WarSclerotic

If it walks like a duck . . . – Blogs – Jerusalem Post.

Ira Sharkansky

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, but, he shows signs of a Wannabe.  

He emphasizes his middle name and his father’s origins when talking to Muslim audiences.

That’s not a sin, but an effort to establish identity. He’d be a lousy politician if he didn’t play that game.

However, he also contributes to the delusion of himself, and others with his frequent assertion that the war against terror is not about Islam.

He says, “They are not religious leaders; they are terrorists.”

No doubt that they are terrorists, but they are also religious leaders, capable of recruiting people and sending them into battle or suicide, with heroic expressions of Islamic history, doctrine, and eventual conquest of the world.

Obama labels ISIS “violent extremists,” and adopts the Muslim line that they have “perverted Islam.”

One has to be careful. We don’t know how many of the billion nominal Muslims are inclined to violence against those labeled as infidels or heretics, inclined to tolerate those who are violent, or likely to be pushed toward extremism by a frontal attack on Islam.

Notions of perverted or distorted doctrine might be applied to all who practice one or another variety of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. All rely on centuries of created and interpreted spiritual doctrine, much of it fuzzy, with passages that lend themselves in support of peace, war, socialism, capitalism, tolerance or hatred.

We don’t know how many of ISIS fighters or supporters are knowledgeable about the doctrines of Islam, or are attracted by the thrill of joining a crusade.

A counter crusade against Islam would not be wise, but neither is demanding that we put our heads in the sand.

The terrorism many of us would like to defeat comes from, has its support, and is arguably inherent in Islamic doctrines.

To be sure, there are other doctrines of Islam that oppose what the promoters of ISIS et al proclaim.

Insofar as virtually all of the terrorists now active are Muslims, it would appear best to follow the line of Egyptian President al-Sisi and enlist Islamic leaders to work against their violent co-religionists, who are making life uncomfortable for moderate or nominal Muslims who may be the large majority. al-Sisi is also doing as much as anyone in acting forcefully against Islamic violence. It’s not pretty, wouldn’t pass muster for being politically correct and showing appropriate concern for innocent civilians, but it may be more effective than Obama’s effort to combat ISIS from a distance, without boots on the ground, and seeking solution by pleading for increased individual opportunities..

The US President is doing his utmost to minimize involvement. He authorizes air strikes, and uses US troops to train the soldiers of Arab countries, perhaps on the soil of Turkey if that country agrees to join his coalition. Obama’s rhetoric might pass muster in a school debate, but it doesn’t ring out as world leadership.

“We have to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies that these terrorist groups use to incite people to violence . . . We need to find new ways to amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion, and we especially need to do it online.”

I have received two e-mails from Abraham Foxman, addressed to Dear Ira, headlined “We’ve got a seat at the table,” going on to say that

ADL was honored to present critical information to the Countering Violent Extremism Summit at the White House, a meeting convened by the President to develop an action plan to address the phenomenon of violent extremism here and overseas.”

The note closed with ADL’s conventional request for money to help the organization continue its good work in our behalf.

Can I refer to him as Abe, and bring to his attention that even the New York Times is doubtful?

“Despite the president’s call to arms, many of the leaders and officials attending the conference expressed doubt about the ability of the Obama administration to counter extremist messages, particularly from the Islamic State, which has a reach and agility in social media that far outstrips that of the American government.”

There is another head in the sand element in the current war against terror. It appears in efforts to avoid the nasty label of anti-Semitism.

There are historians who make the point that Jews fared better under Muslim rule than under Christianity. Maybe. It’s not an easy call. There were pogroms and campaigns to convert or die in the Middle East as well as in Europe.

There should be no doubt, however, that Muslims are now the leading advocates of anti-Semitism. Whether that is all the fault of Israel for existing and succeeding amidst Muslims is another quarrel without a clear winner.

As in failing to focus on Muslims and Islam as somehow responsible for the world’s problems, the failure to describe part of what they do as anti-Semitism gets in the way of appropriate measures.

White House and State Department efforts to describe murders in the Paris kosher market a “random shooting in a deli” deserve condemnation as approaching the sin of being oblivious to anti-Semitism.

No surprise that Jews and the New York Times are part of the problem. In response to the Copenhagen shootings, a lead paragraph on the international web site of that arguably Jewish newspaper

“A manhunt was underway after a gunman opened fire at an event featuring a cartoonist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, and another person was shot dead near a synagogue. The police, who said it was unclear if the shootings were linked.”

A later posting noted that one of the shootings occurred  “outside the city’s main synagogue  That article went on to emphasize the focus of Danish terror on those who insult Muhammad, with no mention of Jews.

Involved in the criticism of Obama and his aides in avoiding the issues of Islamic terror and anti-Semitism is the President’s concern–some would say obsession– more apparent than among other western leaders, to strike a deal with Iran. While Iran has sent troops against ISIS, the best explanation of that is Shiites fighting Sunnis. Iran also is a major source of finance and munitions for other Islamic terrorists, including Hezbollah, sometimes Hamas, and other Jihadists, frequently proclaims its enmity toward Israel, and is seen as a threat by other US allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Would a frontal campaign against Islamic anti-Semitism complicate the war against terror?

The avoidance of the Jewish issue recalls the concern of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to avoid describing his war as something for the sake of Jews. That came along with limitations on granting visas to Jews fleeing Europe, and a refusal to bomb the railroads that brought Jews to the death camps.

The point is not to join the distortion that claims that FDR was anti-Semitic. That’s best left to fear mongers. In his time, the prospect of linking isolationism with anti-Semitism was a serious concern. Its present equivalent appears among Jews and others who may think that too much publicity about the Jewish issue would make things worse.

With violent Islam out of the bag and making its mess across the Middle East and down into Africa, the rest of us may be in for a long struggle. It’s not only with a concern for truth, honesty, and candor that we should call the duck by its proper name. It should also aid the pursuit of cooperation with moderate Muslim leaders if we define clearly our mutual problem.

It is clear from the statistics that Muslims suffer more than others from Islamic violence. Despite efforts to avoid ethnic profiling or discrimination, one can guess that Muslims also pay a cost in limited opportunities.

Sweeping dirt under the rug is never a good way to clean house. It shouldn’t be hard to make the case that the best way to deal with a problem is to recognize its existence.

The point should not be persuading Muslims that the problem is not Islam, but persuading Muslim leaders to deal with the problems of Islam from inside.

Terror Apologist Named to Federal Anti-Terror Post

February 20, 2015 by Matthew Vadum

via Terror Apologist Named to Federal Anti-Terror Post | FrontPage Magazine.

Anybody who have still doubts ?

President Obama is appointing an openly terrorist-sympathizing Muslim to head a government office dedicated to countering Islamic State propaganda.

In April, Rashad Hussain will take over as director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a small office within the U.S. Department of State that Obama plans to make bigger. A new component called the Information Coordination Cell will be added to the expanded center and will reportedly be staffed by intelligence analysts. It will have a staff of around 80 people and will coordinate with other government agencies.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told the New York Times.

The head-chopping barbarians of the Islamic State will no doubt cower in fear because the U.S. government has, as the newspaper notes, “more than 350 State Department Twitter accounts, combining embassies, consulates, media hubs, bureaus and individuals, as well as similar accounts operated by the Pentagon, the Homeland Security Department and foreign allies.”

Hussain is reportedly a devout Muslim who maintains close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in the U.S.

He has been spewing radical Islamic propaganda for years.

As a law student at Yale University in 2004, Hussain whined that the prosecution of University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian was a “politically motivated persecution” calculated “to squash dissent.” The academic was recently deported and he entered guilty pleas regarding his activities as a leader of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

And al-Arian was forcibly removed from the United States for good reason. He supports suicide-bombing and chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” After two jihadist suicide bombers murdered 18 people in Israel in 1995, al-Arian referred to the decedents as “two mujahidin martyred for the sake of God.”

Robert Spencer reports that the pro-jihadist Washington Report on Middle East Affairs published Hussain’s remarks in November 2004. Since then the publication scrubbed Hussain’s quotation from the article that contained it.

WRMEA news editor and executive director Delinda Hanley “denied there was a ‘cover-up,’ and implied that anti-Muslim discrimination was behind the fact this was now being raised,” CNS News reports.

Hussain’s pro-terrorist activities have continued since he left college.

In a 2008 paper for the Brookings Institution Hussain argued that language that links Muslim terrorism to Islam itself should be avoided.

“Policymakers should reject the use of language that provides a religious legitimization of terrorism such as ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremist,’” he wrote. “They should replace such terminology with more specific and descriptive terms such as ‘Al-Qaeda terrorism.’”

This is, of course, exactly what the Obama administration did upon coming into power the next year. Even today Obama argues strenuously that the U.S. is in conflict only with specific terrorist groups and not with the Muslim world as a whole.

In the same paper Hussain urged the U.S. to “welcome and encourage the further development of mainstream Muslim organizations and moderate institutions.” He specifically referenced the work of the Fiqh Council of North America, which is linked to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.

Hussain has also written that, “The primary cause of broad-based anger and anti-Americanism is not a clash of civilizations but the perceived effect of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.”

This is, of course, the standard left-wing rationalization for Islamic aggression against the United States. It ignores the pattern of violent expansionism that has characterized Islam since the days of its founding prophet. It also ignores the fact that Islam, which is the Arabic word for submission, does not believe in the marketplace of ideas. Islam does not recognize separation of church and state. Its purpose from its creation has always been to conquer and eliminate all other religions. It must dominate.

President Obama, who nowadays makes no secret of his sympathy for Islamic terrorists, picked the right man to carry out his policies. Hussain has already been working for the Obama administration for five years.

In February 2010 Obama appointed Hussain as his ambassador to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (previously known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference).

Spencer describes the OIC as “the thuggish international organization that is engaged in a full-scale campaign to intimidate Western governments into adopting hate speech codes that will effectively quash criticism of Islam – including jihad violence perpetrated in its name.” OIC has long been pushing the myth that there is such a thing as “Islamophobia.”

Obama gushed over Hussain when he first appointed him to an administration post.

“I’m proud to announce today that I am appointing my Special Envoy to the OIC—Rashad Hussain. As an accomplished lawyer and a close and trusted member of my White House staff, Rashad has played a key role in developing the partnerships I called for in Cairo [in 2009],” Obama said at the time.

“And as a hafiz of the Qur’an, he is a respected member of the American Muslim community, and I thank him for carrying forward this important work.” (Hafiz is Arabic for “guardian” and refers to a man who has memorized all of the Koran.)

Of course, Hussain was a natural fit for the OIC, which itself is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. It consists of 56 member states plus the Palestinian Authority and aspires to impose shariah law on the entire world. It seeks to reestablish the Islamic Caliphate.

Now that Obama is safely reelected and the final off-year congressional election of his presidency is completed, he doesn’t care about appearances anymore.

Obama doesn’t feel the need for the careful, studied, Alinskyite deception that marked his first six years in the highest office in the land. Now he is free at long last to be Obama and to let his Chicagoland, red-diaper baby, freak flag fly. His despotic power is essentially unchallenged.

Since he left Fox News, Glenn Beck no longer has the power to make the White House damage-control team jump. Inconvenient old-time journalists like Sharyl Attkisson who insist on holding power accountable have been easily ousted from their positions. Most of the rest of the media remains in awe of Obama and continues its slavish advocacy of his catastrophic agenda. There is no real opposition to his policies in Congress even though both chambers are, at least in theory, controlled by his political adversaries. Between extravagant vacations and golf trips, Obama keeps taking in money from big donors on Wall Street and elsewhere even though it’s not exactly clear what he’s going to spend it on.

In short, now more than ever Obama doesn’t care what you or anyone else thinks.

This helps to explain why he nominated Loretta Lynch, a female carbon copy of Attorney General Eric Holder, as his replacement. This helps to explain the lawless executive amnesty he unveiled weeks after his Democratic Party received a historic whooping in congressional elections. And this helps to explain why this week he characterized mass-murdering Islamic terrorists as victims who have “legitimate grievances.”

He just doesn’t care.

And if it bothers you that he is appointing terror apologist Rashad Hussain to a key post in the war against Islamic totalitarians, well, tough beans for you.

SHOCKING: Hundreds Attend Funeral For Islamic Terrorist, Post For Pictures, Pay ‘Respects’
By Robert Gehl, February 21, 2015 Via Downtrend dot Com

(If you see any moderate Muslims in these pictures please let me know. Take your time. – LS)

At least 500 people showed up yesterday for the burial of an Islamic terrorist who murdered two people in a bloody rampage in Denmark.

The Daily Mail is reporting that many of these attendees were dressed in black and had their faces covered. They followed the hearse as it made its way through the streets:

Respectfully carried the coffin to the burial site.

And when the building where they had the ceremony was too crowded, they respectfully lined up outside and prayed.

They did this for a Islamic terrorist who killed two people. They posed next to the grave taking pictures.

The group that owns the cemetery – the Islamic Burial Fund – almost denied the request by the terrorists parents to have their son buried there – because he was a terrorist – but relented.

How much support is there for violent Islamic terrorists attacks against innocents in Europe? I’d start by asking the 500 men who showed up to pray and pay respects for this killer.

PHOTOS: Getty /AP/ Demotix / Daily Mail

News from The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In what is becoming an increasingly nasty grudge match, the White House is mulling ways to undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington and blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.

There are limits. Administration officials have discarded the idea of President Barack Obama himself giving an Iran-related address to rebut the two speeches Netanyahu is to deliver during his early March visit. But other options remain on the table.

Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.

The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.

Vice President Joe Biden will be away, his absence behind Netanyahu conspicuous in coverage of the speech to Congress. Other options were described by officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

Netanyahu’s plan for a March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress has further strained already tense ties between the U.S. and Israel. Congressional Republicans orchestrated Netanyahu’s visit without consulting the White House or State Department, a move the Obama administration blasted as a break in diplomatic protocol. Some Democratic lawmakers say they will boycott the speech.

U.S. officials believe Netanyahu’s trip to Washington is aimed primarily at derailing a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama’s signature foreign policy objective. While Netanyahu has long been skeptical of the negotiations, his opposition has increased over what he sees as Obama’s willingness to make concessions that would leave Iran on the brink of being able to build a nuclear weapon. His opposition has intensified as negotiations go into overdrive with an end-of-March deadline for a framework deal.

“I think this is a bad agreement that is dangerous for the state of Israel, and not just for it,” Netanyahu said Thursday.

The difference of opinion over the deal has become unusually rancorous.

The White House and State Department have both publicly accused Israeli officials of leaking “cherry-picked” details of the negotiations to try to discredit the administration. And, in extraordinary admissions this week, the administration acknowledged that the U.S. is withholding sensitive details of the talks from Israel, its main Middle East ally, to prevent such leaks.

The rebukes have only emboldened the leader of Israel, whose country Iran has threatened to annihilate. He has a double-barrel attack on the Iran talks ready for when he arrives in Washington. Not only will he address Congress, he will also deliver similar remarks at the AIPAC conference, an event to which administrations past and present have traditionally sent top foreign policy officials.

But maybe not this year.

An AIPAC official said Friday that the group has not yet received any reply to its invitation for senior administration figures to attend the meeting that starts March 1. The official stressed that last-minute RSVPs are not unusual, but the White House has been signaling for some time that a Cabinet-level guest may not coming.

Instead, the administration is toying with the idea of sending newly installed Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken to speak to the conference, according to officials familiar with internal discussions on the matter. But it’s possible Treasury Secretary Jack Lew could attend.

Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, who have both previously addressed AIPAC, will be out of the country on foreign travel that appears to have been arranged to make them unavailable to speak. Biden will be visiting Uruguay and Guatemala on a trip that was announced after Netanyahu’s speech was scheduled, while the State Department announced abruptly this week that Kerry will be traveling to as-yet-determined destinations for the duration of the AIPAC conference.

Obama spoke to AIPAC in 2012, while he was in the midst of his re-election campaign.