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Brunei slides past our sybaritic elites:

The sultan of Brunei has issued an edict that threatens Muslims with five years in prison if they celebrate Christmas. Christians are told that their celebrations must remain secret or they can be jailed as well.

One of my family business‘ customers was Brunei Shell, as the state sanctioned oil monopoly was called at the time. (Note that the Dutch were complicit in creating this Islamic money machine, as were they and other Western countries in just about all of the world). Our personnel would visit from time to time; my brother stopped by about a quarter century ago.  His comment was that Brunei was “a good place to watch the grass grow”. Now we have a situation that, with Shari’a law, that’s about the only legal thing left to do.

You think that our “freedom-loving” government would want to do something about this? Think again:

But while most Americans don’t know about Brunei, the Obama Regime does know about Brunei. Members of the Obama Regime loves Brunei. In fact, they love Brunei so much, they included Brunei in the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade deal…Under this deal, there can be no labeling to tell you a product is made in America. Do you want to boycott Brunei because of the way it treats Christians and because it is implementing Islamic law? Good luck finding labeling that tells you products were made in Brunei. Under the TPP, it is even arguable that citizen boycotts of the products of a certain nation could open the individuals up to litigation.

Everybody knows that the current Occupant has little use for Christians.  But wait: didn’t the Shari’a-loving Sultan get into it with the LGBT community because he owns hotels in the Los Angeles area? Guess they’re out of luck too on a boycott. This is especially strange since our government has made a great effort for same LGBT community in Africa, with dubious results for everyone.

The really sad thing this about this is that we have yet another Muslim monarch giving way to the brainless, Saudi Arabian policy of enforcing across-the-board Shari’a in a way that not even the early caliphs did.  They could have taken a cue from the earlier Ottomans, but that, sad to say, is out of fashion in Islam.

I saw a Facebook post which characterised the Jr. Jerry Falwell’s recent comments about concealed carry and Islam as follows:

This is probably what most people expect of Fundamentalists– hyper conservative, right wing bigots who see anyone who disagrees with them as godless enemies. This is religious tribalism at its most basic element. We are right. You are wrong. Our God is God. Yours is not. Be assimilated or, if you provoke us, we will kill you.

As is the case with bad foreign policy, must be something in the water, as this post observes about the departure of Yale professor Erika Christakis:

Secular progressivism is not a developed intellectual position that seeks out followers by honestly setting forth its premises and challenging rational adults to contest or accept its conclusions. Instead it’s a tribal marker, like a tattoo or feather headdress, that marks off “insiders” from “outsiders,” appealing not to the cogitative centers of the brain but the deeper, older and murkier parts. These dark places in the mind have no room for “true,” “false,” or “arguable,” but deal only in “Us” and “Them.” For all that they are the fruits of advanced rational thinking and astonishing technical achievement, both academia and social media are exquisite mechanisms for training millions of people to regress from intelligent discourse to brutal, herd-like groupthink.

Damon Linker starts out his piece on American foreign policy with this predictable assertion:

Unlike so many of the blustering Know Nothings trying to become the Republican nominee for president, Clinton and Kagan know a tremendous amount about the world. Clinton, in particular, sounds comfortable talking in granular detail about the intricacies of international affairs, and her confident grasp of the complexities of the Greater Middle East far outstrips what any of the GOP candidates are capable of.

But then he comes back with this:

Yet Clinton’s speech and Kagan’s essay manage to inspire very little confidence. Both are deeply mired in a delusion that began to spread through the American foreign policy establishment at the end of the Cold War and has risen to complete dominance since 9/11. This is the delusion that the United States can and should act as the world’s “indispensable nation,” leading not just the “free world” but the entire world, using “smart power” to get numerous powerful, independent nations to do exactly what we think must be done to enforce global order as we conceive it.

Foreign policy is the perennial disappointment of the United States.  For all the knowledge that our “knowledge classes” have, and how much superior they are than the provincial yokels of That Other Party, the solutions they come up with are at best no better.  There’s something in the water–or the culture–that, for the education and travel we have regaled our ruling elites with, they’re still provincial boobies at heart.

I suppose that you can be a great American or you can be an expert in foreign policy, but you can’t be both.

For those of us with long memories, an old conflict resurfaces:

The shooting down of a Russian jet by Turkey is a “stab in the back” committed by “accomplices of terrorists”, Vladimir Putin has said.

The Sukhoi Su-24 was warned 10 times before being downed near the Syrian border by two Turkish F16 jets for violating the country’s airspace, according to the Turkish military.

In Ottoman/Tsarist times, the two countries were serious rivals.  And the Ottomans, Muslim caliphs though they were, had the support of “Christian” Britain and to a lesser degree France against the Russians.  That was what the Crimean War was all about, and that too is in play again these days.

Given Erdoğan’s Islamicist tendencies, perhaps he’ll want to unfurl the banner named Barack, as Sultan Abdul Hamid II did at the start of the Russo-Turkish war:

The banner of the Caliphate, to which the Sultan alludes in his speech, is that which the Turks call ‘the Heavenly Standard,’ and, in their language, ‘Bairack.’ (Barack) Its color is green, and they believe it to have been the banner of the Prophet Mohammed, delivered to him by the angel Gabriel, through the medium of Ayesha, as an indubitable token of victory over their enemies. This standard was formerly laid up in the Treasury of the Sultan of Constantinople, but Is now kept in the Mosque at Eyoob (Eyub), where the new Sultans on the day of their coronation gird on the sabre of the Caliphate. In case of any serious struggle, a religious duty compels the Sultan to give orders to the ‘Mullas,’ (Mullahs) or Mohammedan clergy, to display the Prophet’s standard before the people and army, and proclaim ‘Al Jehad,’ (Jihad) or the holy war, by exhorting the Moslems to be faithful to their religion and defend their Kingdom.

If Erdoğan is not careful, he’ll get the same result as Abdul Hamid did, i.e. lose.  He has squandered two legacies of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey: a secularist state and a strong military.

But this is a dangerous situation.  People always speak of a Sarajevo-like event to plunge the world into war, and this is one of them.  That’s especially true if Barack answers the call of the banner that bears his name.