Timothy Birdnow

Caroline Glick nails it.

Several analysts have likened the US defeat in Afghanistan to the fall of the Byzantine capital Constantinople to the Ottoman armies in 1453. The Taliban flag flying over what was the US Embassy in Kabul until the end of last month, and reports that China is considering taking over Bagram Air Base, signal that America’s enemies believe they are ascendant, that the free world has been defeated.

The "forever war” Biden, his advisors and supporters are gunning to aggressively pursue until the complete destruction of their enemy is a war within the United States. The "enemy” are their political rivals, who they castigate as "racists.” They call their forever war, "the war against racism.”

The odd thing about their efforts is that the American war against racism was won decisively more than 50 years ago thanks to the Civil Rights Movement and thanks to the fact that the majority of Americans recognized at the time and since that racism is antithetical to ideals of freedom and equal opportunity on which the United States was founded.

The seeds of this strange war were planted 20 years ago at Durban. We remember the Durban conference mainly for its antisemitic agenda. The plan to present anti-Zionism as a "kosher” form of antisemitism, and use it to abrogate the Jewish state’s right to exist was codified at Durban. But legitimizing antisemitism wasn’t only a means to hurt the Jews. For many actors on the international left, legitimizing the goal of cancelling Israel’s moral and legal right to exist was and remains still today a means to advance their primary goal: destroying America’s moral confidence in its role as the leader of the free world and denying the US’s moral right to fight to defend its national interests.

As author Lee Smith explained recently inTabletonline magazine, the point of presenting the Palestinian terrorists as victims and Jewish Israelis as war criminals while the opposite is true was to undermine America’s faith – and the faith of the West more generally — in its own morality.

"To truly unmask the Western liberal bourgeoisie as sentimental hypocrites whose time has passed,” Smith explained, "it was necessary to strike at those they swore never again to forsake, whose culture and religion helped birth the conceptual and spiritual universe of the West – i.e., the Jews.”

In other words, delegitimizing Israel and legitimizing Palestinian terrorists were means to break America’s belief in its right to lead, its right to defeat its enemies, and its right to be strong.

A political war directed against the United States specifically was launched at Durban in parallel to the antisemitic onslaught. Its foundational assumption was that the US was born in the sin of racism with black African slavery, and that nothing can ever expiate the sin. Racism, not liberty, was declared America’s true foundation. The Civil War, in which half of million Americans died to free the slaves, didn’t change a thing. Neither did the Civil Rights Movement, which ended institutional and legal discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

It wasn’t the governments of Africa, or Iran or Russia or China that spearheaded the war against America at Durban. It was launched by American citizens. Led by Rev. Jesse Jackson, hundreds of black American radicals descended on Durban. They were joined by hundreds of activists from leftist extremist groups. They castigated the US as the most repressive state in the world whose victims are the wretched of the earth. Blacks, all other minorities (except Jews), women, homosexuals, transgendered; everyone was on the list of America’s victims. They called on the UN to send inspectors to monitor "racist” US police forces and the criminal justice system more generally. They demanded trillions in "reparations” for slavery to be paid to black Americans born 100 years after all slaves were freed.

When the Bush administration walked out of the Durban conference in the middle, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and his advisors dismissed the importance of the events by castigating the activists at the conference as radical fringe elements bereft of any significant constituency back home. Their dismissiveness certainly seemed reasonable four days later.

But as it turned out, even before the dust had settled on the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the "radical fringe” began throwing its weight around, and it worked out its weight was considerable. Indeed within a few short years, its influence had become decisive.

The US lost its way in both Iraq and Afghanistan in large part because George W. Bush and his advisors couldn’t contend with the withering and continuous condemnation of them and their military operations by the American left in the media, academia, Congress and beyond. The Left worked without interruption to demonize Bush and to undermine and delegitimize all of the Bush administration’s military efforts against the forces of radical Islam.

Bush’s decision to transform the war on terror into campaigns for democracy was born at least in part from his distress. Bush and his advisors hoped to end or at least diminish the unending assaults on them and on US military operations by transforming the war from a means to defend America and its interests into something altogether altruistic.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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