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Hashtag for Paris: #LET’SJUSTCAPITULATE

November 19, 2015

Hashtag for Paris: #LET’SJUSTCAPITULATE, Front Page Magazine, Tibor Krausz, November 19, 2015

nov.-13-paris-attacks-memorial

Within hours of the slaughter came the usual fatuous memes. The peace sign with an Eiffel Tower in it. The French tricolor superimposed over Facebook profile images. The #prayforparis hashtag on Twitter. If fervent emoting was a viable anti-terrorism strategy, we would have Islamic terrorists on the run in nothing flat. As matters stand, however, the West is facing a massive civilizational challenge from radical Islam, which has been waging a global war on free societies for decades. And not only are most Europeans out of their depth intellectually about this threat; they seem both unable and unwilling to defend themselves from it in any meaningful manner. Most of them can’t even bring themselves to name the threat (radical Islam, which has gone mainstream globally) — as if doing so would unleash some sinister, occult force that would instantly destroy all the comforting illusions of the modern West’s collectivist religions: political correctness and multiculturalism. Then again, you also get labeled a racist instantly for doing so: those comforting illusions must be enforced at all cost.  

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No sooner did Islamic militants massacre 132 concertgoers, partygoers, pedestrians and coffeehouse patrons in Paris last week than the world jumped collectively to its feet. “The world stands with Paris,” the Bloomberg news agency declared. “World stands by France,” USA Today stressed. “The world stands with France,” The Australian insisted. “World stands behind France,” The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong explained. “World stands in solidarity with Paris,” The National in Abu Dhabi, News World in India and CCTV Africa in Kenya all concurred.

Good to know. But we might as well sit down now. It’s not as if “the world” was going to do anything anyhow beyond just standing there and trotting out the usual platitudes that have become routine in the wake of daily atrocities by Islamic terrorists over the past weeks, months and years, from Kenya to Canada and from Thailand to Tunisia. And so there the world was, standing with Paris and by France, posting faux-lachrymose status updates on social media, projecting the colors of France’s national flag onto cultural landmarks, and attending candlelight vigils where someone inevitably led a soulful sing-along to John Lennon’s “Image” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

And the world had barely just started. Within hours of the slaughter came the usual fatuous memes. The peace sign with an Eiffel Tower in it. The French tricolor superimposed over Facebook profile images. The #prayforparis hashtag on Twitter. If fervent emoting was a viable anti-terrorism strategy, we would have Islamic terrorists on the run in nothing flat. As matters stand, however, the West is facing a massive civilizational challenge from radical Islam, which has been waging a global war on free societies for decades. And not only are most Europeans out of their depth intellectually about this threat; they seem both unable and unwilling to defend themselves from it in any meaningful manner. Most of them can’t even bring themselves to name the threat (radical Islam, which has gone mainstream globally) — as if doing so would unleash some sinister, occult force that would instantly destroy all the comforting illusions of the modern West’s collectivist religions: political correctness and multiculturalism. Then again, you also get labeled a racist instantly for doing so: those comforting illusions must be enforced at all cost.

In a video that has gone instantly viral on social media, a father and his young son are being interviewed, in French, by a television reporter at a memorial in Paris to the victims of the attacks. With people laying flowers and lighting candles in the background, the reporter asks the boy, who is around five, if he knows what happened. Yes, the boy answers, some bad people killed others. Why? “Because they’re very, very evil,” he explains solemnly. “They are not very nice. They are bad guys. You have to be very careful [with them]… They have guns and they can shoot us.” The father gently interrupts him. “Yes, but we have flowers,” he tells his son. “Look, everyone is laying flowers. That’s the way to fight guns.” The boy remains unconvinced. “But flowers don’t do anything,” he explains. But the father remains persistent. We need flowers and candles to fight evil, he reassures his son until the boy relents.

In other words, the young boy instinctively understood the world better than the adults around him. But we can’t have that, can we, so he, too, was cajoled into seeing things through the rose-tinted illusions of insipid banalities. Many Europeans’ solution to the ever-present threat of murderous Islamic fanaticism is to pretend that the only way to combat it is to bring flowers to a gun fight. If you can’t beat them, try to hug them. (Their suicide belts might get in the way, though.)

If we needed any more confirmation, the general reactions to the Paris attacks have provided it: Today’s Western European societies are in an advanced state of civilizational decline. Rather than rouse themselves from their stupor and face down the Islamic threat as earlier generations would doubtless have done, the continent’s policymakers and citizens alike prefer to look the other way and carry on insisting that all we need to do is to try and get along. If that takes curtailing our freedoms, giving in to yet more demands from Islamic radicals, and abjectly apologizing constantly for our forebears’ misdeeds in centuries past as if modern Europeans were collectively responsible for the Crusades, so be it. At the same time, the very idea of expecting “moderate” Muslims to take a robust public stance against the endless blood-soaked crimes their coreligionists commit is reflexively dismissed as intolerably racist. That is to say, intellectual coherence isn’t much of a virtue these days.

“France is at war,” French President Francois Hollande declared after the November 13 attacks in Paris, which featured militants from an enviably “multicultural” tableau that politically correct Europeans can be proud of: native-born Belgians, French nationals, recently arrived Syrian “refugees.” Hollande promised a “ruthless” response. Needless to say, his ephemeral impersonation of Charles de Gaulle didn’t last. “We are not committed to a war of civilizations because these assassins don’t represent any civilization,” he waffled. “We are in a war against terrorism, jihadism, which threatens the whole world.” In other words, what France is up against is the nebulous concept of “jihadism,” which is unrelated to any creed or culture or community.

But let’s not blame Monsieur Hollande for his weak-kneed obscurantism. It’s the default position of Western politicians and “intellectuals.” President Barack Obama has likewise opined that the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, “no more represent[s] Islam than any madman who kills in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism.” Leaving aside the logical fallacy in that garbled statement (are we to believe that any madman who kills in the name of those other faiths represents Islam just as much as the Islamic State?), what to make of his follow-up insight? “No religion is responsible for terrorism,” Obama added. “People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

So long, common sense. Goodbye, logic. Farewell, reason.

France will retaliate by bombing ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq while simultaneously rounding up scores of Islamic militants on French soil. It will also boost security at popular venues at great cost to taxpayers. What France and most other European nations won’t do is even try and tackle the real root cause of the problem, which is an extensive homegrown infrastructure of Islamic radicalism. Schools and mosques will continue to indoctrinate impressionable young Muslims with a hatred of their host societies on the trumped-up charge that the West is waging a collective war of extermination against innocent Muslims worldwide. More Europeans will continue to die in brutal terror attacks as a result.

Even as France and other nations cut off one head of the hydra of Islamic radicalism by eliminating a militant cell or two, other ones will spawn instantly in their place. France prohibits polls based on the religious beliefs of respondents, but according to solid evidence at least 15 percent of French Muslims identify with the ideology and goals of the Islamic State. In nearby Britain a quarter of young Muslims said they approved of the Islamic terrorists who murdered almost the entire editorial staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January. Such figures translate into millions of young Muslims, providing Islamic terrorists with a potentially limitless pool of new recruits.

The West is light-years ahead of the Muslim world when it comes to technological, industrial and military might, but it lacks the essential ingredient of long-term success: staunch belief in the justness of its cause and the superiority of its values. What’s the use of pounding away at targets thousands of miles away, in Syria and Iraq, when back home we’ve already capitulated?

Categories: Fairy tales, France, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic supremacy, Paris Muslim attack, Radical Islam
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Know Comment: American-Iranian fairy tales

July 31, 2015

Know Comment: American-Iranian fairy tales, Jerusalem Post, David M. Weinberg, July 30, 2015

ShowImage (4)iran. (photo credit:REUTERS)

An updated list of the fictions peddled by the Obama administration in support of its pact with Iran.

Here is an updated scorecard of the misrepresentations advanced by the Obama administration in defense of its concordat with Iran. The list grows every day.

1. Iran will be motivated to keep the agreement.

False. Iran already may be plotting its escape from the agreement. Dr. Emily Landau of the Institute for National Security Studies points out that Iran has twice bolted – in 2004 and again in 2005 – when it felt that the agreements it concluded with the EU-3 were no longer serving its interests.

Lo and behold, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has an explicit defection clause, which allows Tehran to exit the deal without any deliberations or warning if it feels that any of the P5+1 countries is reintroducing any form or degree of sanction against Iran.

So, Iran will pocket hundreds of billions of dollars in (almost-immediate and unconditional) sanctions relief, then sign hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and business partnership deals with the major French and German companies that are now in on the gold rush to Iran. Then it can accuse Congress or the next US president of being nasty and use that as the pretext for its “nuclear snapback.”

2. In case of Iranian violations, America can “snapback” sanctions.

The opposite is true. The agreement intentionally embeds the US in a web of time-consuming and complex multilateral processes that place significant and perhaps insuperable obstacles to both a snapback of economic sanctions and resort to an American military strike. Prof. Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland has detailed how the deal places sky-high barriers in the way of American enforcement in the event of Iranian violations.

Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has shown that the nitty-gritty of the so-called sanction snapback provisions actually provide disincentives for the US and its partners to confront Iran in the event that Iran does cheat (which it has a long record of doing, and has done even during the recent nuclear talks). Moreover, Iran is supposed to get Western help and technology for defense against nuclear sabotage. So the US is essentially deterring itself from ever acting against Iran, no matter what. Which apparently is exactly what President Obama was after.

3. The deal will moderate or contain Iran’s aggressive ambitions in the Middle East.

Not at all. The nuclear deal seems to be just the first act in a longer drama of American retreat, retrenchment and accommodation as Obama hands the keys to the Persian Gulf and beyond to his new Shia friends.

Obama says that he “hopes” that “we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave.” But, he adds, “We’re not counting on it. So this deal is not contingent on Iran changing its behavior.”

What a damning self-indictment. Is it believable that “conversations” are going to change or contain Iran? What is really needed, instead, says Prof. Walter Russell Mead of the New America Foundation, is a tough regional strategy to counter Iran’s rush for hegemony; an aggressive, anti- IRGC, anti-Assad, anti-Hezbollah policy.

But the White House never intended to contain Iran, says Dr. Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute. It has consistently displayed an aversion to countering Iran. America’s allies in the Middle East (and this list of allies supposedly still includes Israel) “have time and again begged the president to help them curtail Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and time and again Obama has refused.”

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies expands on this in an-depth study published on Thursday.

Under cover of this accord, Iran is likely to greatly strengthen its grip on the Middle East, he writes. It will solidify its control of Yemen, including developing the capacity to block the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea and thus threaten global trade and the Suez Canal, Egypt’s lifeline. It will take complete control of Lebanon.

With the help of other countries (perhaps even including the US) it will “save” the region by fighting ISIS, to become the true ruler of Iraq and of what would remain of Alawite Syria. Hezbollah will be given thousands of precise missiles, while enjoying Iranian backing and silent American approval.

Amidror: “There is little chance that America will follow through on its promise that after signing the agreement it will be more determined in its efforts to contain Iran. This claim is unrealistic and illogical, since once a rival state becomes a partner to an agreement, one does not increase efforts taken against it in other realms. It is the nature of agreements that cover a certain area of relations that they prevent pressure being applied in other areas, rather than increasing pressure. No one in the West will now be interested in jeopardizing either the agreement or trade relations with Iran. It is therefore likely that, despite the messages of reassurance coming from Washington, Iran will become much stronger over the next 15 years, internally, regionally, economically and militarily, with no opposition from the US.”

4. There was no better deal, and the alternative to this deal is war.

Both assertions are absolutely fallacious. More coercive diplomacy could have delivered a better deal. However, Obama refused to put maximum pressure on Iran. He was not willing to impose additional sanctions on Iran (as Prime Minister Netanyahu suggested and Congress wanted), or to threaten the use of military force. When you are in talks with a genocidal, terrorism-sponsoring regime and claim that you have no viable military option, you are not negotiating.

You are begging.

Prof. Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute points out that there is a historical precedent for tougher diplomacy that works. The US Senate refused to ratify SALT II, ending the SALT process, but war between the US and the Soviet Union did not ensue. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan instead increased the pressure on the Soviet Union dramatically. The lesson is that walking away from bad deals does not inevitably lead either to war or to the end of negotiations.

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Fairy tales, Foreign policy, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Kerry, Khamenei, Lies, Middle East, Obama, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, P5+1
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Abbas Paving the Way to Turn West Bank into an Islamist State

March 20, 2015

Abbas Paving the Way to Turn West Bank into an Islamist State
by Khaled Abu Toameh March 20, 2015 at 5:00 am Via The Gatestone Institute


(Abbas is playing a dangerous game with his own security…as usual. – LS)

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership in the West Bank are once again threatening to halt security coordination with Israel — this time in protest over the victory of Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party in Israel’s March 17 general elections.

The latest threat was made during a meeting of PLO leaders, headed by Abbas in Ramallah, to discuss the outcome of the Israeli elections.

At the meeting, the PLO leaders decided to ask the commanders of the PA security forces in the West Bank to come up with a “detailed plan” to stop security coordination with Israel.

Halting security coordination with Israel means that Abbas and the PLO would be paving the way for Hamas to extend its control from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. With that, the Palestinians would have another Islamist state that seeks to eliminate Israel.

Abbas and the PLO leadership are, in effect, saying: “We don’t like the results of the elections and that is why we are going to facilitate a Hamas takeover of the West Bank.”

It is only the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel that has thus far foiled Hamas’s plans to stage a coup against Abbas’s regime in the West Bank.

Were it not for this coordination, Abbas would have been removed from power several years ago — as was the case in 2007, when Hamas drove him and his PA out of the Gaza Strip. Even senior Palestinian officials acknowledge that Abbas would not survive in power without security coordination with Israel.

But now, Abbas and the PLO have decided to respond to the victory of Netanyahu by not only cutting off security coordination, but also intensifying their efforts to isolate and delegitimize Israel in the international community.

Abbas and the PLO have also decided to engage in a “comprehensive dialogue” with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in response to the victory of Netanyahu. These two radical groups seek to destroy Israel and are opposed to any peace process in the Middle East.

In other words, Abbas has decided to join forces with the enemies of peace, simply because he does not like the results of the Israeli elections.

Abbas’s decision to reach out to Hamas and Islamic Jihad means that he sees these two organizations as legitimate players in the Palestinian arena and partners in a future Palestinian state. This is the same Abbas who has been warning over the past few years of Hamas’s repeated attempts to stage a coup against him in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority initially responded to the results of the elections by threatening to pursue its efforts with the International Criminal Court to file “war crimes” charges against Israel. Now the PA and PLO leaders have gone a step further, by threatening to cut off security and economic ties with Israel.

These threats are primarily aimed at scaring the international community into providing the PA with more financial and political support. Moreover, these threats are designed to rally the world against Israel, so that it would be forced to submit to Abbas’s demands and withdraw to the pre-1967 lines.

Abbas has chosen to align himself with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, thus facilitating these two organizations’ dream of taking over the West Bank. This alliance could also result in renewed terrorist attacks against Israel, because Hamas and Islamic Jihad will interpret Abbas’s anti-Israel moves and rhetoric as a green light for such actions.

Abbas’s rapprochement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad will only confirm the fears of many Israelis that the West Bank will fall into the hands of Islamists once Israel withdraws from that area.

However, Abbas’s decision to wage a diplomatic and political campaign against Israel in the international arena is not going to bring Palestinians closer to achieving their aspirations.

Abbas and the international community — especially the U.S. Administration — are ignoring the fact that the Palestinians already have two separate mini-states, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The two-state solution was born the day Hamas kicked Abbas out of the Gaza Strip and turned it into an Islamist emirate. In the end, the Palestinians got two states that are even at war with each other.

Now, by joining forces with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Abbas is paving the way for turning the West Bank into another Islamist state.

Categories: Abbas, Fairy tales

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Susan Rice: Netanyahu Visit ‘Destructive’ To U.S.-Israel Relationship

February 25, 2015

Susan Rice: Netanyahu Visit ‘Destructive’ To U.S.-Israel Relationship
The Huffington Post By Paige Lavender 02/25/2015 8:56 am EST


(Two things to remember when reading this article…first, if it suits the Democrats, it’s a bipartisan issue and second, it’s considered political suicide to meet with or be seen with President Obama before election time. The Democrats are especially cognizant of that fact as evidenced in the last election. – LS)

Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech in front of a joint session of Congress will be “destructive” to U.S.-Israel relations.

“What has happened over the last several weeks, by virtue of the invitation that was issued by the Speaker [John Boehner] and the acceptance of it by Prime Minister Netanyahu two weeks in advance of his election, is that on both sides, there has now been injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the relationship,” Rice told PBS’ Charlie Rose.

(Last time I looked, the legislative branch of the US government is equal to the executive branch, as is the judicial. So why can they not invite heads of state to speak? – LS)

“It’s always been bipartisan,” Rice added. “We need to keep it that way. We want it that way. I think Israel wants it that way. The American people want it that way. When it becomes injected or infused with politics, that’s a problem.”

(Our little friend Pinocchio would be having serious nasal problems about now. – LS)

Obama has said he will not meet with Netanyahu ahead of his speech in March, saying it would be “inappropriate” to meet with the leader two weeks before the Israeli elections. Netanyahu was invited to speak in front of a joint session of Congress by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who did not seek approval from the White House before sending the invitation.

(When has Obama asked Boehner’s approval for anything? – LS)

Several lawmakers have spoken out against the speech, saying it could cause additional strain on international talks over Iran’s nuclear plans. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called Netanyahu’s speech “a tawdry and high-handed stunt” in a statement earlier this month.

(Well, there you go. Israel’s leader is tawdry and high-handed. Electing someone like this is almost as bad as electing Obama….well maybe not. – LS)

Categories: Fairy tales, No go zones

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Humor(?): Brian Williams for President

February 9, 2015

Brian Williams for President, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 9, 2015

(Not so fast. As explained here, Williams should become the Secretary of State first. That is necessary in order to gain foreign policy experience gravitas. — DM)

brian-williams-450x277

If Brian Williams is fired, then even NBC News will have higher standards than the Democratic Party. And then Brian Williams can become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2016.

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Two years ago NBC and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell tried to invent a Romney gaffe by playing an edited tape of Romney. Mitchell wasn’t just another angry MSNBCite, but NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent and a colleague of Brian Williams who often appeared on his newscast.

NBC was criticized, but Mitchell wasn’t fired. Neither was anyone else. She didn’t even apologize.

The network had even more outrageously edited George Zimmerman’s tape to make him sound racist. A local producer and correspondent were fired. The correspondent, Lilia Luciano, had reported for, among other NBC outlets, The Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Brian Williams is in trouble for lying, but he was part of a media culture of deceit where lies were acceptable for a good progressive cause. Williams isn’t really in trouble because he lied, but because he got caught. Worse still, the lies were self-serving. They served Brian Williams; they didn’t serve the left.

Williams had failed to draw the line between the “good lie” (ObamaCare is making life better) and the “bad lie” (I swam the flooded French Quarter with puppies on my back during Katrina while Al Qaeda shot RPGs at me). But the borders between the “good lie” and the “bad lie” have been vague when it comes to the titans of the left.

The media did its best to cover up for Hillary Clinton’s rather similar claims about “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia. There was no sniper fire. There was a little girl with flowers. Today Hillary is in the lead to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the White House in 2016.

Are there really higher ethical qualifications for reading the news from a teleprompter for NBC than there are for the President of the United States? If so, maybe we should just replace the Democratic Party with NBC.  They’re hard to tell apart anyway.

Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s own official Brian Williams, claimed during the Democratic presidential debate that he had been shot at in Iraq. He boasted to a National Guard conference, “If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”

“Where is that safe haven? It is not Baghdad. It is in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan where my helicopter was recently forced down.”

At a fundraiser, he spoke of “The superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down. John McCain wants to know where bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where. That’s where Al Qaida is. That’s where bin Laden is.”

In reality, the pilot had landed due to a snowstorm. Biden had been there with Kerry and Hagel.

Al Qaeda’s safe haven was in Iraq. It wasn’t in the “superhighway of terror” in the mountains where Biden waited out a storm in an area under American control. And Bin Laden wasn’t there either.

Joe Biden and Brian Williams are both compulsive liars. Over the years, Joe Biden lied about everything from his academic degrees to the car accident that killed his wife.  Biden lied and claimed to have three degrees. He lied and claimed to have played college football. He lied and claimed to have heard the gunshots from a school shooting.

In his defense, Biden claimed in the eighties, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.”

Apparently Biden gets angry a lot. Still none of these scandals and lies, going back generations, ever got Biden fired. His harshest punishment came in law school when he was called before a disciplinary committee for plagiarizing a paper. Biden’s aide claimed that he was exonerated. In fact he was found guilty, but Biden “threw himself on the mercy of the board“and promised not to do it again.

He did it do it again as a politician, lifting a speech from UK Labor Leader Neil Kinnock, but there was no longer a disciplinary committee to hold him accountable.

As a senator and vice president, Biden had become too big to fail. He can no longer be held accountable. And if the Vice President of the United States can get away with telling crazy lies about his own accomplishments, why not the anchor for NBC News? They’re both just bad actors with fake hair.

Biden, like Hillary Clinton, is running for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016.

Fake heroics and stolen valor are common problems for Democratic senators. Senator Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. He responded with an angry press conference surrounded by veterans in which he barked that he would not allow anyone to “impugn my record of service to our country.”

It was a shameless performance even by his standards.  And he won. His party certainly did not ask him to step down.

Kerry’s pal, Senator Tom Harkin lied and claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam.  He stayed on and grew old in the Senate.

If lying about your Vietnam military service is fine for Senator Blumenthal, Senator Harkin not to mention former Senator and current Secretary of State John Kerry, how can anyone object to Brian Williams making up stories about saving puppies from fires at gunpoint in the French Quarter in Iraq?

Democratic politicians are allowed to lie about their heroism because they are the cause. At some point along the way, Brian Williams decided that he was important enough to be the cause. He wasn’t just the guy lying for Obama and Hillary. He was important enough for NBC News to lie for him.

And that’s exactly what NBC News did.

The days when the average politician and journalist had served in the military are long over. All that’s left is stolen valor and borrowed heroics.

Obama lied and claimed that his uncle had liberated Auschwitz during his Memorial Day remarks. (In real life he skipped the 70th anniversary commemoration of the day for the Saudis.) NBC News at the time defended it as an “innocent mistake”. But then again Obama had also claimed that his parents got together because of Selma, which took place three years after he was born.

Is NBC News really supposed to have higher standards for its talking heads than the Democratic Party does for the President of the United States?

And when a news organization like NBC News tells constant lies in support of the political agendas of Obama, Clinton and Biden, should one of its big talking heads really be expected to draw the line at lying about their records to lying about his own?

Brian Williams did the same thing that Hillary Clinton had been doing throughout her career.

Hillary Clinton not only lied about coming under fire in Bosnia, but she claimed to have been instrumental in the Northern Ireland peace processand had “negotiated open borders” for refugees in Kosovo. She claimed that her daughter (and future NBC correspondent) was jogging around the World Trade Center on 9/11 when the hijacked plane hit.

None of that was true.

If Brian Williams is fired, then even NBC News will have higher standards than the Democratic Party. And then Brian Williams can become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2016.

Categories: Biden, Brian Williams, Clintons, Fairy tales, Foreign policy, Humor, Lies, Media, Obama
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The Muslim Council of Britain on the Peshawar Massacre

December 20, 2014

The Muslim Council of Britain on the Peshawar Massacre, American Thinker, Paul Austin Murphy, December 20, 2014

(Islam is taqiyya all the way down. Examples of the same sorts of Islamic distortion and public acceptance of them as true are commonplace and guide foreign policy in the United States of Obama and Europe. — DM)

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) seems to spend almost its entire time publishing apologies for Islamic slaughter, killing, terrorism, violence, misogyny, sexual-grooming gangs, and so on. And it usually does so with Islamic taqiyya: lies, prevarications, evasiveness, equivocations, ambiguity, deceit, dishonesty, obfuscation, deception, dissembling and dissimulation (all used to advance and/or protect Islam).

Predictably, in the aftermath of the Islamic slaughter in Peshawar, the MCB has given its own response to the event in a very short piece entitled, ‘A Massacre of Children: An Ummah in Shock’. And equally predictably, it quotes the one quote that Muslims always use in such circumstances.

Basically, you hear this passage all the time at Interfaith meetings, in the Guardian, on the BBC, etc. Try Googling the phrase and you’ll get literally dozens of links; almost all will be from Muslim or interfaith groups.

This is a passage from the Koran which even many non-Muslims will recognize. The MCB version goes:

“Whosoever kills a human being, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”

This quote is a perfect and despicable example of Islamic taqiyya and it is so for many reasons.

What surprises me, however, is that — after the deceitful nature of this passage has been demonstrated so many times and in so many different places — Muslims and Islamophiles are still using it. The MCB, for example, must think its non-Muslim supporters/readers are either stupid or even (fellow) liars.

This following is the MCB’s lead-up to its citation:

“While it is very hard to find the words to respond to the tragedy before us, I can only quote a verse from the Koran in which it says…”

And then we have the passage itself:

“Whosoever kills a human being, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”

(The passage is verse 32 of sura/chapter 5.)

Virtually no religion or ideology believes or accepts what is purported to be the meaning of that Koranic statement. In order to fully accept it, the religion or ideology concerned would have to be fully pacifist in nature (e.g., Jainism or Quakerism); which makes its use by Muslims all the more ironic or even somewhat sick.

This passage — at least within a MCB and indeed Islamic context — is at best meaningless (a mere soundbite) and at worse a piece of gross deceit.

The relevant point is that the MCB has cynically removed the middle clause knowing full well that it more or less negates the surrounding clauses. After all, the erased central clause isn’t long: it’s a mere ten words in length. This, I suggest, is classic Islamic taqiyya or deceit. And no Islamic organization does that better than the Muslim Council of Britain.

Here’s the passage in full:

“… We ordained for the Children of Israel that if anyone slew a person – unless it be for murder or spreading mischief in the land [my italics] – it would be as if he slew the whole people.”

Immediately after that, we have:

“And if anyone saved a life, it would be as he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them our messengers with clear signs, yet even after that, many of them continued to commit excesses in the land.”

It can be seen that the opening clause is also always deleted by Muslims when they quote it at non-Muslims. That is, for a while I didn’t even know — because of the deliberate misquotations from Muslims (or their use of Kitman) — that the passage begins with the clause: “We [i.e., Allah] ordained for the Children of Israel…” That is followed by: “…. that if anyone slew a person…”.

So not only is this supposedly peaceful — or even pacifist — passage not aimed at Muslims in the first place (it was aimed at Jews), on only a tiny bit of analysis it can be seen not to be very peaceful or positive in the first place!

(This well-used passage is from Jewish scripture (Mishnah, Sanhedrin: 4:5) anyway. It was stolen from Jewish sources by Muhammad and his immediate followers (something they often did).

In addition, the passage doesn’t appear to have been abrogated like so many other “peaceful verses” in that book. Perhaps this is so precisely because of the surgically removed central clause.)

Here’s another equally-positive translation used by Muslim:

“That whosoever killed a human being, it shall be deemed as though he had killed all mankind.”

The actual version (again) is:

“That whosoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy [sometimes ‘mischief’] in the land, shall be deemed as though he had killed all mankind…”

This, of course, prompts the question: What would be deemed as “villainy” by Muslims?

What about what the Taliban has claimed about the Pakistani Army and others?

Anyway, here’s a list of what has been — and still is — classed as “villainy in the land” by millions of Muslims:

apostasy, churches, the possession of Bibles, homosexuality, preaching a religion other than Islam, all criticism of Islam, Muhammad, the Koran, not going to the mosque, sex outside marriage, atheism, Zionism, materialist philosophies and political views, secularism… basically anything non-Islamic and certainly everything anti-Islamic.

Let’s not mess about here.

Millions of Muslims today believe the very existence of people who aren’t Muslims — or lands that aren’t Islamic — are examples of “villainy in the land”.

 

Categories: Fairy tales, Foreign policy, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Jews, Middle East, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism
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Jihadists Using Liberalism Against Itself

December 19, 2014

Jihadists Using Liberalism Against Itself, Commentary Magazine, , December 19, 2014

This of course is the war that Israel has been fighting for years, ever since its creation in fact. Most recently there have been feverish blood libels about the IDF harvesting Palestinian organs, of summary executions during the 2010 flotilla incident, and of a supposed massacre and mass graves in Jenin during the Second Intifada. With all of these accusations Israel is obliged to investigate the conduct of its military, and so it does. That was what was so outrageous about the UN’s Goldstone investigation and indeed the subsequent attempt to have a Goldstone II following the war in Gaza this summer. Such international inquiries are only supposed to be mandated where a state has failed to adequately investigate itself first–but in Israel’s case the international community simply steps in and puts on its own investigation regardless, usually with the conclusion having been written at the outset.

The problem is that while many of them may now realize that the Islamists their armies encounter are unreasonable fanatics, they are equally convinced that the Islamists Israel faces have a legitimate grievance and a just cause.

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While the West’s enemies become ever more unrestrained in the barbaric nature of their attacks, Islamist militants are increasingly pursuing tactics aimed at limiting what the West can do in its own defense. As a recent case in Britain has demonstrated, jihadists and their supporters are more than happy to fabricate the most outlandish allegations in an often successful attempt to hinder the fight against them. This is the kind of thing that Israel has been having to deal with for decades, and at some point other Western states need to comprehend that they are all up against the same enemy, one which is willing to employ the same underhanded tactics against all of us.

In May 2004, British troops became embroiled in a three-hour gun battle with insurgents of the Mahdi Army at Al Amara, Iraq. Following the battle it was alleged that British soldiers tortured, executed, and then mutilated the bodies of twenty Iraqi detainees. These accusations have dragged on for a decade now and in response the UK government commissioned the al-Sweady Inquiry, an investigation which has cost the British taxpayer almost $49 million, with the accusers having been able to claim financial assistance from the British state to fund their case against it.

And what did the tribunal discover? The al-Sweady Inquiry has stated unequivocally that the allegations made against the British soldiers are “without foundation,” and that those making these accusations had given evidence that was “unprincipled in the extreme” and “wholly without regard for the truth.”

So after years of investigation, and tens of millions in public money spent (much of it having been used to assist those bringing claims against the British army), the soldiers have at long last had their names cleared while the jihadi militants have been exposed as liars. Hardly surprising; it’s simply delusional to imagine that those who are so unprincipled as to use terrorism to achieve their aims would suddenly become upstanding and honest witnesses once stood before a war-crimes investigation. What these people are, however, is mendacious and calculating in the extreme, and regardless of what al-Sweady may have concluded, by using public money to advance these outrageous allegations the jihadists have won by hijacking the West’s liberalism and respect for the rule of law for their own advantage.

Quite apart from the tremendous financial cost that this investigation and many more like it have carried, the decade that these allegations circulated for have been an outstanding public-relations victory for the insurgents. The media–large parts of which were eager to see Western forces fail in Iraq and Afghanistan–were all too ready to believe the stories spun by the militants and to think the worst of our soldiers. By parroting these lies ad nauseam, the Western media assisted the militants in undermining public morale at home, eroding belief in the rightness of the cause we were fighting for and convincing many that intervention overseas is rarely a defensible or admirable undertaking. In Europe particularly, these tales provide the recruiting fodder that radicalizes young Muslims into believing that their host societies are evil and that they too must join the war against the West. If nothing else, the constant fear of these damaging war crimes allegations persuade Western governments and militaries to be still more restrained in the tactics that they feel able to use in the increasingly muted attempt to counter our enemies.

This of course is the war that Israel has been fighting for years, ever since its creation in fact. Most recently there have been feverish blood libels about the IDF harvesting Palestinian organs, of summary executions during the 2010 flotilla incident, and of a supposed massacre and mass graves in Jenin during the Second Intifada. With all of these accusations Israel is obliged to investigate the conduct of its military, and so it does. That was what was so outrageous about the UN’s Goldstone investigation and indeed the subsequent attempt to have a Goldstone II following the war in Gaza this summer. Such international inquiries are only supposed to be mandated where a state has failed to adequately investigate itself first–but in Israel’s case the international community simply steps in and puts on its own investigation regardless, usually with the conclusion having been written at the outset.

Israel, like Britain and America, does undertake costly and time-consuming investigations where there are allegations of war crimes. But as we have seen so many times before, within hours the international media will have beamed the most tarnishing accusations against Israel around the world several times over. Months later when investigators have established the allegations as baseless, no one is listening anymore and the damage is done.

The debacle of the al-Sweady Inquiry has naturally caused some outrage in Britain, and so one hopes that some lessons will have been learned. But if observers have been reminded that jihadists are readily prepared to use war crimes accusations as a second front in the war against the West, they should also recognize the same tactic when they see it being deployed against Israel. The problem is that while many of them may now realize that the Islamists their armies encounter are unreasonable fanatics, they are equally convinced that the Islamists Israel faces have a legitimate grievance and a just cause.

Categories: Europe, Fairy tales, Foreign policy, Freedom, Ideology, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Palestinians
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More Beheadings, More Denial

November 18, 2014

More Beheadings, More Denial, Front Page Magazine, , November 18, 2014

(Please see also this article, and others, on today’s Islamic slaughter at a Jerusalem synagogue. “Knives, axes and guns” were used.” Hamas responded with praise for the terrorists who did it. Will Obama, our Islamic “scholar” in chief, declare that such Palestinian “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith?” He won’t. Nor, of course, will he admit that the Palestinian’s Islamic actions, like those of the Islamic State, do represent Islam.– DM)

Obama with microphones

All you have to do is change the name of the victim, and this could be a story from August, or September, or October: the Islamic State has beheaded yet another hostage, this time Peter Kassig, aka Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and Barack Obama has declared yet again that the beheading has nothing to do with Islam. Obama might as well have a form ready for the next jihad beheading or mass murder attack: all he will have to do is fill in the blank and then take to the airwaves to say that the latest bloodshed has nothing to do with Islam. If the victims are British, he can lend his form to David Cameron.

But all this repeating of the political elites’ “Islam is peace” meme will never make it so. And the constant repetition of this falsehood is doing nothing less than endangering Americans. It keeps people ignorant who might otherwise get a clear idea of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. It fosters complacency. It makes all too many Americans assume that this kind of behavior is restricted to the “extremists” of the Islamic State, and could never happen here.

It could happen here. It could happen anywhere that people read the phrase “when you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4) as if it were a command of the Creator of the Universe. But to point out that simple and obvious fact nowadays only brings down upon one’s head charges of “hatred” and of “demonizing all Muslims,” when in a sane society it would bring honest explanations from Muslims of good will of what they were doing to ensure that no Muslim ever acted on that verse’s literal meaning.

In reality, they’re doing nothing. No Muslim organization, mosque or school in the United States has any program to teach young Muslims and converts to Islam why they should avoid and reject on Islamic grounds the vision of Islam – and of unbelievers – that the Islamic State and other jihad groups offer them. This is extremely strange, given the fact that all the Muslim organizations, mosques and schools in the United States ostensibly reject this understanding of Islam. And even stranger is that no American authorities seem to have noticed the absence of such initiatives, much less dared to call out Muslim groups about this.

On the contrary, instead of calling on Muslim groups to take some action to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, Obama’s latest denial was even more strenuous in its dissociation of the beheading from Islam: “ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”

“Least of all”! As if it were possible that the Islamic State’s actions represented Buddhism, or Methodism, or Christian Science, or the Hardshell Baptists, or the Mandaeans, to greater or lesser degrees, but the most far-fetched association one could make, out of all the myriad faiths people hold throughout the world, would be to associate the Islamic State’s actions with…Islam. The Islamic State’s actions represent no faith, least of all Islam – as if it were more likely that the Islamic State were made up of Presbyterians or Lubavitcher Hasidim or Jains or Smartas than that it were made up of Muslims.

Why do not just some, but all of the political leaders in Western countries cling to this outlandish fiction? Because reality indicts them. Not only do they insist that Islam is a religion of peace despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence to the contrary; they have made that falsehood a cornerstone of numerous policies. They have encouraged mass immigration and refugee resettlement from Muslim countries, without even making an attempt to determine whether or not any of the people they were importing had any connections to or sympathies with jihad groups. Their governments have for years partnered with and collaborated with groups with proven ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. They have favored and aided the Brotherhood and groups like it to attain power in the Middle East and North Africa, deeming them “moderate” because they claimed to eschew violence, and blithely ignoring that their goals were the same as those of groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

If Barack Obama or David Cameron admitted that Islam was not a religion of peace, all these disastrous policies and others would be called into question. Cameron’s government might, quite deservedly, fall, and Obama’s would be crippled.

However, the primary reason why Obama and his cohorts continue to stand athwart the pile of beheaded bodies shouting that Islam is a religion of peace is because if they didn’t, the mainstream media – following its own policies as delineated by the Society of Professional Journalists – would immediately denounce them as “racists,” “bigots,” and “Islamophobes,” and their career not just as politicians but as respectable people would be over. It’s not that bad, you say? Just look at how the sharks are circling Bill Maher and tell me that.

Nonetheless, the Big Lie, however ascendant it may be today, is foredoomed. The fact that it is repeated, and must be repeated, so often is evidence of that. No one has to run around insisting that Christianity is a religion of peace, because Christian leaders are reacting to the escalating Muslim persecution of their brethren by opening up their churches to Muslim prayer and muting their criticism of that persecution out of deference to their Muslim “dialogue” partners. If anything says “religion of peace,” it’s Christians forcibly ejecting a Christian woman from a Christian cathedral for proclaiming Christ, so that Muslims could deny him there.

“Religion of abject surrender” might be more apt, but in any case, no one thinks contemporary Christianity is a religion of war. All too many Muslims worldwide, however, energetically go about illustrating every day that Islam is not a religion of peace, and so they keep Obama’s printer busy turning out denial forms, ready for him to fill in the blanks with the name of the next victim: “The murder of _________ has nothing whatsoever to do with the great religion of Islam…”

But this is a counsel of despair. The truth will get out; indeed, it is already abundantly out. We can only hope that not too many more will have to feel the blade at their necks before Obama and the rest can no longer avoid taking realistic and effective action.

Categories: Fairy tales, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Obama
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The Beltway’s Syria Fairy Tales

November 11, 2014

The Beltway’s Syria Fairy Tales, National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy, November 11, 2014

(Please see also Inside the CIA’s Syrian Rebels Vetting Machine. — DM)

pic_giant_111114_SM_Syria-Civil-War

[T]he sensible thing at this point would be to concede that there are no viable moderate forces in Syria, and that it would be folly for us to continue pretending those forces either exist or will materialize anytime soon. But no, that would be honest . . . which is not the Obama way — nor, frankly, is it the Washington way — to end our willful blindness to the lack of moderation among Middle Eastern Muslims.

So if honesty is not an option, what to do? Simple: Let’s just pretend that al-Nusra — part of the al-Qaeda network we have been at war with for 13 years — is, yes, moderate!

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The Khorasan group, moderate rebels, and other mythical creatures

Since the outbreak of the latest Middle East war a few years back, we have been chronicling the Washington political class’s Syria Fairy Tales. In particular, there is the story line that Syria is really teeming with secular democrats and authentic moderate Muslims who would have combined forces to both overthrow Assad and fight off the jihadists if only President Obama had helped them. But his failure to act created a “vacuum” that was tragically filled by Islamist militants and gave rise to ISIS. At this point in the story, you are supposed to stay politely mum and not ask whether it makes any sense that real democrats and actual moderates would agree to be led by head-chopping, mass-murdering, freedom-stifling sharia terrorists.

In point of fact, there simply have never been enough pro-Western elements in Syria to win, no matter how much help came their way. There was never going to be a moderate, democratic Syrian state without a U.S. invasion and occupation for a decade or more, an enterprise that would be politically untenable — and, as the Iraq enterprise shows, unlikely to succeed. The “moderate rebels” had no chance against Assad unless they colluded with the Islamist militants, who are vastly superior and more numerous fighters. And they would have even less chance of both knocking off Assad and staving off the jihadists.

The Obama administration and the Beltway commentariat have done their best to obscure these brute facts. Their main tactic is to exploit the American public’s unfamiliarity with the makeup of Syria. Obama Democrats and much of the Beltway GOP continue to invoke the “moderate Syrian rebels” while steadfastly refusing to identify just who those purported “moderates” are. They hope you won’t realize that, because of the dearth of actual moderate Muslims and freedom fighters, they must count among their “moderate rebels” both the Muslim Brotherhood (which should be designated as a terrorist organization) and various other Islamist factions, including . . .  wait for it . . . parts of al-Nusra — i.e., al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise.

We’ve also noted that a new wrinkle has recently been added to the Beltway’s Syria Fairy Tales: Obama’s Khorasan Fraud. In a desperate attempt to conceal the falsity of Obama’s boasts about destroying what is actually a resurgent al-Qaeda, the administration claimed that the threat to America that impelled Obama to start bombing Syria was not ISIS (supposedly just a “regional” threat), not al-Qaeda (already defeated, right?), but a hitherto unknown terrorist organization called the “Khorasan group.”

To the contrary, the Khorasan group, to the extent it exists at all, has never been a stand-alone terrorist organization. It is an internal component of al-Qaeda — specifically, an advisory board (or, in Islamic terms, a shura council) of al-Qaeda veterans who advise and carry out directives from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s emir. During the fighting in Syria, some of these operatives were sent there by Zawahiri to conduct operations under the auspices of al-Nusra. These operations have included jihadist activity against both the United States and Assad allies, plus negotiations for a rapprochement with the Islamic State (or ISIS). The limited success of those negotiations has led to fighting among the jihadists themselves.

The ball to keep your eye on here is al-Qaeda. The al-Nusra terrorist group is just al-Qaeda in Syria. Even ISIS is just a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda. And the Khorasan group is just a top-tier group of al-Qaeda veterans doing al-Qaeda’s work in conjunction with al Nusra — i.e., al-Qaeda.

The Obama administration disingenuously emphasizes these various foreign names to confuse Americans into thinking that there are various factions with diverse agendas in Syria — that al-Qaeda is no longer a problem because Obama has already dealt with it, and what remains are sundry groups of “moderate rebels” that the administration can work with in the effort to vanquish ISIS. Meanwhile, you are supposed to refrain from noticing that Obama’s original Syrian project — remember, he wanted Assad toppled — has given way to fighting ISIS . . . the very Sunni jihadists who were empowered by Obama’s lunatic policies of (a) switching sides in Libya in order to support the jihadists against Qaddafi and (b) abetting and encouraging Sunni Muslim governments in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to arm Sunni militias in the fight against Assad — those militias having all along included al-Qaeda elements, some of which split off to become ISIS and now threaten to bite off the very hands that once fed them.

If you thought the Khorasan fraud was just a passing fad to get Obama through the initial stages of trying to rationalize his incoherent Syria air campaign, think again.

You see, Obama continues to have a problem. Everyone knows that ISIS, the main target of U.S. bombings in Syria and Iraq, cannot be defeated — or even stalled much — by a mere air campaign, which has been half-hearted at best anyway. Ground forces will be needed. So the administration and Washington’s foreign-policy clerisy keep telling Americans: Never fear, there is no need for U.S. ground troops, because we can rely on “moderate rebels” to fight ISIS. But the so-called “moderates” Obama backs have been colluding with al-Qaeda (i.e., al-Nusra) for years — at least when not being routed by al-Qaeda/al-Nusra.

Now, the sensible thing at this point would be to concede that there are no viable moderate forces in Syria, and that it would be folly for us to continue pretending those forces either exist or will materialize anytime soon. But no, that would be honest . . . which is not the Obama way — nor, frankly, is it the Washington way — to end our willful blindness to the lack of moderation among Middle Eastern Muslims.

So if honesty is not an option, what to do? Simple: Let’s just pretend that al-Nusra — part of the al-Qaeda network we have been at war with for 13 years — is, yes, moderate!

But wait a second? How can we possibly pull that off when we know al-Nusra/al-Qaeda is also plotting to attack the United States and the West?

Easy: That’s why we have the “Khorasan group”!

I kid you not. Even as al-Nusra/al-Qaeda mow down any “moderate rebels” who don’t join up with them, the Obama administration is telling Americans, “No, no, no: The al-Nusra guys are really good, moderate, upstanding jihadists. The real problem is that awful Khorasan group!”

Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio have the story at The Long War Journal:

CENTCOM draws misleading line between Al Nusrah Front and Khorasan Group

US Central Command [CENTCOM] attempted to distinguish between the Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, and the so-called Khorasan Group in yesterday’s press release that detailed airstrikes in Syria.

CENTCOM, which directs the US and coalition air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, denied that the five airstrikes targeted “the Nusrah Front as a whole” due to its infighting with the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front, but instead claimed the attacks were directed at the Khorasan Group.

“These strikes were not in response to the Nusrah Front’s clashes with the Syrian moderate opposition, and they did not target the Nusrah Front as a whole,” CENTCOM noted in its press release.

The CENTCOM statement goes a step further by implying that the Al Nusrah Front is fighting against the Syrian government while the Khorasan Group is hijacking the Syrian revolution to conduct attacks against the West.

“They [the US airstrikes] were directed at the Khorasan Group whose focus is not on overthrowing the Assad regime or helping the Syrian people,” CENTCOM continues. “These al Qaeda operatives are taking advantage of the Syrian conflict to advance attacks against Western interests.”

[Emphasis added.]

Read Tom and Bill’s entire report, which sheds light on the web of jihadist connections.

Understand, the Khorasan group is al-Nusra, which is al-Qaeda. The “moderate Syrian rebels” are neither moderate nor myopically focused on Assad and Syria. (Indeed, Syria does not even exist as the same country anymore, now that ISIS has eviscerated its border with Iraq while capturing much of its territory.) The overarching Islamic-supremacist strategy of al-Qaeda has never cared about Western-drawn borders. The ambition of al-Qaeda, like that of its breakaway ISIS faction, is to conquer both the “near” enemies — i.e., the Middle East territories not currently governed by its construction of sharia — and the West. Al-Qaeda (a.k.a. al-Nusra, a.k.a. the Khorasan group) wants to overthrow Assad, but it still regards the United States as its chief nemesis.

The Khorasan group exists only as an advisory group around Zawahiri. The Obama administration’s invocation of it to divert attention from al-Qaeda and launder al-Nusra into “moderate Syrian rebels” is sheer subterfuge.

Categories: Fairy tales, Islamic State, Khorasan group, Moderate rebels, Obama, Syria, Terrorism
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