Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish

2014/10/03 Leave a comment

The debate between Andrew Sullivan and Roger Cohen, starting with Sullivan:

Well, we all see mirages, I guess. But it says something about the hysteria about the latest incarnation of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that we’re suddenly comparing them to Nazis and to non-humans. Even as Cohen himself acknowledges that “the Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims.

”So why break Godwin’s Law so egregiously? Cohen wants us to believe, channeling Martin Amis and Primo Levi, that there was no “why” in the unconscionable unique act of the Holocaust.

And yet, mountains of evidence explain exactly why: it was a function of a vile racism that regarded the Jewish people as vermin that needed to be exterminated in order to allow the master race to flourish. It was not some random act of mass murder; it had a grotesque but clear and constantly trumpeted rationale. Then Cohen seems to endorse the idea that the Nazis were somehow unhumans or “counter-humans”, in Levi’s words. But that too, it seems to me, lets them off the hook. The Holocaust was a deeply human act – a function of humankind’s capacity, revealed throughout history, of extraordinary levels of hatred and violence, brought to new and unfathomable evil in the age of the industrialized state.

And equally, it is absurd to argue that “there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS.”This is after Cohen actually produces a long litany of reasons for ISIS’s brutality and evil, mind you, none of which he deems sufficient to explain the ISIS propaganda beheadings he watched on video. But why should we not take the Islamists’ word for it? They are committing slaughter and rape and attempted genocide for one core reason: because God demands that they slaughter infidels. Their mandate is beyond any human one but results in so-very-human evil.

Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish.

From Cohen:

It is human to seek for reasons. Perhaps the rise of ISIS may be seen as the culmination of decades of Arab resentment at perceived Western domination, drawing support from the same anger as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda before it; or as an expression of the abject failure of Arab societies; or as an armed Sunni response to the Shia-bolstering American invasion of Iraq; or as brutal payback for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo (where, it must be said, there was scant “why” for prisoners detained for years and guilty of no crime); or as a well-funded offshoot of Saudi Wahhabism interpreted in its most literal form; or as a heady alternative for disaffected young Muslims to the moral void of Western civilization; or as evidence of the crisis of Islam and the inevitable Thirty Years War of its Sunni and Shia branches; or simply as a call to arms to drive out the United States the way the infidel Crusaders were ousted from the Levant.

Yet, in the end, there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS. There is no why in Raqqa. Evil may adduce reasons; they fall short. The Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims. But I was given pause by Martin Amis’ afterword to his powerful new novel, The Zone of Interest, where he probes the “why” of Hitler and quotes both the icicle passage and another from Levi:

“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘Understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him.” Levi, referring to Hitler, Himmler and the rest, goes on: “Perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.”

Roger Cohen: For ISIS, slaughter is an end in itself

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Emergency debate on ISIL draws only handful of MPs | “Root Causes” and Government Stupidity

2014/09/18 Leave a comment

Interesting to see Conservatives invoking the Liberals R2P (Responsibility to Protect) initiative, which many conservative commentators have panned if memory serves me correctly:

Employment Minister Jason Kenney invoked the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to fight “genocide” against religious minorities in a sparsely attended yet spirited late-night debate Tuesday over Canada’s response to the Islamic State threat.

… In an extensive speech about the violence minorities face, Kenney took aim at “moral relativism” and cynicism, saying that supporting an existing military presence was the only effective response to the urgent situation.

“There are hundreds of thousands of girls who are facing serial gang rape in this circumstance in Iraq. There are children who have been beheaded,” he said, adding that persecuted families “don’t have time for ‘root causes” — a dig at a previous comment by Trudeau.

Kenney added that stopping ISIL from harming more people takes “hard power,” and couldn’t be done “with pleasant speeches, tents or humanitarian supplies.”

While I share his abhorrence of ISIS and similar groups, blindness or ignoring root causes leads to history repeating itself, and not calibrating the degree of intervention appropriately (admittedly hard to do, both substantively and politically).

Emergency debate on ISIL draws only handful of MPs | Ottawa Citizen.

Ottawa Citizen editorial demolishes the PM and Government’s logic in this regard (“We know (terrorists’) ideology is not the result of ‘social exclusion’ or other so-called ‘root causes.’ It is evil, vile and must be unambiguously opposed.”).

Have highlighted the money quote:

Are the Conservatives really arguing that terrorism, as an expression of pure evil, just springs up without explanation, like demonic possession? That any one of us might wake up tomorrow possessed of an urge to become a terrorist for no reason whatsoever? Surely there are reasons why one person takes up arms in an evil cause and another does not. To try to understand those reasons, and reduce their effect, is not to shrug at violence. It is in fact a moral duty.

Setting up these two perspectives in opposition – that terrorism has causes, and that terrorism is evil and must be opposed – might be time-honoured political strategy. But it’s wrong and dangerous rhetoric. One way to oppose terrorism is to understand it. The Conservative talking point implies that anyone who tries to figure out how to stop a kid from suburban Ontario from becoming a jihadi is, somehow, a terrorist sympathizer. It implies that any analyst who tries to understand the ebb and flow of propaganda within a territory is excusing violence. To sneer at any attempt to understand terrorism is a stupid approach to one of the world’s most insidious problems, and the Conservatives ought to know better. They do know better, but they’re trying to score points.

Canada can and must unambiguously oppose terrorism while trying to improve its understanding of how it operates and how its adherents recruit.

Editorial: Yes, terrorism has causes

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Islamic State attacks on religious minorities ‘genocide,’ Canadian ambassador says | Toronto Star

2014/09/10 Leave a comment

Trying to straddle the fine line between strong condemnation of ISIS and not leading to further mission creep and a seeming endorsement of R2P (Responsibility to Protect):

And, he says, it’s time that Canadians, who live in a secular society, brought religion into public debate — something many Western governments have shied away from.

“We can’t be afraid of religion in public discourse and how we advance foreign policy goals. We cannot say that religion is just bad, because it isn’t. It motivates people to great good and justice. But when we talk about the advancement of religious freedom we don’t mean theological disputes. We’re looking at the inherent dignity of every human being.”

Canada is well placed to set an example of tolerance, he said. But it is also correct to take military and humanitarian action on “religiously based persecutions,” that amount to “genocides in the case of the Yazidis and Christians.” The Islamic State has threatened both groups with conversion to their brand of radical Islam or death, and has massacred hundreds of men, women and children.

“The worst thing we can do is to throw up our hands and say it’s too complicated and we need to back away,” Bennett said. “It depends on countries of goodwill like Canada and its allies — that believe in democracy, freedom, rule of law and human rights — to take a stand.”

Islamic State attacks on religious minorities ‘genocide,’ Canadian ambassador says | Toronto Star.

And an interesting take on ISIS, and valid caution regarding further intervention beyond air strikes and the related current approach.

But the political pressures to do more, not least for the “brilliant” minds cheerleading the 2003 Iraq war, are hard to resist:

Unless politicians in the United States and allies in the West fall back on their traditional “Fire first, think later” approach to military planning. Consider for a moment: ISIS has suddenly begun decapitating Western journalists and placing the videos online for everyone to see. The target audience, of course, is the United States. ISIS says it is engaging in this barbarism to warn the Americans away, but even they aren’t that stupid. The 9/11 attacks, as every terrorist knows, were intended to and succeeded in luring us into war—just as bin Laden hoped it would. He believed his Al-Qaeda fighters would defeat the American military and drive it from Saudi Arabia. Why would ISIS think that killing a few journalists would cause the United States to cower when slaughtering thousands did not?

Simple: They don’t. As one terrorism expert told me, ISIS is hoping America will go too far in response, launch attacks that kill lots of innocent Muslims in an attempt to wipe out the jihadists. That would not destroy ISIS, but would derail the Islamic threat to the group. For no matter how hated ISIS is among the other jihadists and Middle Eastern Muslims, the United States is despised more. A new American strategic blunder on par with the Iraq War would distract ISIS’s Islamic enemies and turn the battle, once again, toward the U.S. If ISIS is to survive, it needs America to strike out rashly and harshly against it.

All this sounds like three-dimensional chess and it is. Unfortunately, in a world of Twitter foreign policy analysis and cable news blathering, America is rarely able to handle more than checkers when trying to address global threats. Yes, ISIS is hoping to strike us with something, anything, and it has enough supporters in the United States that it may succeed in executing an attack on a soft target. But the purpose of such an assault will be to provoke a response, one that will, inadvertently, save ISIS from the threat of the billions of other Muslims who want nothing to do with the group.

So, remember this: Every time you hear some commentator say America should “do something,” they are reading from the ISIS script. The U.S. can soften up ISIS with strategic bombing to aid the Islamic fighters taking them on. But it cannot beat them by rolling the Humvees back into Iraq or Syria. ISIS will be defeated by its own brutality against the people who might otherwise be their allies. In this case, the enemies of our enemies are truly our friends, at least for now.

ISIS will fall. It is inevitable. That is, unless the United States becomes the stupid one and gives them what they want.

ISISs Enemy List: 10 Reasons the Islamic State Is Doomed.

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Baird’s ‘one voice’ in Iraq with Liberals and NDP a notable non-partisan change in tone for the Tories

2014/09/08 Leave a comment

Welcome change in tone and not overly playing to diaspora politics.

Let’s see if applied consistently or partisan temptations too great:

The face of Baird that Iraqis saw just before he left Iraq was not the one politicians and the public are used to seeing in Canada.

Off the top of his closing press conference in Irbil, Baird said a round of thank yous.“I’m also very pleased to be joined by representatives of both the other political parties in Canada,” the minister added.

“I think we speak with one voice: we abhor the barbaric terrorist activity we see in the region and we really want to come and personally stand with you and the people of this great country.”

Baird’s ‘one voice’ in Iraq with Liberals and NDP a notable non-partisan change in tone for the Tories

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Convert, pay tax, or die, Islamic State warns Christians

2014/07/21 Leave a comment

Depressing – and another legacy of the Gulf War of 2003:

In the statement, Isis said Christians who wanted to remain in the “caliphate” declared earlier this month in parts of Iraq and Syria must agree to abide by terms of a “dhimma” contract – a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya”. “We offer them three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract – involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword,” the announcement said.

….Mosul, once home to diverse faiths, had a Christian population of around 100,000 a decade ago, but waves of attacks on Christians since the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein have seen those numbers collapse.

The Mosul residents who saw the Islamic State announcement estimated the city’s Christian population before last months militant takeover at around 5,000. The vast bulk of those have since fled, leaving perhaps only 200 in the city.

Convert, pay tax, or die, Islamic State warns Christians | World news | theguardian.com.

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