Blaming “Islamophobes in America” for the bad rap that comes around whenever a group of Islamists worldwide commits some new blood-soaked atrocity, American Muslim leaders are gathering in Texas this weekend for a “Stand with the Prophet” conference.
Since the headlines will just be fading on the Islamist massacre in Paris on Wednesday – and who knows what stomach-turning activities might crop up before Saturday – it might be a tough sell to the uninitiated.
According to a Washington Free Beacon article by staff writer Adam Kredo, organizers of the “Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect” conference, planned for Saturday evening Saturday evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, say the media and “Islamophobes” are to blame for Islam’s reputation in the Western world.
The conference is apparently meant to change that.
Unfortunately for Harf, the issue she tried to distract reporters with was the activities of the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist group in Nigeria. That would be the Boko Haram group that’s kidnapped hundreds of girls to be forced into “marriage” with Islamist fighters. So far, the Obama White House’s most memorable contribution has been a selfie of Michelle Obama pouting over the girls’ sexual slavery.
If that sounded like an odd thing for the State Department spokeswoman to want to talk about, her performance during the rest of the briefing — vainly trying to explain away the U.S. failure to appear at the Paris gathering — explained it.
“We make decisions like these based on a variety of factors,” Harf said, in a classically obtuse Harf formulation. “There are just a variety of factors we take into account …
“I’m not going to get into what our internal conversations look like.”
Besides, she noted, the whole thing was getting more attention in the United States than it was in France. So to paraphrase another great American diplomat, at this point, what difference does it make?
Read more: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/01/13/dumbest-deflection-of-the-century-state-dept-marie-harf-tops-her-past-breathtaking-ignorant-moments-172224#ixzz3Oi7Lj5E5
THE COIN DOCTRINE-RULES OF ENGAGEMENT ENDORSED BY THE GENERAL SHOWED SUCH OVERWEENING SENSITIVITY TO THE BARBARIAN MOSLEM MORES THAT IT PUT OUR OWN BRAVE WARRIOR’S IN HARM’S WAY…..FIVE STAR BLOWHARD….RSK
One Cheer for Gen. Petraeus David P. Goldman
The Obama administration is still deciding whether to bring felony charges against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. As a senior DOJ official in the Clinton administration, Holder arranged a presidential pardon for fugitive tax cheat Marc Rich. As attorney general, he ignored the unconscionable use of the IRS against conservative-leaning organizations seeking tax-exempt status.
This is a political prosecution. Petraeus’ supposed crime, leaking classified information to a girlfriend, is the sort of victimless infraction that never has been brought to the point of criminal prosecution at any time in the past. Petraeus’ offense, rather, is political: He is credited with the 2006-2007 surge that in Republican mythology won the Iraq War before President Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. One risks being run out of the Republican Party on a rail for questioning this mythology, but someone has to say that the emperor has no clothes.
Petraeus improved the optics of the Iraq mess at the end of the second Bush administration, to be sure, but he also helped set in motion the catastrophe that has now engulfed the Levant.
The story already has been told in depth by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel Bolger, whose memoir Why We Lost appeared last year. I reviewed it in Asia Times Online after observing that not one of the mainstream media reviews mentioned the most important assertions in Gen. Bolger’s excellent book: First, that American success in imposing majority rule on Iraq in 2006 set in motion the Sunni insurgency, and second, that America’s sponsorship of the Sunnis in 2007-2008 (the “Sunni Awakening” built with American funds as part of the “surge”) made the insurgency intractable.
Last week’s terror attack targeting French magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris has sparked a global conversation about the nature of free speech, with the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag in support of the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff going viral and becoming the most used hashtag in the history of Twitter.
But this afternoon, the UN representative for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ufuk Gokcen, was expressing another view with respect to free speech.
The OIC is comprised of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and the Palestinian Authority. They are the largest bloc at the UN, and when they meet on the head-of-state level, they literally speak for the Muslim world.
So it is noteworthy that after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Gokcen is now calling for more implementation of the OIC-sponsored UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 and the follow-up Rabat Plan of Action that would criminalize the very type of speech that Charlie Hebdo engaged in:
The timing of Gokcen’s call couldn’t be more perfect.
JOHN MILLER: HARRY JAFFA R.I.P- THE MOST IMPORTANT CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL THEORIST OF HIS GENERATION
Editor’s Note: This past Saturday, renowned Lincoln scholar and conservative academic Harry Jaffa passed away at the age of 96. The following article is adapted from John J. Miller’s profile of Jaffa that ran in the July 1, 2013 issue of NR.
When Harry V. Jaffa learned of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, he phoned a 36-year-old high-school teacher in Ashland, Ohio, named Sara Whitis. “I just want to be sure you’re okay,” he said in a voice mail. Whitis listened to the message when she arrived home from work. “It stirred me to tears,” she says. Two years earlier, Whitis had completed a master’s thesis about Jaffa’s scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the politics of freedom. The paper had come to the attention of the 94-year-old professor, who liked it so much that he reached out to Whitis and took a grandfatherly interest in her career. He also knew that Whitis was a marathoner who had raced in Boston seven times — and was relieved to learn, when Whitis called back, that she was safely at home.
Preventing a Paris-style attack is, in part, a numbers game. Americans don’t seem to be paying attention.
A major Islamist terror attack in France was only a matter of time. For several decades, the country has invited immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa en masse – first to bolster the labor force in the rebuilding years that followed World War II, then out of multicultural impulses that prevailed over prudential considerations. That radical Islam was transplanted to France, grew in strength and extent, and bore this week’s hideous fruit was not difficult to predict. The same is not unlikely in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere.
Demographics may not be the whole of destiny, but they are certainly a good part, and across the Atlantic, the United States seems increasingly to be turning toward Western Europe’s most undesirable demographic trends.
For a number of years into the Cold War, American presidents were occasionally troubled by the paradox that a democratic United States was supporting right-wing anti-Communist dictatorships abroad. Either Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson — or all of them — was supposed to have scoffed, in response to objections, something like the following, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard.”
That realist cynicism has more or less remained the same. But now the ideology has flipped. Currently, the more that authoritarian thugs abroad position themselves as anti-American, the more that we seem to glamorize them. The new presidential sarcasm is, in effect, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s an anti-American bastard.”
One of the most peculiar pathologies of Western elites is carrying on this apparent romance with non-Westerners who dislike the West, while spurning those who admire it. The feminist pro-Western critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was recently disinvited from speaking at Brandeis University. Earlier, Columbia University had welcomed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unhinged anti-Jewish and anti-American theocrat. Apparently hating America made Ahmadinejad the more interesting speaker; liking America made Hirsi Ali suspect and certainly less romantically revolutionary. How odd that for campus communities, being the victim of forced genital mutilation makes one less sympathetic than a man who had ordered the deaths of female supposed adulteresses.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/01/uthman-badar-squares-circle/
The Islamic firebrand invited by Festival of Dangerous Ideas — then rapidly dis-invited — to put the killing of troublesome women in a cultural context has weighed in on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He disapproves, sort of, while awaiting the day when just deserts are meted out by the law of the land, not “counterproductive” vigilantes
In the aftermath of events like the massacres in Paris, world leaders, religious spokesmen and op-ed columnists dictate the appropriate standard of behaviour: first, Islam and the latest killings must not be mentioned in the same breath; and second, that Muslims should not be asked whether an act of terror deserves condemnation. An all-too-mushy multiculturalism planted the first, and the political left has fertilised the second. Of course every Muslim condemns terrorism! How offensive that mere enquiry!
A serious interrogation of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Australia’s most prominent Islamist movement, can only begin if we break these rules of engagement. Anthony Klan of The Australian noted the group’s uncharacteristic silence in the wake of the incidents in Martin Place and Paris. Don’t think, however, that this means quiet soul-searching and a change of heart. Klan would do well to pay attention to the social media pages of media representative Uthman Badar, best known for his ambiguous views on honour killings, and his more positive ones on the murder of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
From Wittenberg to Mosque Doors: Peter Smith
If Islam is not reformed – root and branch – the very notion of moderate Islam becomes an even more glaring contradiction in terms. If you belong to a club whose very rules condone bad behaviour, the only moral and logical option must be to change the rules or get out.
Memories are short. Charles Lane of the Washington Post said that the events in Paris were ‘a wake-up call’. Weren’t we already well awake before 9/11, never mind since? Charles Krauthammer said that the events reflected a new ‘third phase’ of internally planned and executed attacks, following the externally planned attack of 9/11 and the recent ‘lone-wolf’ attacks. He must have been snoozing when, as just one example among many, the London Underground was bombed.
No doubt the killings in Paris will also fade from mind as Islamic terrorists continue their murderous rampages. One reason memories are so short is that immediately the dust has settled each terrorist event is dealt with discretely, as though it were a law and order problem. The backgrounds of the murderers are analysed. One or more are bound to be identified as alienated, disadvantaged, or as having a prison record.
Then there is the subsequent soul-searching about why the perpetrators in question weren’t kept under observation as putative murderous terrorists. As if, for example, it is remotely possible to keep tabs on so-called ‘disenfranchised’ young people in a Muslim population of around 6 million-plus in France, many of whom live in no-go ghettos. Talk about fanciful.
Guy Millière – I would rejoice at huge demonstrations that took place all over France Sunday, January 11.
I would think that momentum has emerged which will enable a general fraternity, erasing hatreds and divisions, a resolution of all the problems this country has. I do not doubt that France has millions of good people who have been deeply struck by terrorist acts that have marked these days.
I have to assume that everything is not so simple. Sunday I had the sensation of attending a huge political operation.François Hollande, the man who has not been living up to its functions and showed a thousand times he had punctured his level of incompetence by becoming president, found himself master of a planetary ceremony doubt it will benefit in future polls, and no doubt he was not campaigning. The great French media have struggled for years to tone and extend to all the politically correct have contributed to a large communication operation in the service of sweetening and political correctness.
I must say that having seen several members of the government, including Christiane Taubira, come Saturday night in front of the supermarket hide from the Porte de Vincennes seemed particularly sickening if the despicable murderer entrenched in the supermarket had not been released by appropriate judicial decisions by Mrs Taubira, he would not have murdered and he was in prison. I got an instant whether arsonists were to see the damage caused by fire they helped to turn.
