A Reversion to the Law of the Jungle - Michael Devolin

by Michael Devolin

Hat tip: Jean-Charles Bensoussan

And now in Barack Obama we have another American president who, like Jimmy Carter, exhibits the same misguided trust in “external influences” to moderate a regime and a populace rife with Islamic supremacist sentiment and enthralled with the notion that it is now within their grasp to erase the Jewish state from the face of the Earth.

 

“What we today call the policy of appeasement was in fact the refusal on the part of the civilized leaders of France and England to abandon the politics of reason. They were sincerely convinced that by reasoning with Hitler, by making compromises with him, they could avoid the horrors of reversion to the law of the jungle.” –Lee Harris

I won’t pretend to be an expert on the politics of the United States. Like the politics of Israel, and pretty much like the politics of any Western democracy, there are many-faceted issues that cannot be addressed from one perspective only or quickly summarized by even the most adept pundit. Besides, journalists these days are quick to point out the faults of our leaders but not so willing to provide actual denouements to the problems those leaders are dealing with, especially the problem of Islamic terrorism. So it’s not like I’m breaking any kind of rule if I don’t provide here all the answers to all the ills of the present age. Conversely, gross imprudence, even the most naïve kind, especially when committed by a mere neurotic orator (Barack Obama) who feigns a love of his country, cannot be easily mistaken, not even by amateurs like me.

In their book Kingmakers, Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, writing about the Iranian hostage crisis, point out that, “The hostage crisis by common account cost Jimmy Carter the 1980 presidential election.” They quote Abbas Amanat, who wrote in the New York Times on this subject that, “Americans were ‘taken by surprise’ when an Islamic revolution toppled the Shah and transformed a country that seemed friendly to the United States.” Efraim Karsh attributes the Carter administration’s naiveté in dealing with this crisis and their misreading of Iran’s fomenting hatred of America and the West at the time to “…the standard fallacy of attributing Middle Eastern developments to external influences rather than to indigenous dynamics…” President Carter and his advisors failed to recognize “…the supremacy of indigenous dynamics in Middle Eastern affairs and the limits of superpower influence were confirmed yet again.” Prof. Karsh summarizes that “this tendency has not disappeared following the end of the Cold War, as starkly demonstrated by the 9/11 attacks.”

And now in Barack Obama we have another American president who, like Jimmy Carter, exhibits the same misguided trust in “external influences” to moderate a regime and a populace rife with Islamic supremacist sentiment and enthralled with the notion that it is now within their grasp to erase the Jewish state from the face of the Earth. In his book The Devil That Never Dies, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen tells about an article written by a former governor of Iran’s Kish province, Alireza Forghani. “The article called for Iran to attack and annihilate Israel, which he grounded as a religious duty based on the Qur’an and the teachings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that must be carried out.” This is back in 2000, the day after Ali Khamenei announced that, “There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state.” The article consisted of undisguised “operational plans.” As Goldhagen relates, “So that no one would mistake the exterminationist intention for anything else, Forghani, and all those Iranian sites that disseminated the operational plans to Iranians and the world, take pains to make the explicitly genocidal character of the plans clear.”

In February 2015 Khaled Abu Toameh of the Gatestone Institute surmised that “By the time Obama’s term in office ends, Iran will most likely be in control of more Arab countries, and Qatari-backed terror groups will be much stronger, killing more Muslims and non-Muslims.” Just as Brezhnev and the Soviet Union felt empowered by Jimmy Carter’s disinclination in dealing with the discovery of a combat unit of two to five thousand Soviet troops and about forty tanks in Cuba, so Iran’s Islamist mullahs are now feeling likewise empowered by virtue of President Obama’s foolhardy charity in handing them the realization of their genocidal dreams. This is not diplomacy at all—not in the traditional sense and especially of a country still regarded by its patriots as a Western superpower—but rather this is what I refer to as this administration’s “wimplomacy.” President Obama (as did Jimmy Carter before him) is parading the United States of America before the gaze of Islamist ideologues as though it were a mere stepping stone within an inevitable Western capitulation to a future Islam-dominated world.

President Obama is quick to point out the benefits of “dialogue” with Iran, but we hear nothing that would indicate his administration is cognizant of the malefic and brutal nature of Iran’s ruling religious elite. The British paper The Telegraph reported recently that, “Over the last decade, Iran’s regime has typically hanged between 500 and 600 people every year, giving the country the highest number of executions in the world…” Amnesty International informs us that 586 people have already been put to death this year. And now President Barack Obama and John Kerry have given us their assurances that this same regime is not in the least bit interested in developing nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of killing mass numbers of Israeli Jews.

“If the ax has become dull and he has not whetted the edge, he must exert more strength. Thus the advantage of a skill [depends on the exercise of] prudence.” So reads Ecclesiastes 10:10. This Obama administration, throwing prudence out the window, has now given the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the most dangerous enemies of the Western world, the advantage. The State of Israel is at the top of their list of target countries to be “wiped off the map.” All their Muslim neighbours not in good standing will be next. But by then the Western world—our world—will have been forced into a reversion to the law of the jungle in order to free ourselves from another Middle Eastern religious quagmire, but also to prevent the inevitable proliferation of hostilities from becoming a world war. Because the law of the jungle is the only law the Shi’a clergy of Iran understand. If you don’t believe me, ask the people of Iraq.

Michael Devolin

Source: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/07/a-reversion-to-the-law-of-the-jungle

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