What Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ Have in Common

Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission

excerpt from this article: Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots.

This Sept. 11, then, let’s dismiss the fairy stories about the enemies of a free society. Their grievances aren’t merely economic and they won’t be satisfied with jobs or entitlements. Their motivations are ideological and they will be satisfied only with power.

I cling to the hope that most Americans are still willing as a nation to fight and, if necessary, to die to preserve our freedoms, our rights, our customs, our history. That was the spirit of Flight 93. It was the spirit that ultimately defeated al Qaeda and Islamic State. But it is not the spirit of today’s “woke” protesters. And it is time that we all woke up to that reality.

There were many American heroes on 9/11, but the greatest were the passengers and crew of Flight 93. Not only did they avert what al Qaeda planned—a direct hit on the White House—but they also embodied Patrick Henry’s credo “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Do those words still have a meaning in the America of 2020? For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to al Qaeda. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual.

Five More Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Susan Rice

Ineptitude is the theme that runs throughout her diplomatic and national-security career.Joe Biden is reportedly considering Barack Obama’s former national-security adviser Susan Rice to be his running mate. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently told us “20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Susan Rice.”

I worked with Rice during the Clinton administration and have five more things the public needs to know.

1. Rice was obsessed with U.N. peacekeeping to solve world conflicts. Rice was a key architect of a disastrous Clinton-administration policy — Presidential Decision Directive 25. PDD-25, as the document was called, sought to implement “assertive multilateralism” to address all global conflicts with U.N. peacekeepers. This concept, the brainchild of Rice’s mentor Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to the United Nations, rested on the assumption that due to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers could be used to address global conflicts instead of U.S. troops. PDD-25 was so radical that at one point an early draft advocated giving the U.N. the ability to tax international phone calls to pay for new peacekeeping missions. Assertive multilateralism was a spectacular failure since it led to the deployment of lightly armed, often poorly disciplined U.N. peacekeepers in war zones such as Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia, where many were killed or taken hostage.

2. Rice disliked hearing opposing views. As part of my duties as a CIA analyst covering U.N. issues, I briefed Susan Rice on classified and unclassified information related to her job. It was clear that she was not interested in — and objected to — hearing intelligence that contradicted her personal views. She and her NSC boss Richard Clarke were determined to ram through PDD-25 and tried to silence officers from other government agencies (including myself) who expressed skepticism about deploying U.N. peacekeepers to war zones and civil wars. Rice also made clear to me that she did not want to hear about U.N. waste and corruption. During the one occasion when I tried to brief her on an incident of serious U.N. corruption, she cut me off by saying, “Do you know how much a B-1 bomber costs?” Her point was she did not care how much money the U.N. wasted because she believed the U.S. government wasted more.

During times of war and chaos, someone profits. As the world continues to reel from the coronavirus pandemic, businesses have shuttered, families have lost loved ones, and governments at the federal, state, and local levels have scrambled to provide adequate resources to the public. Meanwhile, after lying to international health organizations and governments around the world, China seeks to repair its public image and capitalize on a pandemic it allowed to wreak havoc on the world.

Beijing is positioned to recover faster than its competitors, including the United States. Why that is contains a lesson for America going forward, if we don’t want to be back in this position again.

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a plan to expand China’s global footprint in infrastructure projects abroad called the “Belt and Road Initiative.” What followed was a series of projects aimed at connecting over 65 countries with access to financing in excess of $1 trillion. The relationships span the globe, even including ambitions to control the Arctic Circle. The initiative has given China significant access to resources, economic zones, and trade routes. According to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, from “2000 to 2017, the Chinese government, banks and contractors signed $146 billion in loan commitments to African governments and their state-owned enterprises.” Foreign Policy reports, “Djibouti, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Montenegro … owe more than 45% of their gross domestic products to Beijing over Belt and Road projects.”

And thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of political or economic competition at home, it has been able to lend money on terms advantageous to Beijing — and only Beijing. Azeem Ibrahim, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, notes, “Beijing is becoming adept at translating outstanding debts into foreign assets.” The Belt and Road program largely relies on low-interest credit facilities collateralized by borrowing countries’ infrastructure or natural resources. Due to the poor credit of the sovereign borrower or low expectation of performance of the asset in question, many call China’s practice a form of “neo-colonialism” or “creditor imperialism” through what’s called “debt-trap diplomacy.” The Institute for Security Studies has gone so far as to call China’s behavior a “predatory system designed to ensnare countries into a straightjacket of debt servitude.”

How this works in practice: Borrowers that are unable to fulfill their loan obligations cede tremendous bargaining leverage to the Chinese when they seek to restructure the debt. If they default, the Chinese government simply seizes control of the asset. For example, the Sri Lankan government entered into a credit deal with the Chinese for a port (which reports indicate was a shaky bet, financially, from the start). When the asset didn’t perform to the terms of the contract, Sri Lanka granted China a 99-year lease on the port, including over 150,000 acres of land surrounding it. Just like that, the Chinese Communist Party gained control over a major waterway of another country.

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The hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to  protecting Obama or Biden is  simply amazing that  they get away with it.    It is up to the conservative media to expose them.  Nancy

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