November 14, 2015 – PARIS

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Yesterday morning the president declared ISIS had been “contained.” With that in mind, Mark Steyn posts on last night’s attacks in Paris.

… With his usual killer comedy timing, the “leader of the free world” told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning, America” this very morning that he’d “contained” ISIS and that they’re not “gaining strength”. A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.

Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that “nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable”: We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.

Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.

Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight’s events as “an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share”.

But that’s not true, is it? He’s right that it’s an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to speak for another portion of “humanity”. And these are not “universal values” but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today. …

 

 

 

Roger Simon is a more direct than Steyn. 

I am not going to blame Barack Obama entirely for what happened in Paris Friday — but mostly.  And that’s not just because he famously called ISIS the jayvee team, when they are now unequivocally the New York Yankees or the Manchester United of terror, repellent as that analogy may be (he started it).

But what is clear from the carnage at The Bataclan theatre and elsewhere in Paris that we will be studying for weeks or months to come is that the West has no leader in our evident civilizational war — no Churchill, no Roosevelt, no de Gaulle, not even a George W. Bush.  It’s certainly not Barack Obama, a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror.  This is the same man who oversaw, indeed instigated, a large-scale American démarche for the first time since World War II.

And look what happened. …

 

 

Same with John Podhoretz

“We’ve gone through these episodes ourselves,” President Obama said Friday afternoon in explaining how the “heartbreaking” events in Paris were resonating with Americans. Well, no, we haven’t. We haven’t been through an episode of this kind, ever. We haven’t had a soccer stadium bombed and a concert venue occupied and three gathering places shot up simultaneously. We have not experienced urban warfare executed by a terrorist organization using a combination of suicide bombers and gunmen. We’ve had 9/11, and we had the Tsarnaev brothers, and we’ve had lone shooters. Combining these approaches is a horror we’ve yet to undergo. About these things, we are innocents.

The question is how much longer we will be. If one assumes this was an ISIS operation, that would mean the group may be engaged in a systematic effort against countries that have announced a common goal of extirpating it. And it may be doing so on an accelerated schedule. Two weeks ago, ISIS apparently took down a Russian airliner. Yesterday, it went wild in Paris. Where next? Germany? Australia? Turkey? 

Or here in the U.S.? …

 

 

And Andrew McCarthy.

There is always the chance that the next attack will knock the scales from our eyes. Always the chance that we will realize the enemy is at war with us, even as we foolishly believe we can end the war by not fighting it, by surrendering.

As this is written, the death count in Paris is 158. That number will grow higher, and very many more will be counted among the wounded and terrorized.

“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West.

It is what animates our enemies.

Barack Obama tells us — harangues us — that he is the president who came to end wars. Is that noble? Reflective of an America that honors “our values”? No, it is juvenile. …

 

No cartoons today. Nothing humorous about living in an obviously leaderless country.