Tag Archives: Obama

What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology

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gty_barack_obama_irs_mad_speech_thg_130515_wblogBy Bruce Thornton:

The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.

Benghazi

The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.

Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.

The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.

For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.

The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.

So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up.

IRS Political Harassment

The IRS’s targeting of groups associated with conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status is a predictable consequence of the progressive narrative that conservatism is a form of neurosis, the lashing out of ignorant, violent “bitter clingers” against a changing world that challenges their racial privilege, economic power, and religious superstitions. The fondness of groups like the Tea Party for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution reflects this psychopathology, the desire to “turn back the clock” and restore their once exalted social and political position. As such, they are dangerous––and armed to boot––and so require monitoring by all right-thinking people who are progressing towards the utopia of “social justice.”

So it’s no surprise that IRS functionaries would create investigative rubrics like “Tea Party” or “patriot” that reflect these assumptions in order to guide them in their scrutiny of groups seeking tax-exempt status. These bureaucrats have absorbed the narrative from the mainstream media and popular culture, both of which are steeped in the two-bit pop psychologizing that passes for wisdom among those who fancy themselves the enlightened “anointed,” as Thomas Sowell calls them. Nor are they troubled at using the coercive power of the state to pursue these political agendas, for one of the most important progressive principles is that righteous ends can justify a whole range of brutal means.

Whether or not someone in the Obama administration directly ordered the IRS to pursue this partisan harassment is irrelevant. Like the Corleone family, the administration has a lot of “buffers.” No one had to be told, just as the progressives don’t have to tell anyone in Hollywood to make yet another movie or television show denigrating and demonizing corporations, conservatives, Christians, or the CIA. That is what’s so insidious about this ideology: it has permeated the minds of people to the point that unsavory actions advancing the cause are never questioned or doubted. In the progressive mind, dogma rules, not principle. Hence the righteous act to advance ideologically sanctioned political ends without bothering about coherent or consistent principle.

Read more at Front Page

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Obama and the “Official Truth”

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tea_party-thumb-470x313-3102By Caroline Glick:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing.

But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his parole.

Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula’s film – and scapegoated Nakoula – for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.

With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS’s prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency’s prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department’s subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.

On the surface, they seem like unrelated events.

But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an “official truth” about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that “official truth.”

From the outset of Obama’s tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.

Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban.

It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.

For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother’s jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.

To advance its “official truth,” the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran’s nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration’s foreign policy narrative.

Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration’s narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama’s claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama’s support for the al-Qaida-aligned antiregime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011.

Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.

For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely – and libelously – accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of “book burning.”

Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America’s allies.

Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration’s tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as “bitter” souls who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren’t like them.”

In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.

And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama’s domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups’ donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.

 

Obama: No Shame, No Honor

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Dereliction-of-Duty-Fiveby Justin O Smith:

The statements coming out of the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation into the events surrounding the attacks on the consulate and the CIA Annex at Benghazi on 9/11/2012 paint a picture of the Obama administration, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta and the “Yes men” of the Accountability Review Board, that illustrates they are more concerned with advancing the agenda of the Progressive Democratic Party than protecting American citizens. Their own words have shown them unwilling to take responsibility for their own failures regarding their duties in each of their respective positions, as they are also exposed as self-serving liars, incompetents and cowards!

On May 12, 2012, Senator Feinstein (D-CA) told David Gregory on Meet the Press that she “saw no malevolence” in the actions of the Obama administration during or after Benghazi. It certainly wasn’t good will that had Obama go to bed without a care in the world and get up the next morning, as if nothing had happened, and go campaign in Nevada. It wasn’t good will that kept Obama, Clinton and Panetta from immediately sending a Special Forces or Quick Response team to rescue survivors, and it wasn’t good will that created twelve different revisions of the CIA’s original Intelligence Report that left no doubt the attack on Benghazi was a terror attack and had nothing to do with an anti-Islamic video or a spontaneous protest!

Whose brainchild was the cover story of the anti-Islamic video? Who gave the order for the Special Forces team in Tripoli to stand down? We do need the answers to these questions and more, but in the end, all culpability and responsibilty for the lies and the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Dogherty rests squarely with Obama and Clinton, along with Panetta and General David Patraeus who toed the line and joined the lie.

Obama and Clinton knew almost immediately that the U.S. “diplomatic facility” (whatever the administration is calling it today) was under a terrorist attack, because Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Missions and assistant to Ambassador Stevens spoke with Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State and his boss, at 2:00am the night of the attack, and he briefed her on the events on the ground. Clinton and Obama have been lying through their teeth the entire time, which explains the reason they have persistently stone-walled the Oversight Committee and obstructed the investigation into Benghazi.

Most Americans knew right away something was wrong with the Obama administration’s account of the attack on Benghazi. Many of us heard foreign news services such as ‘The Independent’ from the U.K. detailing the attack as a terrorist attack; and, one would have thought that the account given by the Libyan President, which clearly stated Ansar al-Sharia was the perpetrator, would have precluded UN Ambassador Susan Rice from advancing Obama’s and Clinton’s lie.

“I was stunned. My jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed,” stated Greg Hicks, when asked about his reaction to Susan Rice’s explanation for the Benghazi attacks.

The State Department and spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, in particular, pushed for the removal of all references in the CIA Intelligence Report to Al Qaeda, previous warnings about potential terrorist attacks and Ansar al-Sharia. After meeting with the White House and intelligence agencies, they were worried that the information could be “abused” by members of Congress “to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings”… which was the truth…, as Nuland elaborated, “so why would we want to feed that either?”

Nuland just described the inception of a conspiracy, and one in which then CIA Director David Patraeus enjoined by saying what the administration wanted to hear, and Ambassador Pickering enjoined with a substandard ARB Report that was sorely lacking; Greg Hicks was not allowed to review classified ARB documents, and several individuals with first hand knowledge of the Benghazi attack were never questioned by the ARB, although they were pressing to give their accounts and testimony.

On May 8, 2012, Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked,  “Isn’t it true that just hours after the attack, the Libyan President called it a terrorist attack?” Hicks replied, “Yes.” Then Gowdy focused on Ambassador Stevens’ last words to Hicks…”we’re under attack!” Gowdy asked, “If a protest was ongoing during some part of the day, wouldn’t a professional career diplomat mention it?” Hicks answered, “Yes.” Gowdy: “Did Ambassador Stevens mention such a protest?” Hicks: “No.”

Between January and April 2013, some of the typical responses from the Obama administration have ranged from press secretary Jay Carney’s “Benghazi was a long time ago” to John Kerry’s (new Sec of State) “We have more importan things to get on to” and Clinton’s “What difference does it make.” All of these statements show just what little regard they have for the sacrifice made by those four Americans and their deaths in general.

Elija Cummings (D-MD), in condescending fashion, relegated the deaths in Benghazi to insignificance by stating, “death is a part of life.” This is a gross insult. However much death is a part of life, we do not require such an explanation, nor does it mean that we want to rush to greet Death or to be refused help to escape Death, especially when the help we ask for is standing nearby… willing and able!

The officals at Benghazi and Tripoli were desperate for a rescue mission, but as Lt Colonel Gibson’s Special Forces team prepared to answer the call, they were told to “stand down.” And during this same time frame, Gregory Hicks was having an intense conversation with a furious Mark Thompson, as Thompson and his four man Foreign Emergency Support team were being blocked from responding by their so-called “superiors”!… It’s also unfathomable that a fighter jet could not be scrambled “in less than 22 hours”, as the administration alleges!

Secretary of Defense Panetta essentially said, “There’s bullets flying around over there. I’m not going to put my guys in there.” Why do we even have a military or a Special Forces then, if not to walk in harm’s way when American’s come under attack and an imminent threat of death? Panetta, Clinton and Obama took the coward’s way out. “A brave man dies but once…a coward dies a thousand deaths,” except when a man such as Obama is full of hubris and has no sense of shame or honor.

The party agenda is the most important item for today’s Progressive Democrats, even more than America’s national security or American lives, and this is, in large part, the reason that Obama and Hillary Clinton fabricated the anti-Islamic video story, as part of a cover up and a conspiracy to hide the fact that the attack on the U.S. Consulate at Benghazi was in fact a terror attack initiated by Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia. Only days before the Benghazi attacks, Obama had stated that Al Qaeda was on the run and decimated and “Osama’s dead”, so he made a conscious decision to present this lie about an anti-Islamic video; he delivered the lie convincingly and with emotion any actor would envy, as a ploy to prevent any new wrinkles from undermining his presidential campaign and to avoid acknowledging that Islam and the world-wide Muslim community hated his administration, just as much as they had hated President Bush’s administration. But when Obama and Clinton had clear signs and career professionals saying that they needed more security, and Obama and Clinton ignored them out of a misplaced need to make Libya appear to be “normalized”, that in and of itself is criminal when it results in the deaths of four fine Americans… cut down in their prime!

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The Women of Benghazigate

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By Frank Gaffney:

Suddenly, it seems we have broken through the most effective executive branch cover-up and complicit media blackout in memory.  Among the many recent revelations is one that has gone unnoted:  The prominent role played by women in the Obama administration’s: policy-making that led up to the jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012; its handling of the crisis; and its subsequent, scandalous damage-control operation.

Since, as they say, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, here’s a short guide to the Women of Benghazigate, whose contributions to one aspect or another of this affair have become public knowledge – thanks, in particular, to testimony from three whistleblowers before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week:

  • First, there is Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time. We now know she was personally responsible for at least some of the decisions that left personnel in the “special mission compound” in Benghazi highly vulnerable to attack.  Her whereabouts and activities are unaccounted for – like those of President Obama – during most of the seven-plus hours in which jihadists systematically assaulted first that facility and then a nearby CIA “annex.”  And then, the next day, she knowingly deceived the public about what precipitated the attack, blaming an internet video.
  • The poster child for the Benghazigate cover-up is UN Ambassador Susan Rice.  She was chosen to make the rounds of all five network Sunday morning news programs on September 16, 2012.  She reinforced the false narrative that Mrs. Clinton first pushed out publicly four days before in a joint Rose Garden appearance with President Obama.
  • State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was evidently among those involved in massaging twelve different versions of “talking points” upon which intelligence officials drew to misleadingly brief the Congress.  Amb. Rice also used such guidance to justify the fraud that YouTube, not jihad, was responsible for the violence in Benghazi.
  • Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was formerly in charge of managing so-called “bimbo eruptions” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and administration.  According to one of last week’s witnesses, Gregory Hicks – who became the Chief of Mission in Libya after his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, was murdered on that fateful night, Ms. Mills has lately been suppressing equally unwanted eruptions concerning Benghazigate.  She upbraided the diplomat for challenging the party line about what happened then and thereafter.  She also reportedly sought to interfere with a congressional investigation into the matter.
  •  Mr. Hicks testified that the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, Beth Jones, delivered her own, “blistering critique” of his management style after he asked “why the ambassador said there was a demonstration when the embassy reported there was an attack?”  Mr. Hicks believes he was demoted in retaliation for posing such unwelcome questions.

Curiously, the truth that has finally begun to emerge has yet to shed light on the involvement of two other women who almost certainly were players before, during and after the Benghazi attacks.

The first is Valerie Jarrett.  She is President Obama’s longtime consigliere.  Such is her relationship with him and the First Lady that she is permitted to involve herself in virtually all portfolios, including the most sensitive foreign affairs and national security ones.

That would surely be the case in this instance in light of Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s insightful observation:

“The Obama White House sees every event as a political event….Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.”

To paraphrase Senator Howard Baker’s famous questions from an earlier congressional investigation of a presidential cover-up called Watergate: What did Ms. Jarrett do, and when did she do it?

Then, there’s Mrs. Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin.  It strains credulity that Ms. Abedin would not be involved in this crisis, given the important role she has played in Mrs. Clinton’s world for over twelve years. As the Washington Post observed in 2007 – long before Hillary became America’s top diplomat: “Abedin…is one of Clinton’s most-trusted advisers on the Middle East….When Clinton hosts meetings on the region, Abedin’s advice is always sought.”

What was Huma Abedin’s advice when her boss responded to the proverbial “3 o’clock call” on the evening of September 11, 2012?  For that matter, in light of Huma’s longstanding and well-documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, we need to know what advice Ms. Abedin had been giving the Secretary of State about helping the Brotherhood and its fellow Islamists topple relatively friendly regimes throughout the Mideast and North Africa, including Muammar Qaddafi’s in Libya.

Of course, there are plenty of men implicated in the run-up to, events of and efforts to conceal the Benghazi scandal, starting with the President himself.  Their contributions to this debacle require thorough investigation.  But so do those of the Women of Benghazigate, including those peculiarly unimplicated to date: Valerie Jarrett and Huma Abedin.

How Obama Betrayed America

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betrayed_lgBelow is David Horowitz’s new pamphlet, How Obama Betrayed America…And No One is Holding Him Accountable. To order it, click here.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall.  We see farther into the future.” – Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton

It is a judgment on Barack Obama’s timorous, apologetic, irresponsible and ultimately anti-American conduct of foreign affairs that Madeleine Albright’s words, spoken little more than 15 years ago, now sound as antique as a pronouncement by Harry Truman at the onset of the Cold War, the great challenge America confronted bravely and without equivocation a generation ago.  While Obama has quoted this statement repeatedly to hide his real disdain for his country, he has set in motion policies meant to make America far from indispensable — a diminished nation that “leads from behind” if at all; a nation with a downsized military that is chronically uncertain about its meaning and its mission as it skulks in the wings of the world stage.

Albright’s statement was made about Iraq when Democrats were still supporting their country’s confrontation with its sadistic dictator Saddam Hussein, and before they defected from the war shortly after its battles were under way.  As a senator, in step with his Democratic colleagues, Obama opposed America’s war with Iraq while American troops were still in harms’ way, and then opposed the military surge that finally won the victory; as president he presided over the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq,  against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted a continuing military presence, paid for with the blood of thousands of American men and women in arms. Obama thus turned that benighted nation over to the malign influences of America’s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran, while betraying every American who gave his or her life for its freedom.

Far from shouldering his responsibility as the commander-in-chief of America’s global War on Terror and embracing it as this generation’s equivalent of the Cold War, Obama showed his distaste for the entire enterprise by dropping the term “War on Terror” and replacing it with an Orwellian phrase — “overseas contingency operations.” Minimizing the Islamist threat to the United States is not an oversight of the Obama administration; it is its policy.

It should not have been difficult for Obama to make the nation’s defense a priority when he became America’s commander-in-chief in January 2009.  The American homeland had already experienced a devastating attack, which terrorists have been constantly trying to repeat. The number of foreign states openly supporting terror has steadily increased (and grown even more during Obama’s tenure); and the most dangerous Islamist regime – Iran – is being allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, while Washington dithers over pointless negotiations. With secular governments giving way to Islamist regimes in Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, with the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan and an American withdrawal imminent, the global situation today has eerie parallels to the early Cold War, with implications equally dire.  Yet instead of policies that put U.S. national security first and are pursued without hesitation or apology, Obama’s time in office has been marked by retreat and accommodation and even support of Islamist foes – most ominously of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which swept aside an American ally, with Obama’s personal intervention, and is busily creating a totalitarian state.

  Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters

In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the Bush administration. Withdrawal, not victory, has been Obama’s goal from the outset, and now it is the only outcome possible.  During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height. Yet, in the face of this bloody and intensifying Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” — by him — and the terrorist threat is subsiding.[1]  Denial of the war Islamists have declared on us and denial of the threat it represents is the heart of the Obama doctrine that has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.

Obama’s desire for rapprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime has prompted the administration to drag its feet on the sanctions designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. For the same reason, the president and his administration were silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of Teheran to call for an end to the dictatorship and were met by an orgy of violence from the mullahs’ thugs.  Because of the White House’s moral and political timidity, borne out of its denial of the Islamist threat and the guilty conviction that America (presumably an even greater predator) has no right to condemn another nation, this tipping point in Iran tipped the wrong way.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

This inability to name our enemies was on display again on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 when  jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks against the American embassies in Egypt and other Islamic countries. In Libya, al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the American ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country that had recently been destabilized by Obama’s own intervention to oust its dictator. As senator, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq, which, unlike his Libyan adventure, had been authorized by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution. As president, he had invoked the principle of non-intervention to justify his passivity in the face of governmental atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in Libya he conducted an unauthorized invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States and was not, as Syria is, in alliance with the mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Hizbollah. The chaos that followed Obama’s Libyan intervention led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda, which planted its flag atop the same American outpost in Benghazi it later destroyed, and the U.S. ambassador along with it.

The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a foreign policy without a moral compass.  The battle over the embassy lasted seven hours. Although the President learned about the attack shortly after it began and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only silence answered their desperate calls. The president and his administration then went into cover-up mode lying to Congress and the American people, pretending for weeks afterwards that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed internet video, whose director they then threw in jail.

Before his overthrow, the dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, warned that his demise would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country but throughout North Africa. This was a prophecy quickly realized. In the aftermath of Obama’s intervention, al-Qaeda was able to take control in Mali of an area twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt, jihadists emerged as the ruling parties, with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama administration. In Syria, a savage civil war metastasized unimpeded, killing tens of thousands and eventually pitting a fascist regime allied to Iran against rebel forces largely aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the Islamists but armed and enabled them. Obama had previously intervened in Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force the removal of its pro-American leader, Hosni Mubarak. He then promoted the Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor in the democratic process. As the Middle East situation deteriorated, the Muslim Brotherhood became the chief beneficiary of America’s financial, diplomatic and military support. This same Brotherhood was the driving force behind the Islamist surge, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al-Qaeda, and the creator of Hamas. Rather than being quarantined, the Brotherhood-dominated government in Cairo now received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets from the Obama administration that had facilitated its rise to power.

Appeasement of Islamist Enemies

To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following justification for its acceptance by the White House: “We believe that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.”[2] In these words, Clinton was referring to an organization whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and a party that was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish state.[3] Soon after Clinton’s endorsement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s new leader and was referring to Jews as apes and pigs. Secure in the American administration’s support, he wasted no time in abolishing the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from the United States. Only months before this destruction of Egypt’s civic space by his Islamist party, the new dictator was visited by then Senator John Kerry, shortly to be Hillary Clinton’s successor as Secretary of State. Kerry assured the world that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms.”[4]

Read the rest at Front Page

Anatomy of a Coverup

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Dereliction-of-Duty-Five

We now have whistle blowers set to testify that what happened in Benghazi is very different than what the Obama administration has told us. We also have the proof that the Benghazi talking points were scrubbed. The question being asked now is why did Hillary Clinton and so many top administration officials, including General Petraeus, go to such extraordinary lengths to present a false narrative?

Daniel Greenfield has written a very good explanation of the Obama administration’s foreign policy towards the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in his piece, “Obama’s Big Brotherhood Bet” at Front Page that helps answer this question:

In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. He skipped the gaming tables at the Omar Khayyam Casino at the Cairo Marriott and instead went over to the Islamist baccarat tables at Cairo University and bet big on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama had insisted on Muslim Brotherhood attendance at a speech that was part apology and part abandonment. The apology was for American power and the abandonment was of American allies.

The text of the speech was largely inconsequential in the same way that most of the words that scroll across the teleprompters of politicians are. In politics, the speech is often the medium while the timing, the audience and the location are the message. And the message was that the Brotherhood’s hour had come.

Obama was following through on an idea that had long been an article of faith on the left. The idea was that the United States had invested in a defunct status quo and that our biggest problems were our allies. The only way out was to toss them all overboard.

Generations of diplomats had griped from their walled compounds in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Doha that many of our problems in the region would go away if Israel somehow went away. But this was bigger. It involved dumping every single allied government in the region to start fresh with new governments elected through popular democracy and enjoying popular support. It would be a new beginning. And a new beginning was also the title of the Cairo speech.

The idea wasn’t new, but it was right up there with proposals to unilaterally abandon our nuclear arsenal or dedicate ten percent of the budget to foreign aid; ideas that a lot of diplomats liked, but that they knew no one would ever be crazy enough to pull the trigger on.

And then Obama tried to pull the trigger on two out of three. What he wanted was for the Brotherhood to win so that it could make the War on Terror irrelevant.

As much as the advocates of smart and soft power insisted that Islamic terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, they knew better. They knew that Al Qaeda wanted to create Islamic states that would form into a Caliphate. Central to its thinking was that it would have to fight to create these states. But what if the Caliphate could be created without a war?

To make it happen, all America had to do was surrender the Middle East.

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The Obama administration, with it’s cultural relativist world view, believes that BOTH Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda can be moderated by making a  transition to democracy with our help. There has been an Orwellian re-branding of the word terrorism in order to sell this idea to the public as well as a denial of the so called al Qaeda “franchise’s” ideological links to “core” al Qaeda. So when the al Qaeda militia we were partnering with (Feb. 17th Martyrs Brigade) to protect the embassy actually assisted al Qaeda members from Yemen and possibly Egypt to attack and kill our people in Benghazi, they had to cover that up or risk Obama losing the election. Hillary Clinton went to extraordinary measures to change the Benghazi talking points in order to protect her political future as well as Obama’s. As a bonus, she managed to insert the lie of the “offensive” video tape in order to advance the campaign to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Walid Phares: ” These forces were not on the map as a threat to US national security because of a political determination that they were on the right side of history, and they were perceived as in transition to integration.”

Clare Lopez: “The real issue — which is what the CIA, the State Department or anyone in the U.S. government has been doing backing regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa region in the company of and for the benefit of Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood jihadis — never gets addressed, much less explained by the ARB or anyone else.”

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The Human Cost of Jihad Denial

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usa-boston_bombing-AP-photo-620x385By :

Wednesday brought new confirmation of the increasingly obvious fact that the U.S. intelligence apparatus in the age of Barack Obama is woefully unprepared to deal with the foremost threat to the safety of Americans today: Islamic jihad terrorism.

Nor is this lack of preparedness due to a lack of funding (Lord knows there is plenty of that for anything Obama wants to do) or other resources. There are many people who are deeply knowledgeable in the ideology and belief system that inspires Islamic jihad terror, and they are ready and willing to share their knowledge with intelligence officials – indeed, many of them did so during the Bush Administration and the early years of the Obama Administration, before his 2011 purge the counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad.

That purge came after hard-Left journalistic propagandist Spencer Ackerman wrote a series of “exposes” that supposedly exposed “Islamophobia” in government counterterror training — that is, truthful information about Islam and jihad. See here and here for details. Then Farhana Khera, Executive Director of an Islamic organization called Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter on October 19, 2011 to Barack Obama’s then-Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and current CIA director John Brennan. The letter was signed by 57 organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); Islamic Relief USA; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The letter demanded that Obama officials “purge all federal government training materials of biased materials” – that is, materials that they claimed were biased against Islam – and “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training.”

The Obama Administration immediately complied. Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that same day that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything that Islamic supremacists deemed offensive: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Read more at Front Page

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A call to courage over Benghazi

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-1156172513Center For Security Policy:

By Adm. James “Ace” Lyons (Ret.)

Five committees of the House of Representatives recently issued an interim report on the Benghazi tragedy, which clearly indicated that the highest levels of the State Department were involved in not only denying security resources but reducing them at our facilities in Libya, including the Benghazi Special Mission Compound. These were not “routine” security requests, as some have claimed. They were made by the Regional Security Office and also by Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens as well.

Why these legitimate requests were turned down remains an open question. There remains many other unanswered questions that were not addressed by the Accountability Review Board. For example, we still do not know what business was being conducted at the compound. Also, why was it necessary for Stevens to be in Benghazi with its out-of-control security situation on what should have been a high-security-alert day of Sept. 11? Why did the administration continue to lie to the American public for the better part of two weeks that it was a video that caused the attack when they knew it was a terrorist attack from Day One?

The American public — and certainly the families of the four Americans killed — need to know who gave the “stand-down order” and on whose authority. Former CIA Director David H. Petraeus has stated that no such order came from the CIA.

The lack of a military response remains another important unanswered question. Even though our military resources, particularly those of the U.S. Sixth Fleet have been drawn down to the point at which they’re essentially nonexistent, there were in-theater resources that could have responded and, most likely, would have saved America lives. These included F-16 fighter aircraft from Aviano, Italy, which could have been over the compound in about 90 minutes. There was also a 130-man Marine Force Recon Team at Sigonella, Italy, which could have been deployed to arrive at the compound in a matter of a few hours.

These resources would have made a difference, particularly since the attack went on for more than eight hours with no fear of interference or retaliation. Further, no one has yet been able to interview the 30-odd survivors about what actually happened during the attack. Why not?

Why has there been no effort to retaliate against the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Shariah, which carried out the attack? Their leaders today sit in outdoor cafes in Benghazi sipping tea.

Our U.S. Sixth Fleet military posture in the Mediterranean is a disgrace. Since World War II up until 2008, we maintained the dominant military force in the Mediterranean, consisting of at least one carrier battle group and an amphibious Ready Group with an embarked Marine battalion, along with logistic support ships and other units. Today, we have one unarmed command ship — my old flagship — the USS Mt. Whitney (LCC-20). This is symptomatic of President Obama’s relentless effort to disarm our military, which is clearly affecting our national security.

Compounding the disarming of our military forces is Mr. Obama’s destabilizing social engineering. The latest example is a directive promulgated by the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff that all flag and general officers will now be evaluated by the subordinates under their commands. Does this make any sense? Is this to make sure that our military leadership is complying with the president’s “diversity” agenda? Will any member of the Joint Chiefs find the courage to stand up and voice objection?

This politically correct directive by the chairman defies all leadership logic. It will destroy unit integrity and morale. It will destroy the fundamental principles of the chain of command concept, which has served this nation honorably for more than 238 years. The integrity of command is not obtained by running a popularity contest. Currying favors with subordinates is alien to military leadership. This nonsense must be stopped.

Our nonresponse to the attack on our Benghazi facilities is in part reflective of our military leadership’s politically correct mentality as well as the administration’s policies to disarm our military forces. The first action that needs to be taken is to get the facts out to the American public on the Benghazi cover-up. Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, has sponsored a resolution (H. Res. 36) to establish a select committee to investigate and respond on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. He has been joined by 122 members, at the latest count. The problem has been that House Speaker John A. Boehner has been stonewalling the establishment of such a committee, using the lame excuse that it will cost money and take a lot of time. Nonsense. The systematic causes that brought about the Benghazi debacle need to be unearthed now, as it will affect our national security in the future.

If the president were a Republican and Nancy Pelosi were the speaker, there would have been no hesitation on her part to find the courage to form such a committee. Hopefully, Mr. Boehner can find his.

Whose side is he on?

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-468019352Frank Gaffney:

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the investigation into its perpetrators has been marred by a series of bizarre and even alarming actions by President Obama and his administration. Unfortunately, these increasingly suggest a pattern that is at odds with our national and homeland security. The question must be occurring to many Americans: Whose side is he on?

Consider just a few of the recent examples suggesting the ominous answer is “Not ours”:

  • Team Obama decided precipitously to charge the alleged surviving bomber, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, in civilian court. This action resulted inevitably in his being read Miranda rights and obtaining a lawyer, prompting Tsarnaev to refuse further to answer investigators’ questions. Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy observed (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346785/obama%E2%80%99s-national-security-fraud), “Obama was determined to end the public debate over whether the jihadist is a wartime enemy combatant or a mere criminal defendant.”  Mr. McCarthy theorizes that what is going on here is that: “[We] are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols.”
  • Then there is the peculiar case of the Saudi “student,” Abdul Rahman al-Harbi. Glenn Beck and syndicated columnist Diana West have done yeoman’s work connecting the proverbial dots on this young man starting with his detention at the scene of the bombing (where he was wounded) and initial designation as a “person of interest” in the investigation. The FBI reportedly spent seven hours searching his apartment but, following an in-person and unscheduled intervention with Mr. Obama by the Saudi Foreign Minister, al-Harbi ceased to be classified as even a witness to the jihadist attack.  Still more bizarre is what happened next. The Saudi press reported that First Lady Michelle Obama paid a visit to al-Harbi in the Boston hospital where he was recuperating, even as federal agencies sought to deport him on the grounds that he was a national security threat. That would, needless to say, put him safely beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. At this writing, Team Obama seems to be resisting congressional efforts to establish al-Harbi’s whereabouts and true status. Neither has there been any explanation to date for why a man who, according to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement records made public by Mr. Beck, is ineligible on terrorist-ties grounds to be in the United States was admitted to the White House on numerous occasions.
  • Meanwhile, the evidence continues to accumulate that the FBI failed to appreciate the nature of the threat posed by Dzokhar’s Islamist elder brother, Tamerlan, because it has had to operate for years under guidance that obscures the direct connection between the supremacist Islamic doctrine he practiced, known as shariah, and the terrifying form of jihad it compels its adherents to wage. The Center for Security Policy is helping Americans who believe we cannot afford such shackling of our first line of defense against domestic threats to express their concerns directly to President Obama with a web-based campaign at http://www.FreetheFBI.com.
  • A corollary to this insanity has been the administration’s effort to portray other communities as equivalent threats to that posed by Islamists. This notion is inherent in Team Obama’s adoption of the euphemism “violent extremism.” and in an Army Reserve unit’s equal opportunity training materials that identified evangelical Christians, Catholics and Islamophobes as on a par with al Qaeda and similar shariah-adherent terrorist organizations in terms of readiness to engage in such extremism.

Read more at Center For Security Policy

 

Video: Brigitte Gabriel Blasts Political Correctness

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 Brigitte makes the case for throwing out political correctness by quoting statistics: 

images (24)“Since Obama became president we have arrested 226 homegrown terrorists; 186 of them are Muslims…. We have a problem in this country when a faith based group that accounts for less than 2% of the American population is responsible for over 80% of terrorist attacks or plots against the United States…. 540,000 people are on the government watch list, that’s not just a minority…over half a million people are on the government watch list. That’s a major problem. We need to throw political correctness in the garbage where it belongs and start calling a spade a spade”

(Brigitte at 2:30)