To many Americans, the people of the Middle East appear culturally and ethnically similar. Yet those outward similarities mask profound religious, historical, and political divisions that have shaped the region for more than fourteen centuries. These divisions are rooted in the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

For decades, much of the world's attention has focused on conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors or between Islam and the West. In recent weeks, however, the center of gravity has shifted back toward one of the region's oldest rivalries—the struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam.

I believe there are two reasons for this shift.

First, Iran's military capabilities have been significantly degraded. Second, Iran's leadership must now decide which adversaries pose the greatest long-term threat to its revolutionary ambitions.

A Fourteen-Century Divide

The Sunni-Shia split began after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in A.D. 632 over who should lead the Muslim community.

Sunni Muslims, who represent approximately 85 to 90 percent of the world's Muslims, believe the leader, or Caliph, should be selected by consensus among the Muslim community and should follow the traditions (Sunnah) established by Muhammad and his earliest companions.

Shia Muslims, who represent roughly 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, believe leadership

Many American Jews are uncomfortable with violence. The problem begins when every use of force is placed in the same moral category.

An attacker uses force to control, punish, or injure. A person acting in self-defense uses force to stop the attack and reach safety. The physical movement may look similar, but the intent is very different. One comes from the desire to hurt. The other comes from accepting responsibility for self-preservation.

As a lifelong martial artist and self-defense instructor, I have taught people how to protect themselves for more than two decades. I meet people who want protection without preparing to cause pain. They want to get fit without ever getting sore. They support awareness and professional security, then pull away when training requires resistance or even minimal discomfort.

Jim Rohn said, "We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment."

That choice applies to self-defense. I would rather accept controlled discomfort in training than discover my first physical reaction while someone is trying to hurt me. Discomfort in training can be stopped, examined, and repeated. A real attack gives you none of that control.

A violent person does not judge our restraint

Anthony Fauci spent nearly four decades running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In that time, he became the face of public health in America.

Yet the record now shows he inflicted lasting harm on the very people he claimed to serve, especially the young. His private writings and public actions reveal a pattern of deception that paved the way for lockdowns, school closures, and social isolation whose scars will stretch across generations.

In late July, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary. These ranged from December 2019 through December 2022. Those entries strip away an image which had been polished for the public year after year. On Jan. 26, 2020, Fauci noted that the first COVID-19 infection appeared early in December and had no link to the Wuhan market. He called the market an amplifier, not the source.

Days later, on Feb. 1, he recorded a conference call with a dozen scientists. Most of them saw laboratory engineering of COVID as a real possibility. Only two favored a purely natural origin.

Fauci never shared that private judgment with the public. Instead, he steered grant money toward

Who knew golfing, skydiving, and scuba diving were a “white” thing?

NBC seems to think they are in their piece “Scuba, skydiving and golf: Black adults embrace sports that defy stereotypes and bring joy.”

Those sports and others like them (tennis, skating, gymnastics) always struck me as a disposable income thing not a race thing, requiring as they do the purchase of expensive lessons and/or expensive equipment and/or expensive travel/venue time. Cash and sheer merit — never race — were always what I thought about when I thought about who participates or excels in these sports.

Humans require meaningful struggle, sometimes intensive struggle, to achieve their potential. When societies attempt to eliminate the essential struggle for survival, people must voluntarily assume responsibility, something they’re frequently unwilling to do. If they don’t, they invent artificial alternative struggles.

It was an interesting display of contempt for Senator Rand Paul exhibited by Anthony Fauci: having initially agreed to testify before the committee chaired by Paul only to change his mind, Fauci was hit with a subpoena. The main focus of the inquiry was Fauci’s public and private contrary views concerning the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin. Fauci refused to testify, claiming the Fifth Amendment—a plea which Paul reported to be invalid.

From Wikimedia Commons: German Soldiers in World War I (Hans Stubenrauch, 1915)

In the blood-soaked arena of the twentieth century, where ideologies of total domination masqueraded as movements of popular renewal, an ideological chasm yawned between the true conservative—guardian of inherited law, hierarchical order, and moral continuity—and the barbarian revolutionary, whether Bolshevik or Nazi. While the former trusted in institutions tempered by tradition, honor, and transcendent duty, the latter dissolved them into a cult of power, where the Führer or the Party became the sole arbiter of existence. Revolutionary justice invariably translated into the arbitrary sword of the tyrant, dispensing violence and death as instruments of omnipotent will.

Ignoring the wisdom of Sophocles’ Chorus in Oedipus Rex to avoid “the double weight of past woes,” pondering 2020 has become my recent obsession. I am presently writing a novel and cannot, unfortunately, avoid revisiting the momentousness of that absurd year, and in this pursuit, as Oedipus did, I “suffer twice over” (so you won’t have to), trapped in a retrospective into a kind of madness. Many thoughtful readers no doubt plumb that awful annum’s depths from time to time, whether they like to or not. I pray it has not been with the ugly addiction that has held me in thrall for the better part of ten quarters. Like the proverbial trainwreck, it’s hard to look away.

This week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci to testify. The committee secured extensive daily logs he had prepared while at NIH heading up the COVID-19 response. (The committee still lacks almost 700 pages of these logs, all of which had been secreted on 11 different government servers until retrieved by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)

In Leonard Wibberley’s 1955 novel The Mouse That Roared, the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States, intending to lose quickly and collect Marshall Plan-style reconstruction aid. One character notes that there is no more profitable undertaking than declaring war on America and being defeated.[1]

I am an avid traveler and have been flying for most of my life. Business trips, family vacations, ski weeks, a recent multi-week swing through Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Air travel has changed from something approaching a service industry into something closer to a toll booth with wings. The seats got smaller, the fees multiplied, and the schedules got less reliable. And now the executives running these companies aren't even trying to hide their ambitions.

Seeing Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral seemed fitting: Z-Man’s money-laundering operation in Kyiv was the proximate cause of Graham’s death.  Had the senator not been working so hard to add to the butcher’s bill in Europe, he would still be alive today.  Surely there is a lesson here for some people to see.