The Signs are hopeful for the Year ahead

Lee Smith has expressed pessimism about the year ahead. He wrote “Five Words? Next Year Will Be Worse,” an article that was published in the Weekly Standard on December 31, 2015. Today being January 1, 2016, the year he is talking about has already started.

The article he wrote is a response to the State Department's hashtag celebrating the five foreign policy successes that the Obama Administration has taken credit for during the year 2015. These are: (1) “Protecting Arctic Climate and Communities”; (2) “Protecting Health of Our Oceans”; (3) “Winning Fight Against Violent Extremists”; (4) “Iran Peaceful Nuclear Program Ensured”; (5) “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria.”

Smith grants the State Department that the protection of the Arctic and the oceans can be construed as “big wins” for the Administration. However, he views as questionable the claim that the fight against extremism is being won. He also rejects that Iran's nuclear program is now guaranteed, saying that such boast has no merit. As to the claim that peace and security are being brought to Syria, he calls the Administration's effort in this regard a failure of epic proportions.

Not only does he say that last year was a bad one, he predicts that the year just started will be worse. And he gives the following reasons: First, the White House hosted a conference on countering violent extremism in February of 2015, yet the extremists staged an attack in Paris, France and another one in San Bernardino, USA. Second, he claims that even the Administration admits that in time, Iran could have an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program. Third, with regard to the situation in Syria, he complains that peace is a long way away.

And this is the pivotal topic around which Lee Smith uses the rest of the article to tell why the coming year will be worse than the one just ended. In trying to do this, he put himself at a disadvantage right at the start. Here is how he did it. To say that what's coming will be worse than what has transpired, you must show that the trend is moving in the wrong direction … using numbers if you have them.

Well, Lee Smith did have the numbers, but because he is nowhere near the level of understanding what they mean, he did himself in … and did it royally. Look what he wrote: “The Death toll in Syria over nearly five years has mounted to a quarter of a million, with more than 20,000 civilians killed in the past year alone.” If the man was capable of doing a simple division, he would have realized that 250,000 dead in less than 5 years means that the average toll has been more than 50,000 a year. Now, if the last year produced 20,000 dead like he says, it means that the trend is moving in the right direction – down from 50 thousand to 20 thousand. Lee Smith shot himself in the foot to start his pivotal argument, and what can be more Jewish than that?

This renders suspicious the “facts” that he mentions, and reduces the value of the opinions which he expresses in the rest of the article. See for yourself. Calling the situation in Syria “this massive war,” he verbalizes facts and opinion over several paragraphs that condense into the following:

“The conflict threatens the security and political order of America's closest partners … a global crisis may come even closer to American shores … What will make the next year especially dangerous is the White House itself. Obama is eager and John Kerry hopes that Syrian peace talks could bring him the Nobel Peace Prize … The administration is in a hurry, and [will] cave to Iranian and Russian demand that Assad stay in power.”

And that's where Lee Smith shoots himself in the head this time. Having made the point at the start that the Obama Administration is not moving fast enough in the Syrian conflict, he now complains that the Administration is in a hurry. He thus demonstrates that he is trying to have it both ways … which is the way that Jewish debaters shoot themselves every time they open the mouth to utter what they call Jewish wisdom.

And you can see how hideously screwed up that wisdom is when these people “connect dots” based on bad mathematics and a complete ignorance of what they talk about. Here is an example: “the opposition groups that can agree to a political process in which Assad is not removed are pro-Assad. All others will be excluded, and some will be labeled terrorists, like Jaish al-Islam.”

Had Smith tried to be informed, he would have found someone to tell him that Jaish al-Islam translates into “the army of Islam.” In fact, this is the military wing of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL,) also known as ISIS. Thus, fighting Jaish al-Islam clips the wings of ISIS. To complain about that is to be powered by a screwed up wisdom.

Beyond that point, the author continues to connect imaginary dots with the single-minded purpose of urging the decapitation of yet another Arab regime – Syria this time – thus create one more situation like that in Libya after Gaddafi, and that in Iraq after Saddam.

Look how Smith does that: “Putin's campaign was never about fighting ISIS … John Kerry will be acting as Putin's enforcer.” Well, if Putin and Kerry are not fighting ISIS, they are fighting the military wing of ISIS – and that’s the purpose of this whole exercise.

Smith goes on to tell his readers what the Arabs think, what they want, how they will react to events … and so on and so forth … the very Jewish wisdom that changed America's status from the superpower that it was, to the super joke it has become – all that in less than a generation. And that's the only thing the Jews know how to do.