EU Survey: Every Fifth Jew Victim To Anti-Semitism

 

Survey shows 29% of European Jews considered emigrating due to anti-Semitism.

By JTA and DPA

A fifth of Jewish respondents in an EU survey said they had experienced an anti-Semitic incident in the past 12 months, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency said Friday. 

The survey, to which 5,847 Jews from nine European Union member states responded, was released in full on Friday after parts were released last month.

Morten Kjaerum, the director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, presented the findings at a press conference in Vilnius. 

Twenty-nine percent of all respondents said they “seriously considered emigrating” in recent years because they did “not feel safe” living in their countries as Jews. The figure of Jews contemplating emigration was particularly high in Hungary, France and Belgium with 48, 46 and 40 percent respectively. 

The Internet was seen as the biggest platform for spreading hate against Jews, with three quarters of respondents saying they had experience anti-Semitism on websites and social platforms. Some 42 per cent of respondents said they had experience verbal abuse at demonstrations, and 14 per cent at sports events. 

The survey was conducted in Belgium, Britain, Germany, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia and Sweden. These countries are home to 90 per cent of the Jewish population in the European Union. 

On average, 76 percent said anti-Semitism has increased over the past five years. 

Four percent of respondents said they had experienced physical attack or threats of violence in the past year because they were Jewish, and 64 percent of respondents who said they had experienced physical attacks also said that they did not report the incidents to the authorities because they considered doing so ineffective. 

Asked about their definition of an anti-Semite, 34 percent of all respondents indicated that it applied to “a non-Jewish person if he or she criticizes Israel.” In Sweden, only 21 percent of 703 respondents said non-Jewish critics of Israel were anti-Semitic compared to 42 percent of 1,137 French respondents. Nearly 90 percent of respondents said that people who did not consider Jewish citizens of their country as compatriots were anti-Semitic. 

Twenty percent of respondents said they avoided wearing, carrying or displaying things that might help people identify them as Jews in public. That figure was 34 percent in Sweden; 29 percent in France; 20 percent in Hungary and eight percent in Britain. 

European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said the survey was “of great importance,” adding that the fact that “Jews are not able to express their Jewishness because of fear should be a watershed moment for Europe. He called on EU governments to study the survey’s results. 

"While many EU governments have made great efforts to combat anti-Semitism, more targeted measures are needed," FRA director Morten Kjaerum said.

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The Answer Is Obvious

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 Did Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front party, cross a family Rubicon?

By Michael Gurfinkiel

On June 7, Marine Le Pen criticized her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen — who founded France’s National Front party in 1972 and headed it until 2011 — for his remarks in a videotaped interview posted on the party’s website about the Algerian-born Jewish singer Patrick Bruel, a vocal opponent of what is often described in France as “the far Right.” Le Pen furiously exclaimed that Bruel would be dealt with “à la prochaine fournée,” or as Canada’s National Post translated Le Pen, “We’ll include him in the next batch.” This is a baker’s expression that usually means momentarily, but can be ominously associated in French with the Nazi crematoriums. 

Marine Le Pen asserted that her father’s vile joke was a political mistake, which he should have averted in view of his very lengthy experience. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly indulged in similar puns in the past, and been found guilty in court of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol. He was even suspended twice as a member of parliament for such offenses. The younger Le Pen has been eager to distance herself from such attitudes since she took over the party leadership three years ago. However, this is the first time she did so in an explicit way. 

Marine Le Pen may feel emboldened by her victory in the Euro-Parliament election last month: the National Front carried 24 out of the 74 seats allotted to France, almost one out of three (albeit only 44% of the registered French voters took part in the election). She is convinced that she has successfully recast FN as a democratic national-populist party, one more in the manner of Charles de Gaulle than of Philippe Pétain. De Gaulle was the head of the French anti-Nazi Resistance and the founder of the Fifth Republic; Petain was the head of the collaborationist Vichy state.

Many observers contend that her criticism was still comparatively mild. A more relevant charge is that she might not be above double entendres with racist and anti-Semitic overtones herself, although in a much more sophisticated way. On March 31, during an interview with anchorman Guillaume Durand at Public Sénat TV, she contended that she was hated by another journalist, Anne-Sophie Lapix, the wife of Publicis chairman Arthur Sadoun. She claimed that the entire Publicis management belonged to an exclusive caste estranged from most French, while her own political mission was to return power to the people. True enough, Marine Le Pen did not actually say that Sadoun and most of Publicis’ managers were Jewish, and her words could be construed to apply to any restricted upper-class group rather than just to a Jewish elite. On the other hand, the Jewish heritage of Publicis, from its founder the late Maurice Bleustein-Blanchet to Maurice Levy, its current CEO, to Sadoun, is an open secret. 

Another troubling detail is that Marine Le Pen keeps describing the present regime of France as a parasitic “System” superimposed on the French nation by alien forces or alien minorities. While such a view stems from both socialist and reactionary 19th century myths (the “Two Hundred Families” — Big Capital — that socialists loved to hate, the “Four Confederate Estates” — Freemasons, Protestants, Jews and Peregrines — lacerated by the reactionary polemicist Charles Maurras), it is essentially a hallmark of Nazi ideology: as Victor Klemperer noted in his 1947 book, The Language of the Third Reich, the democratic Weimar Republic was routinely referred to as “The System” throughout the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945. 

However, the fact remains that Marine Le Pen understands that anti-Semitism is still seen as repulsive by the French public at large, notwithstanding the current rise of anti-Semitism in the country. According to participants in a conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) on May 25-28 under the aegis of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA), this is true as well of other countries. Including those countries which condone, in the public space, extreme forms of hostility and defamation against Israel, Zionism, the Jewish religion, or the Jewish people. 

The Jerusalem conference — Anti-Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Delegitimizing Israel — was set up in part as a tribute to Robert Wistrich, 69, the Neuburger professor of European and Jewish history at HUJI and the head of the Vidal Center. Still, Wistrich himself and the many scholars, authors, and statesmen who attended — from Dina Porat (Tel-Aviv University) and Shmuel Trigano (Paris X University) to Manfred Gerstenfeld (JCPA) and Maurice Samuels (Yale), and from Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University) and Melanie Phillips (the London Times and BBC) to Bat Ye’or (the historian of dhimmitude) and Matthias Küntzel (Hamburg), and so forth — were less into celebration than exploring new investigation and debate. They all pointed, as will be apparent when their presentations are collated next year in a single book, to the extraordinary resilience of anti-Semitism, seventy years after the Holocaust and well into the 21st century, and its no less extraordinary ability to transmogrify. 

Irwin Cotler — who, as emeritus professor of law at McGill University and a former attorney general of Canada, played a prominent role in the so called “human rights revolution” of the past thirty years, the drive to recognize human rights not only as an ethical imperative but as a political and judiciary imperative as well — bluntly admitted the whole movement’s limitations and failures. More often than not, he said, human rights and related issues, like the prevention of racism, anti-Semitism, and genocide, have been turned into mantras and emptied of any real content. Or, even more perversely, turned into instruments to promote the ills they were supposed to cure. 

The United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban, in 2001, which coagulated into an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic meltdown, was appalling, but far from an isolated example. Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Center focused on UNESCO’s compliance with the Palestinian Authority’s “identity theft”:  the rewriting of Biblical and post-Biblical archeology and history in the Holy Land as Canaanite rather than Israelite and “Palestinian” rather than Jewish. (According to which, the Western Wall, Judaism’s most holy and most historically identified landmark, is supposed to be the “Al-Buraq Wall.”) Dina Porat and R. Amy Elman of Kalamazoo College described how the European Union first feigned a commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, and then stubbornly declined to define anti-Semitism in an effective way. Other participants noted that international organizations, NGOs, and governments may concentrate on Holocaust history and memorial programs while ignoring or minimizing important aspects of current anti-Semitism when they seem to run against political correctness or political convenience. Or that they frequently juxtapose Holocaust pieties with charges that Israel may be perpetrating Holocaust-like, or apartheid-like, crimes against the Palestinians. 

Most experts at the Jerusalem conference agreed that the Islamic world is today the epicenter of anti-Semitism. Many Islamic governments and religious organizations do not just condone anti-Semitism, but actively promote it, both for domestic consumption and abroad; Islamic anti-Semitism is thus spreading through mass emigration to Europe, North America, Latin America, and other places; and the anti-Semitic culture of many Muslim immigrant communities is in turn reactivating and fueling a dormant or not-so-dormant Western anti-Semitism. Raphael Israeli from HUJI observed that anti-Semitism is in fact so extensive in the Muslim world that in his opinion an increasingly large number of Muslims are starting to see it as one of their culture’s most incapacitating diseases. 

For all that, non-Islamic anti-Semitism is undergoing a revival. There is, beyond anti-Zionism, a growing hostility directed at Jews and at Jewish traditions (from kosher food to circumcision) as such in liberal, progressive, or left-wing circles, notably in academia. Many secular Jews tend to associate with such trends, a tradition which, according to Wistrich, traces back at least to Karl Kraus and other assimilated Mittel-Europa intellectuals. The churches, who are indeed to be praised for breaking away from classic Christian anti-Semitism after 1945, are not immune to “the Devil’s return”; while rightwing Catholics indulge in Holocaust revisionism, more mainstream Catholics, Protestants and Catholics are immersing themselves into what Giovanni Matteo Quer from the University of Trento called “a new replacement theology” where Palestinians are depicted as the new Israel or even as the true Israel. 

There are also intriguing new geopolitical dimensions. What about anti-Semitism in many European Union countries? And what about the former USSR? Sarah Fainberg from INSS/Tel Aviv University commented on the ambivalent “Jewish card” played by an assertive Russia under Vladimir Putin. Samuel Barnai from HUJI explored the wildly anti-Semitic (and explicitly neo-Nazi) background of many ideologues behind the Putin regime. 

But to return to the very first point: anti-Semitism may be surging again, and this is indeed very bad news; nevertheless, it is still largely seen — and for good reason — as a foul and stained thing, so much so that present-day anti-Semites see no better way to attack Jews than to equate them to the worst and most resolute anti-Semites ever — the Nazis. Accordingly, the best way to fight anti-Semitism is probably to stay uncompromisingly accurate and true about the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, rather than diluting it in more global and less defined “narratives” such as racism, intolerance, reaction, class wars, cultural wars, liberation wars, civilizational clashes, and so on. Such was at least the opinion of most participants at the Jerusalem conference.

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A Tale of Two Scandals

By Peggy Noonan

Forty-one years ago, during a small and largely ignored government scandal, a great mystery occurred. A group of determined congressional investigators, who had learned the president of the United States was running a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, pressed to get their hands on the tapes. The courts ruled in their favor. The White House had to hand over a number of tapes. But it turned out one of them, which was understood by the timeline to potentially be the key one, the one that might reveal exactly how the scandal began, turned out to have an 18½-minute gap. 

It came to pass that the longtime personal secretary of the president, Rose Mary Woods, who had been transcribing the tapes in preparation for turning them over, said she had made “a terrible mistake.” She had been listening to the tape when the phone rang; she turned, picked it up, meant to hit the stop button on the tape recorder but hit the record button instead, spoke on the phone for five minutes and when the conversation was over found that five minutes of the tape had been recorded over. Later, and doubly mysterious, it turned out that a total of 18½ minutes of the tape had been erased. No one knows to this day how that happened. The president’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, once mused it might have been the work of some “sinister force."

A few members of Congress went mad with fury, but nobody else really noticed or cared. It was a time of such drama—Vietnam, student demonstrations, a cascade of other scandals to distract the attention of the press. So everyone ignored what happened with the tape, and the Watergate scandal, as it was called, did not end in the impeachment of a president. It just went away, in time became “old news.” Well, the president had said there was “not even a smidgen” of corruption in the story, so there you are. 

* * * 

Ha, wait, that’s not what happened. 

The 18½ minutes of destroyed evidence had a galvanizing effect on an already galvanized national scandal. Rose Mary Woods was hauled before a grand jury, questioned, derided, called a pawn in a criminal coverup. She endured for the rest of her life what the New York Times in its obituary called a “hideous, disfiguring fame.” 

And Richard Nixon’s government of course came crashing down, as did he. 

Why is this pertinent? 

Because the Obama administration is experiencing what appears to be its own Eighteen-and-a-Half Minute moment. In a truly stunning development in the Internal Revenue Service scandal, the agency last week informed Congress that more than two years’ of Lois Lerner's email  communications with those outside that agency—from 2009 to 2011, meaning the key years at the heart of the targeting-of-conservatives scandal—have gone missing. Quite strangely. The IRS says it cannot locate them. The reason is that Lerner’s computer crashed. 

What are the implications of this claim? It means no one can see any emails Lerner sent to or received from other agencies and individuals, including the White House and members of Congress. 

And what is amazing—not surprising, but amazing—is that if my experience of normal human conversation the past few days is any guide, very few people are talking about it and almost no one cares. 

The IRS scandal as a news story carries a stigma, and the stigma is in part due to the fact that when it broke, when Lois Lerner last year made her admission, with a planted question at an American Bar Association gathering, that the IRS had made some mistakes with conservative groups, and disingenuously suggested the blame lay with incompetents in a field office far from the Beltway, conservatives and partisans jumped. The mainstream press was inclined to believe Lerner, or believe at least that a series of mistakes had produced a small if embarrassing so-called scandal. Some conservatives, activists and partisans, not all of them sincere and not all of them serious, viewed the story primarily as another cudgel to use against the president and his party. Some no doubt viewed it as a fundraising opportunity. 

The press viewed it not as a story but as a partisan political drama. And in partisan political dramas they are very rarely on the Republican side. 

I haven’t ever met a reporter or producer who wasn’t a conservative who didn’t believe the IRS scandal was the result of the bureaucratic confusion and incompetence of some office workers in Cincinnati who made a mistake. 

But the IRS scandal is a scandal, and if you can’t see the relation between a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal and what happened 41 years ago with a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal, something is wrong not with the story but with your news judgment. (We won’t even go into the second story last week, that the IRS sent a big database full of confidential taxpayer information to the FBI.) 

It would be very good to see the mainstream press call for a special prosecutor, fully armed with the powers to get to the bottom of the case. 

Democrats don’t want this for the obvious reasons, and Republicans on the Hill haven’t wanted it because they want all the attention while they hold hearings. Why share the lights with a boring old independent investigator who’ll take his time? But the very number of hearings and their lack of effect makes Republicans look worse than incompetent workers in a field office. They have proved themselves no match for the administration, which runs circles around them delaying documentation and testifying in incomprehensible gobbledygook. 

Moreover, Republicans are probably wrong that they help themselves with the base by showily going after the administration. Eric Cantor long supported Congressional prerogatives here before changing his mind just a month ago, and look where he is.

 

* * * 

 

The mischief of the Nixon administration was specific to it, to its personnel. When Chuck Colson left, he left. All the figures in that drama failed to permanently disfigure the edifice of government. They got caught, and their particular brand of mischief ended. 

 

But the IRS scandal is different, because if it isn’t stopped—if it isn’t fully uncovered, exposed, and its instigators held accountable—it will suggest an acceptance of the politicization of the IRS, and an expected and assumed partisanship within its future actions. That will be terrible not only for citizens but for the government itself. 

 

And the IRS scandal will also have disfigured government in a new and killing way. IRS scandals in the past were about the powerful (Richard Nixon) abusing the powerful (Edward Bennett Williams). This scandal is about the powerful (Lois Lerner, et a.) abusing the not-powerful (normal, on-the-ground Americans such as rural tea-party groups). If it comes to be understood that this kind of thing is how the government now does business, it will be terrible for the spirit and reality of the country.

 

So many of those who decide what is news cannot, on this issue, see the good faith and honest concern of the many who make this warning. And really, that is tragic. 

 

* * * 

 

We end with an idea and a bonus memory. 

 

It might be fun and instructive if a great wit did a fictional diary of Lois Lerner’s computer. Assuming that apart from being a U.S. government agency administrator she’s also a grim political operative; assuming that some part of her imagination told her that sooner or later the jig will be up, that internal investigators are coming; assuming it occurred to her that a number of unfortunately incriminating emails might be found on her computer; and assuming she is not technologically clever. What might it have been like that sultry summer of ’11, when Lois Lerner decided her computer had to go? Maybe she put it in the microwave, on high, for 13½ minutes. Maybe she tried to drown the computer in a pool. Maybe she took a hammer to it, like Kathy Bates in “Misery.” Maybe she had a merlot and cooked it over a little Sterno can on the buffet table outside. Maybe she ordered it to answer questions and it took the Fifth. (Maybe it turns out the National Security Agency has the emails. Maybe Edward Snowden can get them!) 

 

The memory: 

 

I once met Rose Mary Woods at a gathering of old Nixon hands in the Reagan White House. I think it was a small party for Pat Buchanan, the communications director. It would have been the mid-1980s, more than a decade after Watergate. I turned and there was a fit, diminutive woman of perhaps 70, in a bright-patterned knee-length dress and matching jacket. Her reddish hair was in a bouffant. Her heels were light-colored, beige or white. She looked like a handsome lady of the Nixon era. She was cordial, friendly, but with the warmly guarded look of the accidentally infamous. 

 

I remember it because about that time I was writing a book and pondering a certain magical aspect of the White House: At any given moment you might turn and see a human ghost, someone who’d been powerful or celebrated who had left, returned to life, and suddenly was back where he’d been a generation or two or three before. 

 

They live in your imagination, they’re of another era, and suddenly they’re there, smiling over a glass of white wine. 

 

Woods’s friends always believed her about the tapes, that she’d made an honest five-minute mistake. (They weren’t sure about the rest of it, the other 13½ minutes.) She was hardy and tough but had integrity and judgment—she wasn’t some grubby political operative who’d do or say anything. She probably turned down millions to write things like “The Dark Nixon I Knew,” for which in those days there was quite an appetite. 

 

She died in her native Ohio in January 2005. At the end of that year, in a beautifully written (meaning beautifully thought and integrated) Christmas Day remembrance in the New York Times, Francis Wilkinson captured her high spirits when she was working for Richard Nixon in the 1950s and would end the day with officemates dancing at a local hotel. “In high-heeled shoes with ankle straps . . . Woods was a joyful sight, cutting loose after a 12-hour grind at the vice president’s side.” 

 

She was one of those usually unknown people who populate government, who come from throughout the country drawn to Washington and wanting to help, wanting the sense of consequence and drama and meaning it can impart, who do their jobs well for many decades, who know what they know and then, eventually, go home. Those were good days, when everybody went home.

Politico: Will The 'Real Hillary' Please Just STFU Already?

By Roger Simon 

 

At some point in a political campaign, a candidate is always advised to “just be yourself.” 

 

It is almost always terrible advice. Though the candidate usually finds it appealing. No more phoniness! No more artifice! No more pretending to be something he or she is not! 

 

Campaigns are about artifice, however, about presenting appealing images, about submerging the personal quirks of the candidate to what is needed for election. 

 

Still, one faction of the campaign — and campaigns nearly always break down into factions — always ends up urging “let the candidate be the candidate,” largely because nothing else has worked. 

 

No doubt Mitt Romney was told to be Mitt Romney, and no doubt the warm and personal side of Mitt was warm and personal. But that doesn’t mean it played that way on the national stage. Ask people what they remember of him today, and they will say putting the dog on the car roof, getting zoning permission for a car elevator in his La Jolla mansion and his 47 percent statement. 

 

All of those were Mitt without artifice. All were Mitt being Mitt. And all were disasters. 

 

Hillary Clinton is currently running vigorously for president under the guise of selling a 656-page doorstop of a book that Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times said presents “little news.” And this was one of the positive reviews.

 

No matter. The book itself is mere window-dressing so that Hillary can go out among the people at a variety of locations — including a Costco in suburban Virginia this past weekend — to reveal the “new, improved” Hillary Clinton, not the Hillary Clinton who hired an inexperienced, often quarrelsome staff in 2008 that spent more time fighting one another than Barack Obama.

 

But now Clinton gets a mulligan, a do-over, a second chance to make a first impression. Six long years have passed since her last presidential run, and she is a totally different person. She is more relaxed, more warm, more human, more connected to the American people.

 

Except she’s not.

Her current rollout has gotten steamrollered by the media. She has been eviscerated for saying she was “dead broke” when she left the White House and portrayed as testy and irritated when a reporter dared ask follow-up questions. 

“Clinton seems to be repeating the central mistake of her 2008 presidential campaign,” wrote Ron Fournier of National Journal, “burying her personality and passion beneath redundant layers of caution, calculation and defensiveness.”

I respect Fournier, but I think the opposite may be true. Clinton’s personality and passion may be her problem and her layers of caution, calculation and defensiveness may be her best way of disguising that. 

Take her exchange with NPR’s Terry Gross. Gross tried to bore in deeply with follow-up questions asking Clinton whether her views on gay marriage had shifted with the shifting politics of the times. 

“I have to say, I think you are being very persistent, but you are playing with my words and playing with what is such an important issue,” Clinton said. 

“I’m just trying to clarify so I can understand … ,” Gross said. 

“No, I don’t think you are trying to clarify,” Clinton snapped back, according to POLITICO’s Maggie Haberman. “I think you’re trying to say I used to be opposed and now I’m in favor and I did it for political reasons, and that’s just flat wrong. So let me just state what I feel like you are implying and repudiate it.” 

Which is Hillary being Hillary. You can say it shows admirable toughness, but when she ran last time, her campaign found out she had toughness to spare. “Ironically, our early research found the Hillary attributes that tested the highest were ‘tough, ready, strong,’” a top Hillary staffer told me in 2008. The highest attributes for Barack Obama, Hillary’s campaign found, were “empathetic, sympathetic, cares about me."

And which set of attributes won? 

Last Friday, at George Washington University, Hillary faced a much kinder interview from a close friend and former employee, Lissa Muscatine. Muscatine came to the startling conclusion that the gaffes and heated exchanges during Hillary’s book tour meant one thing: “You seem like you’re having a really good time,” Muscatine said. 

“Well, Lissa, I am having a good time,” Hillary responded. 

“You’re really free to speak your mind these days,” Muscatine said. 

“Maybe it’s because I am truly done with, you know, being really careful about what to say because somebody might think this instead of that,” Hillary said. “Whether you agree with it or not, you know exactly where I come from, what I think, what I feel. It feels a little bit liberating, to be honest.” 

“And it’s great to watch,” Muscatine said. 

Good drama is always great to watch. But I think Hillary Clinton feels about as free and easygoing as a tightly wound watch. 

She claims she no longer has to be “really careful” about what she says. 

I have difficulty believing that. 

And, if it is true, I have difficulty believing it will get her to the presidency.

NYDN: What Obama Wrought

How the President's failure to act decisively has fed chaos in Syria and Iraq

The New York Daily News (no right-leaning paper, mind you) Editorial Board: 

Highly organized and bloodthirsty, the radical Islamist army called ISIS took but a few days to subjugate the cities of northern Iraq as it dreams of taking over the entire country — while President Obama played it cynically cool. 

The group’s stunning, barbaric march prompted the President on Friday to offer to review a range of options because America has “a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria.” 

Returned now to the White House from a long-weekend family vacation in California, the President must face the awful reality that he dodged last week: 

ISIS is already firmly in charge of large swaths of both of those countries, has ambitions to devour more and is showily slaughtering scores of captured and unarmed prisoners. 

Al Qaeda Nation is being bloodily born before the world’s eyes. 

The battle — for now and surely for the long run — has been lost, in no small part because Obama declined to show strength at crucial moments when strength was needed. Still worse, boxed in by his own failures, he’s flailing for a strategy desperately enough to consider partnering with Iran.

 

 

Video released Monday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) shows militants with men they say are Iraqi soldiers.

 

Yes, that Iran, the country whose regime has held Americans hostage, exported terror against the U.S., supplied weapons to insurgents who killed American troops in the Iraq War and driven insistently toward nuclear weapons capability. Just this month, the grand ayatollah there scoffed, “American cannot do a damn thing.” 

Yes, that Iran. The taste in the mouth is awful. 

The world is reaping what Obama helped sow. 

Elected on the promise of ending the Iraq War, the President was true to his word. He wound down the conflict, enabling Vice President Joe Biden to boast in 2010 that Iraq was “one of the great achievements of this administration.” 

“We’re leaving behind a stable and self-reliant Iraq,” Obama said in 2011 as the last U.S. troops left a war that cost nearly 4,500 of them their lives.

 

 

Cold-blooded terrorists slaughter more Iraqi soldiers, execution style, near the Syrian border in a photo released Monday.

 

 

But he left no residual force to combat terrorism, having failed to reach a troop agreement with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In our absence, ISIS grew quickly into a malignant force. 

Made up of Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq and who despise the Shiite majority, ISIS staged more than 600 attacks in 2011, up from 34 the year before. With no U.S. troops to control them, and with Maliki repressing Sunnis, ISIS followed up in 2012 with more than 400 attacks. 

When civil war broke out across the border in Syria, Obama proved impotent. He called for President Bashar Assad’s ouster to no avail. He threatened missile strikes if Assad used chemical weapons, then he dropped the threat after Assad fatally gassed 1,400 people. He considered and then ruled out providing militarily significant arms to moderate anti-Assad forces. 

ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his fighters marched into Obama’s vacuum, seized territory in southern Syria and proclaimed in January that he planned to create his own domain by taking ground in Iraq, including the capital Baghdad.

Returned now to the White House from a long-weekend family vacation in California, the President must face the awful reality that he dodged last week.

He also made clear that he had a larger target, saying on an audio recording: 

“Our last message is to the Americans. Soon we will be in direct confrontation, and the sons of Islam have prepared for such a day. So watch, for we are with you, watching.” 

You can’t say that Obama wasn’t warned. 

Overeager to leave Iraq, gun-shy about intervening in Syria and insufficiently vigilant about the rising threat of ISIS, the President opened the way to an Islamist force of unprecedented power. 

The toll wreaked by his disengagement from the world and retreat from the use of American influence is severe. While ISIS expands its reach with summary executions possibly running into the thousands, Obama is left to offload onto Maliki all responsibility for the chaos that’s happened and all that’s to come. 

That's the easy way for Obama to escape admitting that he blew it.

The Indigestible Rate of Obama's Foreign Policy Fiascoes

Cold-blooded terrorists slaughter more Iraqi soldiers, execution style, near the Syrian border in a photo released Monday.

By Bret Stephens 

Was it only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ? And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq? 

Even the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest. 

Consider the liver. 

On Thursday, Russian tanks rolled across the border into eastern Ukraine. On Saturday, Russian separatists downed a Ukrainian transport jet, murdering 49 people. On Monday, Moscow stopped delivering gas to Kiev. All this is part of the Kremlin's ongoing stealth invasion and subjugation of its neighbor. And all of this barely made the news. John Kerry phoned Moscow to express his "strong concern." Concern, mind you, not condemnation. 

If the president of the United States had any thoughts on the subject, he kept them to himself. His weekly radio address was devoted to wishing America's dads a happy Father's Day. 

Also last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria seized Mosul. Then ISIS took Tikrit. Then it was Tal Afar. Mass executions of Shiites in each place. The administration is taking its time deciding what, if any, aid it will provide the government in Baghdad. But it is exploring the possibility of using Iraq's distress as an opportunity to open avenues of cooperation with Tehran. 

So because the administration has a theological objection to using military force in Iraq to prevent it from being overrun by al Qaeda or dissolving into potentially genocidal civil war, it will now work with Tehran, a designated state sponsor of terrorism for 30 years and a regime that continues to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Bashar Assad in Syria, to help "stabilize" Iraq. At least the White House has ruled out military cooperation with Iran. But give it time. 

Here, then, is the cravenness that now passes for cleverness in this administration: Make friends with a terrorist regime to deal with a terrorist organization. Deliver Iraq's Arab Shiites into the hands of their Persian coreligionists, who will waste no time turning southern Iraq into a satrapy modeled on present-day Lebanon. 

Deal brusquely with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki —who, for all his manifest shortcomings as a leader nonetheless wishes to be our ally—and obsequiously with an Iranian regime that spent the better part of the last decade killing American soldiers. Further alienate panicky allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem for the sake of ingratiating ourselves with the mullahs.

 Hand those mullahs some additional strategic leverage as they head into the next (supposedly final) round of nuclear negotiations. 

"We are, I am afraid, drifting in a state of semi-animation, towards the rapids." Those where the words of Hugh Dalton, Clement Attlee's chancellor of the exchequer, describing the state of Britain in the winter of 1947, on the eve of the end of Empire. 

Back then, the U.K. had spent a quarter of its national treasure fighting World War II. It was still spending 19% of its GDP on its military budget. The coldest winter in its history had frozen the country's stocks of coal, causing electricity blackouts and putting two million people out of work. 

The U.S. faces no such crises today. Mr. Obama blew more money on his stimulus plan in 2009 than we had spent up until then on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Defense spending in the U.S. amounts to 4% of GDP. Our economy is sluggish, but it isn't crumbling. 

Yet when it comes to leadership, we have our very own Clement Attlee at the top, eager to subtract the burdens of international responsibility so he can get on with the only thing that really animates him, which is building social democracy at home. Actually, that's unfair to Attlee, who could count on a powerful ally to pick up England's dropped reins, rescue Europe, stop the Soviets. Mr. Obama's method is to ignore a crisis for as long as possible, give a speech, impose a sanction, and switch the subject to climate change or income inequality.

America's retreat needn't end in tragedy, and even the Obama presidency is a survivable event. But the strategic blunders and international disasters are accumulating at an unsustainable pace. This is what the real post-American world looks like.