God bless America: Aftermath of an attempted assassination

Qanta Ahmed (who is a Muslim)

Seated on the South Lawn of the White House on 15 September 2020, we couldn’t help but stand as President Trump arrived on the Balcony, leading the three Middle East leaders into the afternoon sun. We were about to witness the signing of the Abraham Accords bringing Israel into peace with Bahrain and UAE that day, and soon after, Morocco and Sudan. I was seated towards the edge of the 600-strong crowd, surrounded by donors sporting Presidential Seal cufflinks, tribute to their deep pockets and deeper still networks.

Next to me Batsheva, doting aunt of a Jared Kushner senior White House staffer, began reciting a soft prayer. Hearing the Hebrew, I enquired about the prayer. She was incanting the Jewish Bracha (blessing) uttered when one sees a king. I wanted to join in. Following her lead phonetically, we prayed together, one an American Jewish woman, one an American Muslim woman, both understanding our President to be our leader.

In the years since that moment of hope and light, President Trump has faced first ridicule, then derision, then dehumanisation and censure; silenced on mainstream and social media, bound in a litany of legal cases, convicted in my city of New York and finally today, targeted for assassination.

As an American and a Muslim, I pray for the full recovery of our former and likely future President and his family. I pray for my nation, the United States, a generous home to me for over 30 years. And as a Muslim I am bound to follow the example of our Prophet as we are reminded in the Islamic Hadith (Sahih Muslim 1828) to pray to our Maker for whomever is given charge of our nation beseeching of our Creator, ‘Whoever is given charge over my nation and he is gentle with them, be gentle with him.’ In other words one prays that the Almighty ‘might treat the ruler as he reigns’. (I remembered this prayer when King Charles III was crowned and wrote about that in this column).

Tonight, I remember the other part of this prayer.

‘Oh Allah, whoever is given charge over my nation and he is harsh with them, be harsh with him.’

There has been harshness within our nation. There has been harshness directed at our great nation’s former president.

We are collectively responsible as a nation for this appalling moment, led astray by a recklessly vitriolic far-left which has co-opted the remnants of the Democratic party. Today, the generous and hopeful America I first moved to in 1992 is unrecognisable.

Consumed by narcissism, extreme left woke neo-orthodoxy and an obscene marriage (maybe not only of convenience but also perhaps of infatuation) with virulent Islamism, the Democratic party that President Bill Clinton once led has been largely devoured.

In the void remaining, President Trump and his supporters have relentlessly been ridiculed, ostracised, dehumanised and demonised. This Frankenstein left calls Trump Hitler even as they celebrate, sanction and refuse to condemn breathtakingly virulent dehumanisation of America’s Jews since 7 October unleashing an astonishing licence for public hate speech, hate crimes and acts of hate towards America’s Jews. All of this has contributed to these highly combustible moments we must now face as virulent antiSemitism flows in our colleges, schools and campuses in the guise of anti-Zionism while espousing blatant allegiance with US designated Foreign Domestic Terrorist Organisations including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Today’s events were not possible without extreme speech.

Extreme rhetoric in our nation has led to this moment. Islamist jihadist ideology I have examined for decades reveals the power of extreme speech and how it dehumanises, how it diminishes integrative complexity, how it devolves into us versus them, good versus evil, and binary constructs until – having successfully laid the groundwork in the previous absolute dehumanisation of ‘the other’ – there remains only the elimination of the other.

Who knew? While I was busy studying radicalisation in the foothills of the Hindu Kush in North-West Pakistan, or in the lands of Yazidism and the valleys of the Zagros in Iraqi Kurdistan, big-budget radicalisation was unfurling right under my nose here in America’s most moneyed zip codes.

America the Beautiful is approaching almost a decade of intense domestic political tribalism, poisonous identity politics and, thanks to Covid, a deeply frayed social fabric. Indeed, such a fraying of the social fabric characterises the aftermath of all pandemics, as the brilliant counterterrorism intellectual Brian Michael Jenkins clearly delineates in his work Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics. This frayed fabric tends to persist – spoiler alert – not for decades but centuries in the wake of global plagues.

Extreme speech with its binary simplicity feeds a ravenous news cycle straining to capture an ever-diminishing attention span targeted by massive bot-farms financed by national and international malignant actors. The result: fraught with tension, suspicion, alienation and frightening hate, Americans are separated gaping chasm by gaping chasm.

As the prayer in the Hadith reminds us, our leaders at this moment will indeed be judged harshly by our Maker for our leaders have treated all of us harshly. They have manipulated us with extreme speech, silenced debate, and censured the target of their hatred, President Trump, who has been throughout captive like a moth to a flame in an incandescent crucible of their animus.

This harshness is exemplified by a government which shows compassion only to a rarefied elite, yet denies it to the everyman upon whom it only rains scorn; a compassion cultivating the rabid anti-Semite at the expense of the disempowered American Jewish citizen. When we cannot protect the most vulnerable minorities in our nation – the Jewish people – it must be said – we may not be able to protect our most empowered citizens, our former and future president.

Language, Foucault has argued, furnishes the building blocks of a particular reality. Language is the battlefield across which power struggles are waged. And it is to language we must now turn.

America’s origins were inscribed in some of the finest language to define a democracy. We must now turn to our founding documents and tenets: one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Melania Trump in her letter after the assassination attempt wrote that our ‘gentle nation is frayed’. Be gentle with my nation. God Bless America. God have mercy on us all.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/god-bless-america/

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World politics: Worth a chuckle and a tear

Judith Sloan

I tried to lose interest in UK politics but when you have been following events in that country for literally decades, it’s hard to withdraw. To say that the Tories in that country were a disappointment is to understate the point – completely pathetic, I say.

I was neither surprised nor particularly disappointed when the Tories were slaughtered at the recent early election brought on by Rishi Sunak, who acted like the turkey voting for an early Christmas.

To be sure, Labour’s Keir Starmer didn’t actually get a mountain of votes, proportionately speaking, but with first-past-the-post voting, he now has a commanding majority in the House of Commons. There is not one Tory-held seat left in London.

(By the way, I’m no fan of first-past-the post voting, although it’s very easy to understand. How is it defensible that the LibDems could get over 70 seats when it polled proportionately less than Reform which secured only five seats? The best option is voluntary preferential. Voters can mark just one candidate but if there are other candidates that they don’t mind, they can mark them 2, 3 etc. I’m also OK with compulsory voting because that takes the extent of turnout out of the equation.)

Of course, by the time Sunak received the baton, it was too late to rescue his party from its dire position. Years of bossy left-leaning dictates coupled with a complete failure to control immigration, both legal and illegal, had well and truly put paid to the Tories’ electoral prospects.

It’s hard to pin the blame on just one person but I’m sticking my pin in Boris. He was the man who had campaigned for Brexit; he was the man who had won a landslide electoral victory by capturing all those Red Wall seats that had never been held by the Tories; he was the man who blew it all up.

His love affair with the green hoax led to a series of bizarre decisions that alienated many ordinary voters. To see him prancing around the Cop climate conference in Glasgow with the equally appalling Cop Minister, Alok Sharma (who has been rewarded by being made a member of the House of Lords) was a dismal sight. (I blame Boris for convincing ScoMo to commit the Coalition to Net Zero 2050, a strategic political mistake if there ever was one.)

All that crap about electric vehicles and phasing out of petrol/diesel ones; about replacing perfectly adequate gas boilers with noisy and inadequate heat pumps; about subsidising extremely expensive offshore windmills; and about eating less meat and cycling or walking everywhere. The list goes on.

Let’s face it, most adults have had a gutful of being told what to do by their parents. They don’t appreciate having another version of their parents bossing them around and imposing additional costs on them.

Of course, the obvious point here is that the Keir Starmer government will be even worse on this score. He hardly had time to get his feet under the desk when Ed Miliband, new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – pause for groan here – cancelled new oil and gas projects in the North Sea.

Mind you, the Tories had dragged their feet on this, going for years without approving any new projects before finally relenting towards the end of their term. Miliband has also approved some massive solar factory on England’s green and pleasant land.

But when voters have had enough of an incumbent government, their main concern is to boot it out rather than carefully analyse the alternative. In due course, the British public may become equally appalled by the Labour government that has clear bossy tendencies, possibly even worse than the Tories. For example, Starmer has already pulled forward the date of exit for internal combustion cars to 2030. But this realisation will take a little while to emerge.

It is interesting to take a look at what has happened over the ditch – not our ditch, their ditch (the Channel) – after the snap parliamentary election called by President Macron. If single-round/first-past-the-post voting is bad, the French two-round system is even worse. Having secured the most votes in the first round, the conservative Marine Le Pen – hatefully called ‘far right’ by her enemies and the press – was dudded when the ragtag team of left-wing parties ganged up to work the system to their advantage.

Of course, playing electoral games doesn’t alter the opinions of the very large number of French voters who want to see the borders controlled and common sense policies introduced, particularly on climate.

In the meantime, the left is likely to engage in a fight to the death for electoral spoils given that not everyone can be a winner. These sorts of coalitions have a habit of falling apart, often over quite minor issues. At this stage, no decision has been reached about who should be the prime minister, with Macron’s man offering up his resignation and Macron refusing to accept it. In other words, things are not going well, even from the start.

What is perhaps even more concerning is the suite of policies that the left regard as non-negotiable: a reduction in the retirement age; a massive lift in the minimum wage; more public servants; and price freezes on food, energy and transport. And these are just the main ones.

Given that France has not run a budget surplus since 1973, when I still wore my hair in pigtails, this list of demands is absurd. The current budget deficit France is running – well above 5 per cent of GDP – is in clear violation of the EU fiscal rules, which is really saying something given Macron’s love affair with the EU.

It will be a case of being alert to the political and economic instability likely to overcome France in the coming months and years. As Henry Ergas has pointed out, it’s likely to be a return to the volatility of the de Gaulle years and the possible end of the Sixth Republic.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/world-politics/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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