http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/embassy-protestors-use-the-palestinian-playbook/ The most depressing thing about the Obama administration’s foreign policy debacle unfolding in the Middle East is that for sixty years we’ve repeatedly experienced the same Islamist game plan for defeating us that is being employed today. There is no tactic currently being used by the Muslim Brothers and other jihadist groups that wasn’t […]
Gitmo Alumnus Involved In Deadly Libyan Attack
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/gitmo-alumnus-involved-in-deadly-libyan-attack/print/
Fox News has reported that its intelligence sources believe “the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was directly tied to Al Qaeda — with a former Guantanamo detainee involved.”
Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan, is the former Gitmo detainee. He is one of a circle of former detainees released from Gitmo who have returned to jihad against the United States.
Qumu was released in 2007 and handed over to the Libyan authorities who were supposed to keep him in jail there. They did not. Ironically, the Qaddafi regime released him as part of its attempt to reconcile with Islamists. Obviously, Qaddafi’s efforts at reconciliation did not work out so well for the late dictator. But the return of Qumu and other Gitmo alumni to jihad has not worked out very well for us either.
The information regarding Qumu’s possible involvement in the Benghazi consulate attack is yet another nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s absurd initial explanation of the Libyan attack. They at first claimed it was essentially the product of a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video that was exploited by extremists.
Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed last Friday that the violence was “in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” Our UN Ambassador Susan Rice made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows and said pretty much the same thing. Both Carney and Rice deplored the violence but saw no link to any larger pattern of Islamist terrorism aimed squarely at Americans.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/iraq-joins-iran%e2%80%99s-axis/print/ Back in 2004 King Abdullah of Jordan, a moderate Sunni, warned that the empowerment of Iraq’s Shiite majority in the Iraq War would mean creating a Shiite crescent—a belligerent, extremist continuum stretching all the way from Iran to Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon. Eight years later, U.S. attempts to create a pluralist Iraqi democracy have instead yielded […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/15-billion-bin-ladens Amidst the graffiti on the wall outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, one of the rioters scrawled “1.5 Billion Bin Ladens.” Last time I heard, the last thing bin Laden saw was a member of Seal Team Six just before he took a bullet to the head. That is the way a nation that […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-ghost-of-bertold-brecht-and-the-balkanization-of-america?f=puball Would it not be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected another? Bertold Brecht (1898-1956), German playwright Bertold Brecht’s name is now largely lost to history, but the idea expressed in the succinct question above remains as potent today as when he uttered it. Brecht, a self-made Marxist who was once investigated […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/disastrous-foreign-policy-reflects-a-disastrous-presidency The “unexpected” nature of the pandemic of chaos throughout the Middle East is really no different than any of the other unanticipated problems now confronting the Obama Administration. Certainly, the $831 billion dollar “stimulus” of early 2009 should have had the nation’s economy humming by now, with Main Street thriving on account of all […]
The Post-American Middle East http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444620104578006173214696856.html?mod=opinion_newsreel#articleTabs%3Darticle Another day, another installment in what President Obama likes to call the “receding” tide of war. On Wednesday, John Kerry threatened to cut U.S. aid to Baghdad unless the Iraqi government blocks overflights of Iranian planes suspected of ferrying military supplies to Damascus. But Baghdad isn’t budging. Welcome to the […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578005880751641560.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop We can’t declare a unilateral end to our troubles, or avert our gaze from the disorder that afflicts the societies of the Greater Middle East. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment—a U.S. Embassy and its staff seized and held hostage for 444 days, America’s enemies taking stock of its weakness, its allies running […]
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/09/20/dinesh-dsouza-is-right/ There is a school of thought, ably represented by First Things editor R.R. Reno, that blames the leftward drift in American higher education for Barack Obama’s resentment of the United States, rather than his Third World upbringing. The estimable Dr. Reno, who is a friend and former colleague, called D’Souza’s film 2016 “misguided” in […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-12-step-guide-for-the-recovering-obama-voter/
“My name is Craig K., and I’m an Obamaholic.” That’s the confession with which Craig Karpel opens The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter [1]. It’s meant, of course, to be an aid not just to addicted individuals but also to a society that’s taken a wrong turn and gone off the rails.
And, analogously to the addicted individual, the first requirement is accurately targeting the blame: “the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault — it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.” And that includes “those of us who didn’t vote for him, because we didn’t persuade enough other people not to.”
In other words, this book offers itself as a curative to a whole country that has “hit bottom,” as Karpel puts it, as the national debt reaches staggering levels, the numbers of those unemployed and living off the dole continue to burgeon, and the world scene descends into a Hobbesian nightmare as Iran strides unimpeded toward nukes and Islamists take the helm in Egypt and a raft of other countries.
What brought things to such a pass? What enabled Americans to enable “a man with no administrative experience to run the largest organization on earth”? Why was Obama elected without “carefully examining [his] background, character, career, and plans,” while ignoring the fact that he lacked any record of significant achievements?
In the framework of his 12 Steps, modeled loosely on those of AA, Karpel looks for the answers.
For one thing, “we became hooked on a political cult that…presented a politician as a messianic figure.” It’s the left, says Karpel, that’s truly “faith-based,” attributing “providential potency to government.” Government under the left’s dispensation, with the “philosopher-king” Obama at the helm, became a “primitive idolatrous pagan church in which, as the ancient Egyptian fertility god Osiris was superstitiously believed to have the power to make grain grow, the president of the United States is superstitiously believed to have the power to make initial unemployment claims shrink” — along with other miracles, while taking steps reflecting European-style statist fantasies instead of experience and prudence.
In electing Obama, America also fell for charisma “instead of valuing only character.” Whereas Bush 43 “offended sophisticates by acknowledging a supreme being rather than pretending to be one,” Obama dissed American exceptionalism while projecting himself as what was truly exceptional, “the appointed person…at the appointed time.” And, taken in by his charismatic mien, people fell for it.
Good old elitism was another Siren luring the ship off course, “the belief that those with certain credentials” — such as Obama’s Harvard background — “constitute an elite whose members have a right to rule.” This while ignoring the fact (except that slice of voters who are far to the left and welcomed it) that ’60s and ’70s radicals have turned the universities into left-wing hothouses — a milieu well manifested in Obama’s quixotic “stimulus” attempt, Solyndra debacle, and appointment of 42 elite “czars” (an example of what Karpel calls “crony anticapitalism”)
And, perhaps most perniciously since it sows social discord, Obama, says Karpel, got Americans addicted to blaming others. “[N]ever before,” Karpel writes, “has there been a president whose central discourse is about blame.” As the U.S. economy continues to tank, Obama goes on blaming his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the woes. But it’s not only that. On pages 52-56 of this e-pamphlet, Karpel has compiled an impressive list of Obama’s malicious attributions of blame to others, ranging from ATMs to auto manufacturers, from Standard & Poor’s to “stupid” police in Cambridge, Massachusetts (for arresting his friend Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). And the habit is catching, as Obama turns Americans against each other and cultivates group antagonisms.
As November 6 looms and the race appears close, Karpel hopes this book will make a difference. He suggests setting up house meetings of Obama Voters Anonymous to “work” its 12 Steps, creating Facebook events, and disseminating the link by Twitter and email. It sounds worth trying; as an American Israeli with an added Middle Eastern perspective on the harm this president has wrought, I hope these ideas catch. There are, of course, those who will vote for Obama no matter what. Polls, though, continue to show considerable ranks of the undecided, people who could potentially be reached by this book’s friendly, empathic approach.
But even if you’ve never dreamed of voting for Obama and aren’t the organizing type, this short, addictive book is one you shouldn’t miss. Distinguished by lean, pungent prose laced with wit, it’s a deeply insightful compendium of where things stand after four years of disastrous executive bungling, and offers a path out of the mess before it’s too late.
