Posted tagged ‘Islamic terrorism’

Obama: Muslim, Napoleon Bonaparte redux or worse

July 5, 2015

Obama: Muslim, Napoleon Bonaparte redux or worse, Dan Miller’s Blog, July 5, 2015

(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

Napoleon sometimes claimed to be a Muslim. Obama often claims to be a Christian. Napoleon sought, and Obama seeks, power and glory through pretense. 

Obams as Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon’s life and history are summarized at Wikipedia. He supported the French Revolution and was appointed General of the Army of Italy at the age of twenty-five. Three years later, he commanded an expedition against Egypt. This post compares his and Obama’s religious and political efforts to gain the confidence of Muslims. The lengthy quotations provided in this section of the post are from Worlds at Warthe 2,500 year struggle between East and West, 2008, by Anthony Pagden.

While en route to conquer Egypt, Napoleon had his “Orientalists” compose a  “Proclamation to the Egyptians.”

It is worth taking a closer look at this document for it summarizes not only the French hopes for the ‘Orient’, but also the ultimate failure of both sides to come to any approximate understanding of each other. It began with a familiar Muslim invocation: ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. There is no God but God. He has no son nor has he any associate in His Dominion’, which was intended to indicate clearly that the French were not Christians. It then went on to assure the Egyptian people that Napoleon Bonaparte, commander of the French army, and ‘on behalf of the French Republic which is based upon the foundations of Liberty and Equality’, had not come to Egypt, as the Mamluks had put it about, ‘like the Crusaders’ in order to destroy the power of Islam. Nothing, Napoleon assured his readers, could be further from the truth. Tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring to you your rights from the oppressors, that I, more than the Mam-luks, serve God— may He be praised and Exalted— and revere his prophet Muhammad and the glorious Qur’an … And tell them also that all people are equal in the eyes of God and that the circumstances which distinguish one from another are reason, virtue and knowledge. 578 Having thus done his best to conflate the principle of human rights— in a language in which there exists no obvious translation for the word ‘right’ 579— with what the Orientalists had persuaded him were the basic tenets of Islam, the man whom Victor Hugo would later describe as the ‘Muhammad of the West’ continued,

O ye Qadis [judges], Shaykhs and Imams; O ye Sharbajiyya [cavalry officers] and men of circumstance tell the nation that the French are also faithful Muslims and in confirmation of this they invaded Rome and destroyed there the Holy See, which was always exhorting the Christians to make war on Islam. And then they went to the island of Malta from where they expelled the knights who claimed that God the Exalted required them to fight the Muslims. 580 [Emphasis added.]

It is hard to say how much Napoleon believed in all this. One of his generals later told a friend in Toulouse that ‘we tricked the Egyptians with our feigned love of their religion, in which Bonaparte and we no more believe in than we do in that of the late pope’. 582 But Napoleon’s personal beliefs were largely beside the point. The point was policy. Napoleon had always practised religious toleration because he knew that religious faiths could make deadly enemies. Toleration, however, was one thing; credence, even respect, was another. It is indeed highly unlikely that Napoleon had read much of the Qur’an he claimed to venerate. As he told Madame de Rémusant, the only holy book which would have been of any interest to him would have been one he had written himself. [Pagden, pp 326 – 327] [Emphasis added.]

Egyptians did not appreciate Napoleon’s Proclamation.

Just as most Muslims today have failed to be persuaded that Western social values can be made compatible with the Holy Law, the Shari’a, so too were the Egyptians who confronted Napoleon. We know something of how they reacted to Napoleon’s profession of love for Islam from the account of the first seven months of the occupation written by a member of the diwan— or Imperial Council— of Cairo named Abd-al Rahman al-Jabarti. Al-Jabarti was a well-read perceptive man who was not unimpressed by French skills and technology (he was particularly taken by the wheelbarrow) and ungrudgingly admired French courage and discipline on the battlefield, which he compared, glowingly, to that of the mujahedin, the Muslim warriors of the jihad. 585 But for all that he was a firm Muslim who could conceive of no good, no truth which did not emanate from the word of God as conveyed by the Prophet. He excoriated Napoleon’s declaration for its language, for its poor style, for the grammatical errors, and the ‘incoherent words and vulgar constructions’ with which it was strewn, and which often made nonsense out of what Napoleon had intended to convey— all of which was no tribute to the skills of Venture de Paradis or those of the French Arabists in the expedition. But al-Jabarti reserved his most searing criticism for what he repeatedly describes as French hypocrisy. The opening phrase of the declaration suggested to him not, as Napoleon had meant it to, a preference on the part of a tolerant nation for Islam; but rather that the French gave equal credence to all three religions— Islam, Christianity, and Judaism— which in effect meant that they had no belief in any. Toleration for a Muslim such as al-Jabarti was as meaningless as it would have been for any sincere believer. It was merely a way of condoning error. The years when some kind of rapprochement between Judaism and its two major heresies might have been possible were long since past. There could now be only one true faith, and any number of false ones. Napoleon could not claim to ‘revere’ the Prophet without also believing in his message. The same applied to the Qur’ an. You could not merely ‘respect’ the literal word of God. You had to accept it as the only law, not one among many. ‘This is a lie,’ thundered al-Jabarti; ‘To respect the Qur’an means to glorify it, and one glorifies only by believing in what it contains.’

Napoleon was clearly a liar. Worse he was also the agent of a society which was obviously committed to the elimination, not only of Islam, but of all belief, all religion. The invocation of the ‘Republic’, al-Jabarti explained to his Muslim readers, was a reference to the godless state which the French had set up for themselves after they had betrayed and then murdered their ‘Sultan’. By killing Louis XVI, the French had turned against the man they had taken, wrongly because their understanding of God was erroneous, but sincerely nevertheless, to be God’s representative on earth. In his place they had raised an abstraction, this ‘Republic’ in whose name Napoleon, who had come not in peace as he claimed but at the head of a conquering army, now professed to speak. Since for a Muslim there could be no secular state, no law which is not also God’s law, the French insistence that it was only ‘reason, virtue and knowledge’ which separated one man from another was clearly an absurdity. For ‘God’, declared al-Jabarti, ‘has made some superior to others as is testified by the dwellers in the Heavens and on the Earth.’ There are few things a believer, especially a believer in the fundamental sacredness of a script, dislikes more than a non-believer. To al-Jabarti the French seemed to be not would-be Muslims, but atheists. [Emphasis added.] [Id. at 329].

Obama

Napoleon, in his mix of religious and political doctrine, was a power-grubbing scoundrel and liar. How about Obama?

Obama has not claimed to be a Muslim and I don’t know what He is. To claim to be a Muslim would be politically inexpedient. However, He has proclaimed His respect and even reverence for Islam and for the “Holy” Qur’an.

In Obama’s June 4, 2009 Cairo address, He stated that Islam and (His) America,

overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. . . .  People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul.  This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it’s being challenged in many different ways. [Emphasis added.]

“Tolerance? Egyptian President al-Sisi is remarkable among Muslim leaders for his efforts to promote religious tolerance. Obama appears to despise him for supporting massive public protests against President Morsi and eventually becoming president. Morsi was a Muslim Brotherhood supporter and Obama appears to cherish the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization.

Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.

And, as Obama tells us, the Islamic State and other such groups are not Islamic.

That sort of stuff didn’t work out well for Napoleon. Are Islamists more dedicated to religious tolerance now than in the days of Napoleon? It does not seem that they are. See, e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Islamic nations.

Shortly after the attack on the U.S. consular annex in Benghazi, Libya — where four Americans were murdered by Islamists — Obama told the United Nations General Assembly,

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.  But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.

He sought power and glory by opposing those who offend “slander” Islam, including the maker of the You Tube video on which He and others in His administration blamed “spontaneous” September 11, 2011 “demonstrations” at the U.S. Benghazi annex.

I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well — for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and every faith.  We are home to Muslims who worship across our country.  We not only respect the freedom of religion, we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video.  And the answer is enshrined in our laws:  Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

The Obama Administration promptly had the video removed from You Tube and jailed its maker on unrelated charges (see excerpts from Daniel Greenfield’s Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism below.)

Obama, who claims to want a peaceful “two state solution” for the Israelis and  Palestinians, has said little if anything about the propensity of Israel’s “peace partner,” the Palestinian Authority, to slander Israel and Judaism on a daily basis while honoring those who murder Jews.

Obama’s romance with Islam

Daniel Greenfield recently wrote a Front Page Magazine article titled Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism. Please read the whole thing; it’s long but well worth the time. Mr. Greenfield notes, in connection with the Benghazi attack,

When the killing in Benghazi was done, the Jihadists left behind the slogan “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is Greater” scrawled on the walls of the American compound.[6] These were the same words that Obama had recited “with a first-rate accent” for the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. Obama had called it [the Islamic call to prayer] “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”[7] On that too, the murderers of four Americans agreed with him.

Those who disagreed and were to be denied a future included Mark Basseley Youssef, a Coptic Christian, whose YouTube trailer for a movie critical of Islam was blamed by the administration for the attacks.

Two days after Obama’s UN speech, Youssef was arrested and held without bail. The order for his arrest came from the top. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered SEAL Tyrone Woods, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”

The ACLU, which had developed deep Islamist connections,[9] sent a letter to Hillary Clinton thanking her for her support of freedom of speech.[10]

The Supreme Court’s “Miracle Decision”[11] had thrown out a blasphemy ban for movies, but Obama’s new unofficial blasphemy ban targeted only those movies that offended Islam. The government had joined the terrorists in seeking to deny such movies and their creators a future.

At the United Nations, Obama had compared the filmmaker to the terrorists. He had used a Gandhi quote to assert that, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence.”[12] Americans who criticized Islam’s violent tendencies could be considered as bad as Muslim terrorists and if intolerance of Islam was a form of violence, then it could be criminalized and suppressed. That became the administration’s priority.

. . . .

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama attacked Christianity for the Crusades in the presence of the foreign minister of Sudan, a genocidal government whose Muslim Brotherhood leader had massacred so many Christians and others that he had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.[20] [21] And he told Christians that they were obligated to condemn insults to Islam.[22]

Women’s rights? Obama supports those that don’t offend Islam. Continuing with Mr Greenfield’s linked article,

In August 2013, Al-Wafd, a paper linked to one of Egypt’s more liberal parties which supports equal rights for women and Christians, accused Obama of having close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. [60]

A year earlier, Rose El-Youssef magazine, founded by an early Egyptian feminist, had compiled a list of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the administration.[61][62]

Beyond Huma Abedin, Hillary’s close confidante and aide, the list included; Arif Alikhan, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, formerly the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and currently the Coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.

These were the types of accusations that the media tended to dismissively associate with the right, but both Egyptian publications were on the other side of the spectrum.

Egyptian liberals were the ones brandishing placards of a bearded Kerry in Taliban clothes or a photoshopped Obama with a Salafist beard. The protesters Obama had supposedly sought to support by calling for Mubarak to step down were crowding the streets accusing him of backing terrorists.

What made the Egyptian liberals who had seen America as their ally in pursuing reform come to view it as an enemy? The angry Egyptian protesters were accusing Obama of supporting a dictator; the original sin of American foreign policy that his Cairo Speech and the Arab Spring had been built on rejecting.

The progressive critiques of American foreign policy insisted that we were hated for supporting dictators. Now their own man was actually hated for supporting a Muslim Brotherhood dictator.

By 2014, 85% of Egyptians disliked America. Only 10% still rated America favorably.[63] It was a shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring when America had slid into positive numbers for the first time.[64]

Obama had run for office promising to repair our image abroad. As a candidate, he had claimed that other countries believed that “America is part of what has gone wrong in our world.” And yet the true wrongness was present in that same speech when he urged, “a new dawn in the Middle East.”[65]

That dawn came with the light of burning churches at the hands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Under Obama, America really did become part of what had gone wrong by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a crime that Obama will not admit to and that the media will not report on.

The Muslim Brotherhood was born out of Egypt and yet Egyptian views of it are dismissed by the media. Despite the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s final orgy of brutality as President Mohammed Morsi clung to power, despite the burning churches and tortured protesters, it is still described as “moderate.”

Morsi, who had called on Egyptians to nurse their children on hatred of the Jews,[66] was a moderate. Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, the Tunisian flavor of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had called for the extermination of the Jews “male, female and children,”[67] was also a “moderate.” Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, went one better with a fatwa approving even the murder of unborn Jews.[68] Qaradawi was another moderate.[69] [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Obama sits at the center of a web of intertwined progressive organizations. This web has infiltrated the government and it in turn has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Consider the case of Faiz Shakir, who went from the Harvard Islamic Society where he helped fundraise for a Muslim Brotherhood front group funneling money to Hamas, the local Muslim Brotherhood franchise, to Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at the Center for American Progress, heading up the nerve center of the left’s messaging apparatus, to a Senior Adviser to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.[73] The next step after that is the White House.

Time magazine described the Center for American Progress as Obama’s idea factory, crediting it with forming his talking points and his government.[74] In an administration powered by leftist activists, the integration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the left resulted in a pro-Brotherhood policy.

Egyptian liberals had expected that the administration’s withdrawal of support for Mubarak would benefit them, but the American left had become far closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than to them. Instead of aiding the left, it aided the Brotherhood. The Egyptian liberals were a world away while the Brotherhood’s activists sat in the left’s offices and spoke in the name of all the Muslims in America.

The [American] left had made common cause with the worst elements in the Muslim world. It formed alliances with Muslim Brotherhood groups, accepting them as the only valid representatives of Muslim communities while denouncing their critics, both Muslim and non-Muslim, as Islamophobes. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

When Obama declared to the UN that the future must not belong to those who criticize Islam’s brutality, bigotry and abuse of women, he was also defining whom it must belong to. If the future must not belong to those who slander Mohammed, it will instead belong to his followers and those who respect his moral authority enough to view him as being above criticism in image, video or word. [Emphasis added.]

With these words, Obama betrayed America’s heritage of freedom and announced the theft of its future. The treason of his unholy alliance with Islam not only betrays the Americans of the present, but deprives their descendants of the freedom to speak, write and believe according to their conscience.

Obama has placed the full weight of the government’s resources behind Islam. He has suppressed domestic dissent against Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while aiding their international goals.

Is Osama Obama worse than Napoleon?

Napoleon represented a nation which, during the French Revolution, had become largely secular. Obama’s America, under His “leadership,” is becoming largely secular. Napoleon sought, and Obama seeks, each in his own way, to promote himself as deserving the approbation of Islam. Napoleon sought power and glory by lying. Obama does much the same, but He most often lies to the denizens of His America.

In the years immediately following the French Revolution, France was considered a great nation. When Obama took office, America was as well. Although some still celebrate America’s freedoms from tyranny on Independence Day, during the Reign of Obama she has become less free and large numbers of “His people” have become increasingly dependent. It’s time to put America back the way she was.

Oh well. Please see also, Pulling down the slaver flags of Islam and Africa.

Postscript: I have read of no reported Independence Day incidents of workplace violence random violence Islamic terror attacks on Obama’s America. Might it be possible that Obama has convinced the (non-Islamic) Islamic State, et al, that, so long as He remains in power, terror attacks would interfere with His plans to promote Islam and otherwise to destroy the nation.

Cartoon of the day

July 4, 2015

H/t Freedom is just another word

(Some also fear that referring to the Islamic State is offensive. Please see UK: Politicians Urge Ban on the Term “Islamic State” and Leftist and Islamic Policymakers Outlaw the Truth.

liberal-logic-101-2011-500x416

Researcher: ISIS Could Exist Without Islam Because There Is Christianity & Judaism

July 3, 2015

Researcher: ISIS Could Exist Without Islam Because There Is Christianity & Judaism, Truth RevoltTrey Sanchez, July 3, 2015

isis-fighters

“Dalia Mogahed may be the most influential person guiding the Obama Administration’s Middle East outreach.” For years she has been a frequent spokesperson in league with the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America: CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, MAS, and MPAC.

******************

Dala Mogahed, a research director for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said that ISIS could exist without Islam because extremist groups simply use “the local social currency” to carry out their terror and that could just as easily be Christianity or Judaism.

Mogahed is not merely some policy wonk for an obscure institute. As Hudson Institute fellow Lee Smith, author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab, put it: “Dalia Mogahed may be the most influential person guiding the Obama Administration’s Middle East outreach.” For years she has been a frequent spokesperson in league with the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America: CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, MAS, and MPAC. Check out her extensive profile here at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resources site.

Speaking at a global terrorism forum at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mogahed said, “[A] world without Islam would still have a group like ISIS — they would just be called something else that may be less catchy.” She added, “That is sometimes Christianity. That is sometimes Judaism. That is sometimes Buddhism. And it is sometimes secular ideologies.”

As The Atlantic points out, Mogahed is suggesting that the Qur’an is not the driving force behind ISIS’s violence but simply their desire for violence to begin with. “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts,” Mogahed said.

Or she could just read from the Muslim holy book:

I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” — Qur’an (8:12)

Designating Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Immigration Enforcement

July 2, 2015

Designating Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Immigration Enforcement, Center for Immigration StudiesDan Cadman, July 2, 2015

During . . . (2009-2014 . . .  half of a decade), ICE agents have removed exactly three aliens. Three. And yet the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and others tell us that the nation is peppered with Islamic State supporters, not to mention the plethora of other terrorist groups one can choose to affiliate with.

*****************

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just issued a public report on the process used to designate foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which assigns lead responsibility to the Secretary of State. It is called “Combating Terrorism: Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation Process and U.S. Agency Enforcement Actions”.

GAO initially prepared and distributed the report to the Department of State (DOS) and other government parties in April, but withheld it publicly until material that DOS identified as “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU) was redacted from the public version just released.

Even with the SBU redactions, one finds some interesting and suggestive factoids buried in the report in typically dry bureaucratic language.

Among them is that, under the designation process developed by DOS, various agencies participating in the targeting and review can put “holds” on designation. Section 219 of the INA, which outlines the legal basis for designation of FTOs contains no such proviso.

The reasons described for placing “holds” are just a wee bit fuzzy and this arouses my suspicious nature because, in addition to the other government agencies one would expect to participate (such as the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Justice and Homeland Security Departments, etc.), one finds mentioned the DOS regional bureaus (see note 16 in the report). These are the folks that look out for the political angles of inter-governmental relationships between the United States and other countries. Could it be that bilateral politics are involved in FTO designation? One fears so, because it is suggestive that, although various other statistics are scattered throughout the GAO report, the number of holds and who placed them is nowhere to be found. Could this be the “sensitive” data that DOS didn’t want revealed to the public? If so, under which secretaries of State did such regional bureaus exercise this extra-statutory ability? And how many such holds have been placed, and for how long?

Another interesting factoid is that between 2009 and 2014 Customs and Border Protection inspectors denied entry to over 1,000 alien applicants for admission based on terrorism grounds, including membership in or affiliation with designated FTOs. We can reasonably assume that some portion of these aliens were applying for admission under the visa waiver program (VWP) and that a significant number were granted multiple entry visas by DOS consular officers before the terrorist connection was known, but that their visas were not revoked by DOS after the connection was made.

Then there is the abysmally low number of aliens taken into custody within the United States on terrorism-related removal grounds, presumably by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During the same date range used to calculate CBP figures, (2009-2014 — half of a decade), ICE agents have removed exactly three aliens. Three. And yet the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and others tell us that the nation is peppered with Islamic State supporters, not to mention the plethora of other terrorist groups one can choose to affiliate with.

The shockingly low number comports with remarks I made in a prior posting when I commented that since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose mission is obviously to protect the homeland, we Americans — and most particularly the leaders in this administration — seem to have forgotten the important lesson about the nexus between safe communities and using the deportation laws to remove foreign threats.

Two other noteworthy items that merit their own examinations in full, but not here: that waivers have been granted to individuals with terrorist connections, apparently both to enter the United States, and to gain various immigration benefits administered by one of DHS’s subordinate agencies; and that of the 69 FTOs designated since 1997 when the law authorizing designation took effect, 10 (nearly 15 percent of total designations) have been removed from the list by the Secretary of State.

Cartoon of the day

July 1, 2015

H/t The Jewish Press

 

ramadan-spirit

Who is Responsible for the Atrocities in the Muslim World?

June 27, 2015

Who is Responsible for the Atrocities in the Muslim World? The Gatestone InstituteUzay Bulut, June 27, 2015


  • If colonialism were the main problem, Muslims, too, still are, colonizers — and not particularly “humanitarian” ones, at that.
  • Islamic jihad and Islamic violence; the sanctioning of sex slavery; dehumanization of women; hatred and persecution of non-Muslims have been commonplace in the Islamic world ever since the inception of the religion. Deny everything and blame “the infidel.”
  • But is it America that tells these men to treat their wives or sisters as less than fully human? If we want to criticize the West for what is going on in the Muslim world, we should criticize it for not doing more to stop these atrocities.
  • Trying to whitewash the damage that the Islamic ideology has done to the Muslim world, while putting the blame of Islamic atrocities on the West, will never help Muslims face their own failures and come up with progressive ways to resolve them.

Every time the ISIS, Boko Haram, Iran, or any terrorist group in the Muslim world is discussed, many people tend to hold the West responsible for the devastation and murders they commit. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Blaming the failures in the Muslim world on Western nations is simply bigotry and an attempt to shift the blame and to prevent us from understanding the real root cause of the problem.

When these Islamic terrorist groups abduct women to sell them as sex-slaves or “wives;” conduct mass crucifixions and forced conversions; behead innocent people en masse; try to extinguish religious minorities and demolish irreplaceable archeological sites, the idea that this is the fault of the West is ludicrous, offensive and wrong.

Western states, like many other states, try to protect the security of their citizens. What they essentially need, therefore, are peaceful states as partners with which they can have economic, commercial and diplomatic relations. They do not need genocidal terrorist groups that destroy life, peace and stability in huge swaths across the Muslim world.

Western states also have democratic and humanitarian values, which Islamic states do not. The religious and historical experiences of the Western world and the Islamic world are so enormously different that they ended up having completely different cultures and values.

The West, established on Jewish, Christian and secular values, has created a far more humanitarian, free and democratic culture. Sadly, much of the Muslim world, under Islamic sharia law, has created a misogynistic, violent and totalitarian culture.

This does not mean that the West has been perfect and sinless. The West still commits some appalling crimes: Europe is guilty of paving the way for the slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust, and for still not protecting its Jewish communities. Even today, many European states contort logic to recognize Hamas, which openly states that it aims to commit genocide against Jewish people.

The West, however, accepts responsibility for the failures in its own territories: for instance, not being able to protect European women from Muslim rapists. These men have moved to Europe to benefit from the opportunities and privileges there, but instead of showing gratitude to European people and government, they have raped the women there, and tried to impose Islamic sharia law.

If we want to criticize the West for what is going on in the Muslim world, we should criticize it for not doing more to stop these atrocities.

The West, and particularly the U.S., should use all of its power to stop them — especially the genocides committed against Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims in the Muslim world.

We should also criticize the West — and others, such as the United Nations and its distorted Gaza War report — for supporting those who proudly commit terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, and we should criticize the West for not siding with the state of Israel in the face of genocidal Jew-hatred.

We should criticize the West for letting Islamic anti-Semitism grow in Europe, making lives unbearable for Jews day by day.

We should criticize the West for having accepted without a murmur the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus for more than 40 years.

We should also criticize the West for leaving the fate of Kurds, a persecuted and stateless people, to the tender mercies of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria — and now the Islamic State (ISIS). On June 25, ISIS carried out yet another deadly attack, killing and wounding dozens of people in the Kurdish border town of Kobani, in Syrian Kurdistan.

And we should criticize especially the current U.S. government for not being willing to take serious action to stop ISIS, Boko Haram and other extremist Islamic groups.[1]

The list could go on and on. Moreover, it would not be realistic to claim that these groups or regimes all misunderstand the teachings of their religion in exactly the same way.

It would also not be realistic to claim that the West has created all these hundreds of Islamic terror groups across the Muslim world.

The question, then, is: Who or what does create all these terrorist groups and regimes?

In almost all parts of the Muslim world, systematic discrimination, and even murder, are rampant — especially of women and non-Muslims. Extremist Islamic organizations, however, are not the only offenders. Many Muslim civilians who have no ties with any Islamist group also commit these offenses daily. Jihad (war in the service of Islam) and the subjugation of non-Muslims are deeply rooted in the scriptures and history of Islam.

Ever since the seventh century, Muslim armies have invaded and captured Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Zoroastrian lands; for more than 1400 years since, they have continued their jihad, or Islamic raids, against other religions.

Many people seem to be justifiably shocked by the barbarism of ISIS, but Islamic jihad does not belong just to ISIS. Violent jihad is a centuries-long tradition of Islamic ideology. ISIS is just one jihadist army of Islam. There are many.

All of this is an Islamic issue. The free West has absolutely nothing to do with the creation and preservation of this un-free culture.

The West has, on the contrary, been the victim of Islamic military campaigns and imperialistic pursuits: Christian peoples of Europe have been exposed to Ottoman invasions and subjugation for centuries. The fall of Byzantine Empire marked the peak of Islamic Jihad in Christian lands. Many places in Europe — including Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, and Cyprus, among others — were all invaded and occupied by the Ottoman armies. Other targets, including Venice, Austria, and Poland, had to fight fierce defensive wars to protect their territories.

The historical and current troubles in the Muslim world are not, therefore, problems “imported” from an outside source; they are internal cultural and political problems, which Muslim regimes and peoples have reproduced for centuries.

Some of the things that women in Saudi Arabia may not do were listed in The Week magazine: Saudi women are not allowed to “go anywhere without a male chaperone, open a bank account without their husband’s permission, drive a car, vote in elections, go for a swim, compete freely in sports, try on clothes when shopping, enter a cemetery, read an uncensored fashion magazine and buy a Barbie and so on.”

Of course, there is nothing specific in Islamic scriptures about cars, fashion magazines or Barbie Dolls. But there is enough there that indicates why all of these abuses, and more, are widespread across the Islamic world, and why the clerics, imams and muftis approve them.

The central issue is to see how the lines that the Islamic theology draws seed the soil in which this kind of discrimination systematically buds, why it is extolled and how it is advocated.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Muslim country where women are dehumanized. Throughout almost the almost the entire Muslim world — including Turkey, considered one of the most “liberal” Muslim countries — women are continually abused or killed by their husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers or other males. [2]

Is it America that tells these men to treat their wives or sisters as less than fully human?

Is the West really what stops them from respecting human rights or resolving their political matters through diplomatic and peaceful ways? Are Muslims too stupid to make wise decisions, and act responsibly? Why should Americans or Europeans have evil wishes for the rest of the world?

Demonizing Western nations — even after all of their cultural, scientific and rational progress — is simply pure racism.

“The belief that the West is always guilty is among the dozen bad ideas for the 21st century,”wrote the Australian pastor, Dr. Mark Durie. “This irrational and unhelpful idea is taught in many schools today and has become embedded in the world views of many. It is essentially a silencing strategy, sabotaging critical thinking.”

Another term that prevents one from understanding the root causes of the conflicts in the Muslim world is “moral relativism” — a politically correct term that really means moral cowardice.

Defending “moral relativism” and saying that “all cultures are equal” really means saying a culture that encourages child marriages, beating women and selling girls on slave markets has a value equal to a culture that respects women and recognizes their rights, and which renounces wanton violence.

Another popular target of blame for the failures in the Muslim world is historical British colonialism.

If colonialism were the main problem, however, Muslims, too, were, and still are, colonizers — and not particularly “humanitarian” ones, at that. The Muslim colonizers do not even seem to have contributed much to the culture of the places they invaded and colonized. In fact, they have actually delayed the progress of the areas they colonized. The printing press, for instance, came to the Ottoman territories almost 200 years later than to Europe.

“Books… undermine the power of those who control oral knowledge, since they make that knowledge readily available to anyone who can master literacy,” wrote Professor Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. This threatened to undermine the existing status quo, where knowledge was controlled by elites. The Ottoman sultans and religious establishment feared the creative destruction that would result. Their solution was to forbid printing.” [3]

“European Empires — the British, French and Italians — had a short-lived presence in North Africa and the Middle East compared with the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over that region for more than 500 years,” said the historian Niall Ferguson.

“The culture that exists in the greater Middle East and North Africa today bears very, very few resemblances to the culture that Europeans tried to implement there, beginning in the late 19th century and carrying on through to the mid-20th century.

“You can’t say it is the fault of imperialism and leave out the longest living empire in the Middle East, which was the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim Empire, which went back much farther than any of the European Empires mentioned in that piece.”

Muslim states continue to occupy and colonize various territories — including Kurdistan, Baluchistan and the northern part of Cyprus, an EU member state.

“One of the most tragic consequences of the 1974 Turkish invasion,” according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus, “and the subsequent illegal occupation of 36.2% of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus, is the violent and systematic destruction of the cultural and religious heritage in the occupied areas.

“Hundreds of historic and religious monuments in various regions of the occupied areas have been destroyed, looted and vandalized. Illegal ‘excavations’ have been carried out and cultural treasures have been stolen from museums and private collections and were sold abroad.”

Muslim groups and regimes continue to persecute indigenous peoples such as Assyrians, Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Shabaks, Copts, Yezidis, and Bedoon, among many others.

“A substantial segment of the Bedoon population lives with the constant threat of deportation hanging over it,” according to the analyst Ben Cohen. “Around 120,000 Bedoon live without nationality and with none of the rights that flow from citizenship.”

“Its members cannot obtain birth or marriage certificates, or identity cards, or driving licenses. They are banned from access to public health and education services. Their second-class status means they have no access to the law courts in order to pursue their well-documented claims of discrimination. And on those rare occasions that they summon the will to protest publicly—as they did in 2011, when demonstrators held signs bearing slogans like, ‘I Have a Dream’—the security forces respond with extraordinary brutality, using such weapons as water cannons, concussion grenades, and tear gas with reckless abandon.”

It is not the West or Israel committing these crimes against the Bedoon community; it is Kuwait, a wealthy Islamic state, which treats defenseless people as if they are slaves.

In Qatar, another wealthy Islamic state, Nepalese migrants building a football stadium, “[h]ave died at a rate of one every two days… This figure does not include the deaths of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers…. The Nepalese foreign employment promotion board said that 157 of its workers in Qatar had died between January and mid-November” last year. In 2013, the figure for that period was 168.”

1131The family of a Nepalese migrant worker, who died in Qatar, prepares to bury him. Nepalese laborers in Qatar are forced to work in dangerous conditions, and die at the rate of one every two days. (Image source: Guardian video screenshot)

“In Libya, naturalisation is only open to a man if he is of Arab descent,” reported the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “And many Akhdam in Yemen, a small ethnic minority who may be descendants of African slaves, are reportedly unable to obtain citizenship.”

Is that not apartheid?

In Kuwait, only Muslim applicants may seek naturalization, while Libya’s nationality law allows for the withdrawal of nationality on the grounds of conversion from Islam to another religion.”

Is that not apartheid? Apartheid laws seem to reign over many places in the Muslim world.

Trying to whitewash the damage the Islamic ideology has done to the Muslim world, while putting the blame of Islamic atrocities on the West, will never help Muslims face their own failures and come up with progressive ways to resolve them.

“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though,” wrote the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on Twitter, after which other Twitter users piled on to criticize him.

It seems that having oil reserves, per capita, that dwarf anything available to Western countries does not create leading scientific nations.

What holds Muslims back when they have unmatched advantages of underground treasures? Why did the scientific revolution not happen in the Muslim world? Why has much of Islamic history been marked by aggressive jihad?

Islamic jihad and Islamic violence; the sanctioning of sex slavery; dehumanization of women; hatred and persecution of non-Muslims and homosexuals; suppression of free speech; and forced conversions have been commonplace in the Islamic world ever since the inception of the religion.

Many teachings in the Islamic scriptures, as well as the biographies of the founder of the religion, set up the parameters where these abuses not only occur but remain protected on a gigantic scale. These are the teachings that have become the culture of the Muslim world.

Sadly, most Muslims have wasted much time, energy and resources on killing and destruction, but — with the exception of some civilization’s most dazzling artistic splendors — not on scientific and cultural advancement.

Recently, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar, said that claims that Qatar paid bribes to win the hosting rights of the 2022 World Cup were “not fair” and stemmed from the West’s Islamophobia and racism towards Arabs.

Recent events indicate that he was, at best, “misinformed.”

Deny everything and blame “the infidel” for your shortcomings. Nothing is more important than your honor, and nothing worse than your shame.

If Muslims wish to create a brighter future, nothing is stopping us but ourselves. We should learn to analyze critically our present and our past.

Human rights activists and academics in the West are lying to Muslims about their culture, and bashing and threatening America, Europe or “Zionism” for the problems of Muslims; this can never lead to any positive developments in the Muslim world. It is the Islamic culture and religious ideology that are responsible for these problems

If there is ever going to be an enlightenment, reform or renaissance in the Muslim world, only a hard look and hard questioning can be its starting point.

_________________

 

[1] Also the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Republic of Iran, al-Qaeda, Al-Badr, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Islamic Jihad, al-Nusra Front, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Al Ghurabaa, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, Al-Mourabitoun, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, Jamaat Ul-Furquan, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, Jamiat al-Islah al-Idzhtimai, Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front, Al-Shabaab, Abu Sayyaf, Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, Supreme Military Majlis ul-Shura of the United Mujahideen Forces of Caucasus, to name just a few.

[2] See: “Gender Equality Gap Greatest in Islamic Countries, Survey Shows“, by Patrick Goodenough, October 29, 2014; “The Treatment of Women In Islam,” by Rachel Molschky, October 7, 2013; “Women Suffer at the Hands of Radical Islam“, by Raymond Ibrahim, January 9, 2014; “As Muslim women suffer, feminists avert their gaze“, by Robert Fulford, National Post; Ayse Onal, a leading Turkish journalist, says in her book, Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed, that in Turkey alone honour killings average about one a day — 1,806 were reported in the period between 2000 and 2005.

[3] Daron, Acemoglu & Robinson, James (2012), Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Publishing Group.

ISIS “lone wolf” violence on global stage baffles Western authorities fighting terror

June 27, 2015

ISIS “lone wolf” violence on global stage baffles Western authorities fighting terror, DEBKAfile, June 27, 2015

“Nothing to do with Islam.”

— DM)

Tunis-Abu_Yahya_al_Qayrawani_was_responsible_26.6.15_1The Tunisian hotel gunman Abu Yahya al Qayrawani

President Barack Obama has avoided linking terrorism with the Muslim religion. Friday, British premier David Cameron responded to the latest round of ISIS attacks with horror, but he also said, “…this terrorism is not in the name of Islam. Islam is a religion of peace.” The killers, rather, “do it in the name of a twisted, perverted ideology.”

******************

The US State Department said Friday, June 26, that there was no indication so far “on the tactical level” that “the attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait and France were coordinated.”

DEBKAfile: That conventional prototype of Islamist terrorist operations is no longer applicable. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ISIS has its own methods of inflicting widespread death which are hard to detect or predict. A decree sent from the top galvanized followers worldwide into initiating lasrgely solo operations. The result was: 211 people dead on Tunisian beaches, a decapitated victim – the first in Europe – at an US-owned French factory, and 27 Shiites killed at a Kuwaiti mosque.

The three outrages were perpetrated on three continents just two hours apart.

The second Friday of the Muslim festival month of Ramadan marked the first anniversary of the founding of the Muslim caliphate in Iraq and Syria under the rule of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi and was therefore judged a fitting date for killing infidels and Shiites.

These atrocities, along with the mass-executions of Syrian Kurds in Kobani and attacks on Saudi Shiite mosques, were also designed to further inflame sectarian hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites and remind non-Sunni minorities, including Kurds and Druze, of the cruel punishment in store for them.

The latest operational mode of terror employed by the Islamic State is a special adaptation of the “lone wolf” method – which is nothing like the lone terrorist acting on impulse, such as Israel officials depict after a Palestinian crashes a vehicle into a crowd, or stabs a passerby. It rests on meticulous forward planning, according to all the evidence.

Most of the terrorists activated by ISIS are radical Muslims living or working outside Syria or Iraq, often in western Europe and the United States, who have pledged an oath of loyalty to the Islamic State and its caliph, or else Western converts who returned home from Middle East battlefields:
These extremists set up their own operations for acting alone, or in twos or threes at most. They choose their targets according to three yardsticks:

1. The highest number of victims they can kill.

2.  The most gruesome atrocity, climaxing in beheading, for inspiring terror in a large community.

ISIS strategists have turned their backs on Osama bin Laden’s tactics. He employed 20 Saudi terrorists to hijack two commercial planes for murdering thousands of people in the horrific 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Fourteen years later, ISIS uses a single terrorist who is ready to die – or two at most – to execute a massacre. It took no more than one gunman, later identified as Abu Yahya al Qayrawani, firing his Kalashnikov non-stop, to mow down 39 mostly foreign holidaymakers on the beaches of the Tunisian resort of Sousse.

Disguised as a European holidaymaker, he sauntered out to the first hotel beach, his automatic rifle hidden in a large sun shade and opened deadly fire on the unsuspecting people lying there, swimming or heading for the hotel lobby. He then raced to the next hotel beach, firing as he went and killing people as they sought cover.

He was only stopped by police gunfire. A bomb belt was found tied to his body, meaning that the shooting was just stage one of the attack. A big explosion was to have followed.

This was no ordinary “lone wolf” terrorist. It was a highly competent terror machine on two feet.

The beheading of victims is another novel Islamic States method, compared with the classical Al Qaeda of yore. Its perpetrators are usually selected from a group of Muslim extremists with a history in the movement. The more gruesome the deed, the more valiant and honored is the perpetrator.

Many of the jihadis are known to Western security and intelligence agencies. In same places, especially Britain, France and Tunisia, they may even serve local Western security agencies as informants, a role they use as cover for secretly setting up their attacks. This makes their attacks virtually unpredictable.

The unfortunate truth is that many Western counter-terror bodies have been penetrated by these extremists who pretend to cooperate in the war on terror and instead keep their handlers confused.

President Barack Obama has avoided linking terrorism with the Muslim religion. Friday, British premier David Cameron responded to the latest round of ISIS attacks with horror, but he also said, “…this terrorism is not in the name of Islam. Islam is a religion of peace.” The killers, rather, “do it in the name of a twisted, perverted ideology.”

DEBKAfile: Too many Muslims, even those who do not preach violence, don’t see it in those terms.

Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism

June 26, 2015

Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 26, 2015

(But Obama can make everything right by restraining carbon dioxide emissions but not The Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weaponization. Right? DM)

Toward the end of September 2012, Barack Obama finally came to New York City after skipping it during the 9/11 anniversary. He had made it out to the city the previous week for a celebrity fundraiser and an appearance on Letterman[1] and then back again for a taping of The View while turning down a meeting with Netanyahu who did not have a talk show or an envelope filled with money.[2]

The next day, while at least one of the Americans killed in Benghazi had yet to be buried,[3] he declared at the UN General Assembly, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”[4]

That statement also encompassed the agenda of the Benghazi killers, the terrorists who would attack Charlie Hebdo and the “Draw the Prophet” contest in Texas along with all the murderous censors of Mohammed determined that the future should not belong to those who slander their holy warlord.

It was Obama’s only mention of “Islam” in a speech addressing the brutal murder of four Americans by Islamic terrorists in a terror campaign targeting American diplomatic facilities on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks in Benghazi. The 9/11 attacks, like so many others, had begun with a cry of “Allahu Akbar.”[5]

When the killing in Benghazi was done, the Jihadists left behind the slogan “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is Greater” scrawled on the walls of the American compound.[6] These were the same words that Obama had recited “with a first-rate accent” for the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. Obama had called it “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”[7] On that too, the murderers of four Americans agreed with him.

Those who disagreed and were to be denied a future included Mark Basseley Youssef, a Coptic Christian, whose YouTube trailer for a movie critical of Islam was blamed by the administration for the attacks.

Two days after Obama’s UN speech, Youssef was arrested and held without bail. The order for his arrest came from the top. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered SEAL Tyrone Woods, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”[8]

The ACLU, which had developed deep Islamist connections,[9] sent a letter to Hillary Clinton thanking her for her support of freedom of speech.[10]

The Supreme Court’s “Miracle Decision”[11] had thrown out a blasphemy ban for movies, but Obama’s new unofficial blasphemy ban targeted only those movies that offended Islam. The government had joined the terrorists in seeking to deny such movies and their creators a future.

At the United Nations, Obama had compared the filmmaker to the terrorists. He had used a Gandhi quote to assert that, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence.”[12] Americans who criticized Islam’s violent tendencies could be considered as bad as Muslim terrorists and if intolerance of Islam was a form of violence, then it could be criminalized and suppressed. That became the administration’s priority.

It took the administration years to make its first arrest of a Benghazi perpetrator,[13] but only days to urge Google to take down the Innocence of Muslims video[14] and weeks to arrest the man behind it.

In a little over a week, there was already a State Department apology video airing in Pakistan.[15] It took until the next month for the United States to even get access to the Benghazi compound.[16] Instead of going on the offensive against the attackers, Obama went on the offensive against critics of Islam.

His administration not only blamed a YouTube video to distract from its failures in Benghazi, but to exploit the crisis in order to suppress the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Obama had illegally fought a war to aid Islamic terrorists and was covering up his role in the Islamization of Libya by the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda[17] and eventually even ISIS.[18] He exploited a terrorist attack against Americans caused by his Islamization of Libya to advance the Islamization of America.

The new Islamized Libya, where Christians were beheaded and churches were bombed,[19] was what a nation that denied the future to those who did not accept the prophet of Islam really looked like.

Obama’s Islamist regime change had denied the Christians and non-Muslims of Libya a future. Among those non-Muslims who lost their future in Libya were four murdered Americans.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama attacked Christianity for the Crusades in the presence of the foreign minister of Sudan, a genocidal government whose Muslim Brotherhood leader had massacred so many Christians and others that he had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.[20] [21] And he told Christians that they were obligated to condemn insults to Islam.[22]

Some persecuted Christians could flee to America, but where would they flee to when Obama began denying a future to those who did not accept the moral and religious authority of the prophet of Islam?

Benghazi was not the first Islamic terror attack against Americans, but it was the first time that our government responded in the Islamic fashion by locking up a Christian for blaspheming against Islam.

Blaming the video turned a public relations disaster into a policy win. The blame was shifted from Obama’s backing for Islamist regime change in Libya to critics of Islam. Not only was the cause of the attack covered up, but Obama’s ideological agenda was advanced by an attack he had helped cause.

Stand With the Muslims

Our current conflict with Islamic terrorists is not caused by joblessness, poverty, the climate, dictators or any of the other familiar excuses. Instead it’s caused by the unholy alliance between Islam and the left.

Obama embodied that unholy alliance as no other occupant of the Oval Office since Carter had.

When discussing Muslim complaints about FBI counterterrorism operations, Obama believed that they needed assurances that, “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”[23] Counterterrorism with its emphasis on exposing plots and potential terrorists singled out Muslims. His preferred form of counterterrorism empowered Islamists while shifting the blame to Americans.

Muslims did not need to change who they were to reject terrorism. Americans instead had to Islamize. The source of tension was not Muslim terrorism, but American ignorance and prejudice toward Islam.

Obama insisted that Americans needed to educate themselves on Islam because their country was “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Not only was his claim false,[24] but it implied that America needed to be defined by Islam and that Americans needed to integrate Islam into their own identity.

As he put it in Cairo, “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.”[25]

The Obama model did not require that Americans become Muslims, but that they make Islam a part of their culture so that, like him,   they would be able to quote the Koran or recite the Islamic call to prayer.

Obama rejected the secular common ground championed by European republics. Secularism had been used in America to limit the presence of Christianity and Judaism in public life, but the left did not accept its logic of neutral spaces when it came to Islam. Islam was treated as a culture rather than a religion. Excluding Christianity excluded a belief. Excluding Islam, unacceptably excluded a culture and a race. The new diverse American identity being constructed by the left would not be truly diverse without Islam.

If France insisted on being a secular republic, America would at least partially become a Muslim country.

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Obama’s failure to attend the Unity March put Islamist feelings ahead of freedom of speech. Instead his administration tried to shift attention to a Countering Violent Extremism summit stacked with Islamists[26] [27] as its preferred response to Islamic terrorism.

The White House had previously been critical of Hebdo’s Mohammed cartoons.[28] While it still paid lip service to freedom of speech, in Paris, Benghazi and Garland[29] Islam came ahead of universal freedoms.

During the Cairo speech, Obama had explicitly rejected the French secular formula, stating, “It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.”

“Likewise, we can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism,” he added.[30]

Christians, whose ability to practice their religion has been unprecedentedly attacked under his administration, might have found that statement disingenuous, but it was an exemption exclusively extended to Muslims. His administration might repress Christianity, but never Islam. While it accused Christians of discrimination, it fought for the Islamic right to discriminate against women.

Obama did not acknowledge the Islamic violence and repression against women that was the true basis for France’s Burqa ban. One survey had found that 77 percent of girls in France who wore the Hijab did so because of threats from Islamist groups.[31] He also ignored the growing problem of Muslim honor killings[32] and female genital mutilation (FGM) in the United States. The half-million girls and women in this country at risk for FGM[33]mattered less than enforcing Islamist standards for covering up women.

While his administration vigorously targeted any employer or school that interfered with the wearing of the Hijab,[34] [35] it showed no similar dedication in any campaign against FGM or honor killings of women.

Like the Saudi religious police who wanted to let teenage girls burn rather than allow them to escape without proper Islamic covering,[36] Obama placed the Hijab above the lives of Muslim women and girls.

The administration had made the decision to protect Islamic sexism, rather than Muslim women.

While the administration cracked down on nuns, it was suing towns over zoning ordinances that interfered with building mega-mosques.[37] [38] [39]Even though the regulations did not single out mosques or Islam, the administration stepped in specifically when Islamists wanted to bully Americans.

If the French still clung to the idea of a secular republic, Obama had chosen to Islamize America. Those who resisted were faced with huge fines and even prison. America might not be one of the world’s biggest Muslim countries, but under Obama it was beginning to act more like Saudi Arabia or Iran.

In Cairo, Obama had declared that, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”[40]

He had committed to waging a constant campaign against those who spoke out against Islam.

By the time that the Benghazi attacks took place, the pattern of promoting Islam, denying Islamic terrorism and silencing critics had become the administration’s twisted version of counterterrorism.

This brand of counterterrorism insisted that the biggest threat was not the terrorists, but the truth. Identifying Islamic terrorists as such would increase Muslim alienation and terrorist recruitment. There was nothing violent about Islam and yet videos and cartoons offensive to Islam could not be tolerated because they would lead to violence; a violence whose Islamic nature would be fervently denied.

Muslim terrorist groups, from ISIS on down, were deemed un-Islamic. Lone wolf attackers were characterized as ignorant of Islam. To disagree was to aid the terrorists, as Obama’s aides suggested.[41] Counterterrorism came to mean lying about Islam. Anyone who defined the problem could, like the “Draw the Prophet” cartoonists in Texas or Mark Basseley Youssef, be accused of having caused it.

The lie could not be challenged or the bombs would go off. Tell the truth and the terrorists win.

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), the administration’s alternative to European integration, outsourced domestic counterterrorism policy to the Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups and transformed pandering to them into the core of our domestic counterterrorism strategy.[42]

Violent extremism was a vague and undefined term. Countering it was an even more vague and undefined policy that had far less to do with phoning tips to the FBI, an act that CAIR, a leading administration Muslim Brotherhood ally, had come out against,[43] than with promoting Islam.

Since Islamic terrorism was un-Islamic, promoting Islam was the best means of fighting Islamic radicalization. The terrorists had “perverted” Islam and had to be countered with authentic Islam.[44] Radicalization was caused by Muslim alienation and the only cure for it was Islamizing America.

CVE could Islamize unlikely agencies of the United States government by redirecting their priorities. When Obama told the NASA Administrator that one of his top priorities had to be making Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering” that was CVE in action.[45]

A CVE conference held the day after Benghazi promoted touring Muslim rappers associated with a Muslim Brotherhood front group who were sponsored by the State Department.[46] [47] [48] [49] Money that should have been used to secure Americans at risk in Benghazi was wasted on Islamist self-promotion.

It was speculated that possibly hundreds of millions of dollars were being thrown at CVE activities.[50] And CVE had not only failed in its mission, but invariably mainstreamed the worst elements in Islam.

By the post-Hebdo CVE conference, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications had been turned over[51] to Rashad Hussain, a Muslim Brotherhood linked official,[52] and before long its “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account was promoting everything from anti-Semitism to Al Qaeda.[53] [54] [55]

Meanwhile, echoing Obama’s mandate to “educate ourselves more effectively on Islam,”[56] the educational system was being bent to promote the practice of Islam to American children.[57]

Parents across the country discovered that schools were taking their children to mosques where they were being taught to participate in Islamic worship.[58] After American soldiers had fought to liberate Afghan women, American girls in this country were being dressed in burqas.[59]

Obama had told a Cairo audience, which included the Muslim Brotherhood, that he was rejecting the French model of protecting women from Islamic coercion. Instead the United States had adopted the Brotherhood’s model of urging American women to adopt Islamist practices.

His idea of standing with the Muslims was transforming counterterrorism into a tool of Islamization.

The Brotherhood Administration

In August 2013, Al-Wafd, a paper linked to one of Egypt’s more liberal parties which supports equal rights for women and Christians, accused Obama of having close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. [60]

A year earlier, Rose El-Youssef magazine, founded by an early Egyptian feminist, had compiled a list of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the administration.[61] [62]

Beyond Huma Abedin, Hillary’s close confidante and aide, the list included; Arif Alikhan, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, formerly the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and currently the Coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.

These were the types of accusations that the media tended to dismissively associate with the right, but both Egyptian publications were on the other side of the spectrum.

Egyptian liberals were the ones brandishing placards of a bearded Kerry in Taliban clothes or a photoshopped Obama with a Salafist beard. The protesters Obama had supposedly sought to support by calling for Mubarak to step down were crowding the streets accusing him of backing terrorists.

What made the Egyptian liberals who had seen America as their ally in pursuing reform come to view it as an enemy? The angry Egyptian protesters were accusing Obama of supporting a dictator; the original sin of American foreign policy that his Cairo Speech and the Arab Spring had been built on rejecting.

The progressive critiques of American foreign policy insisted that we were hated for supporting dictators. Now their own man was actually hated for supporting a Muslim Brotherhood dictator.

By 2014, 85% of Egyptians disliked America. Only 10% still rated America favorably.[63] It was a shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring when America had slid into positive numbers for the first time.[64]

Obama had run for office promising to repair our image abroad. As a candidate, he had claimed that other countries believed that “America is part of what has gone wrong in our world.” And yet the true wrongness was present in that same speech when he urged, “a new dawn in the Middle East.”[65]

That dawn came with the light of burning churches at the hands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Under Obama, America really did become part of what had gone wrong by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a crime that Obama will not admit to and that the media will not report on.

The Muslim Brotherhood was born out of Egypt and yet Egyptian views of it are dismissed by the media. Despite the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s final orgy of brutality as President Mohammed Morsi clung to power, despite the burning churches and tortured protesters, it is still described as “moderate.”

Morsi, who had called on Egyptians to nurse their children on hatred of the Jews,[66] was a moderate. Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, the Tunisian flavor of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had called for the extermination of the Jews “male, female and children,”[67] was also a “moderate.” Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, went one better with a fatwa approving even the murder of unborn Jews.[68] Qaradawi was another moderate.[69]

The only Muslim Brotherhood leader who hasn’t been described as a moderate is Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the ICC for genocide and crimes against humanity.[70]

But if the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a moderate organization, if it is indeed violent and bigoted, why did Obama alienate Egyptians and others across the region by supporting it? The angry Egyptians in the street had an explanation, but they had failed to understand how deeply the infiltration truly went.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups, such as the MSA and CAIR, had become so entangled with the left that it was impossible for the latter to wash its hands of the former. Not only the administration, but its political allies on the left, such as the Center for American Progress[71] and the ACLU[72], had been infiltrated by Islamists. The administration’s infiltration was a symptom of the problem, not its cause.

Obama sits at the center of a web of intertwined progressive organizations. This web has infiltrated the government and it in turn has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Consider the case of Faiz Shakir, who went from the Harvard Islamic Society where he helped fundraise for a Muslim Brotherhood front group funneling money to Hamas, the local Muslim Brotherhood franchise, to Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at the Center for American Progress, heading up the nerve center of the left’s messaging apparatus, to a Senior Adviser to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.[73] The next step after that is the White House.

Time magazine described the Center for American Progress as Obama’s idea factory, crediting it with forming his talking points and his government.[74] In an administration powered by leftist activists, the integration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the left resulted in a pro-Brotherhood policy.

Egyptian liberals had expected that the administration’s withdrawal of support for Mubarak would benefit them, but the American left had become far closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than to them. Instead of aiding the left, it aided the Brotherhood. The Egyptian liberals were a world away while the Brotherhood’s activists sat in the left’s offices and spoke in the name of all the Muslims in America.

The left had made common cause with the worst elements in the Muslim world. It formed alliances with Muslim Brotherhood groups, accepting them as the only valid representatives of Muslim communities while denouncing their critics, both Muslim and non-Muslim, as Islamophobes.

The Arab Spring disaster, from the Muslim Brotherhood brutality in Egypt and Tunisia, the bloody civil war in Libya to the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, was the fruit of this tainted red-green alliance.

The four Americans murdered in Benghazi, the American hostages beheaded by ISIS along with the countless Christians, Yazidis and others butchered, raped and enslaved had fallen victim to the left’s support for the Brotherhood’s political ambitions, tyrannies and holy wars.

The Brotherhood Spring

“What we are witnessing these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event, and it is most probable, according to reality and history, that it will encompass the majority of the Islamic world with the will of Allah, and thanks to Allah things are strongly heading towards the exit of Muslims from being under the control of America,” Osama bin Laden wrote of the Arab Spring.[75]

“The fall of the remaining tyrants in the region became a must with the will of Allah, and it was the beginning of a new era for the whole nation,” he added.[76]

What was happening though had less to do with the will of Allah and more to do with the will of Obama.

Allah had not come down to Cairo to cut Arab allies loose, nor did he reserve seats for the Muslim Brotherhood or force regime change.[77] Osama credited Allah, but he really should have thanked Obama.

Both Obama and Osama agreed on the need to remove the current leaders of allied Arab governments and both men saw the Arab Spring as a vindication of their visions for the future. But the wave of new Islamist governments friendly to terrorists that swept across the region vindicated Osama, not Obama.

In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi , the leader of the Islamist Ennahda party, who had once declared that “Crusader America” was the “enemy of Islam”[78] had come into his own. In the past he had been denied a visa to enter the United States,[79] but in the age of Obama he was feted at an event attended by, among others, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.[80]

Only a few years earlier, he had stated that the Arab Spring would “threaten the extinction of Israel.”[81]

“The Arab region will get rid of the bacillus of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this. “[82]

The Sheikh had already called for the mass murder of Jews, stating that, “There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.”[83]

Once in power, Ennahda chose to turn a blind eye to Islamist violence.[84] On September 11, 2012, as the Jihadist attacks on American embassies and diplomatic missions swept around the Muslim world, the embassy in Tunis came under attack. And help didn’t come from the Ennahda government.

Instead Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced to place an urgent phone call to the secular president, a ceremonial position in Tunisia, who dispatched his own presidential guard to protect the embassy.[85] An ungrateful Hillary then delivered a speech praising the Islamists and thanking the Islamist government, rather than the president, who had risked his own safety to protect the embassy.[86]

The attack and the response by Tunisia’s Islamist government should have been anticipated.

In the past, Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi had urged, “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.”[87]

That was exactly what the Jihadists had attempted to do on September 11, 2012 in Tunis and across the region with the complicity of the new Arab Spring governments Obama had helped bring to power.

A similar pattern of complicity emerged in Egypt where the attackers were allowed to scale the walls of the American Embassy in Cairo.[88] While the worst attack of that day took place in Benghazi, where Jihadists were in control of the city, in Tunis and Cairo a different breed of Jihadists had become the government and they had little interest in defending American lives or property.

While much of the controversy over the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has centered around the failure by the State Department to secure the diplomatic mission, that attack and many of the others came out of a volatile environment created by the empowerment of Islamists through the Arab Spring.

Nowhere was there more at stake for Obama’s “New Beginning” with the Islamists than in Cairo, but by reaching out to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, he was coming dangerously close to Al Qaeda.

The State Department’s 2008 strategic assessment stated that, “Although Usama bin Ladin remained the group’s ideological figurehead, Zawahiri has emerged as AQ’s strategic and operational planner.”[89] Even Osama bin Laden had been a Muslim Brotherhood member,[90] but after his death the organization’s leadership would become a more purely Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood affair.

Saif al Adel, the interim Emir of Al Qaeda, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current Al Qaeda leader, were products of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its splinter group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The brother of the Al Qaeda chief, Mohammed al-Zawahiri, helped organize the attack on the American embassy in Cairo[91] and allegedly engaged in discussions with Mohammed Morsi over an alliance with Al Qaeda.[92]

The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group which merged with Al Qaeda, later reemerged under different leadership as the Islamic Party while the terrorist group Gamaa Islamiya or the Islamic Group formed the Building and Development Party and allied with Morsi.

Morsi pardoned Mostafa Hamza[93] who had ordered Gamaa Islamiya’s Luxor Massacre in which terrorists mutilated and disemboweled European and Japanese visitors. The massacre was reportedly arranged by Ayman al-Zawahiri and funded by Osama bin Laden.[94] Morsi’s alliance with the terror group even led him to attempt to appoint a Gamaa Islamiya member as Governor of Luxor.[95]

Even though Gamaa Islamiya was still listed as a terrorist group, one of its lawmakers, Hani Nour Eldin, received a visa to enter the United States and met with senior Obama administration officials including then Deputy National Security Adviser and current White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough.[96]

The terrorist asked McDonough about releasing Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the infamous Blind Sheikh who was the leader of Gamaa Islamiya, serving a life sentence for plotting attacks across New York City, after his followers bombed the World Trade Center.[97] Shortly thereafter, Morsi told a cheering crowd that he would work to free Rahman. The State Department was reportedly considering the deal.[98]

The thin firewall between the supposed extremists and moderates, between the political Islamists and the terrorists, between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, had worn so thin that it barely existed. Instead members of terrorist groups were running Egypt and openly petitioning the United States to free the figure most closely associated with the World Trade Center bombing in the minds of Americans.

And yet despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s torture and killing of protesters, its alignment with its fellow Hamas terrorists in Gaza and its flirtation with Al Qaeda and Iran, Obama continued to support it.

After videos surfaced of Morsi calling for the destruction of Israel and urging hatred of Jews as a form of worship of Allah, Secretary of State John Kerry defended the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to his regime.

“Not everything lends itself to a simple classification, black or white,” Kerry said. “We have critical interests with Egypt.[99]

Statements like “Resistance is the correct and only way to free the land from the filth of the Jews”[100] should have been easy to classify, but instead the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Semitism became a matter of ambiguity and nuance for an administration determined to continue aiding the terror group.

“President Morsi has issued two statements,” Kerry said, “to clarify those comments and we had a group of senators who met with him the other day who spent a good part of the conversation in relatively heated discussion with him about it.”[101]

Kerry neglected to mention that during the “heated discussion,” Morsi had suggested that the criticism was only taking place because the American media was under the control of the Jews.[102]

While Kerry had insisted at the time that the weapons transfers were necessary to safeguard American interests in Egypt and even help Israel, when another popular uprising toppled Morsi and replaced him with a new non-Islamist government, delivery of the jets was put on hold.[103] [104] This move made it clear that Obama and Kerry had not sought to supply the jets to Egypt, but to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Arab Spring had been intended as a vehicle for bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied Islamists to power, not only in Tunisia and Egypt, but across the region.

Backing for Gaddafi’s overthrow had been bought by the shift of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from Al Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood under the auspices of the Brotherhood’s Sheikh Qaradawi.[105] [106] When the mission in Benghazi needed protection, the task was handed to the Brotherhood’s February 17 Martyrs Brigade[107] [108] which had been employed by the National Transitional Council.[109]

Closely interrelated with Ansar Al-Sharia,[110] the Jihadists that launched the attack against the mission in Benghazi, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade has been accused of complicity in their attack.[111]

The NTC had been Obama’s choice for regime change[112] and its draft constitution stated that Sharia law would be Libya’s law.[113] The Benghazi attack was an early warning of a larger conflict that would see the Muslim Brotherhood and its Jihadist allies take control of Libya’s capital.[114] It was a battle in a larger war.

Across the Middle East, the Brotherhood reaped the political harvest of the Arab Spring.

In Morocco, the Arab Spring brought the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Justice and Development Party (PJD) to power.[115] Abdelilah Benkirane, its Head of Government, was a former member of Chabiba Islamia; an Islamist group working to create an Islamic State, some of whose members would go on to join the Al Qaeda interlinked Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group.

Like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, PJD was depicted as a moderate Islamist group. Little mention was made of its close ties to Hamas.[116] Benkirane had described Israel as a “hostile state”, praised Hamas and stated that Moroccans want to wage Jihad alongside the genocidal terrorists.[117]

The PJD’s 2007 platform had called for imposing Islamic law on Morocco and the destruction of Israel.[118] Even after coming to power, PJD continued to maintain close ties with Hamas. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal attended its first conference[119] and met with Benkirane.[120]

Such relationships between Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood governments were natural and inevitable. Hamas was a fellow Muslim Brotherhood embryonic government. By aiding the rise of Muslim Brotherhood governments, Obama was creating state supporters for the anti-Semitic terror group.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted from power. Elections made the Brotherhood’s Al-Islah into the country’s second largest party.[121] A key figure in Al-Islah was Sheikh Zindani, an Osama bin Laden mentor listed by the US as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” who had played a role in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole and Yemen’s local September 11, 2012 attack on the US embassy. [122] [123]

The Arab Spring led to Muslim Brotherhood political victories putting the group’s various arms on a path to controlling much of the Middle East. However, they fared poorly when the political conflicts grew violent, losing to popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, to the Houthis in Yemen and to ISIS in Syria.

These conflicts often flared up when the Muslim Brotherhood showed its true colors. The Brotherhood, despite its violent rhetoric and roots, produced better manipulators than warriors. It was adept at convincing American officials, the leftist opposition, tribal leaders and freelance Jihadists to follow its agenda, but sooner or later its partners realized that it sought absolute power and could not be trusted.

Obama never realized that about the Muslim Brotherhood or perhaps he chose not to realize it.

American Guilt

Beyond the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama sought to cultivate ties with the worst elements in the region.

The common element that attracted him to the Muslim Brotherhood and the mullahs of Iran, despite their being on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War, was their mutual enmity toward America.

While the foreign policy of the right attempts to secure national interests, the foreign policy of the left seeks to atone for national crimes. It was not strategy that drove his outreach to enemies of our country, but guilt. To the left, both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran were victims of our foreign policy.

The Muslim Brotherhood had suffered because of our backing for Sadat and Mubarak. Iran’s clerical tyrants resented us because of our support for the Shah.

Obama had taken up the Muslim Brotherhood’s cause as far back as the 2002 anti-war speech in which he had demanded that Bush stop Mubarak from “suppressing dissent.”[124] He told his Iran negotiators to understand that the Islamic terrorist state feels “vulnerable” because of the way that America “meddled in first their democracy and then in supporting the Shah and then in supporting Iraq and Saddam during that extremely brutal war.”[125] Iran and the Brotherhood were not our enemies; they were our victims.

Any Islamic enemy of America could count on the left’s sympathy and support for its victimhood.

President Bush’s denunciation of the Axis of Evil had drawn Democrats to rally around Axis members. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi visited Bashar Assad at a time when the Bush administration was seeking to pressure the Syrian dictator to shut down the flow of Al Qaeda suicide bombers murdering American soldiers.[126] And John Kerry became even more notorious for his serial pandering to Assad.[127]

But the left’s best efforts were reserved for the worst Islamic member of the Axis of Evil.

The Tehran Trio of three key administration foreign policy figures, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Sec-retary Chuck Hagel had become notorious for their pro-Iran advocacy before joining the admin-istration.[128] [129] The Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House, but so had the Iran Lobby in the form of the American-Iranian Council.

Animated by American guilt, the left’s foreign policy demanded a constant search for enemies to empower. This disastrous policy was less pro-Muslim than it was anti-American. The alliances that it made did not follow the consistent line of Islamic theology, but the inconsistent line of appeasement.

Every enemy of America, no matter how evil, had a part to play in dismantling our national security.

Out of Gitmo

In his first election, Obama had many endorsements, but in his second election only one name counted.

During the second presidential debate, he was asked what he had done about rising prices. Obama replied that, “Osama bin Laden is dead.” When challenged on Benghazi, he again brought up bin Laden. During the first debate, he brought out bin Laden in response to a question about partisan gridlock.[130]

By the third debate, he was so drunk on secondhand heroism that he boasted that, “I said, if I got bin Laden in our sights, I would take that shot.”[131] Obama was all but starring in his own imaginary action movie. Voters were left with the impression that he had ordered the execution of the terrorist leader.

But Obama’s real plans for Osama had actually been very different. He had not intended to use him to dismantle Al Qaeda, but to dismantle Guantanamo Bay and the military commission trials of terrorists.

If Obama’s plan had succeeded, Osama’s capture would have dealt a death blow to the War on Terror.

Despite playing patriot at the debate, Obama had told the liberal readers of Vanity Fair the real story. According to the journalist who interviewed him, “Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”[132]

Trying a top terrorist in a civilian court had been too controversial, but capturing Osama bin Laden would have been a public relations coup that would have drowned out the protests and the criticism.

Instead of killing Osama, the goal was to bring him back and “put him on trial in a federal court.”

“I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda,” Obama boasted.[133]

If Osama bin Laden had been tried in a civilian court, it would have become impossible to argue that any lesser terrorist should be kept in the Article III system. And that would have dismantled a fundamental distinction between terrorists and criminals that defined the War on Terror and infuriated Obama.

The real target of Operation Neptune Spear wasn’t bin Laden; it was Guantanamo Bay.

When the SEALs killed the Al Qaeda leader, they sabotaged Obama’s plan to try him in a civilian court and shut down military commissions trials. But Obama recovered from that setback by exploiting bin Laden’s death to secure a second term and provide political cover for his disastrous foreign policy.

Most importantly, it diverted attention from the real target, the terrorists of Guantanamo Bay.

Gitmo had been Obama’s priority from the start. During his first days in office, three out of his first five executive orders involved the Islamic terrorists locked up at Gitmo.[134] His third executive order outlawed enhanced interrogations of terrorists “to promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals in United States custody.”[135] His fourth and fifth sought to close the prison and free its terrorists.[136] [137]

It took Obama a month to set up the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. It took him two days to set up a Special Interagency Task Force on Detainee Disposition to free Gitmo terrorists. His priority was not the economy, or even gay rights, amnesty and abortion; it was aiding Islamic terrorists.

The departure of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it clear just how much of a priority freeing Gitmo terrorists was for Obama. The former senator, an anti-war politician, shared Obama’s views on Iraq and Iran. But he was unwilling to free dangerous terrorists at the rapid rate that Obama wanted.

White House officials complained that “his concerns about the security risks posed by the release of detainees” had “thwarted” Obama’s plans for closing Guantanamo Bay. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was reportedly angry because Hagel had not wanted to rush through releases.[138] Hagel admitted to CNN that the White House had indeed pressured him to speed up terrorist releases.[139]

The White House had fought hard for Hagel, but when he tried to slow down the release of dangerous terrorists, he was shown the door. Obama’s highest priority for his Secretary of Defense did not involve freeing Afghans and Iraqis from the Taliban and ISIS, but freeing their Islamic terrorist allies from Gitmo.

The five Taliban commanders freed by Obama in exchange for a deserter made headlines because of the splashy White House photo op, but the administration had been quietly releasing even more dangerous men. These included Mohammed Zahir, the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate, who had been caught with nuclear materials while reportedly preparing to build an atom bomb.[140]

Even while America was trying to stop ISIS from taking over Syria and Iraq, terrorists from the Syrian Group, which had been run by the uncle of the former leader of ISIS back when it was known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, were being released. The freed terrorists had received training in everything from suicide bombing to forging documents. Some had links to terrorist attacks against Americans and America.[141]

Among those freed was Mohammed Abis Ourgy, a bomb maker who may have known ahead of time about September 11.[142]

At least two of the terrorists released by Obama had threatened to assassinate President Bush.

Adel Al-Hakeemy, a military advisor to Osama bin Laden, had threatened revenge against America and stated that he would kill President Bush if given the chance. Muhammed Ali Husayn had dispatched letters to Congress and the White House warning that they would “be destroyed, suffer and lose.”[143]

Obama was forcing the release of terrorists rated as high risk who had made specific threats against the United States. He even insisted on freeing terrorists from conflict zones such as Yemen and Syria.

His administration had freed five Yemeni terrorists, releasing four of them to neighboring Oman, which had been used as a gateway by the Charlie Hebdo attackers operating under orders from Al Qaeda in Yemen.[144] The four included an Al Qaeda veteran of the Yemeni military who was suspected of serving as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden[145] and an Al Qaeda terrorist who had received IED training.[146]

No responsible government would have released such terrorists in the vicinity of an active war zone.

But Obama had made freeing the Jihadists of Gitmo into his highest priority. He executed his plans at the expense of our national security, our allies and the members of his own administration.

Even his greatest unintended triumph against Al Qaeda, the death of Osama bin Laden, had never been anything other than a warped attempt at freeing more Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.

A Stolen Future

Every president is the custodian of a nation and its future.

When Obama declared to the UN that the future must not belong to those who criticize Islam’s brutality, bigotry and abuse of women, he was also defining whom it must belong to. If the future must not belong to those who slander Mohammed, it will instead belong to his followers and those who respect his moral authority enough to view him as being above criticism in image, video or word.

With these words, Obama betrayed America’s heritage of freedom and announced the theft of its future. The treason of his unholy alliance with Islam not only betrays the Americans of the present, but deprives their descendants of the freedom to speak, write and believe according to their conscience.

Obama has placed the full weight of the government’s resources behind Islam. He has suppressed domestic dissent against Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while aiding their international goals.

And by doing so, he has aided the foreign and domestic enemies of this country.

The president is more than the sum of his office. He is the man who believes most strongly in the promise of an American future. His speeches reflect the faith that we have in ourselves.

Obama is the first occupant of the White House to openly deny American Exceptionalism. Every president before him has chosen an American future. Obama chose an Islamic future instead.

It remains up to Americans to reclaim their future by exposing and breaking Obama’s unholy alliance.

Notes:

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-W38

[2] http://swampland.time.com/2012/09/24/obama-comes-to-new-york-for-barbara-walters-and-sorta-the-united-nations/

[3] http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sierra/Slain-U-S-Ambassador-Chris-Stevens-buried-in-Grass-Valley/17556470

[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/remarks-president-un-general-assembly

[5] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/saudi-official-western-politicians-and-media-linked-islam-to-911-thereby-driving-muslims-to-become-terrorists

[6] http://tinyurl.com/ka9jj7q

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html

[8] http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/oct/25/picket-audio-father-killed-navy-seal-hillary-told-/

[9] http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/aclu%E2%80%99s-islamist-friends

[10]https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/state_department_letter_on_innocence_of_muslims.pdf

[11] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/11/why-the-us-should-oppose-defamation-of-religions-resolutions-at-the-united-nations

[12] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/remarks-president-un-general-assembly

[13] http://fox40.com/2014/06/17/captured-key-benghazi-suspect-will-face-u-s-criminal-courts/

[14] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/14/white-house-asks-youtube-to-review-anti-islam-film/

[15] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/20/state-department-spending-70g-on-pakistan-ads-denouncing-anti-islam-film/

[16] http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/FBI-Benghazi-investigation/2012/10/04/id/458761/

[17] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/23/jihadists-now-control-secretive-u-s-base-in-libya.html

[18] http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/world/isis-libya/

[19] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/libyas-unleashed-hatred-for-christianity/

[20] http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-attends-prayer-breakfast-with-sudanese-official-accused-of-genocide/

[21] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2012/10/27/how-will-the-muslim-brotherhood-govern-egypt-look-to-sudan

[22] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/05/remarks-president-national-prayer-breakfast

[23] The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006

[24] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/06/us_is_one_of_the_largest_musli.html

[25] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09

[26] http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/islamists-featured-countering-violent-extremism-summit

[27] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414064/find-countering-violent-extremism-summit-intersection-islamists-and-leftists-andrew-c

[28] http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/01/07/white-house-questioned-french-magazines-judgment-in-2012-for-publishing-naked-muhammad-cartoon/

[29] http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Pamela-Geller-Draw-the-Prophet-ISIS-threat-FBI/2015/05/07/id/643160/

[30] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09

[31] http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2010/03/02/opinion-why-france-is-right-about-the-burqa/

[32] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-29-honor-killings-in-the-US_N.htm

[33] http://www.newsweek.com/fgm-rates-have-doubled-us-2004-304773

[34] http://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2004/May/04_crt_343.htm

[35] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/abercrombie-fitch-supreme-court-hijab-wearing-job-applicant-115498.html

[36]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1387874/15-girls-die-as-zealots-drive-them-into-blaze.html

[37] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/07/justice-department-sues-on-behalf-of-murfreesboro-mega-mosque-federal-judge-orders-it-to-open

[38] http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/cry-islamophobia-and-win

[39] http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/obama-doj-forces-city-to-pay-muslims-7-75-million/

[40] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09

[41] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/politics/faulted-for-avoiding-islamic-labels-white-house-cites-a-strategic-logic.html

[42] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414064/find-countering-violent-extremism-summit-intersection-islamists-and-leftists-andrew-c

[43] http://www.investigativeproject.org/2515/cair-deceptive-spin-on-fbi-support

[44] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/18/remarks-president-closing-summit-countering-violent-extremism

[45] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html

[46] http://www.wired.com/2012/10/cve/

[47] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-national-security-priority-moderate-muslim-rappers/

[48] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Deen#cite_note-rap-1

[49] http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6705

[50] http://www.wired.com/2012/10/cve/

[51] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obama-appoints-terrorist-supporter-to-head-up-counterterrorism-messaging/

[52] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ryan-mauro/rashad-hussains-troubling-ties/

[53] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/is-the-state-depts-new-muslim-run-office-promoting-anti-semitism/

[54] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obamas-counterterrorism-messaging-promotes-islamic-takeover-of-uk/

[55] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/state-department-counters-violent-extremism-by-supporting-al-qaeda/

[56] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/06/us_is_one_of_the_largest_musli.html

[57]http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/allah_in_our_schools.html#.VKAAL7AwpNk.twitter

[58] http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/17/school-apologizes-students-pray-allah-field-trip-mosque/

[59] http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/students-made-to-wear-burqas-in-u-s-state/

[60] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/03/egyptian-newspapers-explosive-allegation-president-obama-is-a-secret-muslim-brotherhood-member

[61] http://www.investigativeproject.org/3869/egyptian-magazine-muslim-brotherhood-infiltrates

[62] http://www.investigativeproject.org/3868/a-man-and-6-of-the-brotherhood-in-the-white-house

[63] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/which-countries-dont-like-america-and-which-do/

[64] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/poll-egyptian-publics-views-toward-united-states-are-much-improved/

[65] http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/24/obama.words/

[66]http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/164282#.VSXffl1g8rk

[67] http://www.clarionproject.org/news/what-isna-doesnt-publicize-about-its-convention-speakers

[68] http://www.meforum.org/700/arab-liberals-prosecute-clerics-who-promote-murder

[69] http://www.investigativeproject.org/2315/moderate-qaradawi-defends-hitler-and-nuclear

[70] http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/situations%20and%20cases/situations/situation%20icc%200205/related%20cases/icc02050109/Pages/icc02050109.aspx

[71] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-center-for-american-progress-and-islamist-influences-over-the-white-house/

[72] http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/aclu%E2%80%99s-islamist-friends

[73] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/nancy-pelosi-hires-former-terrorist-fundraiser/

[74] http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1861305,00.html

[75] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75873_Page3.html

[76] https://archive.org/stream/354027-how-bin-laden-planned-to-capitalize-on-the-arab/354027-how-bin-laden-planned-to-capitalize-on-the-arab_djvu.txt

[77] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/-brotherhood-invited-to-obama-speech-by-us/18693/

[78] http://freebeacon.com/national-security/yale-to-host-radical-terror-sheikh-who-advocated-killing-of-u-s-soldiers/

[79] http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/a-u-s-visa-for-rachid-ghannouchi/

[80] http://www.globalmbwatch.com/2014/03/21/officials-dine-tunisian-muslim-brotherhood-leader-event-honor/

[81] http://www.investigativeproject.org/3262/media-whitewash-ghannouchi-radical-islamist-views#

[82] Ibid.

[83] http://www.meforum.org/700/arab-liberals-prosecute-clerics-who-promote-murder

[84] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-tunisia-rights-islamistsbre89e138-20121015,0,5425588.story

[85] http://world.time.com/2012/09/16/political-battles-in-tunisia-shade-attacks-on-u-s-embassy/

[86]http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/10/199102.htm

[87] http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/a-u-s-visa-for-rachid-ghannouchi/

[88] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/the-hosts-responsibilities/2012/09/12/4eb1edf2-fd1b-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_blog.html

[89] http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2007/103704.htm

[90] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/09/27/Bin-Laden-was-once-in-Muslim-Brotherhood/UPI-15591348771820/

[91] http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/10/al_qaeda-linked_jiha.php

[92] http://blogs.cbn.com/ibrahim/archive/2014/02/04/exposed-muslim-brotherhood-al-qaeda-connection.aspx

[93] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-brotherhood-pres-frees-monster-in-brutal-luxor-massacre/

[94] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/343207.stm

[95] http://www.clarionproject.org/news/morsi-appoints-luxor-terror-group-member-gov-luxor

[96] http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/22/us/egypt-lawmaker-visa/

[97] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/21/member-of-egyptian-terror-group-goes-to-washington.html

[98] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/09/28/egypts-morsi-i-will-do-everything-in-my-power-to-secure-freedom-for-the-blind-sheikh/

[99] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kerry-defends-tank-and-jet-giveaway-to-muslim-brotherhood-terror-regime-video/

[100] http://haam.org/2013/01/29/morsi-obama-and-bibi-which-of-these-is-not-like-the-others/

[101] Ibid.

[102] http://www.timesofisrael.com/morsi-jewish-controlled-media-distorted-apes-and-pigs-remark/

[103] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-f-16s-to-muslim-brotherhood-yes-f-16s-to-egyptian-military-no/

[104] http://tinyurl.com/lwqvn27

[105] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/04/libyan-islamist-fighters-reject-violence

[106]http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/5/02%20libya%20ashour/omar%20ashour%20policy%20briefing%20english.pd

[107] http://cnsnews.com/news/article/testimony-elements-militia-state-dept-hired-station-members-inside-benghazi-compound

[108] http://jcpa.org/article/the-libyan-quagmire/

[109] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/30/ozatp-libya-idAFJOE76T02P20110730

[110] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/benghazi-power-libya-militia-eyed-attack

[111] http://cnsnews.com/news/article/testimony-elements-militia-state-dept-hired-station-members-inside-benghazi-compound

[112] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/19/libya-rebels-will-receive-25-million-from-us/?page=all

[113] http://tinyurl.com/nuuzwrw

[114] http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/alarabiya-studies/2014/08/25/Libyan-Dawn-Map-of-allies-and-enemies.html

[115] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/morocco-pm-claims-he-isnt-muslim-brotherhood-muslim-brotherhood-says-he-is/

[116] http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=71622

[117] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Moroccan-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing

[118] http://www.memri.org/report/en/print2368.htm

[119] http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/14/226341.html

[120] http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/42-48638884/moroccos-pm-benkirane-and-hamas-leader-meshaal

[121]https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2015/04/07/muslim-brotherhood-involvement-complicates-yemen-conflict/

[122] http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4057#.VVVwIPyrRhF

[123] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/world/middleeast/mideast-turmoil-spreads-to-us-embassy-in-yemen.html?ref=middleeast

[124] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99591469

[125] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obama-blames-america-for-iran-feeling-defensive-and-vulnerable/

[126] http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415443/why-pelosis-syria-visit-remains-indefensible-tom-rogan

[127] http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kerry-frequent-visitor-syrian-dictator-bashar-al-assad_690885.html

[128] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obamas-treason-is-the-new-patriotism/

[129] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/25/AR2008082502337.html

[130] http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/17/barack-obamas-awkward-debate-references-to-osama-bin-laden/

[131] http://www.npr.org/2012/10/22/163436694/transcript-3rd-obama-romney-presidential-debate

[132] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/10/obama-put-osama-bin-laden-on-trial

[133] Ibid.

[134] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/does-obama-love-america-or-islam/

[135] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2009/01/27/E9-1885/ensuring-lawful-interrogations

[136] http://tinyurl.com/kkh7wug

[137] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2009/01/27/E9-1895/review-of-detention-policy-options

[138] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/hagel-said-to-be-stepping-down-as-defense-chief-under-pressure.html?referrer=

[139] http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/30/politics/hagel-guantanamo-bay-transfers-white-house-friction/

[140] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-frees-a-nuclear-terrorist/

[141] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-christmas-gift-to-isis-and-al-qaeda/

[142] Ibid.

[143] http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/is-obama-trying-to-kill-president-bush/

[144] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/16/obama-takes-heat-for-terror-approach-as-threat-spreads/

[145] http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/34-al-khadr-abdallah-muhammed-al-yafi

[146] http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/689-mohammed-ahmed-salam

Behind the French “Peace Initiative”

June 26, 2015

Behind the French “Peace Initiative,” The Gatestone InstituteBassam Tawil, June 26, 2015

  • It is a desperate attempt by the French government to buy a few more days of quiet from its Muslim community, especially from the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organizations to which it gave birth — all waiting for the order to run riot through the streets of France.
  • If it succeeds, may Allah prevent it, it will lead to an ISIS and Hamas takeover of every inch of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws if coerced by the initiative.

  • It is evidently too frustrating and unrewarding just to sit in the U.N. and not think of some project supposedly to spread beneficence that could make your country look important to the other 190 members — even if this beneficence is lethal to its recipient.

  • When the Byzantium fell to the Ottoman Empire, the churches, including the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, were turned into mosques; that is the dream of the Islamists today, to turn the Vatican into a mosque.

  • Currently, Qatar is currently investing millions to overthrow the Egyptian regime. It is investing millions to finance incitement among Muslims around the globe by means of its Islamist network and da’wah, the cunning preaching of the Muslim Brotherhood’s variety of Islam.

  • The Arabs always secretly believed that anyone who hated their mutual enemies, the Jews, as deeply as the Europeans did, and who actually tried to achieve their total physical destruction during the Second World War, would be their ally and help to expel them from occupied Palestine.

  • Apparently, the commonly-held hatred between the Europeans and the Arabs was not enough to halt the Jews, so now the Arabs pay huge sums to bribe the leaders of Europe to help them get rid of the Jews now.

The latest missile to split the skies over the Middle East is not a rocket; it is the French “peace” initiative.

No one in the Middle East has the slightest doubt that whatever its objective may be, it will not promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It is a desperate attempt by the French government to buy a few more days of quiet from its Muslim community, especially from the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organizations to which it gave birth — all waiting for the order to run riot through the streets of France.

We, the Palestinians, have suffered, and continue to suffer, from the creation of the Islamist terrorist organizations within the Palestinian Authority territory; it is they who keep us from reaching a peace agreement with the Jews.

One has to be deaf, dumb and blind — or genuinely desperate, which is more likely — to present a unilateral peace agreement like the French one. If it succeeds, may Allah prevent it, it will lead to an ISIS and Hamas takeover of every inch of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws if coerced by the initiative.

One also has to be simply ignorant not to understand that the Middle East is going up in flames and that the Arab states are disintegrating. There is no logical reason, therefore, to construct a new state, which will be both unstable and prey to local and regional subversion. It will also be subject to a quick takeover, and the first people who will suffer will be the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The Israelis know how to look out for themselves, but we will be left to the tender mercies of Hamas and ISIS mujahedeen. Just as they have done in Iraq and Syria, they will slaughter us without thinking twice, on the grounds that as we did not all become shaheeds [“martyrs” for Islam] trying to kill the Zionists, and even tried to reach a peace agreement with them, we are not sufficiently Muslim.

The French initiative is not a benevolent gesture meant to help the Palestinians. Without a doubt, the French government and its intelligence services know full well that the secret of the Palestinian Authority’s existence today — and its ability to function as a sovereign entity, demilitarized and de facto recognizing the State of Israel — is its security collaboration with the Israelis. It serves the interests of both sides. When, therefore, a Palestinian state is declared unilaterally, as the French propose, Israel will stop collaborating with it and the state, not even fully formed, will almost instantly fall prey to Islamist extremists. That is obvious to us: even our institutions of higher learning are ruled by Hamas today, as can be seen by Hamas’s landslide victory in the recent student elections in Bir Zeit University.

The recent visit of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham to Israel helped the Palestinians understand even more thoroughly that behind the French initiative is an attempt, as with many members of the U.N., to “be a player.” It is evidently too frustrating and unrewarding just to sit in the U.N. and not think of some project supposedly to spread beneficence that could make your country look important to the other 190 members — even if this beneficence is lethal to its recipient. One way of doing spreading such beneficence is to take over the peace process through the Security Council, force both sides into a unilateral solution, and not even to feign dismay when its first victims are the Palestinians.

Senator Graham referred to the drastic nature of the initiative and stressed that the United States supported the solution of two states for two peoples, according to the vision of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. It favors a demilitarized Palestinian state that would recognize Israel as a Jewish state and make it possible for everyone, both Jews and Palestinians, to live with self-respect and independence.

Graham threatened the UN, saying that if promotes the French initiative, he would bid to halt American funding for the UN — nearly a quarter of its budget.

Today, the UN’s funds are twisted into sending peacekeepers, who have diplomatic immunity and therefore cannot be sued, out to Africa to demand sex, often from children, in exchange for food or other necessities; and to passing resolutions aimed at harming Israel, while the organization callously ignores floggings in Saudi Arabia, slavery in Mauritania; escalating executions, calls for genocide and violations of nuclear treaties in Iran, just for a start.

The situation is grotesque. They are basically accusing Israel of “terrorism” for defending itself against by rockets fired from Hamas, in a confrontation where Gazan children were hurt because Hamas used them as human shields — while ignoring the real terrorism against the children of Africa committed by the U.N.’s own peacekeepers, Boko Haram, Iran and Sudan. When they so twist logic as to accuse Israel of “terrorism,” while turning their back on the horrendous abuses by other states, they are essentially giving paedophile UN “peacekeepers,” Iran’s torturers, executioners, and nuclear weapons factories a green light.

Graham was very clear about the American point of view. He said that any country that tried to bring Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague would have sanctions imposed on it by the United States.

The parade of the grotesque is the direct result of the Western surrender to Islamic terrorism. Now, sadly, the Vatican has also joined France. The assumption that the Islamists can be pandered to and propitiated by harming the Jews is yet another prevalent misconception. Every gesture to the Islamists, even if it is aimed at “helping” the Palestinians, sends a message of weakness and vulnerability, and increases the Islamists’ aggression against Christians and other non-Muslim minorities.

In the Middle East, anyone who “turns the other cheek,” such as the Pope saying that the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, could be “an angel of peace,” will find his neck under the sword. When Byzantium fell to the Ottoman Empire, its churches, including the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, were turned into mosques; that is the dream of the Islamists today, to turn the Vatican into a mosque.

The dangerous European surrender to radical Islam is not only an attempt to hold off its threat to the free society of Europe just a little longer. It is also the result of the economic distress of the Western world, which is seeking to keep afloat by selling itself, literally, for petro-dollars. The Vatican is in desperate financial straits — there are fewer practicing Catholics and therefore fewer donating Catholics. It is hard not to feel that the anti-Israel manipulations of the Vatican administration are motivated not by a genuine desire to help the Palestinians or to save Christians in the Middle East, but by a genuine desire to extricate itself from its financial straits.

Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver; Boko Haram sells girls for the price of a pack of cigarettes, and Europe is selling itself and the Israelis to Qatar.

Europe is in the same situation as the Vatican; and so are many American universities, which are selling radical Islamist education for petro-dollars from the Persian Gulf. This enables the Islamists to rewrite history and endanger the open way of life in the gullible West.

There is already a Muslim Brotherhood lobby in the United States, a syndicate trying to force the administration to undermine the current Egyptian president, who is an enemy of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood. Their aim is to restore to power the Islamist dictator Mohamed Morsi (who is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood), and to sabotage the measures Egypt is currently taking to rehabilitate itself.

The ease with which Qatar, the petro-dollar heavyweight, manipulates terrorist organizations in the Middle East is unnerving. The country both hosts and finances senior Muslim Brotherhood figures such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others responsible for spreading the doctrine of radical Islamism and terrorism around the world.

Qatar finances a wide range of subversive Islamist terrorist organizations, among them ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and various other global jihad organizations operating under the aegis of the Arab-Muslim regimes. Qatar also seeks to carve out enclaves in Africa and the West, and to turn the West’s pluralistic melting pot into a seething cauldron of terrorist operatives who will, when given the signal, bludgeon Europe and America to the ground.

The petro-dollars of the Qatari feudal lords, totalitarians who dictate their whims to a population with no rights, direct a global network of propaganda and incitement, through vehicles such as Al-Jazeera TV in Arabic, light years more toxic than Al Jazeera in English. It crowns kings and topples regimes throughout the Middle East, as it did by endlessly replaying the self-immolation of the young Tunisian fruit vendor who could not get a license, until it whipped up the Tunisians and Egyptians to start the “Arab Spring.” Currently, Qatar is investing millions to overthrow the Egyptian regime. It is investing millions to finance incitement among Muslims around the globe by means of its Islamist network and da’wah, the cunning preaching of the Muslim Brotherhood’s variety of Islam.

The Arabs always felt that the Europeans had a soft spot in their hearts for them. They always secretly believed that anyone who hated their mutual enemies, the Jews, as deeply as the Europeans did, and who actually tried to achieve their total physical destruction during the Second World War, would be their ally and help to expel them from occupied Palestine. Apparently, the commonly-held hatred between the Europeans and the Arabs was not enough to halt the Jews, so now the Arabs pay huge sums to bribe the leaders of Europe to help them get rid of the Jews now.

Just look at the extensive corruption of the heads of FIFA, bought and paid-for by Qatar. All it took was $100 million, and Qatar could host the World Cup. It makes one wonder what Qatar would be willing to pay for other projects, doesn’t it?

1130Now where did that envelope of cash go…?
Joseph “Sepp” Blatter (R), then president of FIFA, is pictured patting his jacket pocket a moment after awarding the hosting of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (L), on December 2, 2010. (Image source: PBS Newshour video screenshot)

 

 

Investigation Exposes AMP Leaders’ Ties to Former U.S-Based Hamas-Support Network

June 24, 2015

Investigation Exposes AMP Leaders’ Ties to Former U.S-Based Hamas-Support Network, Investigative Project on Terrorism, June 24, 2015

(Please see also, Obama Hosts Israel-Haters at Iftar Dinner ‘President’s Table’. — DM)

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Today, AMP routinely engages in anti-Israeli rhetoric, sponsors conferences that serve as a platform for Israel bashers, and openly approves “resistance” against the “Zionist state.” One AMP official acknowledged the goal is to “to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

********************

Federal investigators shut down a massive Hamas-support network in the United States between 2001 and 2008, prosecuting some elements and freezing the assets of others.

But the Investigative Project on Terrorism finds that many of the same functions – fundraising, propaganda and lobbying ­– endure, now carried out by a group called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). The IPT investigation identified at least five AMP officials and speakers who worked in the previous, defunct network called the “Palestine Committee.” It was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to advance Hamas’ agenda politically and financially in the United States.

Last year, AMP joined a coalition of national Islamist groups in forming the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is among the other founding members (for more on that coalition, click here). CAIR and its founders appear in internal Palestine Committee records admitted into evidence during the largest terror financing trial in U.S. history.

Several Palestine Committee entities were created by Mousa Abu Marzook, who remains a top Hamas political leader. One branch, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), was convicted in 2008 along with five senior officials, of illegally routing more than $12 million to Hamas. HLF’s role in the Palestine Committee was the chief fundraising arm for Hamas in the United States, prosecutors say.

“The purpose of creating the Holy Land Foundation was as a fundraising arm for Hamas,” said U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis during a sentencing hearing.

A flow chart of other Palestine Committee entities includes the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and a Northern Virginia think tank called the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR). IAP served as a propaganda outlet, organizing rallies and publishing magazines with articles supporting Hamas. CAIR was added to a Palestine Committee meeting agenda shortly after its 1994 creation.

UASR published an academic journal and, prosecutors say, was “involved in passing Hamas communiques to the United States-based Muslim Brotherhood community and relaying messages from that community back to Hamas.”

Today, AMP routinely engages in anti-Israeli rhetoric, sponsors conferences that serve as a platform for Israel bashers, and openly approves “resistance” against the “Zionist state.” One AMP official acknowledged the goal is to “to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

An April 2014 AMP-sponsored conference in Chicago, for example, hosted Sabri Samirah, the former chairman of IAP, as a speaker. There was little to no talk about how to achieve peaceful coexistence.

“We are ready to sacrifice all we have for Palestine. Long Live Palestine,” Samirah said. “We have a mission here [in the U.S.] also to support the struggle of our people back there in order to achieve a free land in the Muslim world, without dictators and without corruption.”

The U.S. government had earlier deemed Samirah a “security risk” and he was barred from reentering the country for several years following a trip to Jordan in 2003. While in Jordan, he served as a spokesman for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, the Islamic Action Front. The charges against Samirah were subsequently dropped and he returned to the U.S. last year.

The AMP event also applauded Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Odeh as “a great community member, a great member of the Palestinian cause, a great activist for the Palestinian cause.” Odeh was under indictment, and later convicted, on federal naturalization fraud charges for failing to disclose her conviction in an Israeli court for her significant role in a 1969 terrorist bombing at a Jerusalem grocery store that killed two university students. Those charges, the AMP claimed during an April 2014 event, were “politically motivated” so as “to hurt the active Palestinian solidarity movement and to hurt all strong Palestinian activists that are standing for the just cause of Palestine.”

AMP board member Osama Abu Irshaid has close affiliations to both the IAP and UASR. Abu Irshaid formerly served as editor of IAP’s Arabic periodical, Al-Zaitounah, a mouthpiece for pro-Hamas propaganda. The magazine also published advertisements by terrorist-tied charities, including HLF, the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF).

Abu Irshaid served on the board of the American Muslim Society (AMS), which served as another name for the IAP. He is listed as “Research Fellow at the United Association for Studies and Research” in a 1999 article published in the Middle East Affairs Journal, a UASR publication, titled, “Occupied Palestine or Independent Israel: ‘The Right to Existence’ After More Than Fifty Years of Occupation.”

In the article’s conclusion, Abu Irshaid argues against past peace agreements with the “Zionists” including the 1993 Oslo Accords: “The most unfortunate aspect of these agreements is that they put an end to the zero-sum game of ‘occupied Palestine or independent Israel,’ in favor of the latter, an independent Israel.” He adds, “The PLO effectively traded Palestinian historic and religious rights in its pursuit of a legacy for Yasser Arafat, the PLO Chairman. One motivation was its envy of the resistance, because the intifada earned greater admiration among the Palestinian people, who have consistently shown their support for the resistance by electing resistance candidates to various elected positions in lieu of PLO candidates. Perhaps Yasser Arafat and his cronies felt that the only way to stay in power and to defeat the resistance was to sell out the people and become a collaborator with the Zionists who promised them power, money, and peace.”

In addition to being formed by Marzook, UASR was headed by Ahmed Yousef who now serves as senior political advisor to the former HAMAS prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya. In 1998, while serving as UASR’s executive director, Yousef gave an interview to the Middle East Quarterly in which he defended Hamas. When asked, “Is Hamas a terrorist group?” Yousef responded, “No. Hamas was founded during the intifada and it operated within the confines of the Geneva Convention. It later became a charitable and social service organization in the West Bank and Gaza, helping Palestinians forced off of their land and into unimaginable suffering, humiliation and poverty.”

Abu-Irshaid’s affection for Hamas continues today.

In a December Facebook post in Arabic, Abu Irshaid openly applauds Hamas war tactics against Israel and bashes the Palestinian Fatah party led by President Mahmud Abbas, alleging it “has grown old after deviating from the creed of liberation and resistance upon which it was established.” He writes: “There is a difference between those who resisted and those who compromise; between those who constitute an army for liberation, and those who ready battalions of lackeys; a difference between those who rise up for the blood of martyrs, and those who spill it in the wine glasses of Israel.” He then adds there is “a vast divide between those who hurt Israel and shattered its insolence and aggression in Gaza three times, and those who have conspired with Israel and are complicit with it.”

In a Feb. 28 tweet Abu Irshaid condemns Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization and refers to Sisi’s government as “Cairo Aviv” as a rebuke to existing close relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv.

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Salah SarsourA 2001 FBI reporttalks about Sarsour’s involvement with Hamas and fundraising on behalf of the Hamas charity, HLF. A 1998 Israeli police reportrecounting an interrogation of his brother Jamil Sarsour substantiates these claims, stating that Salah Sarsour was an HLF employee and “collected funds for this organization.”

Sarsour was arrested by Israeli authorities in the mid-1990s and sentenced to eight months in prison in Ramallah, allegedly for support to Hamas. While in prison, he became “very good friends” with Adel Awdallah, a former leader of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, who was killed in an Israeli attack in October 1998. He also sent money to Awdallah “several times” through his brother Jamil Sarsour, who pleaded guilty to aiding Hamas and served a multiple year sentence in Israel before being deported to the U.S. in 2002.

Sufyan Nabhan (also Sufian Nabhan) – served on IAP’s Board of Directors. During a May 2010 event commemorating the Palestinian “Day of Catastrophe” (also known as “Al-Nakba”), Sufian criticized the “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” He was reported saying, “Occupation is apartheid, occupation is segregation. Massacres are going on daily.”

Abdelbaset Hamayel – Formerly served as IAP executive director and secretary general. Hamayel was also a representative of the Illinois and Wisconsin offices of the terror-tied charity, KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development.

The U.S. Treasury froze the assets of KindHearts in 2006. The charity that was dissolved in January 2012 has made contributions to Hamas-affiliated organizations, including significant donations to Sanabil Association for Relief and Development, a Lebanese charity that was designated a Hamas front by the Treasury Department in 2003.

KindHearts was called “the progeny of Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, which attempted to mask their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable,” by then-Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey.

A 2002 U.S. Treasury Department press release announcing the designation of the Global Relief Foundation alleged it “has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups.” The press release further stated that GRF had received $18,521 from HLF in 2000.

Yousef Shahin – Identified in a feature article in Al-Zaitounah’s May 1997 issue as president of IAP’s new branch in New Jersey. “Then Yousef Shahin, president of the [IAP New Jersey] branch, spoke and thanked all who shared in the success of this project, and asked the sons of the community to support the project materially and morally,” a translation of the article in Arabic states.

Shahin has countered allegations against former British MP George Galloway for raising funds for Hamas: “He’s not taking money for terrorists,” Shahin was reported saying. “He’s buying medical supplies for the hospital. He’s not dealing with a terrorist organization. We were assured by him; he’s going to give everything to the hospital.”

Galloway’s now-defunct charity Viva Palestina claimed to “break the crippling siege of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid” to Palestinians. During the first Viva Palestina convoy to Gaza in 2009, Galloway stated, “I personally am about to break the sanctions on the elected government of Palestine…” because, “[We] are giving three cars and £25,000 cash to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Here is the money. This is not charity. This is politics. The government of Palestine is the best people where this money is needed. We are giving this money now to the government of Palestine.”

Shahin was also listed as a point of contact for an AMP banquet that included Galloway and Osama Abu Irshaid as speakers.

Hatem Bazian – AMP’s chairman spoke at a number of IAP events. According to IAP’s Al-Zaitounah, Bazian was a guest lecturer at an IAP event at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee on April 13, 1998. The event was titled, “Fifty Years of Despair and Punishment for the Palestinian People.” An article in IAP’s Al-Zaitounahmagazine summarizes Bazian’s lecture: “During the lecture he [Bazian] spoke on the practices of the loathsome Zionist entity [against] the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Bazian has called on Americans to create a violent uprising at home in 2004 similar to the Palestinian intifada.

“Are you angry? …Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country,” Bazian said. “It’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They’re gonna say some Palestinian [is] being too radical – well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet.”

Further, at an AMP event at the University of California in Santa Cruz in November, Bazian provided the “victimization argument” to justify Palestinian violence. “Palestine is the victim that is being victimized once again by actually blaming them for the fact that they respond. Palestinians’ response to settler colonialism has been identical to every colonized people’s response when they are confronted by the colonization process,” Bazian said. He also failed to openly condemn Hamas, and instead held Israel responsible for the ongoing conflict in the region: “So the question—is Hamas good or not good for the Palestinians –it’s a question that is superficial because it does not address the context within the specificity of what is occurring on the ground of the Palestinians and how Israel is running a massive jail, shifting its powers and resources from one group to the other in order to manage an occupied colonized population.”

At an April fundraising dinner in Chicago, AMP National Media and Communications Director Kristin Szremski announced the recent opening of the organization’s Washington, D.C. office to advocate for the Palestinian cause. While claiming “we don’t lobby,” Szremski said that “for years the American Muslims for Palestine has been calling for an end to aid to Israel. Now Alhamdulillah (Praise to God) we are in a position to do something about it. Now the American Muslims for Palestine is in Washington, D.C., actually beginning the work with legislative staff in Congress to identify specific military units who receive foreign military financing from the United States.”

Szremski also named partnering organizations in its “educational and advocacy work in Congress” that included the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations and U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

There is no indication AMP is routing money to Hamas. But its rhetoric and ideology, emphasizing “resistance” – a coded reference to armed jihad – and the significant representation of leaders tied to an old Hamas-support network, raise serious questions about its true objectives. This is not a mainstream organization seeking a peaceful settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.