2012.09.12 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – Eight people are turned into ‘pieces of meat’ by a suicide bombing at a hotel.
2012.09.11 (Sanaa, Yemen) – Twelve people bleed out following a suspected al-Qaeda blast.
2012.09.10 (Mussayib, Iraq) – Sunni bombers take down three Shiites near their shrine.
2012.09.10 (Parachinar, Pakistan) – Sunnis murder fourteen members of the minority Shiite sect with a car bomb that rips through a packed market.
2012.09.10 (Kunduz, Afghanistan) – A Holy Warrior blows himself up at a demonstration, sending twenty-one other souls to Allah.
2012.09.10 (Aleppo, Syria) – The FSA claims a bombing outside a hospital and school that leaves seventeen civilians dead.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9538493/The-Arab-Spring-turns-sour-for-America.html
“Mr Carter was thrown out of the White House for failing to rescue the American hostages from captivity in Iran. And Mr Obama could suffer a similar fate in November’s presidential election unless he can come up with a convincing means of tackling the new generation of Islamist extremists in the Arab world.”
For anyone who still clings to a naive belief that recent dramatic changes to the political landscape of the Middle East have made the world a safer place, the murder of the US Ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks should act as a brutal wake-up call.
For more than a year, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have given their enthusiastic backing to the seismic changes taking place among the ruling elites who have dominated the region for decades. As dictator after dictator has been removed from power, either through force of arms or the overwhelming strength of popular discontent, Western leaders have universally given their support to what they mistakenly identified as an “Arab Spring” of Western-style pro-democracy movements sweeping aside despotism.
In Washington President Barack Obama has sought, from the start of his presidency, a “new beginning” for America’s problematic relationship with the Muslim world. He has given unqualified support to those campaigning for change in the major Arab capitals, actively encouraging the overthrow of one of Washington’s longest-serving allies, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, and backing the military campaign to overthrow Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
In London, a similarly proactive stance has been adopted by the Coalition. David Cameron and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy were at the forefront of last year’s Nato-led coalition to effect regime change in Tripoli, while William Hague regularly lectures his Foreign Office staff that it is important for Britain to be seen to support the reformers clamouring for change in the Middle East.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316730/fatal-arab-spring-nro-symposium
What does the deadly violence against U.S. officials in Libya and Egypt say about the Arab Spring? Is Mitt Romney ready to lead in this international atmosphere? Is our current president?
SHOSHANA BRYEN
The violence in Egypt and Libya — now spreading to Morocco and Kuwait — is an indication that the U.S. is unable to buy leverage. We bombed Qaddafi and undermined Mubarak on behalf of the revolution, but it has not engendered warm feelings toward us — or our president — in their successors. (In Morocco, they’re carrying signs that say “Death to Obama.”) Revolutionary movements either have, or are co-opted by people who have, well-developed ideologies and agendas. The Muslim Brotherhood was forged over the course of decades spent in Egyptian jails. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Hamas, and Hezbollah know what they want to achieve, and it has nothing to do with representative democracy. They can’t be bought by a few months, or even years, of American largesse or by America’s dumping of Israel. This should be a warning about what we think we can accomplish by arming the “Syrian rebels.”
President Obama wanted our troubles in the region to be the fault of President Bush, but it wasn’t true. The problems in the Middle East are the result of festering tribal, religious, and ethnic hatreds fueled by oil money, a reasonably educated public, and better communications.
America’s problem is that it fails to understand that the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. He is only closer to me than my enemy, and only for now.
— Shoshana Bryen is senior director of the Jewish Policy Center.
DOUGLAS J. FEITH & SETH CROPSEY
The murderous anti-American violence in Libya and Egypt highlights a grim dilemma. Even U.S. officials who believe that promoting democracy and human rights serves U.S. interests need to acknowledge that popular revolutions against unattractive authoritarians can make matters worse. In other words, sometimes our policy choices are between bad and worse. Hatred of tyranny does not, alas, equate to love of liberty. One doesn’t have to feel nostalgia for Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship to recognize that the new Islamist government in Egypt seems intent on doing far more harm to human rights and U.S. interests than Mubarak ever did.
The challenge for U.S. officials is to maximize the chances that we can influence events for the good. By cutting pro-democracy funding in the pre-upheaval period and generally shunning a leadership role, the Obama administration has not met this challenge. This has been true in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere.
President Obama is more interested in renouncing American assertiveness and establishing the paramountcy of the United Nations Security Council than he is in advancing the particular interests of the United States.
— Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey are senior fellows at the Hudson Institute.
CAROLINE GLICK
It is extremely telling that in the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults on the U.S. embassy in Cairo, U.S.-supported Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi has refused to condemn the attack. He has called on the U.S. to prosecute the filmmaker who produced the film that Muslims find insulting. In this vein it is important to note that the film was screened on an Egyptian Salafist television station. Moreover, the assault on the U.S. embassy was led by Mohamed Zawahiri, al-Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri’s brother. Mohamed Zawahiri was released from prison by Morsi.
As for Libya, it is clear that the forces who assaulted the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and murdered the U.S. ambassador and three other foreign-service officers were professional fighters. They were armed with RPG-7s. They were in possession of intelligence information regarding — at a minimum — the whereabouts of the U.S. ambassador.
When the U.S. began its sponsorship of the Libyan rebels against the already neutered Moammar Qaddafi, it was already known that elements of al-Qaeda were participating in the rebellion. And when Qaddafi fell, one of the first things the victorious rebels did was raise an al-Qaeda flag over a courthouse in Benghazi.
All of this is simply to say that the true face of the misnamed Arab Spring, so enthusiastically supported by Obama, is finally undeniable. The Obama administration has played a central role in overthrowing U.S.-aligned regimes and replacing them with regimes that are hostile to the U.S. and its strategic interests.
I find it noteworthy that the Washington Post was swift to condemn Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for referring to the administration’s apology to the mob attacking the U.S. embassy as “disgraceful.” It was disgraceful. And it is even more disgraceful that the Washington Post would seek to squelch debate about the nature of Obama’s foreign policy and its contribution to the assaults on the U.S. embassies on September 11.
— Caroline Glick writes for the Jerusalem Post.
BRIAN T. KENNEDY
Let us put this simply: There is a war going on between the Islamic world and the Judeo-Christian West. They seek our destruction by whatever means possible. We are the enemy. We in the West seem unwilling to acknowledge this.
In the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in North Africa, it meant, in this case, the defiling of the U.S. flag and the murder of U.S. diplomats. These were acts of war. It was incumbent upon Egypt and Libya to protect our embassies. They did not.
Every moment that goes by in which we do not respond demonstrates a lack of resolve, demoralizes Americans about the justice of our cause as a nation, and persuades the Muslim world that we can be destroyed both morally and physically.
Governor Romney was right to be outraged. He should be praised for his restraint.
War should be declared and the terrible swift sword of American justice should be deployed. We should do so not out of some bloodlust but with the cool calculation that punishing our enemies for killing Americans will dissuade them from doing so again. There are ample targets within both countries — sites where terrorists train or operate — attacking which would give the United States a strategic advantage in this long war and demonstrate to the citizens of the United States that we will defend them and their interests.
That is the least that must be done.
— Brian Kennedy is president of the Claremont Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316726/arab-harvest-editors
Behold the harvest of the Arab Spring: attacks — contemporaneous if not coordinated — on the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of September 11. In the former, the American colors were hoisted down, desecrated, and burned, and the black flag of Islamism raised in their place. In the latter, the American ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three members of his staff were murdered in a rocket attack as they attempted to evacuate the facility. Whether both acts of terrorism were committed in protest of a low-budget American film allegedly insulting to the Prophet Mohammed or, as reports now suggest, the Libyan attack was a planned response to the killing of al-Qaeda’s No. 2 in Yemen, the portent is equally disturbing.
The sacrosanctity of diplomats and their missions is among the oldest and most basic axioms of intercourse between civilized nations, and the fact that neither the Egyptian nor the Libyan government acted to prevent these assaults suggests that barbarism is alive and well in Arab North Africa. Egypt’s failure is especially conspicuous, because that country actually has a functioning government and military. Nearly as disturbing was the response, both preemptive and cowardly, of the U.S. mission in Cairo, which went out of its way to condemn not its besiegers, but private citizens of the West who may or may not have “hurt the religious feelings” of riotous Muslims.
Americans are murdered by Islamists, and sovereign American soil is violated, on the anniversary of September 11, and the first word from the administration to reach the world is an apology. So naturally, the mainstream media are focusing on what they in their considered wisdom have determined is Mitt Romney’s crass and ill-timed response to the crisis, even as the Obama campaign found itself in a foot race with the Obama administration to see whether the former could condemn Romney before the latter condemned the terrorists.
But Romney was right to call the Cairo embassy’s obsequiousness “disgraceful,” which is why the White House eventually followed Romney’s lead in disavowing it. Romney was also right to defend his statement against charges that he had “jumped the gun,” saying it is “never too early . . . to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values.” Although the press acted as if Romney’s performance at the press conference was laughably unpresidential, what he said was appropriate and true: “It breaks the hearts of all of us who think of these people who have served during their lives for the cause of freedom and justice and honor,” and “the attacks in Libya and Egypt underscore that the world remains a dangerous place, and that American leadership is still sorely needed.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1645/when_america_dreamed Fifty years ago today, a dashing young American president visited Rice University, in Houston, TX, and spoke words that reflected the optimism and can-do spirit that had defined his nation since its founding. Explaining his call of a year earlier that the United States achieve the goal of “landing a man on the moon […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1646/after_latest_damning_report_when_will_britain_admit_the_nhs_has_failed_
“It’s never a good sign when a nation is proud of the very things that cause it to fail. It’s a tragedy when it gets to the point that it’s harmful to that nation’s health.”
British self-delusion about the NHS seems eternal, but at some point the country must come to its senses and seek a new model for health care
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is not usually associated with radical right-wing opposition to the National Health Service (NHS), nor should it be. In normal circumstances the question of how a country structures its health care provision would transcend ideology and dogma and focus instead on the purely pragmatic issues of whether the current system is fit for purpose or whether we should consider an alternative.
But this is Britain and the NHS is revered in religious terms.
Be that is it may, the great national delusion that the NHS is “the envy of the world“ keeps on running head on into reports from respected institutions packed with horror stories about its failings.
The RCP has now released just such a report, tellingly entitled: “Hospitals on the edge? The Time for Action“.
The report speaks of patients, especially elderly ones, being trundled around from ward to ward not uncommonly “four or five times during a hospital stay, often with incomplete notes and no formal handover”. It states that patients are 10 percent more likely to die at weekends when too few senior staff are on duty.
In places, care on Saturday and Sunday is so bad that the report felt compelled to quote one hospital doctor as saying, “I am relieved on Monday that nothing catastrophic has happened over the weekend”.
Some of the horror stories are almost too much to bear. Try this for example:
“An elderly, confused patient in her pyjamas was wheeled by a porter from her treatment to the entrance door, and left there. She was waiting for transport but obviously in dire need of care. She wore an incontinence pad that was saturated and the chair was also saturated with urine. She would get up and walk for a bit and then go back to the chair. No one spoke to her or tried to help her. She was just ignored. Was no one responsible for her care?“
In the report’s concluding “10 Priority areas for action” it is surely telling that the first item on the agenda is the following:
“We must make sure patients are at the heart of service design and clinical practice. Hospitals must be a safe place in which all patients are treated with dignity and respect, including those with dementia. All health professionals have a duty to ensure patient needs are met, working together as a team to deliver the best possible care.”
For a health system in one of the richest countries in the world, should this really need stating?
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Obama’s clean war in Libya, the one that was won by lying to the UN and then dropping bombs and flying away while ragged bands of fighters whittled away what was left of the decrepit Libyan military, doesn’t look so clean anymore. The bloodless victory has seen its first blood shed as those same […]
All Andrew McCarthy’s books are must reads for everyone concerned about the encroachment of Islam, Jihad and Sharia. I am halfway through a pre-publication download. It will be available on October 1 at Amazon….get your kindles and iPads ready. Nobody tells it better. And see the video below….rsk
Spring Fever The Illusion of Islamic Democracy By Andrew C. McCarthy
E-Book Only Encounter Books
Pub Date: September 18, 2012 Pre-Order: Amazon.com I iTunes I BN.com
The first fundamental truth about the “Arab Spring” is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced.
Is this self-perception based on objective truth? Does it reflect an accurate construction of Islam? It is over these questions that American officials and Western intellectuals obsess. Yet the questions are irrelevant. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of some posture or policy whose subtle tweaking or outright reversal would change the facts on the ground. This is simply, starkly, the way it is.
Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, “freedom” means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners – it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West – beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West’s Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do . . . but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove – and worse – the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter.
That is the real story of the Arab Spring – that, and the Pandora’s Box that opens when an American administration aligns with that movement, whose stated goal is to destroy America.
SEE THIS VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOwP9rtZvVc
Product Details
Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy by Andrew C McCarthy (Oct 2, 2012)
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-muslim-brotherhood-part-iv-sayyid-qutb
Part I – A Brief History of the Muslim Brotherhood (Can be found by clicking here)
Part II – The Muslim Brotherhood – Haj Amin al-Husseini (Can be found by clicking here)
Part III – The Muslim Brotherhood – Hitler’s Imam
If one wishes to understand the origins, ideology and goals of the modern-day Muslim Brotherhood, one must study the life and works of Egyptian theorist and writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). His writings remain enormously-influential within the Ikhwan and the Pan-Islamic movement generally, and are also vitally-important to any informed understanding of such figures as Osama bin-Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaki and groups such as al-Qaeda. Indeed, Qutb’s name has entered the lexicon of the Muslim world; those who follow his ideology and teachings are referred to as “Qutbists” or simply Qutbi. Despite his importance to Sunni Islam, Qutb is relatively unknown in the non-Islamic world.
Qutb was born in 1906 in the rural village of Musha, Egypt. His father was a well-known political activist and land owner. As a teenager, Sayyid was a quiet and artistic young man; he displayed few if any outward indications of the ideologue he was later to become.
After completing studies in Cairo at Dar al-‘Ulum in 1933, he took a post as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During the 1930s, he wrote extensively, trying his hand as a novelist and literary critic. In 1939, he accepted a bureaucratic post in the Ministry of Education, while continuing to write and move within Egyptian artistic and literary circles. In 1948, Qutb traveled to the United States intent upon studying educational administration; during a two-year period abroad, Qutb studied at Woodrow Wilson Teacher’s College in Washington, D.C., at Stanford University in southern California, and at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado. He traveled widely elsewhere in the United States during this period.
Upon his return to Egypt in 1950, Qutb resigned his civil service position, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and quickly emerged as one of its senior leaders. He became the editor-in-chief of the journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, and also took an active role in the propaganda section of the organization. Qutb’s sojourn abroad marked a watershed in his life; he returned to Egypt a very different man than the one who had left two years before. He had departed an unassuming and diffident man; he returned a hardened Islamic ideologue and firebrand. What had so changed him?
Shortly after his return to Cairo, Qutb wrote an impassioned article entitled “The America I Have Seen,” which provided an answer. A revealing window into his perceptions and thoughts upon the U.S. and the modern world generally, this work revealed the extent of his transformation. Qutb was fiercely critical of what he viewed as the decadence and moral degradation of Americans. He condemned everything from the individual freedoms of U.S. citizens to their materialism to what he believed to be the wanton and highly-sexualized behavior of American women. He accused his former hosts of having barbaric tastes in music and the arts, and abhorred the “animalistic mixing” of the sexes in churches and other public places. He decried the “spiritual degeneracy” of common Americans, and lamented their enjoyment of “primitive” sports such as boxing and football. His complaints even extended to the quality of the haircuts he received.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-compares-his-campaign-volunteers-to-embassy-staff-killed-in-libya/article/2507830#.UFGu-lGEqSp
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-compares-his-campaign-volunteers-to-embassy-staff-killed-in-libya?f=puball
President Obama told his campaign volunteers in Nevada that he is “really proud” of them after comparing them to the U.S. ambassador and embassy staff murdered in Libya.
“And obviously [our] hearts are broken for the families but I wanted to encourage those folks at the State Dept. that they were making a difference,” Obama told volunteer leaders in Las Vegas, according to the pool report. “The sacrifices that our troops and our diplomats make are obviously very different from the challenges that we face here domestically but like them, you guys are Americans who sense that we can do better than we’re doing….I’m just really proud of you.”
Obama, during his talk with the volunteers, described his visit to the State Department today. “I had a chance to go to the State Dept. to comfort some of the friends and co-workers of the the folks who had fallen and I reminded them that as hard as things are sometimes, as difficult as change is that if we’re resolute, if we don’t give up, if we don’t give in, if we don’t become cynical, if we continue to be realistic about how hard change is but also keep in our hearts that sense of idealism and sense of purpose then over time good things happen,” he said.
