So much for the ARABS on our side!!!

SO MUCH FOR THE ARABS!!

by Mark Steyn


In 2008, the U.S. electorate voted to repudiate the previous
eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end
when one side decides it's all a bit of a bore and they'd rather
the government spend the next eight years doing to health care
and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps
in Waziristan. In the old days, declining powers seeking to
arrest either their own decline or another's rise would turn to
war-see the Franco-Prussian, the Austro-Prussian, the Napoleonic,
and many others. But those were the days when traditional
greatpower rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have
post-modern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the
way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to
opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the
Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. It too
yearns for normaliut.

So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President
Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American
policy preJanuary 2009.

How's that working out?

In 2010, Zogby International and the University of Maryland
conducted an "Arab Public Opinion Poll" for the Brookings
Institution. They interviewed respondents in Egypt, Jordan,
Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates-the
so-called "moderate" Arab Street. So how did President Obama do
with the citizens of our allies after all the Islamoschmoozing
and other outreach to the Muslim world?

In 2008, the last year of the Bush Texas-cowboy terror, 83
percent of Arabs had a very or somewhat negative view of the
United States. By 2010, the second year of the Obama apology
tour, 85 percent had a very or somewhat negative view. So much
for the outreach.

So if they don't like Obama, who do they like? The poll asked
which world leader (other than their own) do you most admire?
Here's the Top Twelve:

1) Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey (20 percent);
2) Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (13 percent);
3) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (12 percent);
4) Hassan Nasrallah, head honcho of Hizb'Allah (9 percent);
5) Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria (7 percent);
6) Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France (6 percent);
7) Osama bin Laden, Abbottabad's leading pornography aficionado
(6 percent);
8) Jacques Chirac, the retired Gallic charmer (4 percent);
9) Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (4
percent);
10) Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt (4 percent);
11) Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid, Emir of Dubai (3 percent);
12) Saddam Hussein, Iraq War loser (2 percent).

What a hit parade! Twenty percent voted for the avowedly Islamist
leader of a formerly secular pluralist Turkey; 57 percent voted
for current dictators, dead dictators, thugs, terrorists, and a
couple of wealthy minor princelings of the Muslim world; and the
remainder celebrated diversity with Hugo Chavez and a pair of
French roues. Maybe if Obama abased himself even more
ostentatiously, maybe if next time he bows to the King of Saudi
Arabia he licks the guy's feet, maybe then he can boost his
numbers up to Jacques Chirac level.
But, just as fascinating was the so-called "realist" reaction of
the pollsters' clients, the Brookings Institution. They took all
the above as a sign that America needs to work harder to distance
itself from negative perceptions that it's too closely allied
with Israel.
I don't think so. America could join Iran in a nuclear strike on
the Zionist Entity, and those numbers wouldn't shift
significantly. Because sometimes who you are is more important
than anything you do. America will discover, as Israel did, that
a one-way urge for normaliut will lead to a more dangerous world.

In the vacuum of U.S. retreat, anti-Americanism will nevertheless
metastasize and crowd in from our borders. In 2010 Die Welt
reported that, on his recent visit to Teheran, Hugo Chavez had
signed an agreement to place Iranian missiles at a jointly
operated military base in Venezuela. In the years ahead, distant
enemies will seed new proxies in Latin America (as Iran did to
Israel with Hamas and Hizb'Allah), and suicide bombers will board
our city buses, too.

American isolation is already under way. China is the world's
biggest manufacturer, the world's biggest exporter, the
post-colonial patron of resource-rich Africa, the post-downturn
patron of cash-strapped Mediterranean Europe, and the biggest
trading partner of India, Brazil, and other emerging powers. Why
be surprised that in such a world, getting on with America
matters less and less? Sometimes that's good news: Washington and
its geriatric EU allies wanted the bonkers Copenhagen "climate
change" deal; Brazil and India joined with China to block it.
Sometimes it's not so good: the leaders of Brazil (again) and
Turkey, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and
flattered by Obama during his first year, flew in to high-five
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and subsequently took China's position on
Iranian nukes. But, either way, second-tier powers around the
globe are making their dispositions, and telling us very plainly
about what awaits. In 2010, the Royal Australian Navy
participated in its first ever naval exercises with Beijing; a
few weeks later, Britain and Germany declined to support the U.S.
in its efforts to get China to increase the value of the yuan.
Even for America's closest allies, the dominance of both the
Pentagon and the almighty dollar is conditional.

The world after America is beginning to take shape, a planet
where the loons and the hard men make the running and the rest go
along to get along. Picture the UN a few years down the road: for
three of the Security Council's permanent members (Britain,
France, Russia), an accommodation with Islam will be a domestic
political imperative, and getting along with China will be the
overriding foreign priority. In the practical sense, this will
shrink "the West" and destroy the post-war balance of power in
which three permanent members from the free world balanced two
authoritarian powers. Nudge things a little further down the road
- a fractious planet of hostile forces - Russia, China, a
semi-Islamized Europe, the aspiring caliphate, whatever the new
Chavismo bequeaths Latin America - all mutually antipathetic yet
for whom the flailing America remains the biggest and most
inviting target.

There will be no "new world order," only a world with no order,
in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet's
wealthiest nations are unable to defend their borders and are
forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in
such a geopolitical scene, whatever survives of the United States
will still be the most inviting target-first because it's big;
and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but
imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

Listen to the way Washington's European "allies" and Sunni Arab
"allies" and UN "human rights" bigwigs talk about the Jewish
state today. That's how they'll be talking about the U.S.
tomorrow. In a post-American world, the kind of world Barack
Obama is committed to building, America will be surrounded on all
sides by hostile forces and more globally demonized than ever.
Another half-a-decade on, and there'll be an informal Islamoveto
over European policy. Russia and China have already determined
that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims,
their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as
an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts
will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on
the side America's not.

They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as
they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame
Washington for the horrors of the new age more furiously than
ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to
demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and
appeasers. He's the warm-up act, and that's the reception
Washington will get in a world after American power.

Western civilization is a synthesis - a multicultural synthesis,
if you like:

Athenian democracy, Roman law, the Hebrew Bible, dispersed by
London to every corner of the globe. If Rome, Athens, and
Jerusalem are the three temple mounts of the modern world and all
its blessings, none has had a rougher ride than the last:
attacked, besieged, captured, and recaptured dozens of times
across the centuries - and twice destroyed. Today, Jerusalem is
home to the Knesset and all Israeli government ministries, and
the universally unrecognized capital of a universally
delegitimized nation. Because the civilized world could not
summon up the will to prevent Iran going nuclear, Israel will
live on a thin line between the advanced civilized state they
have built and oblivion, a permanent state of high alert in which
the difference between first-world prosperity and extinction will
come down to the hair-trigger reactions of bureaucratic
monitoring of an implacable foe.

But in leaving Israel to its fate we have told our enemies
something elemental and devastating about the will of a decaying
West, and of the supposed global superpower. Around the world our
foes will draw their own conclusions. Just as there are neglected
and rubble-strewn Jewish cemeteries from Tangiers to Czernowitz
to Baghdad, one day there will be abandoned American cemeteries,
too. Across the globe there will be towns and countries where
once were Americans and now are none - from Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia to Germany and Japan. What's left of the republic will
hunker down and finally understand what's it's like to be Israel.
Washington will be the new Jerusalem - a beleaguered citadel in a
world that wants to kill it.
...............

HE IS CORRECT, BUT NOT QUITE IN THE WAY HE THINKS IT WILL BE. IT
IS OUR LOVERS - OUR LOVERS OF EUROPE - THAT WILL COME AGAINST US.
EUROPE WILL NOT GO DOWN AND OUT, IT MAY RESHAPE ITSELF, BUT OUT
OF ALL THIS MESS IT WILL EMERGE MIGHTIER AND MORE POWERFUL IN
ECONOMY AND MILITARY MIGHT. IT WILL BE THE LAST RESURRECTED HOLY
ROMAN/BABYLON POWER, WITH GERMANY AT ITS HEAD (AS IT ALREADY IS)
AND WILL WITH A "CHRISTIAN" FALSE PROPHET WORKING MIRACLES, RISE
TO DESTROY A UNITED ARAB UNION (YET TO FORM), THE JEWISH PEOPLE,
AND THE USA AND BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND OTHER NATIONS OF EUROPE.
IT WILL YET RULE THE WESTERN WORLD, AND WILL LEAD THE WORLD INTO
THE GREATEST TRIBULATION THAT HAS EVER BEEN, DURING THE LAST 42
MONTHS OF THIS AGE. THEN BECAUSE NO FLESH WOULD BE SAVED ALIVE,
JESUS WILL RETURN IN GLORY AND POWER TO RULE ALL NATIONS AND
BRING TO EARTH THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

I HAVE EXPOUNDED FOR YOU ALL THE PROPHETIC BOOKS OF THE BIBLE ON
MY WEBSITE.