#StandDown – Obama Surrenders the War on Terror

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“Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” President Reagan counseled in his farewell address. We would do well to heed his advice as President Obama attempts to lead America backwards, to September 10. Make no mistake: That was the not-so-subtle message he sent last week during his speech at the National Defense University—a speech that was so full of inaccuracies that one is left to conclude the president is either living in an alternate universe or willfully disregarding the facts. Just consider some of the statements he made.

1. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.”

In fact, Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others during his shooting rampage at Ft. Hood in November 2009—an attack authorized by al Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen (AQAP). Since the U.S. Army—no doubt following orders far up the chain of command—refuses to classify the Ft. Hood shooting as a terrorist attack, the survivors’ injuries and acts of bravery cannot be categorized as “combat related.”

In addition, the Boston Marathon bombing was a large-scale attack carried out by individuals who were radicalized to jihad and trained by jihadist elements in Russia.

Moreover, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, inspired and trained by AQAP, almost took down a passenger plane in December 2009; and Faisal Shahzad, trained by jihadists in Pakistan, deployed an IED in Times Square in 2010. Just as catching a thief in the act doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed a crime, the fact that these attacks failed does not mean they were not attacks.

2. “The core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat…They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.”

Like a five-year-old, the president seems to believe that if he says something often enough and loud enough, it will become true. In fact, al Qaeda affiliates did carry out the attacks on Benghazi. No matter what the final draft of those infamous talking points said, several of the attackers were al Qaeda operatives.

3. “Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.”

In fact, American acquiescence and aloofness have allowed extremists to gain a foothold in these places.

Read more at Front Page

 

Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad

By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

If your concern about the threat posed by the Tsarnaev brothers is limited to assuring that they will never be in a position to repeat their grisly acts, rest easy.

The elder, Tamerlan—apparently named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims’ skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels—is dead. The younger, Dzhokhar, will stand trial when his wounds heal, in a proceeding where the most likely uncertainty will be the penalty. No doubt there will be some legal swordplay over his interrogation by the FBI’s High-Value Interrogation Group without receiving Miranda warnings. But the only downside for the government in that duel is that his statements may not be used against him at trial. This is not much of a risk when you consider the other available evidence, including photo images of him at the scene of the bombings and his own reported confession to the victim whose car he helped hijack during last week’s terror in Boston.

But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry—a lot.

For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.

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(Zuma Press) In the White House Situation Room on April 19, President Obama meets with his national-security team, including FBI Director Robert Mueller to his immediate left.

At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI’s interrogation group as well?

Will we see another performance like the Army’s after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan‘s rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout “allahu akhbar”—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as “workplace violence”? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army’s diversity program.

Read more at WSJ

Mr. Mukasey served as attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009 and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1988 to 2006.

 

Interview with Michael Mukasey starts at 3:26

 

 

 

Islamic Terror Plots and More Smoke and Mirrors

Hussam Ayloush

by IPT News 

Obama’s Counterterror Strategy: Lie And Deny

Investors Business Daily:

National Security: Turns out al-Qaida hit not just one, but four U.S.  embassies last month. These coordinated acts of terror are not the first that  the president, who blamed the violence on a video, has downplayed.

The Weekly Standard reports that in addition to the deadly attack on the  American Consulate in Libya, al-Qaida terrorists were behind the U.S. Embassy  sieges in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. All were timed around the 11th anniversary  of 9/11 and carried out by terrorists tied to the same group that attacked our  homeland on 9/11.

A congressional probe reveals President Obama knew on Day One that al-Qaida  terrorists were behind the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three of his aides  in Benghazi. But he spun it as a “spontaneous” outbreak of violence, claiming  local Muslims were reacting to a “hateful” American-made movie on the Muslim  prophet Muhammad.

The initial knee-jerk denial of Islamic terrorism fits a pattern with this  presidency. Since 2009, Obama has insisted acts of terror are not terror, or  terrorists have acted alone when in fact they’ve acted in concert with al-Qaida  or the Taliban. Here’s a rundown of the other cases:

•  Fort Hood massacre: Despite reports Maj. Nidal Hasan screamed “Allahu  Akbar!” before opening fire on a roomful of fellow Army soldiers in Texas on  Nov. 5, 2009, Obama dismissed an otherwise obvious act of terrorism as the  random act of “one individual.”

Even after evidence showed Hasan was in contact with al-Qaida leader Anwar  Awlaki and had religiously justified his attack in an elaborate PowerPoint  presentation, the administration still classified his jihadi rampage as  “workplace violence.”

•  Christmas Day bomber: Within days of the Dec. 25, 2009, attack on a U.S.  airliner, Obama assured the nation that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “an  isolated extremist.”

In fact, the so-called underwear bomber had been trained by al-Qaida in  Yemen. Obama and his national security team knew this within the first hours of  the investigation because Abdulmutallab had told the FBI as much during his  interrogation.

•  Times Square bomber: Two days after Faisal Shahzad tried on May 1, 2010,  to detonate his explosives-packed SUV in downtown New York, the White House  misled the public into thinking there was no larger terrorist conspiracy behind  the attempt.

It described it as as a “one-off” incident — a British term meaning it wasn’t  part of a series. In fact, intelligence clearly showed that the Pakistani  Taliban were behind the attack. Shahzad had been trained at a Taliban terror  camp inside Pakistan and had been funded by the terrorist group.

The president covered up what really happened in all these terror cases,  because they were embarrassing failures of security and intelligence.

Al-Qaida’s coordinated and heavily armed strike in Libya — the worst on U.S.  soil since 9/11 — also jeopardizes Obama’s carefully crafted narrative that he’s  decapitated al-Qaida and is generally tough on terrorists. Neither is true. And  judging from recent polls, voters are starting to see through the smoke  screen.

Mitt Romney now commands a 48%-42% advantage over Obama on the question of  which candidate would be tougher on terrorism, a new Bloomberg National Poll  finds. We suspect this gap will grow as more details leak out about al-Qaida’s  unfortunate — and unnecessary — resurgence on Obama’s watch.

 

Cheney: Cairo, Benghazi and Obama Foreign Policy

 

Protesters destroy an American flag pulled down from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Sept. 11.

By Liz Cheney:

It has certainly been a terrible 48 hours. In Libya, violent extremists killed American diplomats. In Cairo, mobs breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy, ripped down the American flag and replaced it with the al Qaeda flag.

In response to the attack in Cairo, diplomats there condemned not the attackers but those who “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” The president appeared in the Rose Garden less than 24 hours later to condemn the Libya assault and failed even to mention the attack in Egypt. The message sent to radicals throughout the region: If you assault an American embassy but don’t kill anyone, the U.S. president won’t complain.

Though the administration’s performance in the crisis was appalling, it wasn’t surprising—it is the logical outcome of three-and-a-half years of Obama foreign policy.

In March 2009, at an Americas summit meeting in Mexico City, President Obama listened as Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivered a venomous diatribe against America. Mr. Obama stood to speak and accepted Mr. Ortega’s version of history. “I’m very grateful,” Mr. Obama said, “that President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

In April 2009, in France, Mr. Obama proclaimed that America must make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal because only then would the country have “the moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon, to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons.” Embracing the leftist fallacy that the key to world peace is for the U.S. to pre-emptively disarm, the president has reportedly begun reviewing options to take our nuclear stockpile to levels not seen since 1950. These are steps you take only if you believe that America—not her enemies—is the threat.

In June 2009, Mr. Obama went to Cairo and said, “The fear and anger” after 9/11 “led us to act contrary to our ideals.” But the men and women who led this nation then, and the military and intelligence professionals who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, did not act contrary to our ideals. They kept this nation safe.

Protesters destroy an American flag pulled down from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Sept. 11.

Mr. Obama didn’t thank them. He slandered them on foreign soil, and he revealed to al Qaeda the techniques we used to interrogate terrorists—techniques that generated intelligence that saved lives and prevented further attacks on the nation. And he failed to put any alternative interrogation program in place. When Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the “underwear bomber”) was captured on Mr. Obama’s watch, he was read the Miranda rights.

The president wrapped up his 2009 world tour with a speech at the United Nations, where he explained: “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” He has worked hard these past three years to ensure that the U.S. is not “elevated” above others, and he has succeeded.

In too many parts of the world, America is no longer viewed as a reliable ally or an enemy to be feared. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even as his country faces an existential threat from Iran, he can’t get a meeting with President Obama. Ask the Poles and Czechs, two allies we abandoned when we canceled missile-defense systems that the president feared would offend the Russians. Ask the Iranian people who took to the streets to fight for their freedom, only to find Mr. Obama standing silently with the mullahs.

Nor do our adversaries any longer fear us. Ask the mobs in Cairo who attacked our embassy, or the Libyan mobs who killed our diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Ask the Iranians, who make unhindered daily progress toward obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Read more at WSJ

                Ms. Cheney is chairman of Keep America Safe, a nonprofit organization focused on national security issues and education, and was a principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

A Mosque Is Not Like a Church or a Synagogue

By Janet Levy

The marked proliferation of mosques in the U.S. since 9/11 should raise a red flag for Americans.  Recent controversies surrounding mega-mosque construction projects countrywide — many in locations with almost no Muslims to speak of — have grave implications for the future of these targeted communities and areas beyond.

Accelerated mosque-building — in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ground Zero, New York; and Santa Clara and Temecula, California, to name a few — carries significance beyond the mere construction of a collection of Muslim houses of worship.  It represents yet another orchestrated effort to oust traditional American values and replace them with Islamic practices, laws, and beliefs.

Although most U.S. mosques heretofore have been built without resistance, the newly attendant controversies present speciously polarized views between, on the one hand, ostensibly welcoming, tolerant, multi-culti progressives who deny any possible radical agenda despite substantial evidence to the contrary in existing mosques and, on the other hand, so-called fearful, Islamophobic, ignorant bigots unwilling to embrace diversity. Mainstream media’s predominant point of view is that any opposition to mosque-building represents a blatant unwillingness to integrate Muslims into American communities.  This view disallows the possibility that such objections represent appropriate, reasoned responses to an attempt to destroy America from within and supplant its culture with a supremacist, totalitarian, and misogynistic ideology.

Islamic terrorism expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project for Terrorism, attributes the spate of mosque-building and land acquisition to the Muslim American Society (MAS), an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Emerson contends that the MAS has been actively buying up property and establishing mosques to control the appointment of imams who “distribute the message they believe is necessary to spread Islam around the world.”

It should be noted that a mosque is totally unlike a church or a synagogue, entities that serve their communities under the law of the land and are both empowered and restrained under the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Under the Establishment Clause of that amendment, the government is prohibited from establishing a state religion or conferring preferential treatment on one religion over another.  Although the government may not interfere with religious beliefs and opinions, the proscription of religious practices is permissible, as in the examples of polygamy and human sacrifice.

In the U.S. and in other Western countries, Christians and Jews freely and critically choose their brand of theology from a multitude of ecclesiastic offerings and determine their individual levels of religious observance or none at all.  The exercise of faith and the observance of faith-related practices occur across a broad spectrum of individual behaviors based solely on personal choice.

In Muslim countries, no separation exists between mosque and state.  Islamic doctrine or sharia controls all aspects of a person’s existence, from the correct way to use the toilet to permissible forms of lying, or taquiya.  For Muslims, Mohammed is the perfect man, whose every example must be emulated, even though by Western Judeo-Christian standards he was a mass murderer, pedophile, rapist, torturer, and looter.  Furthermore, Islamic doctrine is immutable, and any criticism of the traditions and practices of Mohammed is considered apostasy, which is punishable by death.

No free individual will exists or is allowed when it comes to practices and observances.  Sharia must be strictly followed.  A mosque is a symbol of this ultimate authority and serves the function of organizing every aspect of life in a Muslim community.

Mosques are modeled after the first mosque established by Mohammed in Medina, which was a seat of government, a command center, a court, a school, and a military training center and depot for arms.  Mosque leaders today issue religious decrees, enforce Islamic doctrine, monitor conduct, provide training, punish transgressions, and command actions, including the requirement to conduct jihad.

In the “Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” published in 1991 and discovered in a 2004 FBI raid of a house in Northern Virginia, the Muslim Brotherhood explains historical stages of Islamic activism for “civilizational jihad.”  This usurpation of American Judeo-Christian and Western liberal social, political, and religious values by Islam was defined in the document which gave the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of believers so that it is eliminated and G-d’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The Explanatory Memorandum goes on to describe the role of the mosque or Islamic center as being identical to the Medina mosque constructed by Mohammed, with its status as a military base and a provider of jihadist training.  In essence, the mosque or Islamic center building operates in the service of establishing an authoritative physical presence for a strategic base of operations.  Rather than the benign construction of a house of worship, the building of a mosque represents one in a series of beachheads in the interconnected network of bases to teach the skills of jihad, advance Islam, and impose sharia in due time.

The radical nature of U.S. mosques was confirmed in 2005 by a study conducted by Freedom House, “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques,” in which it was determined that 80% of American mosques encouraged Muslims to work for the establishment of the Islamic state and espoused hatred and intolerance toward non-Muslims.

Read more at American Thinker