Category Archives: Diana West

Afghanistan’s Benghazi: Grieving Families Want Answers

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CH-47_Chinook_flying_night_visionBy Diana West:

Grief and politics don’t mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again.

I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place at Dover Air Force Base, where senior administration officials have used the solemn occasions – Benghazi, the shoot-down of Extortion 17 – less to comfort grieving families than to lay blame, to establish a narrative, to lie.

Think of Sean Smith’s mother. Think of Tyrone Woods’ father. After the Obama administration’s hugs came the Obama administration’s stonewalling. They still don’t have answers about what happened in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

We don’t either.

We still don’t know who in the U.S. government gave the order not to rescue Americans under fire for eight and a half hours, and how and why such an unconscionable order was given. We still don’t know who convinced senior White House officials to tell grieving parents meeting their children’s caskets that a video-maker, not jihad against the West, was to blame for the assault that took four American lives – or what the political motivation was.

This is a national disgrace.

But before Benghazi, there was Extortion 17, the call sign of a Special Operations mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011. Three months after the strike on Osama bin Laden, 30 Americans – including 15 from the bin Laden strike-team unit, Navy SEAL Team 6, and two other SEALs – were killed in the costliest single-day loss for the U.S. military in the Afghanistan war, and the largest SEAL loss ever. A “lucky shot” in the dark brought down the old CH-47 Chinook helicopter attempting to land them in the middle of an ongoing battle in Wardak Province. Or so the U.S. military claims. The families are not so sure.

Then again, they’re not sure about anything. The runaround, the lies, the callous disregard they have received at the hands of the government and military is similar to Benghazi, maybe worse.

“We go to Dover to see bodies, and we’re all in the hangar down there,” Charles Strange, father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, recalled last week before a rapt audience at the National Press Club, where several Extortion 17 families gathered to call on Congress to investigate. “And President Obama comes up to me and he says, ‘Mr. Strange’ – and he grabs me by the shoulders – ‘Michael changed the way America lives.’ I grabbed Mr. President by the shoulders and I said: ‘I don’t need to know about my son, I need to know what happened, Mr. President.’

Strange continued. “The Secret Service guys grabbed me. I’m crying. He went to give me a hug. I whispered in his ear: ‘Mr. President, Is there going to be a congressional inquiry?’ And Mr. President whispered in my ear – and I could feel his lips touch – and he said, ‘Mr. Strange, we’re going to look into this very, very, very deep.’ Well, I haven’t heard nothing.”

Nothing that makes sense, anyway. A military investigation led by then-Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Colt (since promoted to major general) tells us there was no “eye in the sky” that night. Why not? No forces had been sent in to prepare the area. Why not?

More sickening was the fact that rules of engagement prevented suppressive fire from being aimed at the tower firing on the Chinook. Billy Vaughn, father of slain SEAL Aaron Vaughn, recalled how a three-star admiral explained this breach to the grieving families: U.S. forces couldn’t fire back, the admiral said, because “we want to win hearts and minds.” As Mr. Strange later put it: “What about my heart? What about my mind?”

American hearts and minds don’t count with this U.S. government – and that is our national tragedy until we change the government.

What commander is responsible for assembling so many SEALs in one inadequate aircraft, for this particular landing site, for a mission many believe was in fact unnecessary? Extortion 17 took off three months after the strike on bin Laden, three months after the Obama administration blew SEAL Team 6′s cover in the bin Laden raid, three months after intelligence indicated the Taliban were out for revenge. “The chain of command” was responsible, the families were told. Who were they? No answer.

Why was there no gunship escort that night? What happened in the final minutes of Extortion 17? The black box was never recovered, the military insists. Really? What about the seven Afghan soldiers who joined the mission at the last minute, replacing Afghans previously scheduled to fly? No one knows the identities of this last-minute group, or why they flew that day. More troubling still, military investigators didn’t interview Afghan commanders to find out.

Why not? To win their “hearts and minds,” too? The word for that is “submission.” Such submission also explains the appalling inclusion of an imam at the casket transfer ceremony in Afghanistan – a ceremony preceding the transport of the dead bodies, American and Afghan, to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they would finally be identified. (This makes families wonder whether American sons lay in caskets draped with the Afghan flag.) There, in the midst of an otherwise ecumenical ceremony (devoid of any mention of Jesus Christ), the imam invoked Allah, while establishing that Muslims reside in heaven and non-Muslims reside in hell.

Standard Islamic fare, to be sure, but this is the same supremacist basis of the jihad that killed the men of Extortion 17. No wonder the families are doubly outraged.

As should we all be. Congress must investigate Extortion 17 and find out exactly what happened, and who bears responsibility. It is the very least we can do for our people.

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Tell Me Again Why U.S. Used Jihadists to Guard Benghazi?

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20130503_benghazi_libya_clinton_obama_LARGEBy Diana West:

“I want to ask a couple of questions about the February 17 Martyrs Brigade,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold.

The Texas Republican was addressing the three State Department “whistleblowers” who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The three witnesses were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism; Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya.

When Farenthold introduced this crucial subject into the hearings, he also opened a window into Benghazi that shone light not only on disastrous Western support for “Arab Spring,” but also on the core crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Farenthold: “Mr. Nordstrom, can you tell me the role of February 17 Martyrs Brigade in protecting the consulate in Benghazi?”

Nordstrom: “Certainly. That was the unit, for lack of a better term, that was provided to us by the Libyan government.”

This already was news to me: The Libyan government provided known jihadists to guard U.S. interests?

On second thought, there is nothing fantastic about this when – or, rather, if – we consider that the U.S. government supported an army of known jihadists in its revolution against Libya’s anti-jihadist former leader Moammar Gadhafi. I say “if” because I don’t expect even the members of the committee to see the “Arab Spring” this way. Uncle Sam’s open support for jihad is an epic scandal that is never even acknowledged.

Farenthold: “Were you aware of any ties by that militia to Islamic extremists?”

Nordstrom: “Absolutely. Yeah, we had that discussion on a number of occasions, the last of which was when there was a Facebook posting of a threat that named Ambassador Stevens and Sen. (John) McCain, who was coming out for the elections. That was in the July (2012) time frame. I met with some of my agents and also some (CIA) annex personnel, and we discussed that.”

More news: Nordstrom seems to be saying that the February 17 Martyrs Brigade actually threatened both the U.S. ambassador and a U.S. senator – and still served as U.S. security guards. This is shocking to read in black and white, although, again, when it becomes clear that Uncle Sam supported the same, exact jihad in Libya that al-Qaida supported, it makes, if not sense exactly, then certainly a pattern.

Farenthold: “Mr. Hicks, you were in Libya on the night of the attack. Do you believe the February 17 militia played a role in those attacks, was complicit in those attacks?”

Hicks: “Certainly, elements of that militia were complicit in the attacks. The attackers had to make a long approach march through multiple checkpoints that were manned by February 17 militia.”

More news: Most media accounts identified al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Shariah”) as the militia manning the checkpoints around the compound that horrible night. Of course, Libya militias seem to be loose organizations with overlapping membership. More important, though, as John Rosenthal, author of “The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion,” puts it, virtually all of them “sympathize” with Ansar al-Sharia. “In fact,” Rosenthal said in a recent interview with me, “in the literal sense of the term, virtually all of the Eastern Libyan militias are ‘Ansar al-Sharia’ – that is to say ‘supporters of the Shariah.’”

Read more: Family Security Matters 

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Video: Diana West talks about her books Death of the Grown-up and American Betrayal

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betrayalDiana West:

Last week, I traveled to Florida to discuss American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character in the Presidential Speakers Series sponsored by Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona. The book, which, in fact, doesn’t come out until May 28, couldn’t have had a nicer debut with host Marc Bernier helming the interview. Bonus: We ended up discussing current Saudi events for the first 30 minutes, before tucking into exactly what American Betrayal is about.

 

Diana West is a nationally syndicated conservative American columnist and author. Her weekly column, which frequently tackles controversial subjects such as the impact of Islam, the failures of counterinsurgency strategy (COIN), and the questions around President Obama’s eligibility, is syndicated by Universal U-Click and appears in about 120 newspapers and news sites. She is the author of the book The Death of the Grown Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

 

Diana West: Saudi Follies, Part 2

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Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal with bodyguards

Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal with bodyguards

By Diana West:

Let’s pick up where last week’s column left off with that Saudi national in Boston – Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the 20-year-old “student” who was acting suspiciously enough after the Boston bombing to be “detained” under guard at the hospital and named a person of interest in the April 15 attack.

That same day, law enforcement searched Alharbi’s Boston-area apartment for seven hours, leaving with bags of evidence at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16. On Tuesday afternoon, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security created what is called an “event file” on Alharbi, calling for his visa to be revoked due to ties to terrorism. That same afternoon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would inform the Senate Intelligence Committee that Alharbi was now merely a “witness.”

This exonerating designation pulled the public eye off of Alharbi, but only temporarily. On Wednesday night, April 17, Steven Emerson refocused our attention on Alharbi when on Fox News’ “Hannity” show, the terrorism expert broke the news that Alharbi was scheduled to be deported on “national security grounds.”

Since then, however, it has been a struggle to keep this sensational story in sight. The administration has categorically dismissed it, and the media have followed suit – which is better than anything the Saudi dignitaries sweeping through Washington after the Boston bombing could have hoped for.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has done her overbearing best to discredit even elected officials with the temerity to ask questions about it. In an April 18 exchange with Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., Napolitano exploded when Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, asked why the Saudi witness, apparently connected to terrorism by his deportation order, was slated to leave the country when the Boston investigation was just beginning? Calling the premise of the congressman’s question a “rumor,” Napolitano replied: “I’m not going to answer that question. It’s so full of misstatements and misapprehensions that it’s just not worthy of an answer.”

Really?

Maybe Her Secretary-ness was relying on alterations to the original Alharbi file that, The Blaze would later report, were made on the evening of Wednesday, April 17, “to disassociate him (Alharbi) from the initial charges.”

But it was too late – and here’s where the story gets really juicy. Glenn Beck and The Blaze have now reproduced a copy of a page from the original April 16 file on Alharbi. In terse government lingo, this document makes clear that 1) Alharbi was a terrorism risk to the public, and 2) federal authorities who permitted him into the country were negligent. No matter what Napolitano says, this story is no rumor.

Read more at Diana West’s blog

Is Saudi prince steering News Corp. coverage?

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Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (center) with the Supreme Advisory Board of Al Risala TV

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (center) with the “Supreme Advisory Board” of Al Risala TV in December 2012. The board includes Muslim Brotherhood figure and al Qaeda-linked financier Omar Abdullah Naseef (to the left of Alwaleed, I believe), at whose home this photo was taken. The occasion was Al Risala’s receipt of an award for excellence. Part-owner Rupert Murdoch was not in attendance.

By Diana West at WND:

Ever since Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, the network founded and funded by the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, the former vice president has drawn continuous fire in conservative media. Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have all castigated Gore, a man of the left and leading avatar of “global warming,” for such hypocrisies as timing the deal to avoid lefty tax hikes and bagging $100 million in greenhouse-gas money.

These same news outlets share something else in common: They all belong to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That means they also belong to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Alwaleed owns the largest chunk of News Corp. stock outside the Murdoch family. Shortly after his purchase of 5.5 percent of News Corp. voting shares in 2005, Alwaleed gave a speech that made it clear just what he had bought. As noted in The (U.K.) Guardian, Alwaleed told an audience in Dubai that it took just one phone call to Rupert Murdoch – “speaking not as a shareholder but as a viewer,” Alwaleed said – to get the Fox News crawl reporting “Muslim riots” in France changed to “civil riots.”

This didn’t make the “Muslim” riots go away, but Alwaleed managed to fog our perception of them. With a phone call, the Saudi prince eliminated the peculiarly Islamic character of the unprecedented French street violence for both the viewers at home and, more significantly, for the journalists behind the scenes. When little owner doesn’t want “Muslim” rioting identified and big owner agrees, it sets a marker for employees. Alwaleed’s stake, by the way, is now 7 percent.

We can only speculate on what other acts of influence this nephew of the Saudi dictator might have since imposed on Fox News and other News Corp. properties. (I have long argued that News Corp. should register as a foreign agent, due to the stock owned by a senior member of the Saudi ruling dynasty.) Alwaleed hasn’t shared any other editorial exploits with the public. But that opening act of eliminating key information from News Corp.’s coverage of Islamic news might well have set a pattern of omission.

Recently, such a pattern of omission in News Corp.’s coverage of the Gore-Al Jazeera deal seems evident. I say “seems,” because I can’t be entirely certain that I haven’t missed something in my research. But judging from online searches of news stories and audio transcripts, two salient points are missing from at least the main body of News Corp.’s coverage.

One is reference to the noticeable alignment of Al Jazeera with the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamic movement whose motto is, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The second (with an exception noted below) is reference to Al Jazeera’s superstar host and ideological lodestar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure. The influence of al-Qaradawi at the network and in Qatar – where, according to Freedom House’s 2012 press report, it is against the law for journalists to criticize the Qatari government, the ruling family or Islam – can hardly be overestimated.

Strange omission? This relationship between the Qatari-controlled network and the Muslim Brotherhood organization has been observed for years. Back in 2007, for example, Steven Stalinsky reported in the New York Sun that various Arab commentators referred to Al Jazeera as “the Muslim Brotherhood channel” and the like. What’s more, reference to the relationship appears at least in passing in coverage of the Gore deal at mainstream media sites such as USA Today and the Seattle Times. More discussion is available at some conservative outlets, including Rush Limbaugh and The Blaze. (Searches at Breitbart and the Washington Examiner, like News Corp. sites, yielded nothing on these same points. Call it, perhaps, “the Fox effect.”)

Given the rise of Muslim Brotherhood parties in the revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring – undeviatingly cheered on by Al Jazeera – the network’s Muslim Brotherhood connection, which extends to Al Jazeera’s sponsors inside the Qatari ruling family, is a crucial point to miss. Especially when it seems to be missed across the board.

The same goes for failing to mention Al Jazeera’s leading personality, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in the Gore deal coverage. This longtime “spiritual guide” of the Muslim Brotherhood hosts one of Al Jazeera’s most popular shows, “Shariah and Life.” Among other poisonous pronouncements, al-Qaradawi has called for Americans in Iraq and Israelis everywhere to be targeted by terrorists (“martyrs”) who would then find a place in Islamic paradise. Given Al Gore’s refusal to sell his network to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze TV due to political differences, Muslim Brother Al-Qaradawi and his Shariah ideology become highly relevant. Then again, maybe one man’s news story is just another man’s clipping on the cutting-room floor.

Meanwhile, the one story I found in News Corp. coverage of the Gore deal that mentions al-Qaradawi – a column by Gordon Crovitz – neglected to note al-Qaradawi’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood. Particularly given current events, this is a little like forgetting to mention that Hermann Goring was in the Nazi Party.

Could normal editorial discretion or plain ignorance be at work here? I suppose so. Still, there is that tie-in between News Corp. and the House of Saud to consider, a partnership I find more troubling than Gore’s deal with the Qatari emirate. Not only does Alwaleed own a stake in News Corp., Murdoch owns an even more substantial stake (18.97 percent) in Alwaleed’s Arabic media company Rotana.

Within the Alwaleed-Murdoch-Rotana galaxy is a 24-hour-Islamic outlet called Al Risala, which Alwaleed founded in 2006. The channel’s director and popular “tele-Islamist” is Tareq Al-Suwaidan, widely reported to be a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait. The station’s “Supreme Advisory Committee” includes Abdullah Omar Naseef, who, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, is “a major Muslim Brotherhood figure” involved in the financing of al-Qaida.

Al Risala, then, would seem to fit right into the Al Jazeera-Qaradawi-Muslim-Brotherhood lineup.

We know Alwaleed has influenced Fox editorial matters before. Could that Alwaleed influence – even his very presence – account for why News Corp. hasn’t hit harder on the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaradawi angles of the Gore-Jazeera deal?

I don’t know, but I wonder. Don’t you?

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The Scandal of 2013

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1By Diana West

Early in 2012, I opened a column with this question: “Is there a  single public official who is examining – who cares about – the murder  spree by Afghan security forces against Western troops and security  contractors in Afghanistan?”

Nearly one year has passed, during which 62 Americans and other  Westerners have been killed by Afghan forces “inside the wire.” The  president has yet to call for “meaningful change”; in fact, he has said  nothing about it. The Congress has said nothing about it. During the  presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said nothing about it. Such silence  is a national disgrace, but it’s an answer to my question. No. They  don’t care. Not about the men. Not about their families. What they care  about is the story line – the fraud that has kept the national arteries  to Afghanistan open, fueling the American-led “counterinsurgency”  fantasy that an ally, heart-and-mind, exists in the umma (Islamic  world), if only Uncle Sam can mold it and bribe it and train it into  viability.

But this trail of blood shed by our men – fathers, husbands,  brothers, friends – leads in another direction. If We the People were to  follow it, drop by drop, we would begin to understand there is no ally,  no “partner” in Afghanistan, no matter how hard our leadership lies to  us. We would see for ourselves that the difference between the  “extremists” and the “moderates” in a Shariah-supreme culture is  ultimately inconsequential, and that the gulf between Islam and the West  is too deep to plumb without losing ourselves in the process. If we  were to keep following this trail of blood, we would even conclude that  our leaders, from President Bush to President Obama, have been wrong,  criminally, recklessly wrong, ever since 9/11/01, when they began doing  everything possible to deny the centrality of jihad in Islam even while  sending America and her allies to combat jihad in the Islamic world.

Silence, thus, becomes the way our leaders can keep both their  delusional ideology intact and their places in power secure. Deflection,  too. In March 2012, a month in which three Afghan attacks took the live  of two British soldiers and three Americans, Chairman of the Joint  Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey deemed such shootings as  “additional risk” necessary for “national security.” In April, he would  order all branches of the military and the service academies to scrub  any training materials deemed “disrespectful of Islam” – another blow to  the study of jihad. In August 2012, midway through a month in which 12  American and three Australian forces would be killed in seven “insider  attacks,” Afghanistan commander Gen. John Allen actually offered excuses  for the murders – the strain of Ramadan fasting, summer heat and fast  operational tempo. The following month, after four Americans and two  British troops were killed in two separate shootings, Obama campaign  adviser and former senior Pentagon official Michele Flournoy minimized  the attacks as a “very occasional” problem and a sign of “Taliban  desperation.”

Read more

 

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SOS: Save Uncle Sam

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afghan21Written by: Diana West

The Wall Street Journal reports this week about a new draft handbook for US troops in Afghanistan designed to prevent their Afghan “partners” from murdering them. (And yes, we’ve seen this same material before.)

The problem, according to  the Army, is  “ignorance of, or lack of empathy for Muslim and/or Afghan cultural norms” on the part of US troops.

The solution, according to the Army, is for  troops to accept these same Muslim and/or Afghan norms — or else be killed. In effect, then, Uncle Sam is  ordering  Americans  to submit to Islam or die — exactly the choice offered to infidels vanquished by jihad. As far I can tell, the main difference is Uncle Sam will require them to salute while submitting.

I simplify, of course, but I do not exagerate. Say, Joe American hears about  boys being sodomized by Afghan Army personnel. Such pederasty is in accordance with “Muslim and/or Afghan cultural norms.” According to Uncle Sam, Joe American must say  nothing, must ignore the issue altogether — or  risk being killed.

Say Joe American observes the enslavement of Muslim and/or Afghan women — another “Muslim and/or Afghan cultural norm.” It makes Joe mad. But zip it, Joe — or die.

Christians and Jews who have lived under Islamic law across the centuries would recognize the diminished state of the American soldier circa 2012 as that of the classic dhimmi: the non-Muslim subject to Islamic law; his silence, his acquiesence the humiliating price of existence. Similarities to the janissaries, the Islamized forces stolen as children from Christian populations by the Ottomans to enforce Islamic law under the caliph, are also increasingly evident.

In our time, we may also understand this as  another  iteration of  the Hair-Trigger Moderate (introduced back in The Death of the Grown-Up). The syndrome describes  the society-wide phenomenon of curbing speech about Islam to prevent something, anything from setting the hair-trigger moderate off (tick, tick, tick…). This  should, but doesn’t, reveal the “moderation” to be the fraud that it is. We saw this  when George W. Bush recanted the word “crusade” after 9/11/01 (mustn’t offend, or else alienate our  “friends”). We see it in this Army draft manual in 2012  (mustn’t offend, or else receive a bullet/axe in the  head). We see it everywhere in between: in the elimination of “jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” etc., from contemporary debate, in the Danish cartoon “crisis,” in government prosecutions and persecutions of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria,  Lars  Hedegaard in Denmark, Tommy Robinson in England, in the Obama administration’s scapegoating and incarceration of the maker of “Innocence of Muslims,”   in the “Istanbul Process.” Such self-gagging  reflects the influence — the ascendance — of Islamic law. It reflects our own rush to  dhimmitude.

And especially so in the US military, now mired in  Islamic quagmires for more than a decade. Other  “cultural norms” US forces must accept without objection include dog torture, desertion, drug use, and even sympathy for the Taliban.

Yes. Among the Army draft handbook’s “taboo conversation topics” are  “making derogatory comments about the  Taliban.”

You can rub your eyes, but that’s what it says. The US and Afghans are  partnering in the first place because We and They are supposed to have this common enemy, the Taliban. But say something bad about the Taliban and  your “brother in arms “  might get mad enough to kill you.

On first glance, we can read this as evidence of Uncle Sam’s certifiable dementia.  But maybe we should think of it instead as a clear admission: Uncle Sam knows we have met the enemy and he is … in our pup tent. Uncle Sam knows our Afghan “allies” have more in common with the enemy than with Us, the People, but he continues with the doomed, damned mission anyway. Why? Have we been subverted to Islam’s ends? In a word, yes. Is there hope of reversal? Not much, not really, unless something changes in the body (and brain) politic. When/if that happens,  we might look back on this Army draft handbook  as plea for help: Uncle Sam crying out to be rescued from the tiny band of extremists that has seized control of American interests.

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Video: Benghazi: US Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine

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The Center for Security Policy is pleased to present a  panel discussion with three of America’s top experts on the shariah doctrinal threat to national security. Dr. Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin will be joined by Frank Gaffney to discuss, “Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine.”

Featuring nationally-recognized experts and authors:

* Dr. Andrew G. Bostom - author of Sharia versus Freedom (Prometheus Books, October 2012). Dr. Bostom’s earlier publications include The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History and The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. He posts regularly at http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog

* Diana West – author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press, April 2013). Ms. West’s earlier publications include The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization and Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis (Report of Team B II). She posts regularly at http://dianawest.net

* Stephen Coughlin – author of Catastrophic Failure: The Big Lie in the War on Terror (Center for Security Policy Press, January 2013).   Mr. Coughlin’s earlier publications include Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis (Report of Team B II) , and “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad.” His popular series of educational video lectures on Shariah doctrine can be viewed on YouTube.

* Moderator: Frank J. Gaffney Jr., President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy

LIVE-STREAM TUESDAY: Benghazi: US Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine

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Center for Security Policy | Nov 10, 2012

At 12:30PM on Tuesday, November 13 at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC, the Center for Security Policy is pleased to present a live-streamed panel discussion with three of America’s top experts on the shariah doctrinal threat to national security. Dr. Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin will be joined by Frank Gaffney to discuss, “Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine.”

The event will be streamed live, beginning at 12:30PM at the Center’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/securefreedom, embedded on this page or on Facebook at facebook.com/securefreedom.

 The Center for Security Policy presents a panel discussion

Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Featuring nationally-recognized experts and authors:

  • Moderator: Frank J. Gaffney Jr., President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy

Ignoble Legacy of Jihad?—Diana West on Ambassador Stevens and the Libyan Jihadists

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by Andrew Bostom:

Diana West has posted the third installment (see also parts 1 and 2) of her uniquely incisive analysis of the late US Libyan Ambassador Stevens’ “interactions” with the jihadists of eastern Libya, their hub being Derna. Elsewhere, I have described Derna’s rich legacy of jihadism—including anti-American jihadism, since the Barbary jihad wars during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, through the town’s highest per capita contribution of homicide bombers who killed and maimed US troops in our recent engagements in Iraq.

Using, in particular, classified cables made public via Wikileaks, Diana’s singular contribution has been to analyze without politically-correct blinders the Ambassador’s alarming “rationale” for the Derna jihadists’ depredations—including their murderous attacks on the very best of Stevens’ countrymen, US soldiers fighting in Iraq.

One of Diana’s key observations, below, about anti-infidel jihadist zeal even in the absence of strict Sharia compliance confirms anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s 1949 characterization of how the Bedouin of Cyrenaica, i.e., Eastern Libya, “compensated” for their less than assiduous fulfillment of the ritual requirements of Islam, by their zealous commitment to jihad. Here is the full description from the original (1949) text by Evans-Pritchard:

It would [also] be a questionable judgment to assert that the Bedouin of Cyrenaica are not religious because they do not pay the same attention to outward ritual as do townspeople and peasants, for piety and holiness, as we have often been admonished, are not the same…Perhaps the Bedouin make up for their shortcomings by their enthusiasm for the jihad, holy war against unbelievers. They consider that they have fulfilled their obligation under this head in ample measure by their long and courageous fight, formally declared a holy war by the Caliph of Islam, against the Italians, French, and British. A Bedouin once said to me when I remarked how rarely I had seen Bedouin at prayer: “nasum wa najhad, (but) we fast and wage holy war.”

From Diana’s analysis:

Stevens continued:“A heavy influx of Arabic-language satellite television … also fostered a hard view of the world. … Not everyone liked the ‘bearded ones’ (a reference to conservative imams) or their message, [Redacted] said, but the duty of a Muslim in general — and a son of Derna in particular — was to resist occupation of Muslim lands through jihad. ‘It’s jihad — it’s our duty, and you’re talking about people who don’t have much else to be proud of.’ ”

Derna’s residents might take issue with attempts to ban smoking or restrict social activities, but there was consensus on “basic issues”  like jihad. This is a striking comment, and in keeping with other cable reports attesting to both the normalcy and acceptance of jihad among the population at large. Interestingly enough, it is only the manners and mores of sharia — smoking bans, restricted social activities — that are at all controversial in this culture. Jihad, then, becomes a defining attribute, and, a deal-breaker for making common cause, or so an average American might think.

More central to Diana’s thesis—and our travails in Libya, and vis a vis Islamdom overall—is the willfully blind, obsequious denial of the animus Islam itself generates toward non-Muslims, and specifically, Americans. She continues:

But in the next sentence Stevens seems to fall back to invoking the political propaganda of Al Jazeera as a driver of general violence. It’s not that Al Jazeera doesn’t play a role in inciting jihad and anti-Americanism; obviously, it does. But the role it plays it reinforced or, better, enabled by Islam itself. Stevens then goes on to apply what might be described as a Western gloss: “Depictions on al-Jazeera of events in Iraq and Palestine [sic] fueled the widely held view in Derna that resistance [sic] to coalition forces was ‘correct and necessary.’ Referring to actor Bruce Willis’ character in the action picture ‘Die Hard,’ who stubbornly refused to die quietly, he said many young men in Derna viewed resistance against Qadhafi’s regime and against coalition forces in Iraq as an important last act of defiance.”

West concludes:

Thus, the evolution of US foreign service thinking: When Islam has nothing much to do with anything, it’s Die Hard time in Derna. So, take away Qaddafi, you take away “resistance,” right? Q: When did removing Qaddafi become US policy in Libya? Most of us only heard about it last year. Libyans, meanwhile, seem to have been suspicious for some time. In a cable dated August 29, 2008 preparing for Sec State Rice’s visit to Libya, Stevens noted: “Conservative regime elements are still wary that our ultimate goal is regime change.” Was it?

It is quite plausible that the moral and geostrategic blunder of abetting jihadism in Libya—epitomized by the Die Hard jihadists of Derna—to topple the Libyan despot Qaddafi, ultimately resulted in the death of one of the leading avatars of that misbegotten US policy, Ambassador Stevens.

Andrew G.  Bostom is the author of The  Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The  Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism ”  (Prometheus, November, 2008)

You can contact Dr. Bostom at info[@]andrewbostom.org