http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-educational-covenant/ Real education in the broadest and richest sense has always been an unlikely proposition. Its most floral moment may have been Periclean Athens, and then only for a privileged minority of enfranchised philosophers, statesmen and citizens of the polis. The ideal was articulated in Plato’s Phaedrus, as “an acquired conviction which causes us to […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/benghazi-investigator-slams-america-islamophobes/
America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities.
So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling the epithet “Islamophobe” the same way American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.
Pickering’s pontifications came two and a half weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him to head a State Department “Accountability Review Board” tasked with examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths on Sept. 11, 2012, the 11th anniversary of 9/11, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
At last week’s panel discussion, Pickering piously but incorrectly invoked the Holocaust to argue that American Muslims were somehow in danger.
“I’m not great at quotations,” he said, foreshadowing a misattribution to come.
“Perhaps it was [German theologian and dissident] Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said of the Nazis, when they came for the Jews, I didn’t speak up. I was not a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn’t speak up, I was not a Catholic. When they came for us, no one spoke up. There was no one left to do so,” Pickering said, paraphrasing famous, poignant verses actually spoken by Third Reich-era German pastor Martin Niemoller.
Pickering said that Americans’ lack of familiarity with Islam –and not Islamic terrorist attacks on Americans— fuels hostility toward Muslims.
“Data shows that those Americans who do not know Muslims, who do not know much about Islam, are the ones who harbor the greatest feelings of prejudice,” he said.
There is a “strong, continuing, and perhaps, in an unfortunate way in some areas, growing, prejudice against Muslims and Islam,” he said.
However, he added that veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far avoided embracing this anti-Islamic bigotry. “Many of the soldiers are still serving and I think that also is helpful because they understand that as loyal Americans that kind of prejudice is not to be expressed.”
Pickering urged what might amount to a zero-tolerance policy against so-called Islamophobes in American society. “There are strong efforts as well that we must make to deal with opinion leaders who harbor these prejudices, who espouse them and spread them,” he said.
Although the former envoy did not elaborate on what those “strong efforts” might consist of, his statement is worrisome. The Obama administration is openly hostile to the First Amendment.
After the Benghazi debacle, President Obama went before the United Nations General Assembly and apologized for America’s free speech protections. Pushing the false cover story that the attacks on U.S. missions this past Sept. 11 were prompted by an anti-Islam video virtually no one saw, the president said that “the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Weeks before that, Department of Justice official Thomas Perez pointedly refused during a congressional hearing to rule out supporting Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws.
Pickering wasn’t the only panelist last week to describe ordinary Americans as a threat to Muslim inhabitants of the United States.
In a particularly revealing soliloquy, Arab American Institute president James J. Zogby, whose younger brother is renowned pollster John Zogby, passionately inveighed against his fellow Americans, and particularly Tea Party supporters, labeling them dangerous racist Islamophobes:
“I think that there’s a direct correlation between the president of the United States and Islamophobia. As we do our polling, we find that it is not the universal phenomenon. This hatred toward Muslims is largely concentrated with middle class, middle age, white people, and then it overlaps almost identically with the Tea Party. It is not a Republican thing. It’s a generational thing.
And it is a phenomenon born of a simple set of conditions, collapse of home mortgages, foreclosures increasing, pensions in collapse when the stock market went down, unemployment doubling, the decline of the American dream. In our polling we always used, when we’d say, are your children going to be better off than you, that’s the American dream question, we’d get two thirds saying yes. We now get two thirds saying no.
And in the midst of all of that this group of white middle aged, middle class men looked around and saw a young African-American, educated at Harvard with a middle name Hussein, and didn’t like the president of the United States of America. It fueled this phenomenon and it opened the door for the wedge issue to operate and it’s operating simply among that demographic. It’s not a universal phenomenon. It’s not found among African-Americans or Asians or Latinos. It’s not found among young white kids. It’s not found among college educated professional women. It’s found in that one narrow demographic. That’s where the bad numbers come from.
He continued: “And I think that, if, we had, I have a lot of gripes with George Bush, but if he were president, he would be doing what he did, which is put his foot down and say stop. I think we would not be seeing the phenomenon growing as we see it growing. But the problem is is that if Barack Obama says stop they say, you’re just the damn problem to begin with, you’re not one of us anyway,” Zogby said, affecting an accent that might be characterized as “redneck” or “country.”
There is “an overlay between the racism and the Islamophobia” that is “being used as a wedge issue” against President Obama, he said. Zogby also described controversial Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim and an extreme left-winger, as “a gift to America and Congress, an extraordinary person who could not be better than he is.”
It should be noted that Zogby’s views are unremarkable in leftist circles. They are within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. He is a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee. In 1984 Zogby was a senior advisor to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.
Pickering said he agreed with Zogby’s critique. “Let me just go further,” he said. “Jim, I agree with what you say about both domestic politics and the wedge issue and the effect on the attitude towards the president. I’m deeply concerned.”
http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-tourist-sector-hurt-irans-currency-pain-063711927.html
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) — The plunge in Iran’s currency is proving bad for business in neighboring Iraq.
Yousif Jassim Mohammed would know. The Iraqi merchant’s gift shop sits on prime real estate opposite the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims and a huge draw for the busloads of Iranian pilgrims that form the bedrock of Iraq’s tourist trade.
Not long ago, the 60-year-old father of three could count on selling $1,000 worth of silver jewelry, prayer beads and trinkets a day. Now far fewer Iranians are passing by, and those who do come are holding tight to their cash. Mohammed says he’s lucky to make a tenth of what he used to.
“Unlike before, they’re now bargaining down to their last breath,” Mohammed said of his remaining Iranian customers. “The sanctions have hit their economy very badly, and that is being reflected back on us.”
The Iranian rial has plummeted in value against the dollar over the past year, with the slide accelerating over the past month. The drop is blamed on Western-led sanctions targeting Iran’s suspect nuclear program but also on government mismanagement by Tehran.
The steep decline is painful for ordinary Iranians, who now have to pay far more for imported goods. But it is also damaging Iraq’s fragile tourism industry, pinching small-time entrepreneurs and forcing businesses to lay off workers.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/benghazi-culpability-walls-closing-in-on-administration/ The mainstream media is doing all that it can to avoid reporting on the Obama administration’s cover-up of the Benghazi scandal, where President Obama may have abandoned up to 32 Americans to die. Fox News is the only mainstream media outlet to undertake a concerted effort into sorting through the spin coming from the […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2012/11/01/three-things-we-can-learn-from-the-menendez-sex-scandal/?singlepage=true According to a report by Daily Caller investigative reporter Matt Boyle, two women from the Dominican Republic are charging that Democrat New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez paid them for sex. The ladies say the senator offered them five hundred dollars but then only paid them one hundred each after the fact. Senator Bob was […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332257/obama-s-growing-economy-deroy-murdock Who says President Barack Obama is bad for growth? True, U.S. gross domestic product grew 2 percent in the third quarter of 2012. However, comparing data from the time of the president’s January 20, 2009, inauguration with today’s latest figures proves that plenty of things have grown quite robustly during the Obama years. When […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/and_the_prize_goes_to_mayor_bloomberg.html
And the Prize Goes to Mayor Bloomberg Harvey M. Sheldon
Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City grasped the mantle of dumbest of the dumb from the arms of Debbie Wasserman Schultz by saying two particular things in one paragraph: he is supporting Barack Obama, and it is because Mr. Obama cares about global warming.
Reeling from the Tropical Behemoth Storm Sandy, the mayor gave up the ghost of reason…for what? A special-order Obamaphone and a seat on the fifty-yard line when Iran sends rockets into Israel?
On the science, this is as dumb as it gets. Watts Up With That has a nice rebuttal, including mention of more powerful storm surges in hurricanes of three hundred or more years ago. Unless the Industrial Revolution started a lot earlier than anyone knows, the thesis of global warming causation of Sandy is utter bunk.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/11/why_it_should_always_be_called_hamas-cair.html Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from the Holy Land Five: five former officials of what was once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), who were convicted of funneling millions in charitable donations to the jihad terror group Hamas. That effectively ends the story […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/why_obama_chose_to_let_them_die_in_benghazi.html
The burning question is why Obama didn’t give orders to defend our consulate and American lives in Benghazi. The answer is becoming clearer each time President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta issue a denial or explanation of their inaction.
To the president’s surprise, he chanced on an honest reporter during a local interview on the campaign trail in Denver. On October 26, for the first time, Obama was asked directly about the explosive reports on CBS and Fox News, a week earlier, that the CIA and our military denied direct requests for help by the Americans fighting for their lives during the seven-hour battle in Benghazi.
Denver TV’s Kyle Clark twice tried to pin Obama down by asking the key question: “Were they denied requests for help during the attack?”
Obama’s answer is the proof of his guilt, and it gives us a clue as to the doctrine informing his decision to do nothing. The most damaging part of Obama’s evasive answer is this:
… the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. … I guarantee you that everyone in the state department, our military, the CIA, you name it, had number-one priority making sure that people were safe.
This is the blatant lie that condemns the liar. The president says here that immediately, “the minute I found out what was happening,” he gave the order to the military, the CIA, to everyone, to secure our personnel in Benghazi and do “whatever we need to.”
Yet the undeniable fact is that nothing was done. We know that the CIA security agent in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods, asked for permission to rescue Ambassador Stevens when Stevens was still alive and in the safe room. Woods was told twice by the CIA to stand down. He then disobeyed direct orders and rescued the survivors at the consulate, but it was too late for Stevens and Sean Smith.
Secretary of Defense Panetta tells us the military had gunships and Special Forces less than two hours away in Sicily but felt it was too “risky” to send in reinforcements or air cover. It would have been normal military procedure to pre-position air cover and assets from Sicily to Benghazi, but Panetta says this was not done. The air support and FAST platoons, we are told, were left in Sicily. All the U.S. military did was send two unarmed drones to observe the battle.
So if President Obama is not lying about his directives, he is saying that the CIA and the Defense Department and our military chain of command disobeyed the direct order of our commander in chief to do everything in their power to rescue our people under attack in Benghazi. And that as commander in chief, Obama did nothing in response to their dereliction of duty.
That doesn’t happen. No one believes that; the president is lying. He did not issue directives to the CIA, our military, and State to “secure our personnel” and “do whatever we need to do.”
We know it was not the CIA on its own that made the decision to abandon Ambassador Stevens and the eight others with him in the consulate. The CIA say they did not advise anyone in the administration to deny help to the Americans in Benghazi. A CIA spokesman on October 27 issued this statement:
No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.
General Carter F. Ham, the combatant commander of Africa Command (AFRICOM), says he was never asked to send help.
Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, said that General Ham told him during a visit to Libya that he had never been asked to provide military support for the Americans under attack in Benghazi.
On October 18, General Ham resigned.
Panetta explained why no help was sent on October 26, the same day Obama was telling the Denver reporter he had ordered the military to do “whatever we need to.”
Panetta admitted we did nothing. He says the military had the readiness and capability to help. He says the military responded quickly and deployed forces close to Benghazi, ready and capable of responding “to any contingency.”
We quickly responded, as General Dempsey said, in terms of deploying forces to the region. We had FAST platoons in the region. We had ships that we had deployed off of Libya. We were prepared to respond to any contingency and certainly had forces in place to do that.
Panetta then tells us why the forces were never deployed. He says the top leadership of our military didn’t want to send reinforcements, even air support, into harm’s way. It was too risky. Panetta does not indicate that he knew of Obama’s supposed directives to do “whatever we need to” to save the Americans trapped in the 9/11 attack.
“[The] basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.
Note that General Ham had already told Congressman Chaffetz he was never asked to provide military support.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578092832332179210.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion Let’s play connect-the-dots! Here’s our favorite children’s book, the New York Times op-ed page. “Along with eight million others, the Kristofs have lost power,” writes patriarch Nicholas, “so I’ve been sending Twitter messages on my iPhone by candlelight.” Not to mention phoning it in. Can anything be more predictable than a Kristof column after […]
