Jim Whelpley -- A friend.

A wonderful friend died yesterday after a long illness.  Jim Whelpley was, above all else,  an original and highly creative thinker, and above all a loyal friend.  Jim's life, like most, was no smooth cruise on calm waters with the wind always at his back and the sun always shining.  He had his struggle with demon rum and solved it once and for all by becoming a teetotaler.  And he ran afoul of a vile criminal element in society when he legitimately sold his company to a prestigious group that turned out to be a virtual front for a international crime syndicate.  Jim spent a lot of time and energy solving that problem, but he did and was completely exonerated.   


Jim's most original thinking, at least in my book, was his ideas on the economy.  Long before anyone, like back in the '60's, Jim was talking about the monetary system and its dangerous tendency to expand too quickly and take on unlimited debt.  Never content to follow the crowd, or "the experts", Jim was a proponent of doing the research, digging up the facts, and coming to your own conclusions, no matter what the conventional wisdom and experts were saying.  As a consequence he foresaw all the problems that beset our world economy today.  Much of his inspiration for his iconoclastic approach was Irving Fischer, the head of the Yale economics department in the early part of the 20th century.  Jim knew Fisher's thoughts and history cold and was intrigued by how he came to revise his view of the cause of the '29 crash and subsequent depression of the 1930's.  He saw us repeating the same actions that led to the crash and depression all through the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's and while he warned and warned most people were too addicted to the "punch bowl", as he used to say, to step back and consider the consequences.  The consequences are here now, not only in the US, but all over the developed world.  Excessive debt leading to excessive government all flowed from the creation of too much fiat money and the lack of discipline and control on the part of governments.  Jim didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk. Sometime in the 70's Jim bought a bank in Texas was grandfathered exempt from the Federal Reserve system and could practice banking outside the rules and regulations of that system.  This meant no fractional banking which Jim thought to be at the heart of the problem of over expansion of the money supply.  Taking the leverage out of the banking system was part of his mantra.  We can see how wise that thinking was now that everyone is deleveraging and trying to get rid of debt.  


Looking back on Jim's perspective on these matters,  it's amazing how patient and humble he was presenting his case.  He had the facts, he had done the homework, and yet he didn't call the rest of us fools for not seeing it even though we didn't necessarily have all the facts, nor had done all that homework. Jim just patiently waded in making his case year after year. Waiting, probably, for everyone to catch up somewhere along the way.   


Just for the record, here's a website with some of Fisher's history and thoughts. Jim and Irving were right.  They're probably discussing the economy right now.  

ADDED:  Jim's ideas on banking included elimination of the centralized Federal Reserve System and returning to a free market based banking system.  This book, now available on line for free, discusses this concept.   Jim would whole heartedly approve this author's work.

Erdogan's Anti-Americanism

Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is an Islamist who, like all Islamists, hates Israel and the U.S. as well.  Moderate secularist Turks are alarmed at the direction he is taking their country, and they should be.  It appears that he was supportive of the latest manufactured flotilla crises over the Gaza territory by his very quick public condemnation of the Israeli government's handling of the affair.  He has been cozying up to Iran's leadership for some time now and clearly has a different role in mind for Turkey than their traditional one of allying with the West via NATO membership, and moving in the direction of the the European Union.  It may very well be that he has seen the Western model failing under a sea of debt and feckless current Western leaders and has decided to go with the Islamists whom he sees as on the rise.  Who knows?  It is clear from this  article he is no friend of the U.S. and as a consequence we should plan our strategy accordingly.  It's also pretty clear the Obama admin has no idea how to respond to this new reality, which does not bode well for stability in the region or world.  Here, for example, is an article by Charles Krauthammer on the crises in Gaza with a concise history of how Israel got where it is in terms of its self defense.  The bottom line is as long as there are terrorists (Hamas and Hizbollah) in control of the population in the Gaza strip, there will never be peace in the area. For a simple reason.  Those two terrorist organizations are committed to the destruction of the state of Israel.  They have never been willing to assert that Israel has a right to exist, never!  Obama and his State Department and advisors can dance around this fact all they want but they can't change it.  Islamist states and organizations (Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah) presumably including the present government of Turkey, do not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as a state.  When Obama says, as he did last night on Larry King's program that "Turkey has a constructive role to play in solving the problem", he tells the world he does not understand what's at play in the Gaza affair.  Either he doesn't know the history as outlined in Krauthammer's article, or he willfully rejects that history and sides with those who want the destruction of Israel.  Take your choice.  IMHO, Obama is, like most Muslims, anti-semitic.  It's not clear whether he's a Muslim or simply a Muslim fellow traveller.  He's surely no fried of Israel's, and they now know that for certain.

ADDED:  Mark Steyn's latest column at the OCR is most timely in reference to the subject of this post.  A must read, as Steyn is always relevant and right, IMHO.

ADDED:  Claudia Rossett writes for Forbes Magazine on foreign affairs and is knowledgeable about the ME.  She wrote for years for the WSJ.  Her articled here and here shed more light on what's been happening in Turkey since the election of Recep Tayip Erdogan in 2002.  None of it is good for the cause of peace in the area.

ADDED: And here's Ralph Peters' analysis of what's happening in Turkey. Peters is a retired intel colonel whose speciality is ME foreign affairs.  He clearly believes the Obama administration has been had by the Islamists now in control of the Turkey's government in Ankara.  Peters also points out the diminishment of the influence of the military by the Erdogan government since his election in 2002.  This is significant because the military has always played the role of guarantor of a secular, democratic state in Turkey's affairs.  Erdogan is changing that role which effetctively solidifies the autocratic rule of the AKP party.

ADDED:  Victor Davis Hanson, every conservatives favorite historian and an insightful commenter of current  affairs, provides a bit more texture here to the Turkey/ME looming disaster.

Gramscian Marxism

The cultural war is described here. Much of the Obama program becomes clear once one understands the nature and influence of the philosophy of Gramsci.

The Muslim Threat

Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the Blind Sheikh in the early 90's after the failed first attempt to blow up the twin towers.  His new book on the subject is now available for purchase.  His comments on the book and the connection between the hard left and the Islamist is very important, coming as it does from an intelligent person who has studied a terrorist closely for an extended period of time.  The book is "The Grand Jihad", and his comments are below:

Andrew McCarthy is the former Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and his friends for the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing. After he secured a conviction, he recounted what he had learned along the way in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. When it comes to the subject of civilian trials for unlawful enemy combatants and of the Islamist war against the United States, McCarthy is like Walt Whitman: He is the man, he suffer'd, he was there. I find myself returning to this book regularly.

And McCarthy has stayed on the case. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, published last week, McCarthy follows up with a closely argued account of Islamist designs on, and inroads in, the United States.

In a sense, the book provides a counterpart to David Horowitz's The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, whose argument McCarthy cites below. Whereas Horowitz's book focused on the Left, McCarthy focuses on the Islamists, elaborating on events that have occurred and lessons we have learned since Horowitz's book was published in 2004.

Among these events are a few in our own backyard, including the election of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison in 2006, a man who embodies the alliance between Islam and the Left. McCarthy rightly calls Ellison "CAIR's congressman." McCarthy also discusses the case of the flying imams -- a case he calls "the sabotage campaign in action"-- arising from an incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after an imams' conference at which Ellison had spoken. McCarthy also devotes an entire chapter to "The Enclave of Minnesota."

I've been after Andy to provide us something on his new book for readers of Power Line from the time I heard he was writing the book. He has graciously responded with this hard-hitting account of his hard-hitting book:

As a faithful Power Line reader, I am as thrilled as I am grateful to be able to say a few words here about my new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

What is surprising, and dismaying, is that the book's message should come as news to anyone, as if there were real question about whether such a grand jihad exists. Though our opinion elites and their media allies remain desperate to suppress the story, the proof of an Islamist conspiracy to destroy the West is stark and undeniable, and the instances of Islamists being aided and abetted by Leftists are too numerous for serious people to deny the alliance - not merger but alliance - between the two.

As demonstrated at the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trials in Texas, internal Muslim Brotherhood memoranda are unabashed in describing Islamists as engaged in a "civilizational" war against the West. In America, the Brothers attest that theirs is a "grand jihad" to destroy the United States - mainly from within, mainly by "sabotage."

I use the term Islamist advisedly. In the book's second chapter, I've tried to take on the excruciating question of whether the existential challenge we face is Islam itself. On this, besides views I've developed over the last 17 years, I read widely and consulted learned people on both sides of this question, several of whom I'm fortunate to call friends. When I was finally done writing the chapter, and rereading it for the zillionth time, I thought maybe I should rewrite it, to make it shorter and just get to the bottom line. But I decided to leave it as is. If it seems throughout as though I am having an argument with myself, it is because I am, and the argument is anything but settled.

The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman. Though he ended up opting not to testify, I still had to prepare. Back then I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true - if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks - then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none.

To be sure, Islamic scriptures say a lot of things, and some of them are admirable. Good faith contentions can surely be made that passages terrorists cite need to be considered in conjunction with other passages they omit. (That's a weak argument, by the way, but not a risible one.) But the point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. Moreover, he is not, as we'd like to have it, a lunatic; he is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt - the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.

Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. There is, for those willing to pierce political correctness and grapple with fact, an undeniable connection between Islamic doctrine's commands to violence and domination, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the often savage acts and the civilizational campaign carried out by Muslims against the West. For that reason, Islam is very problematic. There is, however, the other side of the coin: there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who, quite clearly, are moderate, tolerant people. These Muslims either reject terrorism (at least in the form of sneak attacks that kill civilians in the U.S.) or they don't see terrorism as having anything to do with them. Thus, people who don't want to grapple with Islamic doctrine point to these tolerant, moderate Muslim individuals and demand that we deduce that Islam, too, must be moderate and tolerant - regardless of what its scriptures say.

But this "Islam is as Muslims do" approach is no more a rationale for giving Islam a pass than it would be for condemning Islam based on the actions of the terrorists. More importantly, to convince the people who need convincing - namely, Muslims, not Western intellectuals - there must be a cogent, persuasive construction of Islamic doctrine that can compete effectively with the ideology that fuels the terrorist attacks and the broader plot to destroy the West from within. The latter ideology is an instinctive turn-off to Westerners because it is supremacist, totalitarian, and violent. Yet, it happens to be an ideology drawn faithfully and logically from scripture - which is why it is endorsed by so many influential clerics and shariah authorities who have spent their lives in Islamic study.

As I point out in The Grand Jihad, it is fair enough to conclude that peculiarities of al Qaeda ideology are favored by only a fringe of the world's Muslims. Here, I refer to the claim that it is legitimate to kill even other Muslims who reject the terror network's strict interpretation of Islam. Now, I find even that fringe distressing. After all, 10 percent of 1.4 billion Muslims is a lot of people.

Here, though, is the truly distressing part. In 2007, the University of Maryland joined with the pollster World Public Opinion to survey Muslim views in nations across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia - i.e., both Arab and non-Arab Muslims. They found that about two-thirds (65.5 percent) endorsed the requirement of "a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country." About the same number wanted to see all Muslim countries unified under a single caliphate, a position shared even by half of Muslims in Indonesia - where one of the most moderate brands of Islam in the world is practiced. These findings match up with other disturbing figures - like the 93 percent of young Palestinians (and 75 percent of all Palestinians) who deny Israel's right to exist, and the 40 percent of British Muslims who would like to see sharia become the law of England.

The point is that Islamist ideology - the modern version conceived by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, refined by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, and expounded by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, probably the most influential Sunni cleric living today - is very mainstream. Sure, it is an aberrant position to endorse the killing of Muslims who fail to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam; but if the proposition at issue becomes, say, "I support the killing of Americans operating in Muslim countries," or "I would like to see the U.S. Constitution replaced by sharia law," we find the percentage of approving Muslims shoots skyward. Indeed, while much was made of Qaradawi's condemnation of the 9/11 attacks (a condemnation that was more tactical position than a moral one), the same Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American troops in Iraq - and in so doing drew strong support from scholars at al-Azhar University.

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see sharia installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate.

In the chapter about what to call the threat, I ultimately conclude that it is best to describe it as "Islamism" or the "Islamist" challenge. I do this as a hopeful nod to the millions of Muslims who both reject violence and do not want to live in sharia societies. But I do it with my eyes open. It may well be that these Muslims will not succeed in reforming their creed, in stripping from it the elements that cannot coexist with such core tenets of Western liberalism as freedom of conscience, the proposition that people have a right to make law for themselves, the proposition that freedom really is freedom rather than perfect submission, the equality of men and women and of Muslims and non-Muslims. Still, I think we have to support the reformist cause. I do not believe we can entice natural allies to our side by telling them their religion is irredeemable. They are trying to redeem it, and it is in our interest to help them - while recognizing that they may very well fail.

Finally, since the book was published last week, I've been asked questions like: "So, are you saying that President Obama wants to implement sharia?" and " Isn't it true that if Islamists came to power, the Left would have a lot to fear?" Again, the alliance between Islamists and Leftists (not all progressives, but the modern hard Left) is an alliance, not a merger. Leftists and Islamists have worked together numerous times in history and, as we look around us today, we see them working together on Obamacare, global warming, the Palestinian cause, the campaign to close Gitmo, the campaign endow terrorists with constitutional rights, and so on. That they work together is not a hypothesis on my part; this partnership exists, period. And why it exists is simply explained, it if we are willing to look at the facts.

While they differ on a number of significant issues, Islamists and Leftists are in harmony on many parts of the big picture. Islamism and today's Leftism (which, as I note in the book, David Horowitz aptly calls "neocommunism") are both authoritarian ideologies: they favor a muscular central government, virulently reject capitalism, and are totalitarian in the sense that they want to dictate all aspects human life. They both see the individual as existing to serve the greater community (the state or the umma). Saliently, they have a common enemy: Western culture, American constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty.

When I argue that Islamists and Leftists are working together to sabotage America, this is what I am talking about. Historically, when Islamists and Leftists collaborate against a common enemy (e.g., the Shah in Iran, the monarchy in Egypt), these marriages of convenience break apart when the common enemy has been eliminated. We are a long way from that point in America - and, hopefully, we never reach it. We must expect, though, that Islamists and Leftists will continue their alliance as long as the Western way of life remains an obstacle to their respective utopias.

See also today's New York Post column by McCarthy, "The 'peaceful' Jihad in America."