Act of Pettiness

From Mark Steyn:

The second highest peak in North America is Mount Logan in the Yukon, named after Sir William Logan, founder of the Geological Survey of Canada. When Pierre Trudeau died 15 years ago, his successor, Jean Chrétien, announced airily that Mount Logan would be renamed for the late Prime Minister. Given the number of women who got to mount Trudeau in the course of his life, having an actual Mount Trudeau seemed an oddly superfluous honor. But, in its insult to and obliteration of Sir William Logan, a Canadian of great accomplishments, it was a typically Trudeaupian act of historical vandalism.

So some of us pushed back against Chrétien’s banana-republican name-change, and, unusually for the deranged Dominion, Mount Logan got to keep its name.

The only higher peak in North America was not so fortunate. On Monday, Barack Obama, by executive order, removed the name of his predecessor from Mount McKinley. It is a strange thing to do – the sort of public humiliation that in normal circumstances would accompany the revelation that the man was a pedophile or racist or some such. And it is an especially undeserved fate for William McKinley, who took a bullet for his country – back in the days before American presidents retreated behind the 40-car motorcade and no citizen could be permitted into their presence without a background check. It was a characteristically petty act for Obama, adding insult to injury, to fly to Alaska personally to strip McKinley of his mountain. I don’t altogether rule out him detonating those guys off Mount Rushmore before his term’s up.

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Quote of the Day

“I grew up in neighborhoods most Americans were told to never drive through. I saw bullets, drugs and death in the same places I played tag and ball with my friends. Both of my older cousins died on the streets where I lived. I thought that was my destiny.

But my mother didn’t. She changed all of that. She saved my brother and me from being killed on those streets with nothing but a library card.”

— Dr. Ben Carson

Courage is Contagious

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

“Three Marines stop terrorist on French train” was the gist of the first headlines on this weekend’s counterterrorism story. But when the actual facts came out, the story got even better.

As it turns out, it wasn’t three Marines. It was two U.S. servicemembers — from the National Guard and the Air Force — and their civilian buddy from middle school. And they had the help of a traveling British businessman.

The three were riding on a train from Amsterdam to Paris when a gunman — an Islamist from Morocco who had visited Syria and was flagged as a possible jihadist — started shooting. One of the Americans, Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone, 23, sprinted at the gunman and tackled him. The others, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Sacramento State University student Anthony Sadler, 23, joined in.

As Skarlatos recounted in a Sky News interview from his hotel in Arras, northern France: “I just looked over at Spencer and said, ‘Let’s go!’ Spencer got to the guy first, grabbed the guy by the neck, and I grabbed the handgun, got the handgun away from the guy and threw it. Then I grabbed the AK (assault rifle), which was at his feet, and started muzzle thumping him in the head with it.”

Stone was cut by the attacker behind his neck, and his thumb was nearly sliced off as the man was wrestled to the ground by the Americans. Sadler said: “The gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times.” He added that the attacker “never said a word.”

To Americans who remember Sept. 11, 2001, this kind of response — even down to the “let’s go” — echoes the story of Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 93. It’s the right response, of course, to terrorists who threaten innocents.

As Brad Todd wrote days after 9/11, it was the response of ordinary Americans on this flight that meant a repeat of the attacks was much less likely: “Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism — the most deadly yet invented — came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. … United Flight 93 did not hit a building. It did not kill anyone on the ground. … Why? Because it had informed Americans on board who’d had 109 minutes to come up with a counteraction. And the next time a hijacker full of hate pulls the same stunt with a single knife, he’ll get the same treatment and meet the same result as those on United Flight 93. Dead, yes. Murderous, yes. But successful? No.”

Meanwhile, the expensive global security establishment failed to stop 9/11, and — despite having the French-train gunman flagged as a possible jihadist— did nothing to stop this weekend’s attack. And that’s a lesson.

Bureaucracies have their place, but they don’t deal well with diffuse threats such as terrorism. By the time “first responders” get there, it’s usually too late. But there’s one group of “responders” who don’t have to go anywhere, and that’s the group already on the scene. In conventional analysis, and in the terrorists’ hopes, those people are called “victims.” But as the three Americans on that French train demonstrated, victimhood isn’t the only response.

And there’s more. The purpose of terror is to terrorize. But responding appropriately has the opposite effect. The response of British businessman Chris Norman, who helped subdue the attacker, illustrates this: “Norman said his first reaction was to hide,” The Fiscal Times reported. “But after he saw the Americans fighting the attacker, he said he went to help them.”

Fear is contagious. But so is courage. People should respond not like a herd of sheep but like a pack of wolves. When the follow-up report on the 2001 attacks came out, J.B. Schramm noted in The Washington Post that “on Sept. 11, 2001, American citizens saved the government, not the other way around.” Intelligence agencies failed. Air defense systems failed. But: “Requiring less time than it took the White House to gather intelligence and issue an attack order (which was in fact not acted on), American citizens gathered information from national media and relayed that information to citizens aboard the flight, who organized themselves and effectively carried out a counterattack against the terrorists, foiling their plans. Armed with television and cellphones, quick-thinking, courageous citizens who were fed information by loved ones probably saved the White House or Congress from devastation.”

Nonetheless, when the government reacted, the money went into enriching and strengthening those bureaucracies instead of, as Schramm urged, educating and training American citizens. Perhaps this latest incident will serve as a reminder that there is another way. At the very least, it should remind citizens that while you can’t rely on the government to be everywhere you are, you yourself are always there.

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Obama’s Common Cause

From Charles Krauthammer:

The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that the American public rejects the president’s Iran deal by more than 2-to-1. This is astonishing. The public generally gives the president deference on major treaties. Just a few weeks ago, a majority supported the deal.

What happened? People learned what’s in it.

And don’t be fooled by polls that present, as fact, the administration’s position in the very question. The Washington Post/ABC poll assures the respondent that, for example, “international inspectors would monitor Iran’s facilities, and if Iran is caught breaking the agreement economic sanctions would be imposed again. Do you support or oppose this agreement?”

Well, if you put it that way, sure. But it is precisely because these claims are so tendentious and misleading that public — and congressional — opinion is turning.

Inspections? Everyone now knows that “anytime, anywhere” — indispensable for a clandestine program in a country twice the size of Texas with a long history of hiding and cheating — has been changed to “You’ve got 24 days and then we’re coming in for a surprise visit.” New York restaurants, observed Jackie Mason, get more intrusive inspections than the Iranian nuclear program.

Snapback sanctions? Everyone knows that once the international sanctions are lifted, they are never coming back. Moreover, consider the illogic of President Obama’s argument. The theme of his American University speech Wednesday was that the only alternative to what he brought back from Vienna is war because sanctions — even the more severe sanctions that Congress has been demanding — will never deter the Iranians. But if sanctions don’t work, how can you argue that the Iranians will now be deterred from cheating by the threat of . . . sanctions? Snapback sanctions, mind you, that will inevitably be weaker and more loophole-ridden than the existing ones.

And then came news of the secret side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. These concern past nuclear activity and inspections of the Parchin military facility where Iran is suspected of having tested nuclear detonation devices.

We don’t know what’s in these side deals. And we will never know, says the administration. It’s “standard practice,” you see, for such IAEA agreements to remain secret.

Well, this treaty is not standard practice. It’s the most important treaty of our time. Yet, Congress is asked to ratify this “historic diplomatic breakthrough” (Obama) while being denied access to the heart of the inspection regime.

Congress doesn’t know what’s in these side agreements, but Iran does. And just this past Monday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to the supreme leader, declared that “entry into our military sites is absolutely forbidden.”

One secret side deal could even allow Iran to provide its own soil samples (!) from Parchin. And now satellite imagery shows Iran bulldozing and sanitizing Parchin as we speak. The verification regime has turned comic.

This tragicomedy is now in the hands of Congress or, more accurately, of congressional Democrats. It is only because so many Democrats are defecting that Obama gave the AU speech in the first place. And why he tried so mightily to turn the argument into a partisan issue — those warmongering Republicans attacking a president offering peace in our time. Obama stooped low, accusing the Republican caucus of making “common cause” with the Iranian “hard-liners” who shout “Death to America.”

Forget the gutter ad hominem. This is delusional. Does Obama really believe the Death-to-America hard-liners are some kind of KKK fringe? They are the government, for God’s sake — the entire state apparatus of the Islamic Republic from the Revolutionary Guards to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei who for decades have propagated, encouraged, and applauded those very same “Death to America” chants.

Common cause with the Iranian hard-liners? Who more than Obama? For years, they conduct a rogue nuclear weapons program in defiance of multiple Security Council declarations of its illegality backed by sanctions and embargoes. Obama rewards them with a treaty that legitimates their entire nuclear program, lifts the embargo on conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, and revives an economy — described by Iran’s president as headed back to “the Stone Age” under sanctions — with an injection of up to $150 billion in unfrozen assets, permission for the unlimited selling of oil, and full access to the international financial system.

With this agreement, this repressive, intolerant, aggressive, supremely anti-American regime — the chief exporter of terror in the world — is stronger and more entrenched than it has ever been.

Common cause, indeed.

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Micro-Totalitarianism

From Walter E. Williams:

George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell’s statement, he need only step upon most college campuses.

Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: “America is the land of opportunity.” That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. “There is only one race, the human race.” Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.”

These expressions don’t exhaust the list of micro-aggressions. Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” or “Affirmative action is racist.” Perhaps worst of all is, “Where are you from or where were you born?” For more of this, see a document released by The College Fix titled “Diversity in the Classroom,” UCLA Diversity and Faculty Development.

This micro-aggression nonsense, called micro-totalitarianism by my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc), is nothing less than an attack on free speech. From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Free speech is a basic tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, writes about the campus attack on free speech and different ideas in his article titled “Obama Unleashes the Left: How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left.” He says that in the Harvard Crimson, an undergraduate columnist wrote: “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice. When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.” The student was calling for the suppression of the research of conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield.

Oberlin College proposed that its teachers be aware of politically controversial topics such as “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, capitalism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The presumption that students must be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.

Last year Vassar College faculty and students held a meeting to discuss the school’s movement to boycott Israel. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue would “not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.” That professor’s vision differs little from Adolf Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in their effort to crush dissent.

Azusa Pacific University “postponed” a speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid “hurting our faculty and students of color.” Brandeis University officials rescinded their invitation to Somali writer and American Enterprise Institute scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam were said to have violated the school’s “core values.” Brandeis officials claimed that allowing her to speak would be hurtful to Muslim students.

Western values of liberty are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality before the law with entitlement. As such, they pose a far greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist organization or rogue nation. Leftist ideas are a cancer on our society. Ironically, we not only are timid in response, but also nourish those ideas with our tax dollars and charitable donations.

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