http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/freedom-from-islam/print/ In 1941, FDR proposed his famous Four Freedoms. Some seventy years later it may be time to add a fifth freedom to that list. Freedom from Islam. Freedom from Islam would have seemed like an unlikely candidate back in 1941 when the worry was over secular ideologies, but as the West and its ideologies […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ryan-mauro/destroy-israel-conference-comes-to-illinois/ On November 22-25, activists with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas will come together at the Oak Brook Hills Marriott Resort in Illinois for American Muslims for Palestine’s (AMP) Conference for Palestine in the U.S.: A Movement United. The event also highlights the Islamists’ success in forging interfaith partnerships with Reverend Donald Wagner […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/dying-by-entitlements/print/ Mark Steyn has done a spate of interviews recently on the occasion of the paperback release of his 2011 bestseller After America: Get Ready For Armageddon. A few weeks ago, he remarked to Canadian television host Michael Coren that, contrary to those who claimed his predictions about American collapse were alarmist, he now finds […]
http://search.aol.com/aol/afe?query=http%3A%2F%2Fspectator.org%2Farchives%2F2012%2F10%2F16%2Fbenghazigate&s_it=DNSERROR The White House and Obama’s media cohort believe they now have the Benghazi consulate attack story under control. They have, they think, established two foundation points of the narrative that relieve Obama of any responsibility for the events and their aftermath. The two points are, first, that the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/hillary-goes-under-the-bus/
In an interview Monday with CNN, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton identified herself as the person to blame for the U.S.’s failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack that took the life Ambassador Chris Stevens and that of three other Americans at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton took care to shield the White House from the scandal, saying that diplomatic security was the exclusive role of the State Department. Coming on the eve of the second presidential debate, the admission follows a barrage of high-level administration surrogates shifting blame to the State Department, and Clinton no doubt felt tremendous pressure to concede in order to remove an important cudgel at Mitt Romney’s disposal. But while Clinton may very well bear much responsibility for the tragedy, the ultimate culprit is the Obama administration policy of voluntary weak positioning abroad, which the President’s State Department was executing in Benghazi. This is why the administration engaged in such a clear cover-up following the attack, along with the President’s need to maintain the facade that he has brought the threat of Islamic terrorism under control.
The tide had turned for Clinton after the vice presidential debate last Thursday when Vice President Joe Biden put the Benghazi problem squarely in Hillary’s lap. Biden claimed that he and the president “weren’t told they wanted more security there.” On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney doubled down. ”These kinds of issues are handled in the State Department by security officials,” he said. Over the weekend the State Department blame game was in full swing. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief re-election campaign strategist, “explained” Biden’s debate assertion to “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “The White House was talking about what the White House knew,” Axelrod said. “There are embassies all over the world and requests all over the world and these requests go over the the security professionals at the State Department. And there’s no doubt that some of these matters went into the security department of the State Department. But it didn’t come to the White House, and that’s what the vice president was responding to,” he added.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-madness-of-qutbs-milestones?f=must_reads
Reading Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones to pen a serious, informative, and critical review was an intellectual and literary chore I expected to be a cinch. Having finished reading this short, 160-page encomium for Islam, it is not so much a cinch as an exercise in nausea. Imagine assigning oneself the task of comparing a set of amusement park horror houses and awarding them points on how realistic their artificial ogres, witches, and ghouls were and how successfully they caused people to scream, cringe, or have strokes.
That is, how does one go about discussing with a straight face the pathological meanderings of a very disturbed and malevolent man, knowing that his meanderings have served as an intellectual sanction for terrorism, death, destruction, and the ongoing Islamic jihad against the West? What makes it so nauseous a chore is not the English translation of Qutb’s screed. I do not think the quality of the translation matters, because there is no way any translator could do the work justice other than just translating it straight from the Arabic. There are no elusive nuances to catch and objectify, there is no “poetry” or literary value to be found and captured in the work. It is the subject matter itself that is nauseous. Milestonesis the Islamic equivalent of the mental ravings of psychotic murderers such as Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Ted Kaczynski.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/mismatch-a-book-with-sensible-proposals-on-affirmative-action?f=must_reads In a recent book entitled Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students Its Intended To Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, the authors identify reforms that could make a difference in dealing with this ticklish racial issue, reforms, as I see it, that are eminently sensible. First, and […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/this-foreign-policys-failing-worldwide?f=must_reads After Team Obama’s horrid handling of the terrible tragedy in Benghazi, does anyone out there really cling to the left’s quickly unraveling yarn that this administration has a strong record on foreign policy and national security Sure, the prez and veep continue to chant the mantra that “Osama bin Laden is dead” – and, […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
AS DIANA WEST AND JOHN BERNARD HAVE EXPLAINED OVER AND OVER AGAIN…WE LOST THE WAR BECAUSE WE NEVER NAMED THE ENEMY AND OUR RULES OF ENGAGEMENT WERE SUCH THAT SOLDIERS WERE DELIBERATELY
PUT IN HARM’S WAY TO AVOID INSULTING THE LOCAL SAVAGES AND THEIR BARBARIC MORES…..RSK
“We lost Afghanistan because we forgot that we never had it. We lost the war because we forgot that it was a war and decided that it was a humanitarian mission. We lost because we had come to believe that no war was moral unless it ended in the moral redemption of the foe. We lost the war because we could no longer justify a war to ourselves in the interests of our own defense, only in the interests of saving another people and another society from themselves. We lost Afghanistan because we still knew how to fight, but we no longer remember why we fought.”
Regardless of who wins this election in a few years the final planes carrying the last soldiers will shake off Afghanistan’s dust and take to the sky. They will leave behind a limited number of advisers, ex-military civilian contractors and a whole bunch of diplomats running out the clock in Kabul. A few years later when Islamist mobs are roaming the streets and rocket attacks on the US embassy have become routine, the helicopters on the roof will be back and the surviving diplomats will be on their way to new assignments in more peaceful parts of the world like Baghdad and Cairo.
The war in Afghanistan is lost and that loss is mostly unspoken. Had Obama never been elected then the left, in coordination with their Democratic big brothers, might have elevated the defeat to the level of another Vietnam. But that dream, nurtured in the early years of the Bush Administration, is a done deal after the Son of Jimmy Carter who ran on a platform of beating the Taliban. Instead of another Vietnam, the long war will be an unremarked defeat.
Neither side wants to talk about it and the American people just want to leave. The ending is written the cemeteries are full and all that’s left is to shake off the dust and go home.
Defeats however have to be learned from and no one intends to learn the lessons of Afghanistan. The people responsible for 1,500 deaths in implementing a directive to beat the Taliban without breaking a single fingernail on an Afghan civilian, even if he’s a Taliban gunman hiding behind a Burqa, will not pay the price for this. They will go on to lucrative gigs as lobbyists or leadership trainers, herding corporate executives around golf courses and trading on anecdotes about the time they almost came under fire.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-real-lesson-of-benghazi/?print=1 The Obama administration is approaching full meltdown over the steady stream of revelations concerning its inaction and lies over the massacre of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel in Libya. Obama and Biden are lining up against Hillary Clinton and the State Department [1], claiming that they weren’t told about Stevens’ requests for […]
