ISIS, Rabbinical Wisdom and Jihad Jujutsu

 Gamaliel was, perhaps, Jerusalem’s most respected Rabbi circa 35 A.D.  When asked how the Sanhedrin should deal with the alarming and seemingly heretical Jesus movement, he counseled restraint and patience advising that:

“if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them.”  (Acts 5 33-39)

In support of his case, he cited earlier popular “messiahs” that had come and gone of their own accord.

Today, when the West is challenged by radical Islam, Gamaliel’s sage advice rings true.  Leaving the Islamic Middle East alone to work out its issues may be the most prudent and productive response.

A thumbnail portrait of Middle Eastern history and quick peek into the probable future will provide useful perspective.

From ancient times up until the 16^th Century, the legendary Silk Road and associated spice trading routes were the commercial arteries through which Europe obtained precious silks, spices and even opiates.  These routes passed through Persia and the Arabic lands.  The Middle East was prime real estate and its inhabitants prosperous traders.

Fortunes plummeted when Columbus returned from his voyage to the New World.  With the Age of Discovery, oceanic shipping displaced land based commerce,  Thus the Atlantic facing nations including England, France, Spain and the Netherlands rose to world dominance while the Middle East and Italy, then the commercial hub of Europe, withered into irrelevance.

However, the invention of the internal combustion engine coupled with the discovery of Middle Eastern petroleum made the Islamic desert wastelands a hot commodity again.  Following the First World War, the Western imperial powers assured themselves of access to Mid-East oil by divvying up the region into client states ruled by compliant war lords.

From that time onward, imperialist meddling in Mid-East by Europeans and the U.S. has never ceased. A century of political, economic and military intervention by Christian, Jewish and secular Westerners has stoked nationalist and religious resentments alike.  This is manifested in the violent “blowback” that Ron Paul and our own CIA has documented.

A look forward validates the Gamaliel strategy.  The fracking boom combined with new energy efficient technologies have broken the Mid-East stranglehold on energy.  The world is awash in petroleum and prices have tanked.  Experts estimate that we have a supply of over 200 years of crude in the ground.  My guess is that way before the supply runs out, the human race will have moved onto new energy technologies and Mid-East oil will as relevant as Silk Road trade routes in a jet plane world.

As oil income wanes in importance, the region’s people will seek other livelihoods.  This will require innovation and investment which demands economic and social liberalization.  At that point you can  kiss radical Islam goodbye unless, it is “from God” as Gamaliel hedged 2,000 years back. 

If it is from God, so be it.  But I don’t think so.  Meanwhile, Islamists use political, cultural and emotional

Jujutsu. Jihadists turn the force of Western incursions back upon their opponents. The harder that America strikes at them, the more foolish we look.

A half century ago, The United States faced a far more formidable threat from the Soviet Union, a true military super power.  At that time Princeton scholar, George Kennan, recommended a policy of “containment”, diplomatic and economic initiatives to hem in Stalinist – Soviet expansionism.  This formed the basis of U.S. foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Marshall plan to rebuild war torn Europe and Asia was the type of program that he envisioned. This was s patient Gamaliel approach. Unfortunately, America’s militarists misrepresented Kennan’s intent.  They exploited it to justify a massive military buildup, nuclear proliferation and unceasing armed intervention the world over. 

President Eisenhower, the diplomat/warrior hero of World War II, perceived the folly of continual proxy wars and runaway military expansion.  He withdrew from the Korean War and warned his countrymen of the dangers of the “military industrial” complex in his presidential farewell speech:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ultimately, America prevailed in its showdown with the Soviet Union, because of Gamaliel theory, not armed confrontation.  Because Soviet Communism was oppositional to human nature, it collapsed under its own weight.  It was of man, not of God.

Thus the true danger from the Islamist movement comes not from wild eyed terrorists.   The true danger is how it frightens Americans to surrender their essential liberties to the military and surveillance state.  Long before Ike, America’s first warrior president foresaw danger of a militarized government:

“a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country… it could not be done without great oppression of the people.”

America’s enormous warfare establishment makes us unsafe by intervening in intractable international conflicts that are beyond our control and in which we have no moral standing or compelling interest.  Americans are best served by the Gamaliel strategy of allowing the will of God or nature to take its course,

Related Posts:

Fighting For Democracy? For Real
Crimea & The End of Empire

 Subscribe to the 2 Percenter blog by going to http://feedage.com  and entering 2percentpov into the box on top -choose your favorite reader.

Go back to:  2 Percenter Home      Article Archive

Connect through:

Facebook     Twitter     E-mail     

"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon

Piltdown, Polar Bears, Ponzi and Fiat Money

Up until now, the Piltdown Man was one of the great scientific hoaxes of all time. In 1912, a collection of carefully doctored human-like remains were unearthed near the village of Piltdown in Sussex, England.  These findings were put forward and readily accepted as the missing evolutionary link between man and ape.  This farce stood for nearly 50 years as scientific “consensus” until it was demonstrated that this discovery was a mélange of human and orangutan bones of fairly recent vintage.  They had been dyed and filed to look like the Real McCoy fossils of a heretofore unknown species.

To this day, the jokesters remain anonymous and no one was bilked out of billions of dollars.  The worst that can be said is that the worldwide scientific community got punked and ate a healthy slice of humble pie.

Scientific shenanigans are afoot again in new millennium.  This time the tables are turned.  Scientists are pulling the wool over our eyes with the climate change scam. In a February 7 Telegraph article, Christopher Booker reports on how global temperature data has been fudged upward at monitoring stations throughout the world.  The article is based upon the investigations of Paul Homewood.  Booker writes:

“When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.”

 But what about those poor polar bears whose icy home is melting away?  Homewood demonstrates that is not global warning that is causing the thaw.  Rather the diminished ice is the result of:

“cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.”

And why would scientists throughout the world be party to such as scam?  The reason is that “Big Science” is underwritten by “Big Government”.  Just as Big Government handsomely paid Big Science to create weapons of mass destruction and disruption, they are now in cahoots to shake taxpayers down with the warming scare.

Another present day “scientific” canard comes courtesy of those who practice economics as if it were particle physics.  Econometricians would have us think they can pull a few levers and people will respond predictably as if they were rats in a Skinner Box.  

Thus central bankers adjust the flow of legal tender intent upon modifying our behavior, supposedly for our own wellbeing.  Here is what happens:

1.     Elite bankers and financiers get newly created money first to invest or spend it as they see fit.

2.     This new money makes it way downstream in the economy, thereby devaluing the currency that Joe and Jane Sixpack hold.  This drives up the nominal cash prices of the things that Joe and Jane must buy.  Meanwhile the elites were able to buy things at lower prices before inflationary pricing kicked in.

3.     The U.S. Fed seems pleased with itself that the Consumer Price Index is increasing at a “modest” and “steady” 2% per year.

4.     This means that if Joe and Jane just hold on to their money, it decreases in worth by 2% each year.

5.     Since The Fed is also suppressing interest rates at near 0%, Joe and Jane will still lose purchasing power by putting money in a savings account – formerly a time honored way of building up middle class wealth in America.

6.     So it order to break even, Joe and Jane must move their savings into risky investments like securities and commodities.

7.     This again benefits the elite Wall Street crowd by artificially pumping up the value of the stocks and bonds that they hold.

The schemes of Charles Ponzi fleeced a handful of greedy investors who should have known better.  The

policies of The Fed and world’s central bankers rob unsuspecting millions of their savings.  They encourage malinvestment and inflate financial bubbles that create hardship and misery on a global scale.

The real question is, “why do people keep falling for the empty promises of the ruling elites?”  I suspect it that people have lost faith in themselves and in any other higher power.  Therefore, like captives under the spell of a worldwide Stockholm Syndrome, they wish to believe that their captors have their best interests at heart.

The moral at the end of Steve Goodman’s con man saga, Turnpike Tom, is this:

“Remember that you only fall for
Lies and stories when you really want to”

Related Posts:

Climate Change – The Model
The Nobel Truths of Climate Change
Blinded BY (Pseudo) Science

 Subscribe to the 2 Percenter blog by going to http://feedage.com  and entering 2percentpov into the box on top -choose your favorite reader.

Go back to:  2 Percenter Home      Article Archive

Connect through:

Facebook     Twitter     E-mail     

"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon