During his speech on Israel, Rick Perry argues that if the UN supports statehood for the Palestinians — that is, taking Israel’s land and giving it to those who have, in an actual charter, sworn to annihilate Israel — the US should cease any funding of the UN.
Which, while it is a nice gesture — and also a political gauntlet dropped at the feet of a President steeped in the anti-Zionist rantings of Reverend Wright, and a host of leftist academics sympathetic to the authoritarianism (and exoticism) of Arab states — is a gesture that need not come with conditions: the US, as part of its move to return to Constitutional principles, should divorce itself from such an intellectually and morally corrupt institution as the UN and boot every ambassador to every ugly and blood-soaked regime back to their own local hellholes.
After which, the US should announce that it is putting together an organization of free countries.
The US, in every official capacity, has to divorce itself to the leftism that has insinuated itself into nearly every international institution. It needs to build alternative and competing international institutions around its own ideas of liberty, natural rights, individual freedom, and free market capitalism.
Allowing the left to provide the framework inside which the US has been forced to operate has, by design, forced the US to make “compromises” that always move in one direction: toward the left, internationalism, transnational progressivism, and the moral relativism that is disguised in the Orwellian language of “multiculturalism” or “diversity” or “racism” (defined internationally these days as Zionism, while the overt apartheid of the Arab world is forgiven or left largely unacknowledged).
Take back the framework. Rewrite the narrative. Wrestle back language from those who deconstruct it and recycle it to match their ends: tolerance has nothing to do with squelching speech; being anti-big government does not mark one a racist or a militia member; diversity has nothing to do with outward appearances when the stated purpose of a diversity movement is to bring in diverse perspectives; multiculturalism is not in and of itself laudable, particularly when it is juxtaposed against the supposed evil provincialism of assimilation, and when it promotes Balkanization and ethnic identity politics.
For too long classical liberalism has accepted the framings of the left and tried to work within those parameters. Not until we make a structural break from the constraints the left has saddled us with will we be free to once again embrace and promote the fundamental social, political, and civic agreements laid out in our founding documents.
And only then can we really take back our country, and once again become a beacon to the world.
In short, American exceptionalism is only possible once we remove the alien ideological strains actively infecting it.
Language is the place to start.
After which, the US should announce that it is putting together an organization of free countries.
We have some ways to go before we would qualify for membership ourselves. Wresting control away from the entrenched interests currently in power would be a good start.
Im wondering who would qualify for this organization of free countries too. Maybe instead we should have an organization of “not blood thirsty regimes”. Start with that… it’ll rule out most of the world at least.
Make Palestinian statehood recognition in the UN conditioned on Hamas and Fatah supporting Israel’s right to exist. If they do not, the U.S. vetos.
Hamas will not and the veto then is do to that decision.
It looks like John Bolton’s mustache agrees with Perry. Sec State Bolton in a Perry Administration. That gets my vote simply for the head-explosion factor.
I’m heartened that Perry is taking the bull by the horns and addressing this issue instead of tip-toeing around it. It’s about time someone stuck up for Israel instead of kissing Arab butt like we have been for these many years.
Links to Perry/Israel.
The Obama foreign policy is the same as his domestic one, blow everything up then take credit for planting one flower in the rubble all the while lying about how the destruction came into being.
Blinken it seems works for “Nod” who in turn works for “Winken”.
Perry’s text.
For too long classical liberalism has accepted the framings of the left and tried to work within those parameters.
Why do you suppose that is? What did the Left do to force CL to kow-tow to it?
Asking in earnest: I really don’t know.
In slightly related news, in yesterday’s Corner, Jonah blunders into a huge pet peeve of mine: the “in the name of” fallacy, i.e., millions were slaughtered “in the name of Marxism”; ergo, Marxism is the cause of the slaughter.
But you can slaughter millions in the name of anything at all: freedom, democracy, Christianity, bran muffins, etc. but that doesn’t mean that the thing in whose name you’re committing the slaughter has a causal connection to the slaughter.
The respondents to the post mostly ignore the lapse in logic and hasten to point out that those slaughtered “in the name of” Christianity didn’t amount to near as many as those slaughtered for Marxism.
As if that were the point.
Yet another linguistic slight-of-hand to distort reality, and yes, I do note the double-standard wherein Christianity is made to answer for the Inquisition and the Crusades but Marxism doesn’t accept the gulags and Mao and the killing fields et al.
A snippet from the tail-end of Geoff’s link at the WSJ:
On the language, since this statement “… should eventually be given statehood …” isn’t a quote, yet is accompanied by a quote which says no such thing as “given”, I thought it might be useful to suggest that the Palestinians ought rather to acquire a State through negotiations with their immediate neighbors (which is to say, not solely Israel): by earning a State of their own through their conduct in negotiations; through their conduct of their own affairs, affairs internal to the territories in which they reside, in the manner of other States, and in their affairs in relations with other States; by demonstrating they can conduct themselves with a view to the good of their people; by demonstrating they can conduct themselves with a view to the peace of the region.
But no-one is giving. Nor are the Palestinians taking.
It compromised, believed it was arguing with a people arguing back in good faith. Also, it was easier just to give an inch here and there.
#11 – Bingo! I remember in the 1980s the dreaded “insensitive” label would make many of a CL bent think they had violated good manners, etc., and take a step back. “Wow, what did I say that was so wrong…”? Before you knew it, here we are…
Somewhere, Tolkien is smiling, Jeff. Well said. Meanwhile, Chomsky is somewhere (probably a lavish villa on Mallorca) gnashing his teeth.
The UN should serve simply as a location that everyone can have a diplomatic presence – so small nations could have a place they could deal/talk with everyone (ie. Guinea-Bissau isn’t exactly going to have embassy staff in 190+ other countries). That and WHO (before its capture by the Left) were about the only useful aspects of the whole place I can come up with.
While neither my brain or forearms are in Jeff’s league, di, I’ll take a crack at it. It’s quite simple you see. Classical Liberalism is hard. Ben Franklin knew it, too. It’s “A republic, if you can keep it”.
That’s a powerfully good point OI. In a sense, the left simply retreats to the default position of the vast history of humankind, where they feel comfortably ensconced in slavery.
What is wrong with being a militia member? And this racist word, I don’t think it means what they think it means.
It’s almost like there is nothing “progressive” about the progessives, sdferr. Ok, maybe their taste in haute couture.
There was an idea about progressivism once upon a time OI (not to say that idea was an adequate idea, just to say it had somewhat more of a vision about it) but that was long ago, I think, and has been largely forgotten, with good cause, since in the event that idea proved its inadequacy as a template of governance. So the name lives on as a sort of talisman of earnest good faith, concealing the wolf beneath.
But honest, it does appear to be in its death throes, doesn’t it? Sure looks that way to me.
Re: #12:
I’d take it back further, one point would be the setting up of the “Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection of the Democratic Party”, another would be the backing down of the 1930’s Supreme Court when FDR threatened to “pack” it with 6 additional justices to get his plans approved.
BALLOON FENCE!
“The general militia consists of all citizens capable of carrying arms.”
In my State, the organized militia is the Guard, the unorganzed militia is the able bodied men folk over 17 and under AARP…
Did I wake up inside a Monty Python sketch? Palestinian Foreign Minister says attempts underway to win over Gabon, Nigeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in quest for UNSC majority. It’s so reassuring to know that Gabon is on the case.