An excellent essay from the great VDH, who writes:
"This naïve belief in the attractive power of our ideals has been the
big mistake of our war against jihad, one made by both parties.
(I actually don't think it's naïve, it's a calculated choice, based on a Marxist viewpoint and a passionate desire to reduce American preeminence and power-permanently.)
"To
traditionalist Muslims, the ideals we cherish are not self-evidently
superior to those of Islam."
"What we call freedom, for example, pious
Muslims like Ayatollah Khomeini understood to be license: it is the
“freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to
the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.”
"Similarly, al Qaeda theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, “The freedom we
want is not the freedom to use women as commodities . . . it is not the
freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual
marriages.” Of course, our idea of political freedom is much different
from these social practices, but the biggest example of Western freedom
that most Muslims see is the degrading spectacles available on satellite
television, Hollywood movies, and the Internet."
"Likewise with democracy, tolerance, separation of church and state,
sex equality, and all the other goods that define the Western
civilizational paradigm but are contrary to shari’a law and Islamic
doctrine."
"For a Muslim who takes those doctrines seriously––and poll
after poll shows that hundreds of millions do–– none of these goods is
worth risking his eternal soul. Indeed, they are seductive temptations
for the pious, the subtle weapons the infidels use to weaken the
faithful and bring about their spiritual destruction. That’s why the
mullahs call us the “Great Satan”: not just because in Muslim eyes we
are evil, but because we are tempters who addle the minds of the
faithful with what the Iranian political activist Al-e Ahmad in 1962
called “Westoxification.”
That's exactly it. For fundamentalist jihadists "freedom" means freedom to implement and practice sharia, a la ISIS.
For fundamentalist jihadists, "elections" are merely a way to seize and keep power, not to implement what we know as "democracy". As much as I admired George W. Bush, this was something I believe he did not understand. He needed a much more extensive schooling from Natan Sharansky, to understand that without the civil commitment, the individual commitment to the rule of law, there can be no "democracy", no matter what "elections" take place. "Electing" Hamas in Gaza does not a "democracy" make.
Getting back to Iran and the "deal"-a four letter word if I've ever seen one, I've been reading a lot of commentary and really, the only thing I can really add (that should be obvious to any thinking person) is that President Obama is on the Iranian side, and on the side of ISIS and Hamas. Every policy decision made by this administration shows his complete and total antipathy to Western values and to American power.
That's the bottom line, my American friends.
Your President is not on your side.
He is not on the side of freedom. He is not on the side of Western and Judeo-Christian values.
He is gunning for the very nations and regimes that want to exterminate you.
Your President is delighted that he is running the Big Satan, to borrow a term from his Iranian friends, precisely to run it into the ground. He won't rest until he has done everything possible within his two evil terms in office to ensure that America is weakened, that plenty of innocent Americans are killed, that American diplomats, soldiers and civilians walking the streets of their neighbourhoods are killed, and that he lowers the scope and capacity of American leadership and firepower on a scale that was unimaginable to most decent citizens of a previously great nation.
Ironically, one of his signature policy "achievements" will be bringing Israel and the 'moderate' Muslim world together as allies. You can be damned sure that Saudi Arabia is more hostile at the moment to Obama than Israel, that Egypt and Israel are closer allies than either are with America, and that the Gulf state leaders are chatting with Israeli PM Netanyahu on a regular basis.
Obama's policy direction and decisions are simply indistinguishable from those of Iran's Supreme Leader and the worst of the evil, murderous and Marxist thugocracies world-wide.
That's the bottom line.
