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September 2012

MY SAY: SUDDENLY BILL CLINTON IS A HERO?

Am I the only one who is disgusted by the rebranding of Bill Clinton? Well, perhaps just some of the victims of the Rwanda genocide agree with me. After all, this great humanist completely ignored the brutality, the violence, the horror in Rwanda. He did sort of apologize for that omission. This is also the man who had a chance to capture Obama in Khartoum but under the advice of stocking stuffer Sandy Berger and his comely Secretary of State he nixed the offer from Khartoum. Lo0k, cut him a little slack. He was too busy trying to corner Israel into signing a suicide note for Yasser Arafat at the Wye Plantation.

And there was that little dalliance..but never mind. Even John Edwards wanted to be President. That’s just the unending Spitzerama of the Democrats.

And, how about this nugget? You think only Obama falterS on Iran? Here is Bill in his own words in an interview by Charlie Rose during the 2005 Economic Forum in Davos:

Clinton: …” Iran’s a whole different kettle of fish—but it’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back in—] and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government, because he was in Iran, and Iran was what it was because we got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the ’50s; at least, that is my belief.I know it is not popular for an American ever to say anything like this, but I think it’s true and I apologized when President Khatami was elected. I publicly acknowledged that the United States had actively overthrown Mossadegh and I apologized for it, and I hope that we could have some rapprochement with Iran. I think basically the Europeans’ initiative to Iran to try to figure out a way to defuse the nuclear crisis is a good one.”

And then he continued with this one:

But Iran is the most perplexing problem … we face, for the following reasons: It is the only country in the world with two governments, and the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami. [It is] the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: two for President; two for the parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralities.

In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70% of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: WHITHER THOU GOEST AMERICA?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” Jack Kerouac asked in On the Road That was the Fifties. That shiny car is pretty beat up these days. It’s supposed to get 100 miles to the gallon, so long as the temperature never drops below 75 and the gasoline has additives like the joy of children and the smiles of unicorns. And you can’t buy the car because you can’t get approved for that loan. Instead you ride a bicycle, pedaling furiously, dodging trucks delivering goods from factories in Shanghai, on your way to a job that may not last.
“What do we want” is the ritual chant of every political assembly. The RNC’s chant is jobs. The DNC’s chant is abortion. Both are solutions of a sort. There are two ways to tackle unemployment. You can either make more jobs or make less people. If you make more jobs then families will make more little people and be able to afford them. If you make less people, then singles will be more economically secure but unable to start families.

“Whither goest thou, America,” the pollsters and pundits asked the country four years ago. And the answer was a superwide highway lined with shovel-ready jobs and a new era in history. We drove on that highway and went as fast as we could, and still we could not escape the blight in every direction. The faster we drove, the worse it got. The gasoline cost a fortune and there were no jobs to be found to pay for it.

As night gave way not to morning but a sullen overclouded dusk, we realized that we had taken the wrong road. We were no longer in America anymore. Maybe we were in Mexico or Pakistan. It was hard to say where exactly the dark highway had taken us, but the place we were at now was not the place we wanted to be.

Down the road was a strange place rife with political corruption, everyone had a hand out for a bribe and there was no longer a highway, just a million dirt roads segregated by race and gender, by class and creed, where all the drivers are angry all the time and the traffic cops are there to spread the misery in equal proportion. It might be Russia or Ecuador, it might be anywhere, but it’s not America.

DANIEL GELERNTER: MUNICH MISREMEMBERED…..SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/4918/features/munich-misremembered/

TONY KUSHNER, WELL KNOWN “CALUMNIST” OF ISRAEL WROTE THE SCRIPT FOR THE MOVIE “MUNICH” WHICH WAS AN ATTEMPT TO DRAW EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN THE TERRORISTS AND THOSE IN THE MOSSAD WHO HUNTED THEM DOWN. STEPHEN SPIELBERG WHO IS SO CORRECTLY DEVOTED TO CATALOGING EVENTS AND TESTIMONY FROM THE HOLOCAUST, WON KUDOS FOR THIS SHAMELESS FILM ON MUNICH. THE MASSACRE WAS ANOTHER FRONT IN THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS….THE JIHAD FRONT…..TOO BAD THAT ISN’T INCLUDED IN SPIELBERG’S WRATH…..RSK

Forty years ago, on September 5, 1972, eight Arab terrorists broke into the Israeli apartments at the Munich Olympic village, murdered two athletes, and took nine hostage. After a day of failed negotiations, aborted rescue attempts, and a shootout at nearby Fürstenfeldbruck airport, not a single hostage survived. A month later, the Germans compounded what Simon Reeve, in his seminal book One Day in September, called their “criminally shambolic failure” to rescue the Israeli hostages: The terrorist group Black September hijacked a Lufthansa jet and demanded the release of the three surviving Munich terrorists; the Germans complied.

Good books have been written about the Munich massacre, but David Clay Large’s recent Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games isn’t one of them. There is no triumph in this book, and not enough about terror and tragedy. Unlike Reeve’s book or Aaron J. Klein’s excellent Striking Back, Munich 1972 is about sports, not terrorism. Large thinks it a great shame that terror ruined the ’72 Games and overshadowed the great sporting events that took place there.

In this respect, Large is in tune with the times. The International Olympic Committee refused to honor the Israeli dead with a moment of silence at the London Games. (They refuse at every Olympics.) IOC President Jacques Rogge said “the Opening Ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident.” The chairman of the Palestinian Olympic Committee thanked Rogge in a letter: “Sport must not be a cause for divisiveness and for the spreading of racism.”

Large describes the massacre and continues with the Munich Games (just as the Games were continued over Israeli objections). He doesn’t seem to grasp that America’s loss to East Germany in pole-vaulting (for example) is so unspeakably trivial in comparison to the terrorist outrage that the attention he gives it is embarrassing.

Large regards himself as a historian above history. He calls the Black September terrorists fedayeen (“self-sacrificers,” their own preferred name) and compares them to Zionists, who “frequently resorted to terror tactics in their own struggle.” He makes nothing of the Irgun’s having attacked military targets, while Black September targeted civilians. “Apologists,” Large writes, “will undoubtedly deny the claim [of] ‘innocence’ for the Israeli Olympians on grounds that no Israeli could ever be innocent.” Large does not endorse this view; neither does he reject it. Faults on both sides, tit-for-tat.

Large assumes the legitimacy of the Palestinian “grievance.” World opinion—even Israeli opinion—increasingly seems to agree. Where does the idea come from?

GADI ADELMAN: ANOTHER EXODUS….BUT NOT BY CHOICE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/another-exodus-not-by-choice

It was 1956 and the cost of a gallon of gas was .22 cents a gallon, the average price of a new home was $11,700.00 and the box office movie hit was “The 10 Commandments” starring Charlton Heston.

Interestingly, 1956 was the year that the U.N. dispatched the world’s first peacekeeping force and it was because of Egypt; it was due to the Suez crisis after Egyptian President Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company bringing Egypt, Israel, France and the U.K. to war.

The movie “The 10 Commandments” was the story of Moses who is commanded by God to return to Egypt to free the Hebrews from slavery. The most famous line in the movie is undoubtedly when Moses stands before the Pharaoh Rameses and demands “let my people go!”

That same story of “Exodus” can be heard each and every year the world over when Jews celebrate the Passover holiday which commemorates the emancipation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt.

Fast forward to 2012, gas is averaging $3.82 a gallon, the average price for a new home is $372,000.00 and the last functioning synagogue in Egypt has been closed.

It’s rare for me to have difficulty writing an article given the fact that I concentrate on Israel, the Middle East, terrorism and Islam. However when something news worthy occurs, but no news outlets report it, it is almost impossible.

HERBERT LONDON: OBAMA ROPE-A-DOPE FOR A JEWISH AUDIENCE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-rope-a-dope-for-a-jewish-audience

The Jewish community of Boynton Beach Florida has sponsored an event on who the Jews might support in the upcoming presidential election. Boynton Beach is not alone. Jewish communities all over Florida are in the process of deciding how to cast their vote. Although I am not a Florida resident, let me explain the conditions an American Jew should consider in entering that November election booth.

Although President Obama has indicated he is a staunch ally of Israel and speaks passionately of the bonds that cannot be severed, his actions reveal a different sentiment.

When candidate Obama attended an AIPAC meeting, he said unequivocally that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel. Recently his aides were asked to name the capital of Israel. They were unable (unwilling?) to do so.

EDWARD CLINE: THE NEW ISLAMIST VIGILANTES OF SPEECH

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-new-islamic-vigilantes-of-speech

David J. Rusin of the Middle East Forum recently published an article on Islamist Watch about the vandalizing of “anti-Islamic” ads. He reveals just how pervasive the phenomenon is worldwide.

When Cyrus McGoldrick, advocacy director for the New York office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), logged into Facebook on August 12 to hint at his desire to vandalize anti-jihad ads that may soon run on city buses, he did not simply underline CAIR’s troubling attitude toward free expression. McGoldrick’s words – and the subsequent actions of others – have illuminated an overlooked aspect of the Islamist assault on Western speech: the defacement, if not obliteration, of political and commercial messages.

Of particular interest is the destruction of print or commercial ads of scantily clad women. I find this interesting because of the near psychotic or pathological mindset about women that Islam inculcates in Muslim men.

This phenomenon has been especially prevalent in the UK. A Times of London article revealed in 2005 that Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD) had launched a website with instructions on how to vandalize ads and which ones to select. “There is no longer any need to cringe as you walk past a sleazy poster,” the group declared. “We’ll improve it.” Many answered the call, as ads pitching bras, beauty products, and even television programs were trashed. “Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the offending body parts painted over or ripped off,” the Times observed. In a telling example, thugs destroyed images of scantily clad women on an East London billboard promoting the series Desperate Housewives, but fully clothed characters were untouched. Responding to the controversy, leading British Islamist Ahmed Sheikh argued that “freedom of speech should end when you offend others.”

Cultural jihad, or the de facto imposition of Sharia law on Western non-Muslims, is insidiously accumulative. In Britain it begins with such things as complaining about images or figures of pigs that Muslims might see in a bank or a shop. They are removed so that Muslims are not offended. Next will come a complaint about halal food not being served in restaurants and schools. Non-Muslims will be served it, as well, with or without their knowledge. Next will be a complaint that one must have some place to pray five times a day, and if an employer does not provide such a space, the street outside will do just as well, and damn the traffic jam caused by hundreds of Muslims mooning non-Muslims as they express their obeisance to a rock thousands of miles away.

Language must also be altered to preempt potential offense. Muslim criminal suspects are called “Asians.” Polygamy is taboo among non-Muslims, but Muslim men collecting welfare and enjoying subsidized housing may have several dependent wives and a dozen dependent children. The taxes collected to pay for their special welfare is a form of jizya, or a tax levied on conquered infidels. Muslims may demonstrate en masse, displaying signs that damn freedom of speech, sneer at British culture, warn of violence if non-Muslims resist, and predict the Islamization of Britain, and not be charged with hate speech. Any other group behaving in such an obnoxious manner would see its members hauled into court.

Criticism of Islam is forbidden and regarded as “defamation,” “bigotry,” or “racism.” Muslim activists are aggressive in this respect, going after not only titillating ads but serious discussions of Islam. Rusin writes:

Islamists also have adapted to the information age, recognizing that much of the Western speech they despise now exists online. Al-Azhar University scholars, representatives of the highest religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, even crafted a fatwa in 2008 that sanctions hacking for the purposes of jihad. Therefore, those who criticize Islam or otherwise offend its followers often find that their freedom of expression is no safer on the internet than it is on a Tower Hamlets billboard.

Arab News sympathetically profiled one such hacker, a Saudi native, in 2011. “An Alkhobar woman studying in the United States is taking credit for destroying 23 Danish websites that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad,” the piece begins, relaying material originally published by an Arabic-language source. “Nouf Rashid told the Arabic newspaper she was hacking into Danish websites having references to cartoons of the Prophet along with other sites that had questionable content in her view,” including pornographic ones.

The focus here, however, is the pseudo-ironic and psychotic symbiosis between a creed/ideology that finds bare female anatomy offensive, yet is lured to it in spite of the proscriptions against it.

There is a link between such vandalizing and the rape and often disfigurement of non-Muslim women in Europe by Muslims, the “sex slave” rings recently exposed in Britain, and the honor-killings of Muslim-born women and girls who break Islamic rules and “go Western.” This has everything to do with the Muslim dictum compelling women to cover themselves up as much as possible in burqas, veils or some other form of self-effacing garb, depending on the Islamic sect.

The phenomenon swings wildly, like bipolar dysfunction, between the vigilante censorship described by Rusin and incidents such as the rape of Lara Logan in Cairo, in which her clothes were ripped from her and even part of her hair torn out during the assault. That was not the only such incident endured by Western women in Cairo, but it is the most notorious. Her attackers wished to extinguish Logan, to wipe her out of existence.

This is the behavior of nihilists.

However, these incidents are all connected to the same criminal psychosis (or pathology) that is part and parcel of strict and even “moderate” Islamic upbringing. It is a concerted ideology that wishes to blank out women’s existence, to negate it, to obliterate it. On the surface, this “gendercidal” wish seems based on the Islamic perception of men as uncontrollable demons who lose all reason and restraint at the sight of a bare ankle or arm or coiffed or perfumed hair or inviting lips or seductive eyes. Hide these things, and the libidos of Muslim men will not be triggered to launch criminal assaults.

If they are not hidden, a Muslim man cannot be held responsible for his criminal actions. If a woman is attacked, it is her fault, because her “immodesty” is regarded as the invitation of a whore or prostitute. Unveiled or uncovered women are just “meat” to be consumed by sex-starved Muslim maniacs. They can’t help it, and so are forgiven. So goes the anti-reasoning. For an overview of the incidence of rape by Muslims of infidel women, see Jamie Glasov’s Front Page article from a year ago in which he discusses the attitude of a Muslim rapist in Australia.

WHERE IS THE “FLOTILLA” FOR SYRIA? RON PROSSOR ****

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443759504577631070927821022.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket

Assad’s war has claimed four times as many victims in 20 months as have been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict in the last 20 years.

Last month, a group of Scandinavians pulled up anchor from a Swedish port and set off toward the Middle East under the pretense of delivering humanitarian aid. The Nordic fog may have clouded their choice of destination. The moral compass of these self-proclaimed human-rights activists steered them to the Gaza Strip, not Syria.

The fleets of flotillas, ferries, yachts, sailboats, canoes and catamarans and that have set sail for Gaza in recent years rival the size of the Spanish Armada. Yet one might argue that humanitarian flotillas are needed just a bit more urgently in Syria, where more civilians have been murdered by the Assad regime than those killed during Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 combined.

The conflict in Syria has also claimed roughly four times as many victims in the past 20 months as were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 20 years. The residents of Gaza continue to enjoy more international assistance than virtually any other population on the planet, but almost no aid is reaching the two million people displaced within Syria—roughly 10% of the country’s population.

DANIEL MANDEL: HANAN ASHRAWI’S WAR ON HISTORY

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=283826

The paramount object of Palestinian politics remains the nullification of Jewish statehood.

Hanan Ashrawi, the telegenic, kinder, gentler face of Palestinian politics, knows how to attract a headline, but one wonders if she is becoming reckless with the years. This week, she claimed that Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries were not refugees because they left their homes voluntarily.

This suggests Palestinians officials are alarmed at Israel’s intention to include an agenda item on compensation for Jewish refugees in any future peace negotiations bearing on Palestinian refugees.

In a recent article, Ashrawi asserted that the “claim that Jews who migrated to Israel, which is supposed to be their homeland, are ‘refugees’… is a form of deception and delusion.” With a touch of the casuistical, Ashrawi explained: “If Israel is their homeland, then they are not ‘refugees’; they are emigrants who returned either voluntarily or due to a political decision…Jews voluntarily and collectively left [Arab lands].”

THERE IS an element of the surreal to this, quite apart from its flat-earth factual quality. By Ashrawi’s logic, the millions of Muslims who fled India and the millions of Hindus who fled Pakistan around the same time were not refugees either, since each ended up in their respective nation states.

SRDJA TRIFKOVIC: THE DISAPPEARING MIDDLE EASTERN CHRISTIANS

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2012/09/04/the-disappearing-middle-eastern-christians
Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of the region their percentages have been reduced to single digits. Whether they disappear completely will partly depend on Western leaders belatedly taking an interest in Christian plight and persecution. This seems most unlikely, as the examples of Iraq, Egypt and Syria demonstrate.

In Syria the Obama administration is fully committed to supporting the rebels, although it should be well aware of the ideological outlook and long-term objectives of Bashar al-Assad’s foes. They are Sunni fundamentalists. The partnerships forged thus far are ominous. The New York Times reported last June that CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, deciding which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms. The weapons are being funneled across the Turkish border “by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.”

Syria is the region’s only remaining country where Christians live effectively as equals with their Muslim neighbors. It has the second largest Christian community in the region (after Egypt), some 2.5 million strong. Most of them are supporting President Bashar Al Assad amidst ongoing rebellion in the country because they prefer a dictator who guarantees the rights as a religious minority to the grim future that Assad’s departure might bring. According to George Ajjan, an American political strategist of Syrian origin, an existential fear about a bloody fate awaiting them—should the Assad regime fall in Syria—is the main driver behind the Christian community’s almost unanimous support of its policies:

“The secular regime of the Baath Party dominated over the past four decades by the Alawites, a heterodox Shiite sect to which the Assad family belongs, undoubtedly secured life and liberty for the Christians— although dire economic circumstances resulting from the regime’s failure to provide growth have driven many middle-class Christians to emigrate, seeking a better standard of living abroad. Taking that into account, the commonly-cited figure of 10% Christians is perhaps close to double the real number living in Syria at the start of the uprising.”

It is not to be doubted that if the Obama Administration is successful in its stated objective of bringing Assad down, the Christians in Syria will follow their Iraqi brethren into exile. The predictable consequences of Assad’s fall and the Brotherhood’s victory would be the creation of a Shari’a-based Islamic state.

According to political analyst James Jatras, it sometimes appears as if Washington’s policy toward the unrest sweeping the Middle East is impacted by a network of Muslim Brotherhood agents working in cohorts with Obama who is only pretending to have strayed from his Islamic birth (as defined by Sharia). If this scenario is even only partly correct, Jatras says, then it would be hard to see how the result would be different from the one we have:

“If the conscious goal of the policy were the final uprooting of Christ’s followers from the region of His birth and earthly ministry, it could not have been better crafted. No one can doubt that should the regime of Bashar al-Assad fall, Syria’s Christians (primarily Orthodox), already singled out for attack by the ‘democratic’ opposition, would be subject to a full-scale campaign of elimination that they (unlike the Alawites, who at least can try to defend themselves in mountain areas in which they predominate) are unlikely to survive as a living community. It is thus not too strong to accuse, in so many words, those bipartisan champions of ‘Free Syria’ who urge outside intervention of advocating Christian genocide, whether or not that is their conscious intention.”

That this scenario seems acceptable to the Obama Administration became obvious in October 2011 when Dalia Mogahed, Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at the White House. Mogahed reportedly cancelled the meeting at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt. Rai has warned repeatedly that a Brotherhood-led regime would be a disaster for Syria’s Christian minority, but his admonitions are unwelcome in Washington.

Last July, the Department of State vigorously lobbied against bipartisan Congressional legislation to send “protection envoys” to the Middle East to examine the position of the Christian minorities. The State Department called the protection envoy role “unnecessary, duplicative and likely counter-productive.” In the meantime, tens of thousands of Syria’s Christians have already fled rebel-controlled areas as Islamists who dominate in the rebel ranks target them for murder, extortion and kidnapping. As George Ajjan concludes, this gradual downward demographic pressure of recent years will explode with the exodus of Christians from Syria that is occurring and will accelerate without an end to the current armed conflict:

“Should the uprising continue, with the regime losing control of more and more territory to armed rebels and law and order further breaking down, Christians will increasingly become the targets of intimidation tactics, kidnapping, and overt hostility—if not ethnic cleansing from mixed areas.”

At the same time, Administration officials pressed Egyptian generals into gradual surrender to the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of the country. The decision to treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a strategic partner has been on the cards at least since February 10 of last year—one day before Hosni Mubarak’s resignation— when President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made an astounding statement. He told the House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence that the Brotherhood “is an umbrella term for a variety of movements… a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam.”

The assertion by a top-ranking member of Obama’s team that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular” defies belief. It came into being in 1928 as an outright reaction against secularism, which the Egyptian elites had largely embraced during the British dominance in the country. To this day the Brotherhood’s simple credo remains the same: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Contrary to Clapper’s assurances, the Brotherhood is an archetypical Islamic revivalist movement that opposes the ascendancy of secular ideas and advocates a return to integral Islam as a solution to the ills that had befallen Muslim societies. Today it has branches in every traditionally Muslim country and all over the world, including the United States. Its members share the same long-term goal: the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state based on Sharia law. As is to be expected, they believe that the Koran and the Tradition justify violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments, and they look upon America as a sworn enemy.

During the Cold War, Washington routinely pandered to various Islamists as a means of weakening secular Arab nationalist regimes. In the mid 1950s, the Americans even promoted the idea of forming an Islamic bloc—led by Saudi Arabia—to counter the Nasserist movement. That approach may have made some sense during the Cold War, but it certainly makes none today. The strategy of effective support for Islamic ambitions against the Soviets in Afghanistan has helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon detrimental to U.S. security interests. The ridiculous notion that the Muslim Brotherhood can become America’s user-friendly partner merely proves that the architects of our Middle Eastern policy have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Egypt’s dwindling Copts have seen their position deteriorate over the past year from precarious to perilous. Already facing discrimination and harassment from Mubarak’s secular regime, they now see that things could get a lot worse under the Islamists who are now poised to take complete power. Their annus horribilis started on New Year’s Day 2011, when a powerful car bomb targeted a Coptic church in Alexandria, killing 25 parishioners and wounding nearly 100 just as they were finishing midnight liturgy. The next turning point was the Maspero massacre on October 9, 2011, when 27 unarmed Christian protesters were killed and hundreds more injured, not by some shadowy Islamic extremists but by the military. An official commission—established by the Army—has unsurprisingly absolved the Army of all responsibility for the killings.

Egypt shows that the prospect of the end of Christianity in Syria as a direct consequence of American policy is not unique, nor limited to one party or administration. The almost complete Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt already is accompanied by an accelerating Coptic exodus, as church attacks and kidnappings (mainly of girls, who after rape and supposed “conversion” to Islam are denied return to their families).

The process is accelerating. On August 1 Sherif Gadallah, a prominent lawyer from Alexandria, submitted a report to the public prosecutor demanding the exclusion of Copts from the committee in charge of forming Egypt’s constitution. That same week a sectarian crisis escalated in the village of Dahshur, only 25 miles south of Cairo, where hundreds of Muslims torched and looted Coptic businesses and homes. “As 120 families had already fled the village … the businesses and homes were an easy game for the mob to make a complete clean-up of everything that could be looted,” said Coptic activist Wagih Jacob. “The security forces were at the scene of the crime while it was taking place and did nothing at all.” The Coptic Orthodox Church issued a statement criticizing officials “for not dealing firmly with the events, demanding the speedy arrest of the perpetrators, the provision of security to the village Copts, their return to their homes, and monetary compensation for all those affected.” Its adherents see the Dahshur incident as a continuation of the Mubarak-era policy of collective punishment of Copts. Renowned Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany said, “What if the Americans acted the same way as the extremists of Dahshur; would you accept the expulsion of Muslims of America in response to Bin Laden’s terrorism?”

Egypt’s ongoing transition to what passes for democracy in the Muslim world is going to make matters far worse for the Copts, who are fearful the army and courts will not shield them from ever-greater discrimination and harassment. The Freedom and Justice Party, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood, now controls the country’s parliament, and the president is a Brotherhood disciple. The adherents of political Islam are in charge. Their spiritual leader is Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who in a recent video reminded the faithful that Christians are infidels. The Sheikh’s position is in line with orthodox Islamic teaching, which may explain the fact that he is still hailed in the West as a moderate. Five years ago, a U.S. News article described him as “a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam.” As a result, according to an August 14 report in El Fegr, jihadi organizations openly distribute leaflets inciting for the killing of Copts and promising them “a tragic end if they do not return to the truth” (Islam). The letter even names contact points and a location, Sheikh Ahmed Mosque in Kasfrit, where those supportive of such goals should rally after Friday prayers and join forces.

Upcoming U.S. Defense Strategy: Weakness, Trembling and Passing the Buck by Kalen Taylor ****

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p19080.xml

Originally published at the American Thinker

Official Washington has begun to focus on the implications of the planned sequestration of funds in January that will result in record cuts in defense spending. But while the financial impact is grave, attention should be paid as well to the administration’s philosophical approach to defending our national interests, laid out in a January DOD paper entitled “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.”

Noting that America must put its “fiscal house” in order, President Obama introduces the paper as America’s solution to a scarcity of resources and growing complexity of challenges. Written with the budget cuts of FY 2013 in mind (though not sequestration), the guide lays out a framework for a leaner and more nimble military. The goal, according to the president, is to keep America’s “… Armed Forces the best-trained, best-led, and best-equipped fighting force in history.” Does the guide produce a better military for less money? To answer the question, examine the underlying premises of the administration’s strategy.

The basic, pre-sequestration premises are:

* The U.S. will not be engaged in large-scale ground operations;
* Smaller, more flexible forces can cover counter-terrorism operations;
* The U.S. nuclear arsenal can safely be reduced, and nuclear modernization is not an immediate issue;
* European allies have adequate defense resources to complement those of the U.S.;
* The U.S. has the resources to “pivot to Asia” without abandoning its responsibilities in the Middle East; and
* Regardless of the size of the defense budget, the U.S. retains the intellectual and productive capacity to “gin up” whatever is required for unforeseen contingencies.