{"id":8775,"date":"2015-11-15T13:37:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T21:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8775"},"modified":"2016-01-10T15:30:16","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T23:30:16","slug":"waging-the-war-on-terror-vichy-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/waging-the-war-on-terror-vichy-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Waging The War on \u2018Terror,\u2019 Vichy-style"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Parisian<\/a>
Photo by Thierry-Chesnot\/Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A<\/span> few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now \u201ccontained,\u201d a recalibration of his earlier assessments of \u201con the run\u201d and \u201cJayvees\u201d from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the \u201cscourge of terrorism\u201d and \u201cextremist violence\u201d. Who were these terrorists and generic extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris \u2014 anti-abortionists, Klansmen, Tea-party zealots?<\/p>\n

Middle Eastern websites may be crowing over the jihadist rampage and promising more to come, but this past week in the United States we were obsessed over a yuppie son of a multi-millionaire showboating his pseudo-grievances by means of a psychodramatic hunger strike at the University of Missouri and a crowd of cry-baby would-be fascists at Yale bullying a wimpy teacher over supposedly hurtful Halloween costumes. I guess that is the contemporary American version of Verdun and the Battle of the Bulge.<\/p>\n

This sickness in the West manifests itself in a variety of creepy ways \u2014 to hide bothersome reality by inventing euphemisms and idiocies likely \u201cworkplace violence\u201d and \u201clargely secular,\u201d jailing a \u201cright-wing\u201d video maker rather than focusing on jihadist killers in Benghazi, deifying a grade-school poseur inventor who repackaged a Radio Shack clock and wound up winning an invitation to the White House, straining credibility in Cairo to fabricate unappreciated Islamic genius. Are these the symptoms of a post-Christian therapeutic society whose affluence and leisure fool it into thinking that it has such a huge margin of security that it can boast of its \u2018tolerance\u2019 and empathy \u2014 at the small cost of a few anonymous and unfortunate civilians sacrificed from time to time? Is deterrence a waning asset that has now been exhausted after seven years of Obama administration apologetics and contextualizations?<\/p>\n

Our premodern enemies have certainly got our postmodern number. Newsmen compete to warn us not of more jihadists to come or the nature of the Islamist hatred that fuels these murderers, but instead fret about Western \u201cbacklash\u201d on the horizon, about how nativists and right-wingers may now \u201cscapegoat\u201d immigrants. Being blown apart may be one thing, but appearing illiberal over the flying body parts is quite another. Let\u2019s hurry up and close Guantanamo Bay so that it will stop \u201cbreeding\u201d terrorists; and let\u2019s hurry up even more to restart the \u201cpeace talks\u201d to remind ISIS that we are nice to the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands flock to Europe not in gratitude at its hospitality but largely contemptuous of those who would be so naive to extend their hospitality to those who hate them. Barack Obama recently called global warming our greatest threat; Al Gore \u2014 recently enriched by selling a TV station to carbon-exporting Persian Gulf kleptocrats \u2014 is in Paris in Old Testament mode finger-pointing at our existential enemy \u2014 carbon. John Kerry, hours before the Paris attacks, announced that the days of ISIS \u201care numbered.\u201d Angela Merkel welcomes hundreds of thousands of young male Muslims into Europe, and the more they arrive with anything but appreciation for\u00a0their hosts, the more Westerners can assuage their guilt by turning the other cheek and announcing their progressive fides.<\/p>\n

To preserve our sense of progressive utopianism, we seem willing to offer up a few hundred innocents each year to radical Islam. The slaughter might cease in a few years if we were to name our enemies as radical Muslims and make them aware that it could well be suicidal for their cause to kill a Westerner \u2014 or at least remind the Islamic world in general that it is a rare privilege to migrate to the West, given that immigration demands civic responsibilities as well as rights and subsidies, and is predicated on legality rather than the power of the stampede. But then to do that we would no longer be Westerners as we now define ourselves.\u200b<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online A few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now \u201ccontained,\u201d a recalibration of his earlier assessments of \u201con the run\u201d and \u201cJayvees\u201d from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[18,203,29,111,59,230],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2hx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8790,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-wont-we-call-this-islamist-terrorism\/","url_meta":{"origin":8775,"position":0},"title":"Why Won’t We Call This Islamist Terrorism?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 19, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"This isn't an attack on \"humanity.\"\u00a0 It's a war against the West.\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Politico (Europe Edition) President Obama summed up the jihadist killing in Paris as\u00a0\u201can attack not just on Paris.\u201d But rather, he assured us, \u201cThis is an attack on all of humanity and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 2 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-wont-we-call-this-islamist-terrorism\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"epa05025424 People place flowers and light candles in tribute for the victims of the 13 November Paris attacks at the foot of the statue on Place de la Republique in Paris, France, 14 November 2015. 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