Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/barack-obamas-unholy-alliance-a-romance-with-islamism/print/
Toward the end of September 2012, Barack Obama finally came to New York City after skipping it during the 9/11 anniversary. He had made it out to the city the previous week for a celebrity fundraiser and an appearance on Letterman[1] [3] and then back again for a taping of The View while turning down a meeting with Netanyahu who did not have a talk show or an envelope filled with money.[2] [4]
The next day, while at least one of the Americans killed in Benghazi had yet to be buried,[3] [5] he declared at the UN General Assembly, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”[4] [6]
That statement also encompassed the agenda of the Benghazi killers, the terrorists who would attack Charlie Hebdo and the “Draw the Prophet” contest in Texas along with all the murderous censors of Mohammed determined that the future should not belong to those who slander their holy warlord.
It was Obama’s only mention of “Islam” in a speech addressing the brutal murder of four Americans by Islamic terrorists in a terror campaign targeting American diplomatic facilities on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks in Benghazi. The 9/11 attacks, like so many others, had begun with a cry of “Allahu Akbar.”[5] [7]
When the killing in Benghazi was done, the Jihadists left behind the slogan “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is Greater” scrawled on the walls of the American compound.[6] [8] These were the same words that Obama had recited “with a first-rate accent” for the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. Obama had called it “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”[7] [9] On that too, the murderers of four Americans agreed with him.
Those who disagreed and were to be denied a future included Mark Basseley Youssef, a Coptic Christian, whose YouTube trailer for a movie critical of Islam was blamed by the administration for the attacks.
Two days after Obama’s UN speech, Youssef was arrested and held without bail. The order for his arrest came from the top. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered SEAL Tyrone Woods, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”[8] [10]
The ACLU, which had developed deep Islamist connections,[9] [11] sent a letter to Hillary Clinton thanking her for her support of freedom of speech.[10] [12]
The Supreme Court’s “Miracle Decision”[11] [13] had thrown out a blasphemy ban for movies, but Obama’s new unofficial blasphemy ban targeted only those movies that offended Islam. The government had joined the terrorists in seeking to deny such movies and their creators a future.
At the United Nations, Obama had compared the filmmaker to the terrorists. He had used a Gandhi quote to assert that, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence.”[12] [14] Americans who criticized Islam’s violent tendencies could be considered as bad as Muslim terrorists and if intolerance of Islam was a form of violence, then it could be criminalized and suppressed. That became the administration’s priority.
It took the administration years to make its first arrest of a Benghazi perpetrator,[13] [15] but only days to urge Google to take down the Innocence of Muslims video[14] [16] and weeks to arrest the man behind it.
In a little over a week, there was already a State Department apology video airing in Pakistan.[15] [17] It took until the next month for the United States to even get access to the Benghazi compound.[16] [18] Instead of going on the offensive against the attackers, Obama went on the offensive against critics of Islam.
His administration not only blamed a YouTube video to distract from its failures in Benghazi, but to exploit the crisis in order to suppress the truth about Islamic terrorism.
Obama had illegally fought a war to aid Islamic terrorists and was covering up his role in the Islamization of Libya by the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda[17] [19] and eventually even ISIS.[18] [20] He exploited a terrorist attack against Americans caused by his Islamization of Libya to advance the Islamization of America.
The new Islamized Libya, where Christians were beheaded and churches were bombed,[19] [21] was what a nation that denied the future to those who did not accept the prophet of Islam really looked like.
Obama’s Islamist regime change had denied the Christians and non-Muslims of Libya a future. Among those non-Muslims who lost their future in Libya were four murdered Americans.
At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama attacked Christianity for the Crusades in the presence of the foreign minister of Sudan, a genocidal government whose Muslim Brotherhood leader had massacred so many Christians and others that he had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.[20] [22] [21] [23] And he told Christians that they were obligated to condemn insults to Islam.[22] [24]
Some persecuted Christians could flee to America, but where would they flee to when Obama began denying a future to those who did not accept the moral and religious authority of the prophet of Islam?
Benghazi was not the first Islamic terror attack against Americans, but it was the first time that our government responded in the Islamic fashion by locking up a Christian for blaspheming against Islam.
Blaming the video turned a public relations disaster into a policy win. The blame was shifted from Obama’s backing for Islamist regime change in Libya to critics of Islam. Not only was the cause of the attack covered up, but Obama’s ideological agenda was advanced by an attack he had helped cause.
Stand With the Muslims
Our current conflict with Islamic terrorists is not caused by joblessness, poverty, the climate, dictators or any of the other familiar excuses. Instead it’s caused by the unholy alliance between Islam and the left.
Obama embodied that unholy alliance as no other occupant of the Oval Office since Carter had.
When discussing Muslim complaints about FBI counterterrorism operations, Obama believed that they needed assurances that, “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”[23] [25] Counterterrorism with its emphasis on exposing plots and potential terrorists singled out Muslims. His preferred form of counterterrorism empowered Islamists while shifting the blame to Americans.
Muslims did not need to change who they were to reject terrorism. Americans instead had to Islamize. The source of tension was not Muslim terrorism, but American ignorance and prejudice toward Islam.
Obama insisted that Americans needed to educate themselves on Islam because their country was “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Not only was his claim false,[24] [26] but it implied that America needed to be defined by Islam and that Americans needed to integrate Islam into their own identity.
As he put it in Cairo, “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.”[25] [27]
The Obama model did not require that Americans become Muslims, but that they make Islam a part of their culture so that, like him, they would be able to quote the Koran or recite the Islamic call to prayer.
Obama rejected the secular common ground championed by European republics. Secularism had been used in America to limit the presence of Christianity and Judaism in public life, but the left did not accept its logic of neutral spaces when it came to Islam. Islam was treated as a culture rather than a religion. Excluding Christianity excluded a belief. Excluding Islam, unacceptably excluded a culture and a race. The new diverse American identity being constructed by the left would not be truly diverse without Islam.
If France insisted on being a secular republic, America would at least partially become a Muslim country.
After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Obama’s failure to attend the Unity March put Islamist feelings ahead of freedom of speech. Instead his administration tried to shift attention to a Countering Violent Extremism summit stacked with Islamists[26] [28] [27] [29] as its preferred response to Islamic terrorism.
The White House had previously been critical of Hebdo’s Mohammed cartoons.[28] [30] While it still paid lip service to freedom of speech, in Paris, Benghazi and Garland[29] [31] Islam came ahead of universal freedoms.
During the Cairo speech, Obama had explicitly rejected the French secular formula, stating, “It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.”
“Likewise, we can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism,” he added.[30] [32]
Christians, whose ability to practice their religion has been unprecedentedly attacked under his administration, might have found that statement disingenuous, but it was an exemption exclusively extended to Muslims. His administration might repress Christianity, but never Islam. While it accused Christians of discrimination, it fought for the Islamic right to discriminate against women.
Obama did not acknowledge the Islamic violence and repression against women that was the true basis for France’s Burqa ban. One survey had found that 77 percent of girls in France who wore the Hijab did so because of threats from Islamist groups.[31] [33] He also ignored the growing problem of Muslim honor killings[32] [34] and female genital mutilation (FGM) in the United States. The half-million girls and women in this country at risk for FGM[33] [35] mattered less than enforcing Islamist standards for covering up women.
While his administration vigorously targeted any employer or school that interfered with the wearing of the Hijab,[34] [36] [35] [37] it showed no similar dedication in any campaign against FGM or honor killings of women.
Like the Saudi religious police who wanted to let teenage girls burn rather than allow them to escape without proper Islamic covering,[36] [38] Obama placed the Hijab above the lives of Muslim women and girls.
The administration had made the decision to protect Islamic sexism, rather than Muslim women.
While the administration cracked down on nuns, it was suing towns over zoning ordinances that interfered with building mega-mosques.[37] [39] [38] [40] [39] [41] Even though the regulations did not single out mosques or Islam, the administration stepped in specifically when Islamists wanted to bully Americans.
If the French still clung to the idea of a secular republic, Obama had chosen to Islamize America. Those who resisted were faced with huge fines and even prison. America might not be one of the world’s biggest Muslim countries, but under Obama it was beginning to act more like Saudi Arabia or Iran.
In Cairo, Obama had declared that, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”[40] [42]
He had committed to waging a constant campaign against those who spoke out against Islam.
By the time that the Benghazi attacks took place, the pattern of promoting Islam, denying Islamic terrorism and silencing critics had become the administration’s twisted version of counterterrorism.
This brand of counterterrorism insisted that the biggest threat was not the terrorists, but the truth. Identifying Islamic terrorists as such would increase Muslim alienation and terrorist recruitment. There was nothing violent about Islam and yet videos and cartoons offensive to Islam could not be tolerated because they would lead to violence; a violence whose Islamic nature would be fervently denied.
Muslim terrorist groups, from ISIS on down, were deemed un-Islamic. Lone wolf attackers were characterized as ignorant of Islam. To disagree was to aid the terrorists, as Obama’s aides suggested.[41] [43] Counterterrorism came to mean lying about Islam. Anyone who defined the problem could, like the “Draw the Prophet” cartoonists in Texas or Mark Basseley Youssef, be accused of having caused it.
The lie could not be challenged or the bombs would go off. Tell the truth and the terrorists win.
Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), the administration’s alternative to European integration, outsourced domestic counterterrorism policy to the Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups and transformed pandering to them into the core of our domestic counterterrorism strategy.[42] [44]
Violent extremism was a vague and undefined term. Countering it was an even more vague and undefined policy that had far less to do with phoning tips to the FBI, an act that CAIR, a leading administration Muslim Brotherhood ally, had come out against,[43] [45] than with promoting Islam.
Since Islamic terrorism was un-Islamic, promoting Islam was the best means of fighting Islamic radicalization. The terrorists had “perverted” Islam and had to be countered with authentic Islam.[44] [46] Radicalization was caused by Muslim alienation and the only cure for it was Islamizing America.
CVE could Islamize unlikely agencies of the United States government by redirecting their priorities. When Obama told the NASA Administrator that one of his top priorities had to be making Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering” that was CVE in action.[45] [47]
A CVE conference held the day after Benghazi promoted touring Muslim rappers associated with a Muslim Brotherhood front group who were sponsored by the State Department.[46] [48] [47] [49] [48] [50] [49] [51] Money that should have been used to secure Americans at risk in Benghazi was wasted on Islamist self-promotion.
It was speculated that possibly hundreds of millions of dollars were being thrown at CVE activities.[50] [52] And CVE had not only failed in its mission, but invariably mainstreamed the worst elements in Islam.
By the post-Hebdo CVE conference, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications had been turned over[51] [53] to Rashad Hussain, a Muslim Brotherhood linked official,[52] [54] and before long its “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account was promoting everything from anti-Semitism to Al Qaeda.[53] [55] [54] [56] [55] [57]
Meanwhile, echoing Obama’s mandate to “educate ourselves more effectively on Islam,”[56] [58] the educational system was being bent to promote the practice of Islam to American children.[57] [59]
Parents across the country discovered that schools were taking their children to mosques where they were being taught to participate in Islamic worship.[58] [60] After American soldiers had fought to liberate Afghan women, American girls in this country were being dressed in burqas.[59] [61]
Obama had told a Cairo audience, which included the Muslim Brotherhood, that he was rejecting the French model of protecting women from Islamic coercion. Instead the United States had adopted the Brotherhood’s model of urging American women to adopt Islamist practices.
His idea of standing with the Muslims was transforming counterterrorism into a tool of Islamization.
The Brotherhood Administration
In August 2013, Al-Wafd, a paper linked to one of Egypt’s more liberal parties which supports equal rights for women and Christians, accused Obama of having close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. [60] [62]
A year earlier, Rose El-Youssef magazine, founded by an early Egyptian feminist, had compiled a list of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the administration.[61] [63] [62] [64]
Beyond Huma Abedin, Hillary’s close confidante and aide, the list included; Arif Alikhan, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, formerly the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and currently the Coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.
These were the types of accusations that the media tended to dismissively associate with the right, but both Egyptian publications were on the other side of the spectrum.
Egyptian liberals were the ones brandishing placards of a bearded Kerry in Taliban clothes or a photoshopped Obama with a Salafist beard. The protesters Obama had supposedly sought to support by calling for Mubarak to step down were crowding the streets accusing him of backing terrorists.
What made the Egyptian liberals who had seen America as their ally in pursuing reform come to view it as an enemy? The angry Egyptian protesters were accusing Obama of supporting a dictator; the original sin of American foreign policy that his Cairo Speech and the Arab Spring had been built on rejecting.
The progressive critiques of American foreign policy insisted that we were hated for supporting dictators. Now their own man was actually hated for supporting a Muslim Brotherhood dictator.
By 2014, 85% of Egyptians disliked America. Only 10% still rated America favorably.[63] [65] It was a shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring when America had slid into positive numbers for the first time.[64] [66]
Obama had run for office promising to repair our image abroad. As a candidate, he had claimed that other countries believed that “America is part of what has gone wrong in our world.” And yet the true wrongness was present in that same speech when he urged, “a new dawn in the Middle East.”[65] [67]
That dawn came with the light of burning churches at the hands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Under Obama, America really did become part of what had gone wrong by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a crime that Obama will not admit to and that the media will not report on.
The Muslim Brotherhood was born out of Egypt and yet Egyptian views of it are dismissed by the media. Despite the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s final orgy of brutality as President Mohammed Morsi clung to power, despite the burning churches and tortured protesters, it is still described as “moderate.”
Morsi, who had called on Egyptians to nurse their children on hatred of the Jews,[66] [68] was a moderate. Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, the Tunisian flavor of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had called for the extermination of the Jews “male, female and children,”[67] [69] was also a “moderate.” Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, went one better with a fatwa approving even the murder of unborn Jews.[68] [70] Qaradawi was another moderate.[69] [71]
The only Muslim Brotherhood leader who hasn’t been described as a moderate is Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the ICC for genocide and crimes against humanity.[70] [72]
But if the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a moderate organization, if it is indeed violent and bigoted, why did Obama alienate Egyptians and others across the region by supporting it? The angry Egyptians in the street had an explanation, but they had failed to understand how deeply the infiltration truly went.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups, such as the MSA and CAIR, had become so entangled with the left that it was impossible for the latter to wash its hands of the former. Not only the administration, but its political allies on the left, such as the Center for American Progress[71] [73] and the ACLU[72] [74], had been infiltrated by Islamists. The administration’s infiltration was a symptom of the problem, not its cause.
Obama sits at the center of a web of intertwined progressive organizations. This web has infiltrated the government and it in turn has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Consider the case of Faiz Shakir, who went from the Harvard Islamic Society where he helped fundraise for a Muslim Brotherhood front group funneling money to Hamas, the local Muslim Brotherhood franchise, to Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at the Center for American Progress, heading up the nerve center of the left’s messaging apparatus, to a Senior Adviser to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.[73] [75] The next step after that is the White House.
Time magazine described the Center for American Progress as Obama’s idea factory, crediting it with forming his talking points and his government.[74] [76] In an administration powered by leftist activists, the integration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the left resulted in a pro-Brotherhood policy.
Egyptian liberals had expected that the administration’s withdrawal of support for Mubarak would benefit them, but the American left had become far closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than to them. Instead of aiding the left, it aided the Brotherhood. The Egyptian liberals were a world away while the Brotherhood’s activists sat in the left’s offices and spoke in the name of all the Muslims in America.
The left had made common cause with the worst elements in the Muslim world. It formed alliances with Muslim Brotherhood groups, accepting them as the only valid representatives of Muslim communities while denouncing their critics, both Muslim and non-Muslim, as Islamophobes.
The Arab Spring disaster, from the Muslim Brotherhood brutality in Egypt and Tunisia, the bloody civil war in Libya to the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, was the fruit of this tainted red-green alliance.
The four Americans murdered in Benghazi, the American hostages beheaded by ISIS along with the countless Christians, Yazidis and others butchered, raped and enslaved had fallen victim to the left’s support for the Brotherhood’s political ambitions, tyrannies and holy wars.
The Brotherhood Spring
“What we are witnessing these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event, and it is most probable, according to reality and history, that it will encompass the majority of the Islamic world with the will of Allah, and thanks to Allah things are strongly heading towards the exit of Muslims from being under the control of America,” Osama bin Laden wrote of the Arab Spring.[75] [77]
“The fall of the remaining tyrants in the region became a must with the will of Allah, and it was the beginning of a new era for the whole nation,” he added.[76] [78]
What was happening though had less to do with the will of Allah and more to do with the will of Obama.
Allah had not come down to Cairo to cut Arab allies loose, nor did he reserve seats for the Muslim Brotherhood or force regime change.[77] [79] Osama credited Allah, but he really should have thanked Obama.
Both Obama and Osama agreed on the need to remove the current leaders of allied Arab governments and both men saw the Arab Spring as a vindication of their visions for the future. But the wave of new Islamist governments friendly to terrorists that swept across the region vindicated Osama, not Obama.
In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi , the leader of the Islamist Ennahda party, who had once declared that “Crusader America” was the “enemy of Islam”[78] [80] had come into his own. In the past he had been denied a visa to enter the United States,[79] [81] but in the age of Obama he was feted at an event attended by, among others, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.[80] [82]
Only a few years earlier, he had stated that the Arab Spring would “threaten the extinction of Israel.”[81] [83]
“The Arab region will get rid of the bacillus of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this. “[82] [84]
The Sheikh had already called for the mass murder of Jews, stating that, “There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.”[83] [85]
Once in power, Ennahda chose to turn a blind eye to Islamist violence.[84] [86] On September 11, 2012, as the Jihadist attacks on American embassies and diplomatic missions swept around the Muslim world, the embassy in Tunis came under attack. And help didn’t come from the Ennahda government.
Instead Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced to place an urgent phone call to the secular president, a ceremonial position in Tunisia, who dispatched his own presidential guard to protect the embassy.[85] [87] An ungrateful Hillary then delivered a speech praising the Islamists and thanking the Islamist government, rather than the president, who had risked his own safety to protect the embassy.[86] [88]
The attack and the response by Tunisia’s Islamist government should have been anticipated.
In the past, Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi had urged, “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.”[87] [89]
That was exactly what the Jihadists had attempted to do on September 11, 2012 in Tunis and across the region with the complicity of the new Arab Spring governments Obama had helped bring to power.
A similar pattern of complicity emerged in Egypt where the attackers were allowed to scale the walls of the American Embassy in Cairo.[88] [90] While the worst attack of that day took place in Benghazi, where Jihadists were in control of the city, in Tunis and Cairo a different breed of Jihadists had become the government and they had little interest in defending American lives or property.
While much of the controversy over the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has centered around the failure by the State Department to secure the diplomatic mission, that attack and many of the others came out of a volatile environment created by the empowerment of Islamists through the Arab Spring.
Nowhere was there more at stake for Obama’s “New Beginning” with the Islamists than in Cairo, but by reaching out to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, he was coming dangerously close to Al Qaeda.
The State Department’s 2008 strategic assessment stated that, “Although Usama bin Ladin remained the group’s ideological figurehead, Zawahiri has emerged as AQ’s strategic and operational planner.”[89] [91] Even Osama bin Laden had been a Muslim Brotherhood member,[90] [92] but after his death the organization’s leadership would become a more purely Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood affair.
Saif al Adel, the interim Emir of Al Qaeda, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current Al Qaeda leader, were products of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its splinter group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The brother of the Al Qaeda chief, Mohammed al-Zawahiri, helped organize the attack on the American embassy in Cairo[91] [93] and allegedly engaged in discussions with Mohammed Morsi over an alliance with Al Qaeda.[92] [94]
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group which merged with Al Qaeda, later reemerged under different leadership as the Islamic Party while the terrorist group Gamaa Islamiya or the Islamic Group formed the Building and Development Party and allied with Morsi.
Morsi pardoned Mostafa Hamza[93] [95] who had ordered Gamaa Islamiya’s Luxor Massacre in which terrorists mutilated and disemboweled European and Japanese visitors. The massacre was reportedly arranged by Ayman al-Zawahiri and funded by Osama bin Laden.[94] [96] Morsi’s alliance with the terror group even led him to attempt to appoint a Gamaa Islamiya member as Governor of Luxor.[95] [97]
Even though Gamaa Islamiya was still listed as a terrorist group, one of its lawmakers, Hani Nour Eldin, received a visa to enter the United States and met with senior Obama administration officials including then Deputy National Security Adviser and current White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough.[96] [98]
The terrorist asked McDonough about releasing Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the infamous Blind Sheikh who was the leader of Gamaa Islamiya, serving a life sentence for plotting attacks across New York City, after his followers bombed the World Trade Center.[97] [99] Shortly thereafter, Morsi told a cheering crowd that he would work to free Rahman. The State Department was reportedly considering the deal.[98] [100]
The thin firewall between the supposed extremists and moderates, between the political Islamists and the terrorists, between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, had worn so thin that it barely existed. Instead members of terrorist groups were running Egypt and openly petitioning the United States to free the figure most closely associated with the World Trade Center bombing in the minds of Americans.
And yet despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s torture and killing of protesters, its alignment with its fellow Hamas terrorists in Gaza and its flirtation with Al Qaeda and Iran, Obama continued to support it.
After videos surfaced of Morsi calling for the destruction of Israel and urging hatred of Jews as a form of worship of Allah, Secretary of State John Kerry defended the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to his regime.
“Not everything lends itself to a simple classification, black or white,” Kerry said. “We have critical interests with Egypt.“[99] [101]
Statements like “Resistance is the correct and only way to free the land from the filth of the Jews”[100] [102] should have been easy to classify, but instead the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Semitism became a matter of ambiguity and nuance for an administration determined to continue aiding the terror group.
“President Morsi has issued two statements,” Kerry said, “to clarify those comments and we had a group of senators who met with him the other day who spent a good part of the conversation in relatively heated discussion with him about it.”[101] [103]
Kerry neglected to mention that during the “heated discussion,” Morsi had suggested that the criticism was only taking place because the American media was under the control of the Jews.[102] [104]
While Kerry had insisted at the time that the weapons transfers were necessary to safeguard American interests in Egypt and even help Israel, when another popular uprising toppled Morsi and replaced him with a new non-Islamist government, delivery of the jets was put on hold.[103] [105] [104] [106] This move made it clear that Obama and Kerry had not sought to supply the jets to Egypt, but to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Arab Spring had been intended as a vehicle for bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied Islamists to power, not only in Tunisia and Egypt, but across the region.
Backing for Gaddafi’s overthrow had been bought by the shift of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from Al Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood under the auspices of the Brotherhood’s Sheikh Qaradawi.[105] [107] [106] [108] When the mission in Benghazi needed protection, the task was handed to the Brotherhood’s February 17 Martyrs Brigade[107] [109] [108] [110] which had been employed by the National Transitional Council.[109] [111]
Closely interrelated with Ansar Al-Sharia,[110] [112] the Jihadists that launched the attack against the mission in Benghazi, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade has been accused of complicity in their attack.[111] [113]
The NTC had been Obama’s choice for regime change[112] [114] and its draft constitution stated that Sharia law would be Libya’s law.[113] [115] The Benghazi attack was an early warning of a larger conflict that would see the Muslim Brotherhood and its Jihadist allies take control of Libya’s capital.[114] [116] It was a battle in a larger war.
Across the Middle East, the Brotherhood reaped the political harvest of the Arab Spring.
In Morocco, the Arab Spring brought the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Justice and Development Party (PJD) to power.[115] [117] Abdelilah Benkirane, its Head of Government, was a former member of Chabiba Islamia; an Islamist group working to create an Islamic State, some of whose members would go on to join the Al Qaeda interlinked Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group.
Like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, PJD was depicted as a moderate Islamist group. Little mention was made of its close ties to Hamas.[116] [118] Benkirane had described Israel as a “hostile state”, praised Hamas and stated that Moroccans want to wage Jihad alongside the genocidal terrorists.[117] [119]
The PJD’s 2007 platform had called for imposing Islamic law on Morocco and the destruction of Israel.[118] [120] Even after coming to power, PJD continued to maintain close ties with Hamas. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal attended its first conference[119] [121] and met with Benkirane.[120] [122]
Such relationships between Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood governments were natural and inevitable. Hamas was a fellow Muslim Brotherhood embryonic government. By aiding the rise of Muslim Brotherhood governments, Obama was creating state supporters for the anti-Semitic terror group.
In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted from power. Elections made the Brotherhood’s Al-Islah into the country’s second largest party.[121] [123] A key figure in Al-Islah was Sheikh Zindani, an Osama bin Laden mentor listed by the US as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” who had played a role in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole and Yemen’s local September 11, 2012 attack on the US embassy. [122] [124] [123] [125]
The Arab Spring led to Muslim Brotherhood political victories putting the group’s various arms on a path to controlling much of the Middle East. However, they fared poorly when the political conflicts grew violent, losing to popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, to the Houthis in Yemen and to ISIS in Syria.
These conflicts often flared up when the Muslim Brotherhood showed its true colors. The Brotherhood, despite its violent rhetoric and roots, produced better manipulators than warriors. It was adept at convincing American officials, the leftist opposition, tribal leaders and freelance Jihadists to follow its agenda, but sooner or later its partners realized that it sought absolute power and could not be trusted.
Obama never realized that about the Muslim Brotherhood or perhaps he chose not to realize it.
American Guilt
Beyond the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama sought to cultivate ties with the worst elements in the region.
The common element that attracted him to the Muslim Brotherhood and the mullahs of Iran, despite their being on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War, was their mutual enmity toward America.
While the foreign policy of the right attempts to secure national interests, the foreign policy of the left seeks to atone for national crimes. It was not strategy that drove his outreach to enemies of our country, but guilt. To the left, both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran were victims of our foreign policy.
The Muslim Brotherhood had suffered because of our backing for Sadat and Mubarak. Iran’s clerical tyrants resented us because of our support for the Shah.
Obama had taken up the Muslim Brotherhood’s cause as far back as the 2002 anti-war speech in which he had demanded that Bush stop Mubarak from “suppressing dissent.”[124] [126] He told his Iran negotiators to understand that the Islamic terrorist state feels “vulnerable” because of the way that America “meddled in first their democracy and then in supporting the Shah and then in supporting Iraq and Saddam during that extremely brutal war.”[125] [127] Iran and the Brotherhood were not our enemies; they were our victims.
Any Islamic enemy of America could count on the left’s sympathy and support for its victimhood.
President Bush’s denunciation of the Axis of Evil had drawn Democrats to rally around Axis members. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi visited Bashar Assad at a time when the Bush administration was seeking to pressure the Syrian dictator to shut down the flow of Al Qaeda suicide bombers murdering American soldiers.[126] [128] And John Kerry became even more notorious for his serial pandering to Assad.[127] [129]
But the left’s best efforts were reserved for the worst Islamic member of the Axis of Evil.
The Tehran Trio of three key administration foreign policy figures, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Sec-retary Chuck Hagel had become notorious for their pro-Iran advocacy before joining the admin-istration.[128] [130] [129] [131] The Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House, but so had the Iran Lobby in the form of the American-Iranian Council.
Animated by American guilt, the left’s foreign policy demanded a constant search for enemies to empower. This disastrous policy was less pro-Muslim than it was anti-American. The alliances that it made did not follow the consistent line of Islamic theology, but the inconsistent line of appeasement.
Every enemy of America, no matter how evil, had a part to play in dismantling our national security.
Out of Gitmo
In his first election, Obama had many endorsements, but in his second election only one name counted.
During the second presidential debate, he was asked what he had done about rising prices. Obama replied that, “Osama bin Laden is dead.” When challenged on Benghazi, he again brought up bin Laden. During the first debate, he brought out bin Laden in response to a question about partisan gridlock.[130] [132]
By the third debate, he was so drunk on secondhand heroism that he boasted that, “I said, if I got bin Laden in our sights, I would take that shot.”[131] [133] Obama was all but starring in his own imaginary action movie. Voters were left with the impression that he had ordered the execution of the terrorist leader.
But Obama’s real plans for Osama had actually been very different. He had not intended to use him to dismantle Al Qaeda, but to dismantle Guantanamo Bay and the military commission trials of terrorists.
If Obama’s plan had succeeded, Osama’s capture would have dealt a death blow to the War on Terror.
Despite playing patriot at the debate, Obama had told the liberal readers of Vanity Fair the real story. According to the journalist who interviewed him, “Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”[132] [134]
Trying a top terrorist in a civilian court had been too controversial, but capturing Osama bin Laden would have been a public relations coup that would have drowned out the protests and the criticism.
Instead of killing Osama, the goal was to bring him back and “put him on trial in a federal court.”
“I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda,” Obama boasted.[133] [135]
If Osama bin Laden had been tried in a civilian court, it would have become impossible to argue that any lesser terrorist should be kept in the Article III system. And that would have dismantled a fundamental distinction between terrorists and criminals that defined the War on Terror and infuriated Obama.
The real target of Operation Neptune Spear wasn’t bin Laden; it was Guantanamo Bay.
When the SEALs killed the Al Qaeda leader, they sabotaged Obama’s plan to try him in a civilian court and shut down military commissions trials. But Obama recovered from that setback by exploiting bin Laden’s death to secure a second term and provide political cover for his disastrous foreign policy.
Most importantly, it diverted attention from the real target, the terrorists of Guantanamo Bay.
Gitmo had been Obama’s priority from the start. During his first days in office, three out of his first five executive orders involved the Islamic terrorists locked up at Gitmo.[134] [136] His third executive order outlawed enhanced interrogations of terrorists “to promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals in United States custody.”[135] [137] His fourth and fifth sought to close the prison and free its terrorists.[136] [138] [137] [139]
It took Obama a month to set up the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. It took him two days to set up a Special Interagency Task Force on Detainee Disposition to free Gitmo terrorists. His priority was not the economy, or even gay rights, amnesty and abortion; it was aiding Islamic terrorists.
The departure of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it clear just how much of a priority freeing Gitmo terrorists was for Obama. The former senator, an anti-war politician, shared Obama’s views on Iraq and Iran. But he was unwilling to free dangerous terrorists at the rapid rate that Obama wanted.
White House officials complained that “his concerns about the security risks posed by the release of detainees” had “thwarted” Obama’s plans for closing Guantanamo Bay. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was reportedly angry because Hagel had not wanted to rush through releases.[138] [140] Hagel admitted to CNN that the White House had indeed pressured him to speed up terrorist releases.[139] [141]
The White House had fought hard for Hagel, but when he tried to slow down the release of dangerous terrorists, he was shown the door. Obama’s highest priority for his Secretary of Defense did not involve freeing Afghans and Iraqis from the Taliban and ISIS, but freeing their Islamic terrorist allies from Gitmo.
The five Taliban commanders freed by Obama in exchange for a deserter made headlines because of the splashy White House photo op, but the administration had been quietly releasing even more dangerous men. These included Mohammed Zahir, the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate, who had been caught with nuclear materials while reportedly preparing to build an atom bomb.[140] [142]
Even while America was trying to stop ISIS from taking over Syria and Iraq, terrorists from the Syrian Group, which had been run by the uncle of the former leader of ISIS back when it was known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, were being released. The freed terrorists had received training in everything from suicide bombing to forging documents. Some had links to terrorist attacks against Americans and America.[141] [143]
Among those freed was Mohammed Abis Ourgy, a bomb maker who may have known ahead of time about September 11.[142] [144]
At least two of the terrorists released by Obama had threatened to assassinate President Bush.
Adel Al-Hakeemy, a military advisor to Osama bin Laden, had threatened revenge against America and stated that he would kill President Bush if given the chance. Muhammed Ali Husayn had dispatched letters to Congress and the White House warning that they would “be destroyed, suffer and lose.”[143] [145]
Obama was forcing the release of terrorists rated as high risk who had made specific threats against the United States. He even insisted on freeing terrorists from conflict zones such as Yemen and Syria.
His administration had freed five Yemeni terrorists, releasing four of them to neighboring Oman, which had been used as a gateway by the Charlie Hebdo attackers operating under orders from Al Qaeda in Yemen.[144] [146] The four included an Al Qaeda veteran of the Yemeni military who was suspected of serving as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden[145] [147] and an Al Qaeda terrorist who had received IED training.[146] [148]
No responsible government would have released such terrorists in the vicinity of an active war zone.
But Obama had made freeing the Jihadists of Gitmo into his highest priority. He executed his plans at the expense of our national security, our allies and the members of his own administration.
Even his greatest unintended triumph against Al Qaeda, the death of Osama bin Laden, had never been anything other than a warped attempt at freeing more Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.
A Stolen Future
Every president is the custodian of a nation and its future.
When Obama declared to the UN that the future must not belong to those who criticize Islam’s brutality, bigotry and abuse of women, he was also defining whom it must belong to. If the future must not belong to those who slander Mohammed, it will instead belong to his followers and those who respect his moral authority enough to view him as being above criticism in image, video or word.
With these words, Obama betrayed America’s heritage of freedom and announced the theft of its future. The treason of his unholy alliance with Islam not only betrays the Americans of the present, but deprives their descendants of the freedom to speak, write and believe according to their conscience.
Obama has placed the full weight of the government’s resources behind Islam. He has suppressed domestic dissent against Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while aiding their international goals.
And by doing so, he has aided the foreign and domestic enemies of this country.
The president is more than the sum of his office. He is the man who believes most strongly in the promise of an American future. His speeches reflect the faith that we have in ourselves.
Obama is the first occupant of the White House to openly deny American Exceptionalism. Every president before him has chosen an American future. Obama chose an Islamic future instead.
It remains up to Americans to reclaim their future by exposing and breaking Obama’s unholy alliance.
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