http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/rice-on-libya-obfuscating-from-behind/?print=1 With an American ambassador murdered abroad for the first time since 1979, it was clear that someone from the Obama administration had to show up on the Sunday TV talk shows to field questions about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But of all the many officials to whom the […]
http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/09/17/steyn-on-after-america/ Last year, as the month of August began, I received a copy of Mark Steyn’s After America from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday. Mark’s crack PR team earned their keep once again this year, staging riots across the Middle […]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/17/islamists-tipping-point/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS History is replete with examples of strategic miscalculations in which an overreach — usually born of contemptuous disdain for a foe — led to disaster for the aggressor. Think Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union 131 years later. We may look back at Sept. 11, 2012, as […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444450004578002010241044712.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
‘The Book of Mormon’ performed at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre
‘Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the hit number in Broadway’s hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can’t tell you, because it’s unprintable in a family newspaper.
On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can’t tell you about that, either. Let’s just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.
The “Book of Mormon”—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing “Innocence of Muslims.” This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.
No matter. The film, the administration says, is “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice), “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, “disgusting and reprehensible” (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.
So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578002523312508286.html?mod=hp_opinion
The spectacle of reporters over the past week hounding Mitt Romney for speaking his mind does not come as a surprise.
After an astounding week of ardent media focus on Mitt Romney’s criticism of the initial U.S. response to mob assaults on American diplomatic outposts, the furor is dying down—but it’s not over by any means. Nor was the message that the furor sent a negligible one.Condemnations of Mr. Romney had come thick and fast. He had been “crass and tone deaf,” in the view of MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. He had committed a “slander” against the president, according to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
Journalists in pursuit of this story—to the exclusion of virtually all else going on—were quick to point out that denunciations of Mr. Romney were by no means limited to Democrats, that criticism came from Republican commentators too. This fact was hardly surprising—the sanctimony of the virtuous knows no political bounds.
The spectacle of those hordes of journalists in single-minded pursuit of the Romney story day after day—days that saw the killing of four Americans, embassies burned and trashed, mobs of the faithful running amok—shouldn’t have been surprising either. It’s the most dramatic indicator yet that in this election the pack journalism of four years ago is alive, and well, and in full cry again.
Especially wonderful to hear were all the charges about Mr. Romney’s political opportunism and tone-deafness—this after three days of a Democratic convention distinguished by shameless, nonstop exploitation of the military raid that put an end to Osama bin Laden. It is impossible to imagine any other president in American history orchestrating even two minutes—much less three days—of the self-glorification and wallowing in a victory won by the nation’s armed forces that was on display at the convention. If any of this orgy of boasting in the interest of a political campaign caught the attention of those commentators whose sensibilities were so offended by Mr. Romney last week, we haven’t heard about it.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warning-how-gaia-replaced-god/?singlepage=true A review of frequent PJM contributor David Solway’s new book, Global Warning, Trials of an Unsettled Science. A thought experiment. You’re a jury member in a courtroom trial that will decide whether the defendant – man-made global warming advocacy – is, as it claims to be, a disinterested conduit of scientific truth, or, as […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-setback-for-geert-wilders/print/
Last week, even as the Islamic world was erupting in yet another bout of Koran-fueled fury that put the 2006 explosion over the Danish cartoons in the shade, the Dutch electorate, apparently having decided that the clash of civilizations was yesterday’s news, handed Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) , or Freedom Party – the only one of the Netherlands’s several major parties that is seriously critical of Islam and of the country’s current immigration and integration policies – its first setback ever. While the two top parties received about twenty-five percent of the vote apiece, up about five percent from the last election, the PVV got ten percent, down from fifteen. It remains the third largest party, but just barely, with fifteen out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth largest parties will have fifteen, thirteen, and twelve seats respectively.
“For the first time since he founded the PVV in 2004,” reported De Volkskrant on Friday, “Geert Wilders lost an election, and substantially so. How can that be?” The newspaper Trouw claimed to have the answer: “The Netherlands of 2012 is radically changed….the protest vote for the PVV has disappeared.”
On Saturday, I met Wilders’s right-hand man and fellow Member of Parliament, Martin Bosma (48), at a café in Amsterdam, to discuss the election results.
“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he said with a tired grin. It had been a long week and he hadn’t had much sleep.
Bosma rejected the idea that the election had been a referendum on immigration – in fact, he pointed out, “immigration was not a subject during the campaign.” The PVV didn’t bring it up, and “if the PVV doesn’t bring up immigration, nobody does.” This time around, with the Euro in what seem like its death throes, the PVV decided to focus its campaign on the EU. Should the Dutch should continue to slavishly follow directives from Brussels which, among other things, compel it to cough up 56 billion euros a year to subsidize Greece and other countries? The PVV said no.
Alas, the Dutch have always been temperamentally conservative, and, as Bosma put it, “leaving the EU feels like an adventure” – a leap into the unknown. (Of course, the EU itself was an “adventure” that was foisted on them, step by step, without their approval; but now it’s the status quo, and Dutch voters are reluctant to reverse it.) And so, on Election Day, the PVV took a dive.
Still, Wilders and Bosma are in it for the long haul. “Ten years from now, everybody will agree with us,” Bosma told me. “At least about the EU. About mass immigration, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll still be in denial.”
This I frankly don’t get. How can so many Dutchmen, at this late date, still be in denial about the reality of Islamic immigration? How – especially – can they be in denial about it at a time when violent mobs are attacking Western embassies in one Muslim capital after another?
Bosma shrugged. “It’s far away,” he said about all the Middle Eastern mayhem. He gestured toward our fellow customers, most of them elite Amsterdam types sipping lattes. “Ask anybody here what they think of Islam. They’ll say that, well, there are rotten apples everywhere.”
“Even after everything that has happened?”
“Yes. They’re deluding themselves. They don’t want to face the truth. Because if you face it, you have to do something about it.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/charles-bybelezer/the-u-s-s-iran-delusion/ The United State of America is “not setting deadlines” on Iran and is still committed to negotiations which are “by far the best approach” to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last week. To ensure the message was not lost in Hebrew translation, US State Department […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/stephenbrown/europe%e2%80%99s-multicultural-nightmare/print/
“The festival gives expression to our demand for a peaceful coexistence of all humans with their different cultures, languages and traditions.”
– Proclamation of the festival’s organizers.
The beautiful, rosy multicultural paradise Europe’s leftists promised in the 1960s and ’70s manifested itself brilliantly again recently at a Kurdish festival in Mannheim, a German city in the south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg. Almost as soon as the festival began, German police were set upon by hundreds of young Kurds who were encouraged “with words and applause” by thousands of others. When the shocking, hours-long savagery ended, eighty policemen were injured, one seriously, while “more than a dozen vehicles were destroyed” before order could be restored.
Martin Boll, a spokesman for Mannheim’s police, said he had never seen such violence in his 30 years of police service.
“The outbreak of violence by the attackers was enormous,” said Boll, who was described by German newspapers as “visibly shaken” by the events. “Hundreds, if not more than a thousand Kurdish assailants stormed towards the police and threw stones at officials.”
One German newspaper said policemen had to “throw themselves down behind vehicles” in order to avoid the pavement stones, glass bottles, bricks, barricades and even firecrackers that were being thrown at them.
It was estimated 40,000 people, of whom 2,500 were regarded as “violent or violence-prepared,” attended the twentieth holding of this annual “multicultural” event. Most of the previous 19 Kurdish festivals had been held in the German state of Rhineland-Westphalia. An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 Kurds live in Germany, but Kurds had travelled from all over Europe for this year’s festival in Mannheim.
The riot began when officials of a security firm contracted by the festival’s organizers asked two policemen for assistance with a 14-year-old Kurdish youth who was refusing to give up a flag he was carrying of the banned Kurdish terrorist group, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Apparently angry at the police intervention, about 100 young Kurds “suddenly attacked the two policemen from behind and kicked them in the back.” The violence escalated from there as more police and thugs were drawn in.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/obama%e2%80%99s-foreign-policy-fraud-has-come-undone/print/
The mass riots and attacks on embassies do not mark the moment when Obama’s foreign policy imploded. That happened a long time ago. What these attacks actually represent is the moment when the compliant media were no longer able to continue hiding that failure in bottom drawers and back pages.The media successfully covered for Obama’s retreat from Iraq, and the weekly Al Qaeda car bombings and rush to civil war no longer make the news. The media have also done their best to cover for Obama’s disaster in Afghanistan which has cost thousands of American lives while completely failing to defeat the Taliban.
Obama had hoped to cover up his defeat in Afghanistan by cutting a deal with the “moderate” Taliban, but the Taliban, moderate or extreme, refused to help him cover his ass. Attacks in Afghanistan have escalated, but the media have avoided challenging the bizarre assertions from the Obama campaign that the mission has been accomplished and Karzai will be ready to take over security in a few years.
And then the Islamists did something that the media just couldn’t ignore. They staged a series of attacks on American embassies and foreign targets beginning on September 11. These attacks, the most devastating and public of which took place on September 11, were accompanied by Islamist black flags and chants of, “We Are All Osama” in countries across North Africa and the Middle East.
The media have done their best to avoid dealing with the implications of Islamists carrying out a coordinated series of attacks on everything from foreign embassies to peacekeeping forces in the Sinai, by focusing on a Mohammed movie which the Egyptian Salafists exploited for propaganda purposes, rather than on the tactical support and level of coordination required to launch such a broad series of attacks and what the attacks and their scope say about the transformation of the conflict from stray attacks by terrorist groups to armed militias taking control of entire regions.
Rather than doing their job, the media seemed to be dividing their attention between reporting on the carnage without any context and putting out talking points to prevent Mitt Romney from taking political advantage of the disaster. The media’s accusations that Mitt Romney was politicizing the conflict were absurd, especially coming after the New York Times ran an editorial on September 11 attacking George W. Bush for not preventing the attacks of that day and after five years of Obama and his media allies politicizing every suicide bombing in Iraq.
While American embassies burned, the media were determined to go on doing what they had been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They had covered for Obama in three disastrous wars, one of which he had begun and which had exploded in the faces of staffers at the Benghazi consulate. And they are still covering for him, but the conflict has moved beyond the point where it can be relegated to the back pages of the daily papers.
Obama had hoped that the Islamists would see the advantage of allowing him to save face and give them another term of the same inept appeasement disguised as diplomatic soft power. Instead the Islamists seized on his weakness and trumpeted it to the world to humiliate him and the country that he had been temporarily placed in charge of.
