Read A History Book Once in a While: The American “Inability to Understand” Jihadis

It has hamstrung our foreign policy for decades.

April 20, 2018 Robert Spencer

One of the biggest ongoing problems of U.S. foreign policy is a failure to understand what we’re really up against. This problem is nothing new, although Barack Obama took it to new heights by banning all mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training, with many of his loyalists still in place and hampering our ability to deal realistically with the jihad threat today.

This myopia goes back decades. In Theodore H. White’s America In Search of Itself, there is this telling passage about the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979:

Of the negotiating effort, the most biting summary was that later made by Captain Gary Sick of U.S. Naval Intelligence. “Nobody knew what kind of person Khomeini was,” said Sick…”In every day of this early crisis,” he said, “and right through until this day, there’s been this American inability to understand the true fanaticism of this man, not moved by any sense of compassion, by any concern for law, by any understanding of international tradition. We’d been dealing with people like Kim Il-Sung, Mao Tse-tung, and other dictators. So it was difficult for us to grasp the total, unyielding, unwillingness of this man to consider any other factor outside of his own limited view of the world. Khomeini was beyond the experience, if not the imagination, of anyone in the United States government. We made that mistake repeatedly — of trying to deal with Khomeini as if he were a government.”

Khomeini’s Islamic regime was a government, but not in any sense that American diplomats were used to dealing with. What set Khomeini and his regime apart from the likes of Kim and Mao was Islam, and few, if any, foreign service professionals in the State Department understood that or knew how to deal with it.......To Read More.....

My Take - Once again we look at highly educated people who should know the history of the world and those groups and individuals they're dealing with - and what do we find?  They're ignorant about the culture, the people and what social paradigms drive them.  Dumb as dirt because they're over educated and under smart!  And they're arrogant in their ignorance.  What could be worse?

It's absolutely disgraceful when a bug man like myself can know more about this kind of thing than the diplomats, military leaders and politicians who are the decision makers.  I keep asking - does anyone ever read a history book any longer?  And the answer is invariably the same - no!

In my own industry a mere fraction of the people in pest control have read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.  They have no idea what she said and how she lied.  Yet that book was the driving force for the modern environmental movement against pesticides, furthermore, she's the patron saint of that movement.  Why wouldn't everyone involved in the various chemical industries not have read it?  Because we've been indoctrinated with the green litany. 

What's sadder yet - recently I gave a talk and asked how many people heard of Norman Borlaug.  Some remembered hearing or reading the name, but not one person in the room knew who he was. He was the father of the green revolution and his work using modern agricultural practises involving chemistry and high yield crop varieties saved a billion lives.  And no one knew who he was.

I have a saying.  Tell me the history and I will give you the answer.  Read one history book a year and be shocked at what you will know for sure for the rest of your life.  And as you read more history books that depth of understanding will transform you.

Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality.  Everything we're told has a historical foundation and structure.  Everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.  If what's presented to us fails in either of those categories it's wrong.  The hard work has now been done - deciding what's right and what's wrong.  All that's left to do is develop the intellectual response to explain why it's wrong.