http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1854/cheap_date_with_bill_clinton Interesting to wake up this morning and find that Groupon customers can save £103.00 to see former U.S. President Bill Clinton give a Keynote speech at the London’s Excel Entrepreneurs Conference 2012. The 86 percent discounted deal can be bought over the next two days. So far over 650 people have bought the deal […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1861/baroness_ashton_steering_eu_towards_blasphemy_laws_ n the aftermath of the demonstrations, riots, and killings in Islamic countries following the publication of the on-line video-clip portraying Muhammad as a violent, lascivious, cruel, and somewhat stupid individual – inflamed by the Islamists who promoted the video themselves – the EU has decided to step into the fray. This was ineptly done […]
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/18/the-candy-crowley-tipping-poin
CNN debate moderator becomes to the media what the Tet Offensive was to Vietnam: Did she elect Mitt Romney?
She got it wrong. She interfered. She took a side.
Candy Crowley may finally have done something else as well: so visibly tipping the scales of media bias that the end result makes Mitt Romney the next president.
Taken all together, CNN’s Candy Crowley, in her zeal to intrude on the presidential debate and save President Obama from himself, may just have provided the televised moment that finally sparks a revolt against the four years of fawning coverage of President Obama.
Becoming to the liberal media what the Tet Offensive was to Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War.
For four years the mainstream media has done everything in its power to portray Barack Obama as the Second Coming, the messiah, or, in the immortal words of one-time Newsweek honcho Evan Thomas, “God.” Chris Matthews described thrills down his leg. Katie Couric purred in a sycophantic Obama interview with hard hitting questions like this:
You’re so confident Mr. President, and so focused. Is your confidence ever shaken? Do you ever wake up and say “damn, this is hard”?
Tuesday night Candy Crowley became the latest — and perhaps the most important — example of what Fox’s Bernard Goldberg called in his book title A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.
http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/7196 “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” – Preamble […]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19992267
The head of Saudi Arabia’s religious police has said there is a pressing need to employ more women in the force.
Speaking to the official Saudi Gazette newspaper, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said he hoped a recruitment drive would take place soon.
Saudi’s religious police enforce the kingdom’s strict Islamic laws, including dress and prayer times.
Correspondents say the introduction of women could be a sign of the king’s cautiously reformist agenda.
Earlier this month, Mr Sheikh announced that he would curb the powers of the religious police, known as the “mutawa”.
He himself was appointed in January to deal with growing public anger about excessive behaviour by the force.
Recently, a mobile phone clip of a religious policeman ordering a young woman to leave a mall because of her make-up went viral on the internet.
There is no indication that the introduction of women into the religious police would necessarily make the rules any less strict, but it would boost the presence of women in public life.
The sanctioned duties of the mutawa, officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, include preventing women driving, enforcing modest dress codes, policing bans on public entertainment and making sure all businesses close for prayers five times a day.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/330778
Almost everything we have been told about Libya over the last two years is untrue.
A free Libya was supposed to be proof of President Obama’s enlightened “reset” Middle East policy. When insurgency broke out there, the United States joined France and Great Britain in bombing Moammar Qaddafi out of power — and supposedly empowering a democratic Arab Spring regime. Not a single American life was lost.
Libyans, like most in the Arab world, were supposed to appreciate the new, enlightened American foreign policy. Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech had praised Islam and apologized for the West. A new “lead from behind” multilateralism was said to have superseded George W. Bush’s neo-imperialist interventions of the past.
Obama’s mixed racial identity and his father’s Muslim heritage would also win over the hearts and minds of Libyans after the Qaddafi nightmare. During this summer’s Democratic convention, Obama supporters trumpeted the successes of his Middle East policy: Osama bin Laden dead, al-Qaeda defanged, and Arab Spring reformers in place of dictators.
To keep that shining message viable until the November election, the Obama administration and the media had been willing to overlook or mischaracterize all sorts of disturbing events. We had asked for a United Nations resolution for humanitarian aid and a no-fly zone to intervene in Libya, but then deliberately exceeded it by bombing Qaddafi’s forces — after bypassing the U.S. Congress in favor of a go-ahead from the Arab League.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-when-four-americans-get-killed-its-not-optimal/article/2511149#.UIB1jWMj7XF
President Obama, during the taping of The Daily Show, discussed the Benghazi terrorist attack that claimed the lives of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
“Here’s what I’ll say. When four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal. We’re going to fix it,” Obama said per pool. “The government is a big operation and [at] any given time something screws up,” he also said, saying that he believes “you find out what’s broken and you fix it.”
The president was responding to this question from Stewart. “Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within,” the comedian asked according to the pooler. “Because I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as all of us being on the same page” (emphasis added).
Obama promised that his administration publicized information about the Benghazi attack as quickly as it came in, which contradicts previous reports.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3405/missile-defense Other parallel developments should also raise serious concerns for America and our allies, including China’s expanding its missile production beyond previous Western estimates. The major argument against taking preemptive military action against Iran is the fear that Tehran’s retaliatory capability will engulf the Middle East and other regions in serious violence and turmoil, throwing […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3404/anti-semitism-france-sweden In France and Sweden – and in the UN – authorities fail to acknowledge that Europe’s Jewish communities are under attack by Muslims who have formed insular, radical and often criminal enclaves. They are attacked NOT because of what they do or do not do; NOT because of what Israel does or does not […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/18/its-not-just-obamas-lies-its-the-premise-of-obamas-lies/
With CNN’s Candy Crowley shamelessly throwing President Obama a Libya life-preserver at Tuesday night’s debate, the so-called Mohammed video is back in the news. That ought to offend sensible people – and not just because the president, aided and abetted by Ms. Crowley, is lying when he now claims, despite weeks of denials, to have regarded the Benghazi massacre from the first as a pre-planned terrorist attack.
For weeks, Obama and his minions attempted to hoodwink the country into believing that the murders of our ambassador and three other Americans were triggered by when Muslim protests over a “movie” virtually no one has seen spontaneously erupted into rioting. In fact, these Americans were killed precisely because Obama’s high-priority policy of embracing Islamists, in Libya and elsewhere, has empowered al Qaeda and other Muslim militants. The policy’s current implosion, in the presidential campaign’s final days, has made a mockery of Obama’s pretensions about having decimated al Qaeda – the only part of his record that the president thought it was safe to run on.
The video was the heart of the administration’s initial lie and subsequent cover-up. The assertion that it caused the latest atrocity was always untenable. Now that this causation claim has been blown out of the water, you might think that the video’s relevance has been destroyed along with it. But in a significant way, it has not.
Obama’s emphasis on the video as causation was so demonstratively false that detractors have focused myopically on the lying. This serves short-term political objectives: a president who richly deserves to lose is reeling with the election just 19 days away.
Nevertheless, long-term societal needs are being disserved. Focus on the administration’s serial lies has left unrefuted the obnoxious premise of these lies. It is as though we have conceded that, if the movie had actually triggered protests that led to violence (as Islamist protests are wont to do), responsibility for that violence would lie with the filmmakers. The culprit would be our culture of liberty and reason, not the anti-democratic culture of the Muslim Middle East. That is dangerous nonsense.
Constitutionally protected speech can never be legitimized as a cause of violence. Period.
The administration has attempted to walk a disgraceful line on this. First, it has worked closely with Islamist governments for four years, endeavoring to carve out of the First Amendment’s carapace the protection of speech that criticizes Islam. Clearly aware that this is a rogue effort, Obama and his minions further suggest that the Constitution limits only what laws government may enact, not any extra-legal methods – what Secretary of State Clinton euphemistically calls, “shaming” – by which government pursues ends the Constitution forbids.
We see this raw, bullying power in the speeches and nauseating Pakistani-television commercials Obama and Clinton produced to reprove the video at taxpayer expense. These fundamentally betray the federal government’s principal duty to safeguard American liberties against foreign threats. We also see it in the Kafkaesque prosecution and detention of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, alleged producer of the video, on a mere probation violation. “Violations of supervised release,” as they are called in the biz, are numbingly routine. Convicts are rarely re-imprisoned over them absent a truly severe infraction. And even when such infractions occur, there is almost never any rush to adjudicate them – generally, the probationer is given a summons with notice to appear in court on his own recognizance with counsel; he is not arrested in his home by armed police in the middle of the night, as Nakoula was, as if he were a terrorist or a drug lord. That is not responsible law-enforcement; it is abuse of power.
Finally, while the administration winks at the Muslim Brotherhood and prostrates itself before Islamist audiences, Obama lamely claims that his detractors are wrong: No, he maintains, he is not really saying that speech critical of Islam justifies violence; just that such speech is wrong and somehow blameworthy. But while there is never a whisper of complaint about the savagery of Islamists who kill – who brazenly declare the right to kill – over trivial slights, the president spares no indignant syllable in condemning free expression. The contrast is stark. Its inevitable effect is to immunize the marauders. This only intensifies the danger to Nakoula (whose movie no one would ever have heard of absent Obama’s promotional campaign) and to Americans who lawfully grapple with a threat over which the administration prefers to slobber – the ideology, rooted in Islamic scripture, that has led to the killings of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of people (many of them Muslims) worldwide.
Put aside, if you can, the administration’s banana-republic repression tactics. To accept the premise that a video, rather than the malevolent culture of Islamic supremacism, could possibly have caused the murderous attacks in Benghazi is not only to accept sharia’s suffocating blasphemy standards. It is to instill in our culture classical sharia’s noxious caste system, in which Muslims, and only Muslims, are licensed to respond violently to criticism of their beliefs and icons. It is to eviscerate our constitutional commitment to equal protection under the law.
The last point would be bad enough – in fact, intolerable – even if Islam were only a religion. In that case, we would “only” be excusing violent reactions to negative speech about Islamic spiritual principles – the kind of speech all other religious believers are expected to abide without forcible protest. But, as I explain in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, the predominant Islam of the Middle East aspires to be far more than a religion.
That form of Islam, Islamic supremacism (or what we call “Islamist” ideology), is a thoroughgoing societal system. It dictates behavior in every aspect of life, including economics, finance, military combat, crime and punishment, legal evidence, social relations, hygiene – in short, the plethora of affairs that, in the West, are consigned to the judgment of the body politic, outside the control of any creed. Obama’s “no criticism of Islam” standard would thus render unfit for public discussion not only religious tenets but innumerable matters of great public importance. Naturally, the most urgent of these involve national defense because Islamist ideology fuels the terrorist threat. But it is not just our security that is at stake; it is our capacity to maintain the free-flow of ideas a self-governing people must have in order to flourish.
There is nothing new about crass provocation being passed off as art. What is new, and perilous, is the notion that it has become government’s place to condemn free expression – based not on community standards of decency but on the political tastes of government officials. Government’s only proper role is to protect the right to provoke. When government’s coercive power is put in the service of the heckler’s veto, when it becomes the “ad hoc nullification machine” by which corrupt officials smother constitutional protections that inconvenience their cronies, then that government is no longer legitimate.
It is not enough to reject Obama’s lies. It is essential to reject the premise of his lies. In our society, we get to say unkind things about icons, just as we get to speak vigorously in their defense. It is for us, the sovereign people, to weigh the merits of these competing claims, without government’s meddling thumb on the scale. That is a big part of what makes Western civilization civilized.
