one of those.

In a disposable society, people have no value. Children have no value. Human labor has no value. If you want something done, you force someone to do it. If you can't have your own slaves, you can control an extended family. You don't think in terms of what it costs to make something. The only cost that matters is the cost of imports. Everything else is inhumanely cheap.

Emotional reactions always trump rational ones. Everyone feels put upon and slighted from the biggest prince to the lowliest laborer. Everyone is filled with resentments that they channel through the Koran and the mad preachings of Islamic clerics promising holy wars and blaming everything on the CIA, the Freemasons and the Jews.

When it gets hot enough, the killings begin and they usually don't stop until the weather cools down. The black flags fly. The yellow flags fly. The green flags fly. And you can either play the game or get beheaded on the evening news.

Maybe both.

There's no morality out here. The men are careful not to look at a donkey or a woman while praying to Allah. But they have no sense of ethics. They will casually kill, steal, rape, break oaths and a commit a hundred other crimes before breakfast.

If you're not a member of their family, you're fair game. If you are, you had better know your place and help with the stealing, kidnapping and assorted economic empowerment projects.

Killing is easy. Self-control is hard. If there's no accountability, no local bigshot that wants infidel tourists and their dollars and will make the killer's family suffer, then he has no reason not to beat you, steal from you or drag you into a home in some slum somewhere and wait for the fabled wealthy infidels to pay him a king's ransom.

If not he always cut off your head to raise the price on the next one.

His life is cheap, but yours is even cheaper.

It's best to understand that we are not dealing with a moral code that looks anything like our own. The nastier qualities of human nature, deceit, violence and greed, are practically virtues. Especially if they are directed at the right targets.

There's a reason that Islam was born here. There's a reason that it still thrives here largely in its unaltered form. There is no civilization where the black flags fly.

Let's say that Chester A. Maxwell decides that he hates America. He takes a flight from Massachusetts to Paris, renounces his citizenship and spends the rest of his life stomping up and down the beaches of France and screaming imprecations at Americans.

Our friend Chester is not a self-hating American because he is no longer an American. He may have an American accent, like the same foods, books and movies that give him a common reference point with many of his old countymen and otherwise be mistaken for one of the gang. But he isn't.

Even if he chooses to continue describing himself as an American, it's a meaningless self-description. 'American' is a group identity. Not an individual identity. You cannot be an American who does not want to be part of America or to associate with other Americans.

Nor is Chester self-hating. Just because he hates America and Americans doesn't mean that he hates himself. He probably likes himself a good deal. People with poor self-images rarely reject group identities. Those who reject a group identity this vehemently tend to be extremely egotistical.

Now suppose Chester Maxwell's real name is Howard F. Goldstein and he spends all his time screaming about Israel from Ann Arbor. When he speaks, his accent has more than a little Brooklyn in it, his bookshelves are lined with books by Jewish authors and he has a fondness for knishes.

Accuse him of anti-Semitism and he exclaims that he's a Jew. But Howard is as Jewish as Chester is American.

Jewish is a group identity. There is no such thing as an individual Jew. No man is an island and certainly no Jew is. Someone who is not part of the Jewish people is not a Jew. 

The term self-hating Jew is also self-nullifying.  Self-hating Jews rarely hate themselves, though sometimes the neurotic stereotypes hold true. And someone who hates Jews is not a Jew.

Modernism has confused many of these issues. Pundits scratch their heads wondering whether the Jews are a religion, an ethnic group or a nation... when they have always been all three. Likewise the left has defined bigotry exclusively in terms of an oppressor-oppressed relationship. And while bigotry can relate to the attitude of an oppressor toward the oppressed, it is not limited to that. It is possible for bigotry to exist without power relationships and even within a particular group.

The anti-Semitic Jew is as real a manifestation as white liberals who emphasize their disdain for white people or the middle class black man who sneers at most of his own race as 'ghetto'.

Jewish anti-Semites hate Jews for most of the same reasons that his fellow non-Jewish anti-Semites do. He may focus in on certain perceived Jewish traits that he despises, he may feel injured in some way by Jews as a group, but these and other examples are instances of viewing Jews as an "Other".

By viewing Jews as an "Other", the Jewish anti-Semite concedes that he is no longer a Jew, no matter how much Brooklyn there is in his voice or how many Jewish authors line his bookshelf.

The most common anti-Semitism is the explicit perception of Jews as an "Other" who are seperatists and disrupt the larger society by clannishly holding themselves apart from it for their own agenda. The left's expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have always consisted of this same critique. And the most common Jewish anti-Semites today are those of the left.

The Jews who publicly beat their breasts in the pages of the New York Times or on Twitter about how "conflicted" they feel because of what Israel is doing in Gaza are torn between two identities. One is a subordinate Jewish identity and the other is the dominant identity of the left. The left views Jews and the Jewish State as an "Other" and they see the scraps of their Jewish identity as an "Other". A cruel murderous Nazi-like "Other" who senselessly kills children out of fanatical nationalism.

Full-blown Jewish anti-Semites are not conflicted. They simply view Jews as a group as an "Other". They are not Jews. No more than Chester is an American. They simply have some of the cultural markers.

Out of the postmodern confusion of the multicultural society arose the old anti-Semitic perception, now embraced by Jewish secularists, that a Jew was an individual with a series of common traits. The stereotypes that these Jews clung to (humor, neurosis, Chinese food on Christmas) were not the same ones as the general perception (good with numbers, nerdy, greedy) but they amounted to the same thing. Jewish identity was reduced to a set of behaviors associated with a particular time and place in American Jewish life. Jewish comedians and writers turned the stereotypes into cultural markers.

The stereotypes had nothing to do with Jewish identity. A quick look at  Yemenite Jews would confirm that. They were markers associated with some urban centers in some parts of the United States around the early and middle parts of the 20th century. Most of them are vanishing now. They were never anything more than cultural immune system reactions, neurotic multicultural rashes.

This confusion of stereotypical traits with identity is what leads some to identify Woody Allen as a quintessential Jew when he has no Jewish identity and is not Jewish in any sense that matters. Confusing a display of stereotypes with identity would make Al Jolson black and Mickey Rooney Asian.

The question of "Who is a Jew" has endlessly and needlessly complicated. When the question is broken down into modern categories like race and religion and then run through the filter of individually constructed identities and assorted stereotypes, it becomes endlessly confusing.

But it doesn't have to be.

Jews are a family united by a common religion and originating from a single land. They have been described as a religious civilization. Considering the Bible as the oldest history of the Jewish people and the Jewish role in the world's religions, that seems like an apt description.

Like any family, it is possible to marry into it. It is not however possible to leave it and remain a Jew.

The most significant part of Jewish identity is not who your parents were, but who your children will be. It is possible to be a Jew if your parents were not Jewish. It is not however possible to pull a Chester, to stomp around the beaches of France insisting that you're an American. If Chester marries in France, his children and grandchildren will be French. Chester's American identity ends with him.

There are real examples of that, such as the Confederados of Brazil who still have the gray uniforms and bits and pieces of Southern history, but whose children don't speak English and haven't been to the United States. America is a distant cultural legacy to them, but they are now Brazilians.

Being Jewish is not an accident. It's not a collection of Woody Allen movies or any other meaningfully meaningless cultural signifiers from 20th century New York.

It's Jewish children who raise other Jewish children who will go on to do the same thing.

The Jews of the present day are only a cross-section of the Jewish People in its entirety, comprising the past, present and future. It is possible to enter that cross-section in the past and the present. But once you step out of that cross-section in the present, you are out of that civilization for good.

The so-called "Self-Hating Jew" has stepped out of Jewish history. He remains behind only as an antagonist in the dim recollections of the descendants of the people he has tried to destroy. He may protest that his hatred is founded on some pure source of what Jewish ethics ought to be, but it is not possible for an individual to define Jewishness on his own terms in a way that will last across time.

It takes a great deal to maintain a civilization across thousands of years. Whatever else the civilization does, it must perpetuate itself to exist. If it cannot pass down its values to its children in a way that will be perpetuated countless centuries from now, it will cease to exist.

Civilizations are the trains that ride the tracks of time. You are either on the train or you aren't. Either you maintain the train or it breaks down and your civilization ends. If your civilization is mobile and flexible, then when the train is destroyed you learn to ride a bike. When the bike breaks, you run for a while and hitch a ride. When the tide floods the tracks, you build a boat. When the water dries, you slowly and patiently build another train. That's what the Jews have been doing for a long time.

Adaptability can be dangerous. Those whose minds are too open, lose them. The same biological flexibility that provides vitality also leads to mutations and cancers. Being able to adapt to catastrophic changes makes it more likely that the group will survive, but that you will also lose a lot of individuals along the way. That is what happened to the Jewish People in the last century.

In this century the effects of those crises will be resolved in one way or another. The dead ends will die off. They will leave behind few Jewish children and fewer Jewish grandchildren. It will take some time, but the demographic impact can already be seen in New York. It will be seen elsewhere too.

The leftist Jew who sees the members of the Jewish civilization as an "Other" is a dinosaur. And he
knows it and like the dinosaurs, he will do as much damage as he can on the way out. His organizations will wreak havoc. They will work to destroy the Jewish State and wage war on traditionalist Jews. That is what has been happening in this generation.

Like the Jewish Communist, he has no future. He has a past. But to have a past and no future is to be irrelevant. The Jewish Communists of Russia came from Jewish homes and went to cold graves. Their Western counterparts will fill out cemeteries leaving behind multicultural descendants. Their numbers, for now, appear intimidating, but looking at the cross-section of the Jewish People, they are already gone. It's easy enough to see that in the demographic picture of the next generation.

The self-hating Jew is not a Jew. He is not part of the Jewish civilization moving through time. He may have a Jewish past, but he has no Jewish future.

His malice causes damage in the present, but it is the frustrated act of a mortal man who knows that he has no future, that he will leave behind no legacy that a century of time will not wash away as thoroughly as the debris in the gutter.

There are no self-hating Jews. There are Jews who hate the Jewish People. Their hatred excludes them from the thing that they hate. By Othering Jews, they only Other themselves. Their books, their petitions, their jokes and their protests, their boat trips to Gaza and their letters from 199 Rabbis Against the Occupation and all the other symptoms of their hatred exist in the present, but not the past or the future. In the totality of Jewish civilization across time, they are already gone.

Daniel Tregerman, a four-year-old boy, was killed by a terrorist rocket from Gaza launched from near a UNRWA school.

“Daniel was disciplined and was always quick to get to shelter. Once the alarm sounded, he always knew what to do and where to go.  Always."

"When everyone would come to the shelter, Daniel would say, ‘Now we are all safe.’”

Hamas Rocket Fired Near UNRWA School Kills 4-Year-Old Boy




15 SECONDS

An Israeli father was moderately injured by shrapnel Thursday morning, moments after he helped a group of young children — including his son, whose birthday it was — to scramble to safety when a rocket slammed into the Eshkol region community kindergarten

Jan Berman, 35, and his wife Leora had brought their three-year-old son to the kindergarten for his birthday celebration that morning, when a siren sounded, warning of an incoming projectile from Gaza.

The Eshkol region is so close to the Palestinian enclave that the rocket warning system allows just 15 seconds to run for cover.

With many children still gathered outside the kindergarten, Berman and the kindergarten teacher dashed to herd them inside the building that was reinforced against rocket attacks. As the last of the kids made it into the building, a rocket struck. Although Berman was inside, shrapnel blasted through a window, injuring him in the arm.

“As the Last of the Kids Made it Into the Building, a Rocket Struck”




“13 Year Old Boy” Killed by Israel Turns Out to be Adult PLO Terrorist




NO

Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda? cnn.com/2012/08/07/opinion/bergen-terrorism-wisconsin/index.html … #cnn

James W. Foley - 5:32 PM - 7 Aug 2012

James Foley Went Looking to Support Terrorists in Syria, Instead They Cut Off His Head




36 Shot in Chicago, Obama Sends 40 FBI Agents to Ferguson




NO MEDIA COVERAGE, NO PEACE

Ferguson happens a few times every month. More often in the summer when tempers are hot and crowds of bored men and women fill the streets looking for something to do. Teenagers ransack stores. Small cities stretch their budgets in a bad economy to put as many cops as they can on the street.

And then somewhere between the open fire hydrants, the stores that do most of their business in EBT cards and lottery tickets, the check cashing places and furniture rental outlets, something happens.

A crowd gathers. Fists rise in the air. The police deploy. The EBT stores, check cashing places and furniture rental outlets roll down their shutters. A tense hour passes before the scene fades away leaving behind a crude graffiti scrawl of a wannabe gangsta and his favorite pit bull, a few faded color photos and some purple candles guttering in the night underneath his portrait.

Obama’s Racism for Fun and Profit

... from the comments

You do not see the bigger systemic problem where in a country as wealthy as the United States, with 442 Billionaires, 9.63 million Millionaires, a Michael Brown is forced into such wretchedness by the system to steal from a grocery store.

The tragedy of a country with 200 trillion billionaires that forced Michael Brown to steal cigars to feed his starving family.



A GAZA GROWS IN NORWAY

Suppose a little Gaza is set up in downtown Oslo. Does it end there? Obviously not. This local ISIS draws its support from Muslim Supremacists who believe that they have superior rights to the land. That means they’ll expand. If their little Gaza in Grønland is cut off, they’ll launch terrorist attacks, rockets and dig tunnels.

Terrorism is the inevitable outcome of Muslim colonialism and settlement.

Islamic Terrorist Group Demands Islamic State… in Downtown Oslo




FORE

“Next week, President Obama intends to challenge the Caliph of ISIS to 19 holes at the Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course in Hawaii,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “His entire administration, all his experiences, have been leading up to this point. Every time conservatives ridiculed him, he was actually training for the day when he will personally defeat ISIL. At golf.”

However in an exclusive interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary Clinton suggested that challenging the Caliph to a golf game wasn’t much of a strategy.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” the former Secretary of State said. “Maybe challenge him to a game of ping pong in the tradition of the US rapprochement with China. Or to see who can best defend a 12-year-old girl’s rapist by calling her a mentally ill slut. I could do that one again in my sleep.”

Obama Challenges Caliph of ISIS to Golf Game




PRIORITIES

Obama: “The Golf Game Did Not Reflect the Depth of his Grief Over Mr. Foley”

Obama Delayed Rescue of US Hostages Until it Was Too Late

Obama’s Rescue Release Puts Americans in Danger

Biden: Iraq Could Be One of Obama’s Greatest Achievements




DREAM BIG

And though we may be divided by race, gender and creed, we can all feel a moment of solidarity as we watch Chris Hayes awkwardly dodge rocks while trying to keep his glasses on his head.

It’s a moment that reminds us of our common humanity. It tells us that no matter how bad things get in this country, we’ll always have this animated GIF of people throwing rocks at Chris Hayes.

This Animated GIF of Ferguson Protesters Throwing Rocks at Chris Hayes Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity




ABRACADABRA

“The airport staff suspected the passenger, so they inspected his luggage and found books that contained spells, mostly in unknown languages, and some suspicious tools which seem to be used for black magic,” said Colonel Rashid Bursheed, the head of the organized crime section at the Criminal Investigations Department.

Saudi Arabia Beheads Man for Being a Sorcrerer




THEY SENT THE WRONG ONE TO PRISON

The higher-profile names included home-decorating maven Martha Stewart, former Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, all of whom chatted with Clinton in a private area in the store before the official signing began. “Martha! Martha!” the photographers who had been allowed inside the store called out, hoping for her to look up as she chatted with Clinton.

Hillary Clinton Connects w/Ordinary Working People in the Hamptons




COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM

The great genius of Arab and Islamic supremacism was their pretense that the Jewish story of an indigenous minority resisting their colonialism was really their own story. Having failed to destroy every culture that they had conquered, they instead appropriated their stories, painting their fallen empires as the tragic victims of the imperialism of the very people whom they had conquered and oppressed.

Edward Said tainted scholarship with this revisionist nationalist history. His defense of Arab and Islamic colonialism in an era in which academia no longer looked kindly on conquerors required him to turn history on its head and manufacture a narrative of oppressed colonizers suffering at the hands of the newly liberated indigenous people whom they had oppressed.

This local perversion of history fitted into the larger global perversion of Orientalism which indicted Middle Eastern scholarship for its intellectual colonialism as part of Said’s effort to colonize the study of the Middle East with his own tribal nationalism. Like a thief who pretends to be a policeman to scare away the other competing thieves he imagines are lurking nearby, Edward Said disguised the imperialism and colonialism of his agenda by dressing it up as anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.

Edward Said: Oppressed Fraud





GAO says Taliban Release Violated Law, So Where is Obama’s Mugshot?




MOHAMMED WAS THE ORIGINAL FEMINIST

The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: When one of you asked a woman in marriage, if he is able to look at what will induce him to marry her, he should do so. He (Jabir) said: I asked a girl in marriage, I used to look at her secretly, until I looked at what induced me to marry her. I, therefore, married her.

Book 11, Number 2077: Narrated Jabir ibn Abdullah:

“From Anas ibn Maalik (may Allaah be pleased with him)” ‘The Prophet wanted to marry a woman, so he sent another woman to look at her and said, “Smell her mouth and look at the back of her ankles.”

Egyptian Imam Issues Ladies Room Invasion Fatwa




Obama Shot Down Saturday Night Live Cartoon About Islamic Terrorism




HEDY EPSTEIN, OPPRESSED BLACK MAN

Making a career for yourself as a fake Holocaust survivor is horrible enough. Marketing yourself as a fake Holocaust survivor who attacks Jews is even worse. But that’s what Hedy Epstein, a “Holocaust Survivor” who survived the Holocaust in the UK, has been doing.

But then Michael Brown stole the spotlight from Hedy Epstein‘s latest Gaza tantrum, so she headed to Ferguson to get herself arrested.

Next week Hedy Epstein will be claiming that she’s a black man.

Hedy Epstein, Fake Holocaust Survivor, Gets Desperate for Attention, Goes to Ferguson





New Jersey Muslim “Innocently” Flying ISIS Flag “Liked” Conspirator in WTC Bombing




BUT BEING A HIPSTER IS...

Why is this white woman holding up a skateboard with “Being Black is Not a Crime?” scrawled on it.

Why is she doing it in Hell’s Kitchen, a formerly edgy area that has now been thoroughly gentrified. Do these people have no sense of irony at all.

Angry White Hipsters Protest Michael Brown Shooting in New York




THE ROUNDUP

 Moe Lane on the New York Times' sour grapes. Liz Harrison at Politichicks on Feminism and Free Stuff. Mark Tapson on Obama's Empty Rhetoric. Space Ramblings on what killed Robin Williams. David Harsanyi on Sharpton's newfound respectability. Tel Chai Nation on the danger of talking to Hamas. Ed Driscoll on the Dumbing down of everything.



GIFTING ONESELF TO SAVAGES

 James Foley, from Rochester, New Hampshire, was one of those romantics who step out from a world of safety to flirt with violence, the more extreme the better; imagining that his opinions against his own country and condescendingly sympathetic to its ideological and terrorist enemies, would make him a gift to them, protected and invulnerable.

In the event, the savage Muslim jihadis didn’t give a damn for his opinions. They killed him because he was an American.

A would-be traitor to his country, he was forced to die for it.

A Twilight Zone moment on James Foley from Jillian at The Atheist Conservative. "The man who gifted himself to savages" is her title.




NOW EVERYONE CAN PLAY THE JIHAD GAME

So in other words, we need to make them citizens or else, since it’s our fault, they will resort to terrorism. I hate to tell this loon but actually gangs like MS-13 are already here! And as we reported, ISIS may be too.

Talk about fear mongering and threats — how much worse could it get? So what, we are now “occupiers”? It’s inane statements like this that really makes me question the sanity of progressive socialists.

...from Allen West.



MORE ON LEFTY MADNESS

Bob Ellis is an illustrious Australian playwright, screenwriter, journalist, filmmaker, and political commentator. Ellis has attracted a great deal of international attention (and incredulity) for his hyper-sophisticated remarks yesterday wondering why there should be so much outrage over the beheading of James Foley by a representative of ISIS. If Joffrey Baratheon can have Ned Stark beheaded, after all…

The only possible observation is that decadence, deracination, and over-exposure to left-wing BS damages the brain and anesthetizes natural human sensibilities, making some people unable to distinguish between contemporary reality and fiction.

...from Never Yet Melted



THE READING

Writing about Ferguson has become a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into the town and its environs, to sit outside of undestroyed, un-looted shops, clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with other leftists and the oppressed protester or grieving mother of the week.

Ferguson is hot (well, it is August) with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface, except when it's no longer a suggestion but a volcanic eruption. Ferguson should be described as a "troubled town." Throw in occasional ironic references to civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr., and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize the cops and shopkeepers, personalize blacks. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A blacks-only looting and torching a Korean-owned store is always in retaliation for something, but a shopkeeper's defending his property with a gun is rarely a retaliation for anything. When shopkeepers repel a mob by simply waving their guns from a rooftop, suggest that this latest action only feeds the "Cycle of Violence" and quote some official who urges the shopkeepers to talk and negotiate with those who would harm them – whether or not there actually is anything to talk about. Well, maybe free Swisher cigars for the overweight among the mob, with unlimited EBT card use at the counter.

...from Edward Cline at Rule of Reason

The interior of the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store is littered with broken bottles and scattered snacks. Despite the plywood boards covering the windows and doors, looters with their faces covered in bandanas helped themselves to anything they could find as those who came to memorialize Michael Brown carried on his work.

The violence in Ferguson didn't begin when a police officer shot Michael Brown. It began when a 300 lb thug robbed the Ferguson Market and abused a clerk. The release of the video showing the obese criminal assaulting the clerk led to a terrified statement from the store manager that he had not called the police and had nothing to do with the release of the video.

The media gave us every detail of Clayton Lockett's suffering after his botched execution. It didn't tell us how he raped one teenage girl and shot her friend and buried her alive while she begged for her life. It didn't even tell us that Lockett died horribly because opponents of the death penalty had been working overtime to cut off the supply of reliable lethal injection drugs.

Without that context, the justice system seemed monstrous for making a man suffer while the monster was passed off as the innocent victim of the senseless brutality of the system.

This is why the left tears away the context from a crisis. If we began to genuinely discuss why there are police officers dressed like soldiers or TSA agents examining your shoes, the line would trace all the way back to the policies and agendas of the left.

The left isn't just covering up for the rioters and the looters, the terrorists and the murderers. It is covering up its own role in causing all of this.

That is why its cultural apparatus snips away the context, reacting to the reaction as if it were the cause. The left keeps yammering about finding the root cause, but it is the root cause. The root cause isn't poverty. It's not racism. It's the left.

Communists realized how useful race riots and the authoritarian backlash could be to their agenda. Terrorists don't just aim for the target; they also exploit the fallout to polarize a society.

That is what the left has been doing for generations since.

Everything from the Weathermen to September 11 became a means of polarizing the response while removing the context. The left plants the bombs and then acts as if the security men running around are insane fascists who could have no other possible motive except abusing innocent people.

Ferguson is more of the same. The left's army of activists and reporters troop down to the city. The activists start the violence while the reporters dramatize it. The coverage polarizes Americans and gives the left another hook for hanging on to power long after its economic policies have been as thoroughly discredited as those of the Soviet Union.

Law enforcement is an immune system. If we have an overdeveloped and oversensitive immune system, that's worth discussing, but it has to be discussed in the context of the infection it is reacting to. Until we treat the infection of the left, the country will be caught in the same cycle of crime and authoritarian backlash, liberals who open the door for criminals and conservatives who slam it shut.

Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS.

ISIS is not a new phenomenon.

Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson.

That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the Iraqi city of Kerbala in 1802 on the United States or an oil pipeline.

Forget the media portrayals of ISIS as a new extreme group that even the newly moderate Al Qaeda thinks is over the top, its armies are doing the same things that Wahhabi armies have been doing for centuries. ISIS has Twitter accounts, pickup trucks and other borrowed Western technology, but otherwise it’s just a recurring phenomenon that has always been part of Islam. Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for over a thousand years. Declaring other Muslims to be infidels and killing them is also a lot older than the suicide bomb vest.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are at odds because its Iraqi namesake had a different agenda. Al Qaeda always had different factions with their own agendas. These factions were not more extreme or less extreme. They just had different nationalistic backgrounds and aims.

The Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda was obsessed with Egypt. Bin Laden was obsessed with Saudi Arabia. Some in Al Qaeda wanted a total world war. Others wanted to focus on taking over Muslim countries as bases. These differences sometimes led to threats and even violence among Al Qaeda members.

Bin Laden prioritized Saudi Arabia and America. That made it possible for Al Qaeda to pick up training from Hezbollah which helped make 9/11 possible. This low level cooperation with Iran was endangered when Al Qaeda in Iraq made fighting a religious war with Shiites into its priority.

That did not mean that Bin Laden liked Shiites and thought that AQIQ was “extreme” for killing them. This was a tactical disagreement over means.

During the Iraq War, Bin Laden had endorsed Al Qaeda in Iraq’s goal of fighting the Shiite “Rejectionists” by framing it as an attack on America. AQIQ’s Zarqawi had privately made it clear that he would not pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden unless the terrorist leader endorsed his campaign against Shiites.

Bin Laden and the Taliban had been equally comfortable with Sipahe Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi which provided manpower for the Taliban while massacring Shiites in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year LEJ had killed over a hundred Shiite Hazaras in one bombing.

The narrative that ISIS was more extreme than Al Qaeda because it killed Shiites and other Muslims doesn’t hold up in even recent history.

The media finds it convenient to depict the rise of newly extremist groups being radicalized by American foreign policy, Israeli blockades or Danish cartoons. A closer look however shows us that these groups did not become radicalized, rather they increased their capabilities.

ISIS understood from the very beginning that targeting Shiites and later Kurds would give it more appeal to Sunni Arabs inside Iraq and around the Persian Gulf. Bin Laden tried to rally Muslims by attacking America. ISIS has rallied Muslims by killing Shiites, Kurds, Christians and anyone else it can find.

Every news report insists that ISIS is an extreme outlier, but if that were really true then it would not have been able to conquer sizable chunks of Iraq and Syria. ISIS became huge and powerful because its ideology drew the most fighters and the most financial support. ISIS is powerful because it’s popular.

ISIS has become more popular and more powerful than Al Qaeda because Muslims hate other Muslims even more than they hate America. Media reports treat ISIS as an outside force that inexplicably rolls across Iraq and terrorizes everyone in its path. In reality, it’s the public face of a Sunni coalition. When ISIS massacres Yazidis, it’s not just following an ideology; it’s giving Sunni Arabs what they want.

Jamal Jamir, a surviving Yazidi, told CNN that his Arab neighbors had joined in the killing.

ISIS is dominating parts of Iraq and Syria because it draws on the support of a sizable part of the Sunni Arab population. It has their support because it is committed to killing or driving out Christians, Yazidis, Shiites and a long list of peoples in Iraq who either aren’t Muslims or aren’t Arabs and giving their land and possessions to the Sunni Arabs.

The media spent years denying that the Syrian Civil War was a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s unable to deny the obvious in Iraq, but it carefully avoids considering the implications.

Genocides are local. They are rarely carried out without the consent and participation of the locals. An army alone will have trouble committing genocide unless it has the cooperation of a local population that wants to see another group exterminated. When we talk about ISIS, we are really talking about Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria. Not all of them, but enough that ISIS and its associated groups have become the standard bearers of the Sunni civil wars in Syria and Iraq.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain can complain that we could have avoided the rise of ISIS if we had only armed the right sort of Jihadists in Syria. But if ISIS became dominant because its agenda had popular support, then it would not have mattered whom we armed or didn’t arm.

We armed the Iraqi military to the teeth, but it didn’t do any good because the military didn’t represent any larger consensus in an Iraq divided along religious and ethnic lines.

To understand ISIS, we have to unlearn many of the bad ideas we picked up since September 11. Terrorists, the media tell us, represent some extreme edge of the population. If they have popular support, it’s only because the civilian population has somehow become radicalized. (And usually it’s our fault.)

And yet that model doesn’t hold up. It never did.

The religious and ethnic strife in the Middle East out of which ISIS emerged and which has become its brand, goes back over a thousand years. If support for terrorism emerges from radicalization, then the armies of Islam were radicalized in the time of Mohammed and have never been de-radicalized.

Terrorism is not reactive. As ISIS has shown us, it has a vision for the future. The Caliphate, like the Reich, is a utopia which can only be created through the mass murder and repression of all those who do not belong. This isn’t a new vision. It’s the founding vision of Islam.

What is wrong with ISIS is what is wrong with Islam.

We can defeat ISIS, but we should remember that its roots are in the hearts of the Sunni Muslims who have supported it. ISIS and Al Qaeda are only symptoms of the larger problem.

We can see the larger problem flying Jihadist flags in London and New Jersey. We can see it trooping through Australian and Canadian airports to join ISIS. We can see it in the eyes of the Sunni Arabs murdering their Yazidi neighbors. ISIS is an expression of the murderous hate within Islam. We are not only at war with an acronym, but with the dark hatred in the hearts of men, some of whom are in Iraq and Pakistan. And some of whom live next door.

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week.

At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won't give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn't hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week's outrage.

Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a "troubled land." Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.

Avoid mentioning all the mansions that you pass on the way to interviewing some Palestinian Authority or Hamas bigwig. When visiting a terrorist prisoner in an Israeli jail, be sure to call him a militant, somewhere in the fifth paragraph, but do not mention the sheer amount of food in the prison, especially if he is on a hunger strike. If you happen to notice that the prisoners live better than most Israelis, that is something you will not refer to. Instead describe them as passionate and embittered. Never ask them how many children they killed or how much they make a month. Ask them what they think the prospects for peace are. Nod knowingly when they say that it's up to Israel.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize Israelis, personalize Muslims. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A Muslim terrorist attack is always in retaliation for something, but an Israeli attack is rarely a retaliation for anything. When Israeli planes bomb a terrorist hideout, suggest that this latest action only feeds the "Cycle of Violence" and quote some official who urges Israel to return to peace negotiations-- whether or not there actually are any negotiations to return to.

Center everything around peace negotiations. If Israel has any domestic politics that don't involve checkpoints and air strikes, do your best to avoid learning about them. Frame all Israeli politics by asking whether a politician is finally willing to make the compromises that you think are necessary for peace. Always sigh regretfully and find them wanting. Assume that all Israelis think the same way. Every vote is a referendum on the peace process. A vote for a conservative party means that Israelis hate peace.

The Israelis can also be divided into two categories. There are the good Israelis, who wear glasses, own iPads and live in trendy neighborhoods. They are very concerned that the country is losing its soul by oppressing another people. They strum out-of-date American peace songs on guitars that they play badly, but which you will describe them as playing "soulfully", and they show up at rallies demanding that the government make peace with the Palestinians.

Your good Israelis invariably volunteer or work for some NGO, a fact that you may or may not mention in your article, but you are not to discuss who funds their NGO, particularly if it's a foreign government. Write about them as if they are the hope of an otherwise brutish and unreasonable Israel too obsessed with killing and destroying to listen to the hopeful voices of its children.

When writing about them, act as if they are representative of the country's youth and its best and brightest, which for all you know they might be, because you rarely meet anyone who isn't like them, because you rarely meet anyone who isn't like you. When you do it's either a taxi driver, repairman or some working-class fellow whom you have nothing in common with, and who turns out to be a raving militant when it comes to the terrorism question.

These are the other Israelis. The big swarthy men who have no interest in alternative art exhibits. If you have to deal with them at all, get a quote from them about their hopes for peace and how much they dislike the government. Pretend that the two things are connected, and that everything that your friends, who are aspiring artists and playwrights, as well as volunteer humanitarians, told you about the country being ready to rise up against right-wingers like Barak and Netanyahu, to demand peace, is absolutely true. Don't ask yourself why the country keeps electing right-wingers; if you do, turn it into an essay that touches on Holocaust trauma and biblical hatred.

At some point, you will have to write about the thin bearded men in black hats rushing through the streets on their inscrutable errands. Describe them as "Ultra-Orthodox", even if the word does not seem to mean anything, and pretend that they're all the same. If anyone tries to explain the distinctions to you, ignore them. When writing about them, be sure to imply that they are ignorant and fanatical. Mention their growing numbers as a danger to the survival of the state, associate them wrongly with the right wing and throw in some of the complaints from your friends about the "Schorim", the blacks,  moving in and destroying secular neighborhoods.

Israeli soldiers should be depicted looming menacingly over children. Your stringers are already experienced at urging a child into camera range, then getting down on one knee and tilting the camera up just as an Israeli soldier walks into the frame. If there isn't time to set up the shot, get what you can. The photo can be cropped afterward to show just the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian child, even if the two are not actually interacting in any way.

In print, contrast the bored detachment of the soldiers with the prolonged miserable suffering of the Arab Muslims. Checkpoint lines should consist entirely of old and pregnant women waiting to visit their families. If you are Jewish then mention that the soldiers have given you special treatment on account of your race, even if the actual reason is because you are a journalist and your kind doesn't set off bombs, your kind acts as the propaganda corps for those who set off bombs.

When visiting "settlers," a term that currently covers a sizable portion of the country, describe them as "dogged" and "fanatical." Dwell on their beards and on their assault rifles. Find some American ones and disarm them with hometown mentions of Brooklyn or Baltimore and then dig for a hateful comment. If you can't get a properly damning quote from one of them, get it from one of their children. If you have no luck there, hit up one of your NGO friends, preferably with a degree, to give you a quote on the danger that they pose to peace.

Convey to the reader that there is something disturbing about the tenacity with which they cling to the land, while making it clear that they will have to be ethnically cleansed from the land for there to be peace. Do not use the word "ethnic cleansing," use "evacuation," it sounds cleaner. Be sure to mention that they believe G-d gave them the land. Mention something about the Caananites and the Amalekites. Talk to the girls and contrast their fresh youthful faces with their unwillingness to make peace with their neighbors.

Pay a visit to Jerusalem. Mention a place or two that you like to eat, make sure that it is owned by Arabs, accept their tale of being here for thousands of years with complete credulity. If they mention that they are worried about East Jerusalem being taken over by the Palestinian Authority, don't report that. Do report any complaints that they have about the Judaization of Jerusalem. Draw a picture of the neighborhood as a wonderfully multicultural place dating back to when the Jordanians expelled all the Jews—that is now under assault by the returning Jews. Mourn all the tourists and the Jewish families who are getting in the way of your orientalism. Be sure to remind readers that the Muslim name of the city, or as you will write, the Arab name, is Al-Quds, and that it is holy to three great religions.

Visit with politicians. Israeli Prime Ministers will invariably be unpleasant obstructionist types, if they make jokes, describe it as a transparent effort to curry favor with you. Generals are even worse. Press them about the separation wall, checkpoints, misery and deprivation in the territories. Then get your NGO friends to introduce you to friendly left-wing pols who will commiserate with you about the state of the peace process and the leap of faith that needs to be taken to make peace. Get a quote from them about the next generation and describe them as saddened by their government's unwilling to make peace.

Palestinian politicians are always willing to make peace, even when they aren't. Work at it and you will get a hypothetical quote about their willingness to one day live in peace with the Jews. Turn that quote into the centerpiece of your article. Contrast it with Israeli leaders who still refuse to come to the table. Never ask them any tough questions about the budget, their support for terrorists or why they refuse to negotiate. Instead feed them softball questions, take their talking points and plug them into the template for the same article that your predecessors have been writing since the seventies.

If an Israeli tells you that there is no such thing as Palestinians, that they're gangs of Muslim militias who have no interest in running their own country, or that Jordan is the actual Palestinian State, ignore him. Details like that don't matter and you're not here to litigate history, you're here to tell a story. The same story that has been told for generations about villainous Israelis and the heroic resistance fighters battling against them.

Don't dig into the relationships between Arab clans, the depth of nepotism within the Palestinian Authority or the lack of elections. Don't discuss Israeli poverty except when your NGO friends ask you to write about their work. Don't mention the epidemic of car thefts or land seizures. Don't try to understand what all the different religious subgroups are really all about. You were sent here to tell a simple story and your job is to tell that story.

Write about the hills and the blood-red sunsets, mention all the armies that probably passed over them in a history you never bothered to learn. Talk about your mixed feelings as a Jew or part-Jew or someone who has Jewish friends, at the sight of Jews oppressing another people. Describe the black soulful eyes of a Palestinian leader or terrorist or terrorist leader. Write up the settler children who are taught to hate. Write about how all the guns make you uncomfortable. Close with an old man who expresses hope that one day peace will come to this troubled land.

Then go home.