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Huma Abedin, perhaps our next Secretary of State?

by Speranza ( 114 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood at May 2nd, 2013 - 7:00 am

If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as president in 2017 do not be shocked if Huma Abedin becomes Secretary of State. What a nightmare scenario that will be! A woman whose family has Muslim Brotherhood connections as National Security Adviser or even Secretary of State – in other words the perfect Democratic nominee and of course the aged John McCain and his buddy Miss Lindsey Graham would fall over backwards in praising her.

by Daniel Greenfield

In 2017, Huma Abedin may be the wife of the mayor of New York City or the National Security Adviser to the President of the United States. It’s even possible that she might be both.

Huma Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner, was once the front-runner for the top job. Weiner’s career was temporarily torpedoed by a sex scandal, but a weak campaign field has tempted him back into the race and already positioned him at the number two spot.

Weiner’s competition is a lesbian City Council speaker, who is seen as a Bloomberg toady, a Comptroller who may soon be headed to jail for campaign finance fraud and a radical leftist Public Advocate who quotes Che and whose wife once claimed to be a lesbian.

In that company, Weiner no longer looks as freakish as he once did and with a $4.3 million war chest, he could win by drowning his Democratic opponents in cash and then fundraising all over again during the general election when he becomes the only alternative to a Republican mayor.

Bloomberg proved that even an unpopular candidate despised by most voters could win elections by flooding community and interest groups with cash and Weiner’s biggest asset isn’t even his war chest; it’s his connection to the Clintons.  [........]

The woman at the heart of that connection is his wife. Media reports say that Huma Abedin is the one to decide whether Weiner runs and the existence of the New York Times Magazine image rehab profile makes it clear that she has already decided. But no one really believed that Huma Abedin would have stayed married to a formerly promising politician who would never again run for public office.

The only thing standing between Huma Abedin and Gracie Mansion is Joe Lhota, a balding Giuliani official and Weiner’s likely Republican opponent, whose biggest asset is the Giuliani brand.  Lhota is pitching himself as a libertarian alternative to the Bloombergian nanny state, but the chances are still good that the Clinton machine will roll over him on Election Day.

For most politicians, Gracie Mansion is the last stop of their political careers. Ed Koch, the last mayor to try and move to higher office, couldn’t make it. Lindsay took a shot at the White House in 1972 and Weiner likely has dreams of following in his footsteps. It’s an unlikely project, but if Weiner climbs into the top spot in the city, it will only be as a stepping stone to higher office.

By then Huma Abedin is likely to have an even bigger place in the political sun. Bill Clinton traded his support in the last election for the coronation of his wife. Hillary Clinton does have a likability problem, despite the media’s best efforts to pretend otherwise, and she lost the last time she was the inevitable candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.  [.......]

The prospective Democratic presidential candidates for 2016 include such charismatic figures as Joe Biden, Maryland Governor Martin “Rain Tax” O’Malley and New York’s Machiavellian governor Andrew Cuomo. It’s the kind of race that even Hillary might be able to win. And then it’s up to the Republican Party to put up a candidate who can communicate better than any of its candidates have in the last generation.

President Hillary Clinton is almost certain to take along Huma Abedin. The two women were virtually inseparable and politicians like to keep their close confidants and aides by their side. Huma Abedin served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Hillary Clinton during her Secretary of State days.  [.......]

Moving Huma Abedin over into a job like the director of policy planning would allow her to reshape the State Department’s foreign policy worldview. And from there it would not be impossible to move her up to National Security Advisor or even Secretary of State.

Both of those positions might be a little too high profile for Abedin who works best in the shade. A 2007 Observer profile of her struggled to dig up any information on her official role, and whether with Clinton or Weiner, she has stuck to the background part.

The controversy that flared up over her background shows why she avoids the spotlight. With close family members, including her parents, involved in the Muslim Brotherhood and her own work at their Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, which was set up by the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood to build a fifth column of Islamization within the United States; Huma Abedin has every reason to be the woman behind the man or the woman behind the woman.

The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood player who has been accused of funding Al Qaeda front groups, is not an ideal mention on any resume. And yet few Republicans have been willing to challenge Huma Abedin when she was serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Secretary of State. Would they be willing to challenge an emboldened Secretary of State Huma Abedin?

[.....]

By 2014, Huma Abedin may be married to the mayor of the biggest city in the country. By 2018, she may be the National Security Advisor.

It would be a rapid ascension, but the process of moving agents of influence up the ladder has shredded the normal seasoning process that would usually required for the top spots. The Center for American Progress’ Denis McDonough went from being an aide to an advisor to the Deputy National Security Advisor to the Chief of Staff in a handful of years. It would not be too hard to imagine Abedin making the same rush up the ladder while the media gushes at her ambition and her posh designer handbags.

In an age of terror and appeasement, Huma Abedin’s Muslim background is her best credential. The close collaboration between the Obama and Clinton foreign policy infrastructure and the Muslim Brotherhood makes her own Muslim Brotherhood background another plus.

What seems like treason to most ordinary Americans is ideologically convenient to a political and diplomatic clique that believes empowering “moderate” Islamists is our best defense against Al Qaeda. Placing Huma Abedin in a position where she can shape American foreign policy would be their show of sincerity to the Brotherhood.

None of this is inevitable. Another Twitter scandal could sink Weiner’s comeback and a more likable Democrat could pull together enough support and media adoration to challenge Hillary Clinton. And the work of researchers and investigators could still sink Huma Abedin the way it sank Susan Rice.

Read the rest – Secretary of State Huma Abedin?

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Posted in Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood | 114 Comments »

Tears don’t protect against murder. Bullets do.

by Speranza ( 205 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, Germany, Hamas, History, Israel, Palestinians at April 18th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

The way to stop terrorism is to exterminate the terrorists, a fact that should be manifest to all except the blinkered ideologues who prefer “dialog”.

by Daniel Greenfield

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities.

They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.

While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.

The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and officials were dead.
European law enforcement had failed to hold even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre responsible, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in its capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The Israeli raid on the PLO terrorists in Beirut’s Muslim Quarter missed one important target. Arafat. And so, on another September day, some 19 years later, September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook hands with Arafat and proclaimed, “Enough of blood and tears! Enough!” But the blood and tears had only begun, as a PLO on its last legs was revived and built its terrorist infrastructure inside Israel’s borders.

[..........]

Today, some 40 years after that September in Munich and 19 years after the even worse tragedy of that September (1993) in Washington D.C., with over 1,500 dead since that fatal handshake, there have been rivers of blood and tears. And a shortage of bullets.

PLO officials these days are more likely to die of morbid obesity or, like Arafat, of AIDS, than of Israeli raids. They are nearly as likely to kill each other, like Arafat’s cousin, Moussa Arafat, the former head of the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist forces, who was dragged out of his home and shot by his own people. The murder of Mohammed Abu Shaaban, killed a week after the handshake, by his own people, was the first of a long string of Fatah on Fatah violence that is a far more likely cause of death for top terrorists than the jet planes and tanks of the hated Zionist regime.

The rivers of tears keep flowing, but tears don’t protect against murder. Neither do peace treaties. No amount of tears from the tens of thousands mutilated, tortured, crippled, wounded, orphaned and widowed by the PLO in all its front groups, splinter groups and incarnations, including its current incarnation as a phony government, has been enough to stop Western governments from supporting, arming and funding the terrorists.

Tears don’t protect against murder. They don’t stop killers from killing. They don’t prevent the authorities from looking the other way when the killings happen because there is something in it for them. They don’t bring the terrorists to justice.  [.........]

Tears did not stop the operation of a single gas chamber. They did not save the life of a single Jewish refugee. [.......] They will not stop Israel from being carved up by terrorists whose demands are backed up by the diplomatic capital of every nation that bows its head in the direction of Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, and the old men who control the oil wells and the mosques.

In 1988, Willi Pohl published another book, Das Gesetz des Dschungels or The Law of the Jungle. That same year, PLO terrorists carried out the “Mother’s Bus Attack” taking the passengers of a bus, filled with women on board, hostage and demanding the release of all imprisoned terrorists. The terrorists killed two hostages and Israeli Special Forces moved in, killing the terrorists and saving the lives of all but one hostage.

In response, Israeli commandos stormed Tunis, killing Abu Jihad, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and the number two Fatah leader after Arafat . The United Nations Security Council met and passed Resolution 611, noting with concern the “loss of human life”, particularly that of Abu Jihad, and vigorously condemned the “act of aggression”, Not a single member of the Security Council voted against it. The United States abstained.

Not one single resolution was passed that year or the year afterward or the year after that condemning a terrorist attack against Israel or criticizing any of the countries that trained, armed and harbored the terrorists. Instead there were numerous resolutions condemning Israel for expelling and deporting terrorists. The closest thing to a resolution critical of terrorism was Resolution 579 in response to the Achille Lauro hijacking, carried out by men loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the current President of the Palestinian Authority, who also provided the funding for the Munich Massacre. Resolution 579 did not mention the Achille Lauro, Leon Klinghoffer or Palestinian Arab terrorists. Instead it condemned “hostage-taking” in general.

In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. Not a single one condemning the massacre of Olympic athletes at an international event. [........]

This was the law of the jungle disguised as international law. Against the law of the jungle, tears are futile. Jungle law cannot be debated away or subdued with the speechifying of an Abba Eban or a Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be moralized into decency or signed away with peace treaties. It can only be met with resistance.

Tears don’t protect against murder. Bullets do.

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Posted in Fatah, Germany, Hamas, History, Israel, Palestinians | 205 Comments »

The ‘all powerful’ Israel Lobby strikes again

by Speranza ( 360 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Democratic Party, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan, Palestinians at February 28th, 2013 - 3:00 pm

The so called “Israel lobby” (or as Chuckster Hagel referred to it as “the Jewish lobby”) cannot hold a candle to the Saudi lobby.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Israel Lobby which controls American foreign policy, but has thus far been unable to get the United States to stop funding the terrorists currently shooting rockets at its 14th largest city, has struck again as Senate Democrats voted unanimously to make Chuck Hagel the next Secretary of Defense.

The dreaded Israeli Lobby, Jewish Lobby, Israel Lobby or any other permutation of the form that you prefer, has largely kept silent during the Hagel nomination. The head of the ADL was heard to mutter something and the AJC suggested that the Senate should possibly rethink the nomination before falling silent again. As if anyone needed more proof that the Zionist Entity controls Washington.

AIPAC and all the other groups who regularly send out envelopes warning of disaster if the check doesn’t come in the mail have an amazing track record.

When Israel builds apartment buildings in its own capital city, the State Department, that branch of government which Hagel claimed was an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, denounces the provocative act of putting one brick on top of another. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia arrests Christians for celebrating Christmas and you couldn’t pay the State Department to pay attention.

Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden and still rolls in the foreign aid. Egypt’s government is torturing protesters. Libya arrested Christian missionaries in Benghazi, but still can’t be bothered to arrest those responsible for the murder of Ambassador Stevens. The Palestinian Authority hasn’t held an election in forever and is actually paying the salaries of convicted terrorists.

[......] To hear them talk, East Jerusalem is the only thing standing in the way of peace in our time. And talk like that is just more evidence that the Israel Lobby really does run everything.

John Kerry, the new Secretary of State, gave Code Pink, the radical leftist Anti-War and Anti-Israel group, a pass to go see Hamas. John Brennan Islamized Jerusalem. Hagel blamed the Jewish Lobby for spoiling his milk. But what do you expect in a Washington D.C. run by the Israel Lobby?

There are constant dire warnings that Israel is about to pull the United States into a war. The number of wars that Israel has pulled the United States into clocks in at zero. The number of wars that the Saudis have pulled the United States into clocks in at three; if you count a Saudi terrorist funded by Saudis using a bunch of Saudis to ram planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

True aficionados of the nefarious Jewish Lobby however know that the House of Saud was framed by a few thousand Jews who showed up early to wire up the towers with C4 and then punched out before the flights arrived. That is if the planes weren’t just holograms full of passengers who never existed as part of a false flag operation against a fake terrorist group created by the CIA in a conspiracy to steal all the opium in Afghanistan.

And in the same way they know that Hagel really is an Israeli agent. Why else did the Jewish Lobby remain silent? And wasn’t it suspicious how Hagel seemed to hate Israel so much? [.......]What if beneath that mopey exterior that bespeaks a man who has spent his entire life watching a fly crawl across a window, beats the heart of a Semitic partisan who is just raring to begin bombing Iran as soon as he figures out how to make his executive chair go up and down?

Hagel’s triumph is a disappointment to them. It would have been better if he had gone down a martyr, his stumped visage adorning book covers alongside James Forrestal and Adlai Stevenson III as another victim of the lobby in the blue-and-white hotel. A brave truth-teller like Charles Freeman who wasn’t approved for a position chairing the National Intelligence Council for taking money from Saudi Arabia and China, and claiming that Tienanmen Square was a moderate response, but mostly because of the Israel Lobby.

There’s no question that the Israel Lobby is a truly impressive beast. Every now and then it convinces a bunch of senators to sign a letter calling for peace and a two-state solution while condemning the taxpayer supported terrorists who shoot rockets at Israeli cities. The letter doesn’t actually call for ending funding to the terrorists. It just asks the President or Secretary of State to review the situation and strongly urge the terrorists to stop shooting rockets because that endangers the future of the peace process.

[........]

Occasionally the Israel Lobby will get truly serious and a non-binding resolution of support will be introduced in Congress. Everyone will vote for it, even the senators and congressmen whose fondest wish is that Israel didn’t exist.  [.......]

In a truly disturbing overreach of power, sometimes there will be a bill proposing to cut off aid to the terrorists unless they stop shooting rockets at Israeli cities. The bill will allow for a national security waiver by the president. And every president will employ the waiver making the bill slightly less useless than a non-binding resolution, but not in any way that can be pinned down.

Meanwhile the three-hundred blogs dedicated to exposing the Israel Lobby’s muzzling of dissent will denounce the bill and author six more books describing how the dreaded lobby makes it entirely impossible to discuss the conflict from the perspective that Israel is to blame for absolutely everything. This is a perspective that seldom appears in major newspapers and magazines and is absolutely never heard on CNN. You could go a whole five seconds without encountering it on any world news broadcast.

It’s not always clear what the Israel Lobby’s accomplishments really consist of. There’s a good deal of traffic between the interlocking American and Israeli defense industries that adds up to a sizable amount of foreign aid.  [......] To say nothing of the Pakistani Hotel Taliban. Israel is doing better than Taiwan which can’t convince the United States to sell it any serious firepower for fear of offending China, and if folks like Hagel had their way, Israel might be in the same boat.

Beyond that, Israel and the United States have a mutual agreement. The State Department, an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, will blame Israel for all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world, especially those caused by Saudi Arabia, and Israeli diplomats will attend negotiating sessions with terrorists that will fail and then accept responsibility for the failure.

The United States will provide foreign aid to Israel and the countries and terrorist groups trying to destroy it. This will be known as a pro-Israel policy because Israel will get more aid than the countries trying to destroy it giving it a qualitative advantage.

The United States will help fund the terrorists shooting rockets at Israeli cities and help fund the Israeli Iron Dome anti-rocket program, so that both sides are evened out. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will get fighter jets and tanks and Israel will get a visit from Obama. The last time Obama visited Egypt, it imploded, but when he visits Israel, he promises not to reduce the country to a violent civil war and urban anarchy. And so qualitative advantage is upheld once again due to the work of the Israel Lobby.

In one of his more brilliant moments, Hagel signed on to a report that called on Obama to present Israel with his own peace plan backed by a 60,000 NATO peacekeeping force deployed inside Israel that would include soldiers from Muslim countries. We have no idea if this latest brilliant plan will ever come to fruition, but carving up Israel like a turkey and deploying Muslim armies inside it is clearly another creation of the Israel Lobby.

It doesn’t sound like something the Saudi Lobby would come up with, does it?

Read the rest - The dreaded Israel lobby strikes again

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Democratic Party, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan, Palestinians | 360 Comments »

The Left seeks to do “nation building” here at home

by Speranza ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Islam, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Politics, Progressives, Taliban at February 15th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

A refusal to identify the enemy is a recipe for failure, and this predated Obama.

by Daniel Greenfield

Over a decade after thousands of New Yorkers were murdered by Muslim terrorists, the city’s mayor is declaring victory in the War on Salt. Next up he plans to wage a spring offensive on Styrofoam cups. After that, who knows?

We live in surreal times. In the Middle Ages, cats and rats were put on trial. In this modern age, we are fighting wars on food ingredients, the bags we carry them in and the containers out of which we eat and drink them.

There’s no telling what surreal enemy our wise and brilliant leaders will declare war on next. Shoes? Pepper? Umbrellas? Mathematics? The color blue?

There’s just no way to know anymore.

The United States has lost the War in Afghanistan, a minor matter that no news outlet can find the time to report on because they’re too busy covering a breaking story about a Republican senator taking a sip of a water. Maybe a War on Water can be next. Was there a Styrofoam cup involved? It’s time for one of those hard-hitting investigations that reminds us what a loss it will be when the last newspaper is strangled with the entrails of the last news network.

But who can find the time to fight a war against Islamic terrorists, when there are more pressing wars to be fought? Like a war on being fat.

Michelle Obama declared that obesity was a national security threat.  [........]

The military has been unable to identify the Fort Hood Massacre as a terrorist attack and fires any instructor who talks about Islam as anything other than a wonderful Religion of Peace practiced by our closest allies in Saudi Arabia and on board a plane headed for the Pentagon, but the political generals are always ready to jump on any truly serious national security threat.  [........]

Faced with a seemingly unwinnable conflict against the Soviet Union, American leaders began to retreat into smaller social wars that were actually far more unwinnable. Those wars have also gone the way of the dodo. The War on Poverty is one with the ages and the War on Drugs is usually only mentioned in a pejorative context.

But the same government that couldn’t get a small percentage of the population to stop doing cocaine and heroin imagines that it will somehow be able to compel 11-year-old boys to stop eating candy and drawing guns. A heroin addict is nothing compared to a normal growing boy seeking a sweet sugar rush before playing a game of cops and robbers.  [.........]

The government that couldn’t stop drug use or defeat Islamic terrorism has set its sights on something easier. Taking candy from a baby.

During his State of the Union Address, Obama announced that the mission in Afghanistan had been completed because Al Qaeda was defeated. Then he explained that while the war was over, American soldiers would have to go on staying in Afghanistan to continue fighting the already defeated Al Qaeda in a war that was no longer a war, but an extended vacation with shooting.

Since Al Qaeda did not have a significant presence in Afghanistan at any time during his maladministration, defeating it was fairly easy, and true to form it only cost thousands of lives. But somehow it still isn’t defeated. Still if fighting things that don’t exist gets applause, put your hands together for the War on Global Warming, which has recently been scaled down to Climate Change, which means that any time the weather changes, it’s probably due to people using the wrong kinds of light bulbs, driving the wrong kinds of cars and not paying enough attention to Al Gore.

[........]

During the election, Obama promised to begin “nation building” at home. Since that usually involves destroying a country’s military, wrecking its industrial base and then feeding them off the back of trucks while communicating with them only through interpreters, it looks like he’s making good on his promise. Chicago already looks more like Kabul or Baghdad than America.

Nation building at home means bringing the war home. Nation building is something that we usually inflict on our worst enemies in the hopes of teaching them a better way to live. It means wrecking the United States and then rebuilding it in the way that our conquerors see fit. All those little wars aren’t really being fought against salt, sugar, plastic bags and a thousand other tiny inanimate enemies. They are being fought against you.

Guns don’t kill people. And salt and sugar don’t eat themselves. Plastic bags don’t fill themselves with groceries and your old-fashioned gas guzzler won’t drive itself home from the store with plastic bags full of salt and sugar in the trunk.

The left has blown the war against Islamic terrorism. For the most part it has chosen not to fight it. Its real enemy isn’t some bearded guy sitting in a cave with a Kalashnikov being propped up by his fourth wife’s Hijab; it’s Mr. and Mrs. America in all their racist, overeating and polluting criminality.  [......]

What we can expect is a war on everything but the war we’re in. To the sort of people who declare war on salt and make up fake global crises to force everyone to pay more to fly, Islamic terrorism is just what happens when the sainted 3rd World gets tired of our overeating and overdriving, and begins fighting back. The understanding that the terrorists are not just out to protest the destruction of the rainforest or fracking, but intend to establish a totalitarian theocracy based on over a thousand years of bloody history never even enters the minds of the sort of people who declare wars on salt and Styrofoam cups.

In New York City, an awkward skeletal tower stands near where the World Trade Center towers once touched the sky. And on some lamp posts you can still see the faded imprint of missing person flyers. But there is good news. Mayor Bloomberg reports that the war on salt has been won.

Read the rest - War on everything but Islamic terror

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Posted in Islam, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Politics, Progressives, Taliban | 130 Comments »

The only remaining virtue in the Democratic Party is shamelessness

by Speranza ( 115 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Libya, Media, Politics at February 5th, 2013 - 7:00 am

To prove the Knish’s point, one needs only to  look at Obama’s appalling first term and yet the poseur was re-elected. Good economy, bad economy, foreign policy triumphs, foreign policy disasters – it does not matter if you are a Democrat. Right now (and it can change) I think that Hillary Clinton if she wants it will win the presidency in 2016 despite the fact she looks awful.

by Daniel Greenfield

On Friday, Hillary Rodham Clinton left the Harry S. Truman Building of the State Department after doing a grand media tour of every media outlet with a camera and a microphone. Meanwhile in Benghazi, where it was twenty degrees warmer, foreign organizations were fleeing the city while the killers who stayed behind still walked the streets.

In her joint appearance with Obama on 60 Minutes, Clinton claimed that her critics were not living in an “evidence-based world”. This is the same world of which she wrote in her goodbye letter to her State Department colleagues; “I am proud of what we have accomplished together.” Those accomplishments are hard to find among the debris of three failed wars, two failed containment policies in Iran and North Korea, and more attacks on American diplomatic facilities than ever before.

Hillary Clinton presided over the first murder of an American ambassador in thirty years. It was the closest thing to a notable moment in her time as Secretary of State, which concluded, in true Clinton style, with a cover-up, Senate hearings and more finger-wagging.

And yet, despite all that, the media threw her a farewell party in preparation for the 2016 election.  Four Americans died in Benghazi and in four years, Hillary Rodham Clinton expects to take the White House.

There is a certain symmetry to that. A year of political exile for every man she left unguarded and unsupported while lavishing millions on mosque renovations, embassy paintings and assorted trinkets. A year for every man whose blood was spilled on the warm streets of Benghazi. Four dead men and four years in which to prepare to do the same thing all over again as President of the United States.

[.........]

The Benghazi attackers came out of Al Qaeda in Iraq; an organization that is showing more staying power than General Motors, and like the maker of the Aztek, it’s spending a lot of time and energy expanding internationally.

When Obama turned his back on Iraq, discarding the sacrifices of the Surge, like he did the lives of the four men murdered in Benghazi, the terror didn’t stop. Al Qaeda bombs have kept going off as Iraq melted down into a conflict between its Iranian-backed Shiite government, the Kurds and Sunni Islamists. And Al Qaeda found new wars. Like a persistent suitor, it followed BHO and HRC to Benghazi.

[.........]

Like Hillary, Obama has never been held accountable for any of it. And Hillary’s very lack of accountability, her immunity from accountability makes her eminently qualified for the top spot in a Democratic Party where it’s more important to know how to shrug off accountability than it is to get things right.

Bill Clinton ushered in the post-accountability era, where evidence no longer mattered and the law was something that you could ignore if you felt like it. It is the thing that Obama, Clinton 2 and Biden all have in common. They are the poster-children of the post-accountability era where the synergy of media and party is so complete that it no longer matters what you do; only which side you’re on.

Jimmy Carter, the man under whose administration the last American ambassador was murdered, was also the last Democratic president to be held accountable for anything. [.........]

Looking back on the last two decades, it almost seems as if the Clinton era never ended. Not only are both Clintons on television all the time, but so is Al Gore, still playing the guru in a suit, the deep thinker with a hand out to foreign governments. In the Clinton era, it was Communist China. Today it’s Islamist Qatar. At the time Gore said that he had done nothing wrong because there was no controlling legal authority. There still isn’t. Not where Democrats are concerned.

Al Gore, whose palm always itches for money from the enemies of the United States, nearly made it to the White House, where his influence peddling would have taken place on a whole other scale. Clinton, who did make it, deported a little boy to a Communist country at gunpoint and murdered more children at Waco, in the world’s bloodiest training exercise.

But again no one was held responsible. It’s a long way from Benghazi to Waco, but the Clintons retain their talent for walking over corpses to reach their ambition. And their critics, who notice the bodies, are accused of harboring personal vendettas and of not living in an “evidence-based world.”

The Democratic Party in the last two decades has absorbed Bill Clinton’s ability to avoid accountability. The ranks of its congressmen are full of liars, felons and lunatics. It is a party so devoid of accountability that the likes of Sheila Jackson Lee can sit on the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics without being able to tell apart the Moon and Mars, while Hank Johnson can warn that Guam may tip over if too many Marines land on it.

The Party of Jefferson has made the long sad trip to a party that views Massachusetts scandal machines like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank as elder statesmen, instead of criminals who were never locked up, on account of their political influence. And it is full of these elder statesmen, men like Joe Biden, whose only gift is an inability to shut up and a media unwilling to condemn even the worst of their shenanigans.

The only remaining virtue in the Democratic Party is shamelessness. Those Democrats who have no shame prosper, those who do turn themselves in and serve their time.

After having trashed the housing market, the likes of Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo step forward as reformers. After having murdered a woman, Ted Kennedy retired as a champion of women’s rights.  [........] And four years from now, Hillary Clinton will be touting her experience in Benghazi as a reason that she should be elected to the White House where she will be able to do it all over again.

Read the rest – Things only a Democrat could get away with

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Posted in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Libya, Media, Politics | 115 Comments »

John Kerry: the radical careerist

by Speranza ( 102 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Progressives at January 29th, 2013 - 7:00 am

John Kerry would have made a God awful president. The fact that he came as close as he did in 2004 reminds us of how important we need to have strong candidates to run for president.

by Daniel Greenfield

November 1971. The Anti-War movement was moving into high gear even as the Vietnam War was fading away. Americans troops were leaving Vietnam in large numbers and the last American offensive in Vietnam had begun the year before. But for the Anti-War movement, the actual war was only a pretext for undermining their country and promoting themselves.

Few men fit that description better than John Forbes Kerry who had not needed a weatherman to know which way the winds of political fortune were blowing. Vietnam Veterans Against the War became the platform for an aspiring Congressman seeking to remake his image. Despite its name VVAW was as bent on attacking the men fighting the war, as the war itself. Its publicity stunts, such as Operation RAW or Kerry’s own Senate testimony, were calculated to cast returning veterans as war criminals and murderers.

Toward the end of 1971, VVAW was balanced on the edge of its own irrelevance. The publicity stunts had brought it fame and undermined America’s position in negotiating a departure from Vietnam, but the departure was still underway. Rather than speeding it up, Kerry and VVAW had slowed it down to make the most of their moment in the sun, but once the public and VVAW’s membership realized that the war really was ending, so would their popularity.

For John Kerry, VVAW had accomplished its goal by making him famous. [.......] But not every VVAW activist had a political exit strategy. Some had a more violent one in mind.

At the Kansas City leadership meeting of VVAW, a proposal was put forward to use the Christmas recess to murder several senators. Murdering senators would not be helpful to Kerry’s career plans, but neither would informing the authorities of the plot. Unlike much of the VVAW, Kerry didn’t want to storm the Senate, he wanted to work there. And so the man of nuance found a compromise, he resigned without telling anyone of the plot.

Three months later he was running for Congress.

Kerry’s second desertion was to become a pattern in his career. While some in the VVAW were career radicals, Kerry was a radical careerist. Leftist politics were his way up the ladder, but he never let them get in the way of his own career.

Over 40 years later, Kerry, the fake war hero turned fake anti-war hero, would try to pull off the same trick a second time, going from pro-war to anti-war in Iraq.

During his Senate testimony, Kerry had said, “We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.” But John Forbes Kerry had always been a summer soldier, a straw man playing a part, a traitor to everything but his own career. John Kerry had gone to Washington not to tell the truth, but to tell the profitable lie.

Kerry was willing to lie, to portray himself as a war hero when it suited him and as a war criminal when it suited him, and to switch from one to the other, as quickly as he switched from supporting a war to opposing it. He was willing to cover up the planned assassination of United States senators, to throw away medals that he claimed were his before claiming that they weren’t, and to make common cause with America’s enemies, so long as it got him where he needed to go.

John Kerry has spent thirty years holding public office, twenty-eight of them as a United States Senator, and he has spent that time pushing the same bankrupt politics of international appeasement. The Kerry who made up imaginary war crimes in Vietnam while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee became a member of that same Committee while making up imaginary war crimes in Nicaragua.

The career of Senator Kerry is bookended by his support for the Sandinista terrorists at its inception to his recent support for Assad. In that time, the man who would be Secretary of State demonstrated that he had learned nothing from his constant mistakes.

In 1985, Kerry insisted that America needed to put its faith in the goodwill of the Sandinistas, as he had earlier expected it to puts its faith in the goodwill of the Viet Cong’s peace offer that he had announced in Washington D.C.

In 1970, as Kerry was taking aim at his first Congressional campaign, he told the Harvard Crimson, “I’m an internationalist. I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”  [........]

In 1985, Kerry finally became Senator Kerry. Shortly thereafter, Senator Kerry announced that he was going to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinistas as a Vietnam Veteran to avoid “repeating the mistakes we made in Vietnam.”

To Kerry, Nicaragua was just another Vietnam. The Comandante, Daniel Ortega, was just another Ho Chi Mihn and the old winter soldier was back in the saddle galloping to the rescue of another Communist dictatorship. [.......] In his Senate floor speech a year later, he argued against military aid to the Contra rebels by invoking Vietnam.

“Mr. President, how quickly do we forget? How quickly do we forget? No one wanted to widen the war in Vietnam.” Then followed the usual tale of young Kerry suffering through Christmas in Cambodia and a plea not to send off another generation of American soldiers to die in Nicaragua. It was a shameless speech that Kerry would repeat with tedious regularity throughout his long political career of finding new Vietnams around the world.

While Nicaragua did not have much in common with Vietnam, the Sandinistas and the Viet Cong both had Kerry selling their agenda in Washington. In the Senate, John Kerry did exactly what he had done outside it… represent the interests of the Communist foe.

Having found himself another Vietnam, Kerry obstructed Reagan’s policy as much as he could. He met with Ortega and brought back his proposal to block all aid to the contras. [.......] It claimed that the Sandinistas were non-aligned, when they were aligned with the USSR, and Ortega’s visit to Moscow shortly thereafter would humiliate and discredit pro-Sandinista Democrats like Kerry. Kerry’s claim that he was not illegally negotiating with Ortega, but only passing along a message, was an even thinner tissue of lies.

When Reagan imposed sanctions on the Sandinista regime, Kerry denounced it as an “unpardonable” “unilateral display of arrogance.”  [......]

John Kerry defined himself as a veteran, but the one consistent attitude that he has shown is contempt for the American soldier.

As far back as his Yale days, Kerry had been insisting that American’s foreign policy problems were caused by its military. Kerry’s political career began with his demonization of American soldiers in Vietnam and it wrapped up with his demonization of American soldiers in Iraq.

In 1971, Kerry had accused American soldiers of cutting off ears and heads, raping women and behaving in a way reminiscent of Genghis Khan. Thirty-four years later, Kerry accused American soldiers in Iraq of terrorizing women and children.

[......]

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” he told students.

John Forbes Kerry, Yale man, was far too smart to get stuck in Iraq or Vietnam. Instead he did his homework and finessed his way out of Vietnam and into Washington DC. Unlike those fools in the military who believed in winning wars, he believed in losing them and profiting politically from the defeat.

This was the lesson that Kerry had taken away from his work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the same lesson that he had taken away from every war, that it was safer to be the senator than the soldier, the critic rather than the commander. [.......] It is the lesson that he intends to bring with him to his work as Secretary of State.

For all his cleverness, John Kerry has always been a pawn of foreign interests. Kerry let himself be used by the Viet Cong and by the Sandinistas, by the Soviet Union and by half the Muslim world. As Secretary of State, he will go on being used, no longer as a Senator, but as the most important foreign policy figure in the Obama Administration.

If John Kerry becomes Secretary of State, then every terrorist group that he panders to and every tyrant that he plays up to will ascend that post with him. The Senate confirmation of John Kerry will mean that every enemy power or group that despises the United States will have an ally at the head of this country’s foreign policy establishment.

Over 40 years ago, Kerry learned that treason will be rewarded by the political establishment of the left. If his political career is capped off with this honor, then American foreign policy will be in the hands of a man with no principle except contempt for the military and no guiding light but the efficacy of treason.

Read the rest - John Kerry: Unfit for duty

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The difference between civilization and the jungle is security

by Speranza ( 209 Comments › )
Filed under Crime, Weapons at January 11th, 2013 - 10:30 am

As the Knish points out, with a new Carter in office, the cycles of  1970′s  high crime rates in cities are coming full circle again. In calling attention to the pre-Giuliani days of New York City there are  a whole slew of films that gave a good example of what gritty Gotham was like – Death Wish, The Warriors,  Serpico, Panic in Needle Park,  Dog Day Afternoon,  Alphabet City, Fort Apache: The Bronx,  The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3,  Across 110th Street, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy.  The sunny city of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” had long since pretty much vanished. Giuliani made it safe for their heads up their butts hipsters to take over Williamsburg by giving them a sense of security to be able to sip their lattes all night at the myriad of coffee shops.

Daniel Greenfield

In Washington D.C., the office of the Honorable Joseph Biden was busy phoning up everyone from Mothers Against Pointy Things to the Gay Communist Gun Club of America to Wal-Mart to invite them down for a serious no-holds-barred discussion about doing to the Bill of Rights what his boss had done to the economy.

Meanwhile over in Chicago, the 13th corpse was being scraped off the sidewalk. In just nine days, Obama’s hometown, one of them anyway, was already 15% ahead of last year’s whopping murder rate. East of Second City, in the city that would be Chicago if it wasn’t for a lot of money and a Republican mayor, one of the city’s liberal judges gave civil rights activists a late Christmas present with a verdict against the NYPD’s ‘Stop and Frisk” program in the Bronx.

The Bronx is the part of New York City voted most likely to be Detroit. An ironic fate for a borough that built the city’s biggest zoo and botanical garden as a way of keeping the riffraff out of what was once an exclusive area. It’s the place where you are mostly likely to shoot or be shot at.  The Bronx is the fourth smallest borough of the five, but it’s number one in murders, rapes and robberies.

New York’s Finest commute to work from Staten Island, where the homicide rate is less than half that of the Bronx. In the 40th Precinct (you may know its neighbor, the 41st Precinct from the movie, Fort Apache, The Bronx) last year there were 12 murders, 21 rapes, 476 robberies, 387 felony assaults, 1,337 misdemeanor assaults, 62 shooting victims and a partridge in a pear tree.

That’s not too bad considering that there were 72 murders there in 1990. In 1998, after 4 years of Giuliani, 72 murders had become 15. The two forces that transformed the 40th from a really bad place to just a bad place were aggressive policework and gentrification. The aggressive policework wasn’t pretty, but it made the gentrification possible and kept New York City from turning into Newark or Chicago.

Stop and Frisk, which is just what it sounds like, allowed police to stop suspects and frisk them just on suspicion that they might be up to something bad. It’s one of those programs that upsets people on both sides of the aisle, but it happens to work because it lets police stop gangbangers before they bang and lowers the murder rate to something you can actually live through.

Civil rights groups have been protesting against Stop and Frisk for years because it’s racist, in the sense that it tends to take place outside dilapidated Bronx apartment buildings rather than Upper East Side high rises. For the 40th Precinct, civil rights group statistics show that 17,690 stops were made, and of those stopped, 9.200 were black, 6,039 were Hispanic, 119 were white, 63 were Asian and 15 were American Indians. Considering the lack of major tribes in the five boroughs, it is a testament to the NYPD’s dedication to diversity that they were able to find and frisk that many Native Americans.

Since the only white people in the 40th are hipsters who think Williamsburg is over and went looking for somewhere edgier to set up their metal working studios, these numbers are not too surprising.  [.......]

Water dripping down eventually bores a hole in a rock. Civil rights lawyers suing and screaming long enough eventually dismantles a police force. Crime is rising again in New York City, which makes it more dangerous to move to some formerly dilapidated part of the city and set up shop in an abandoned warehouse while constructing giant jagged metal figurines as a protest against capitalism that will one day decorate the lawn of a corporate office park.

Bronx crime, like most urban crime, is driven by gangs. The Black Assassins, Majestic Warlocks and the Black Muslim Five Percenters are one of the 70 street gangs in New York’s own Detroit. While civil rights activists call for fighting gang violence with peace treaties and afterschool programs, there are really only two things that work. Either a police state of the kind you will find in the Bronx where the cops monitor the Twitter and Facebook postings of gang members, and their text messages, or an armed population that is capable of defending itself against them.

Liberals invariably choose none of the above.

[........]

In the 90s, the Democrats learned that they could be tough on crime or they wouldn’t even be elected dogcatcher. It was a lesson that the humiliation of Michael Dukakis drove home, and no matter how often Democrats denounced the Willie Horton ad, they took its lesson to heart. At least until now.

While Obama pitches gun control, his Attorney General has undermined local law enforcement at every turn. It would seem that the only crime that Obama wants to fight is the crime of owning the type of rifle that those experienced hunters, Barack Obama and Diane Feinstein, have decided that no hunter needs. But the idea that gun control is a substitute for law enforcement is laughably insane, even by Chicago standards.

Urban mayors like to believe that cracking down on rural sporting goods stores will end the killing. It won’t. The real gun culture isn’t at gun shows and Wal-Marts, it’s down in the 40th where kids grow up listening to 50 Cent and where pointing your own gun sideways is a rite of passage. There’s no place in the United States where you can legally sell heroin, but heroin use is still off the charts in the Bronx. Gun control nationwide will be just as effective as heroin control in the Bronx.

[.......]

When you scuttle both law enforcement and gun ownership, then what remains is the hell that the country descended into in the seventies when civil rights lawyers got their way and major cities, including New York City, became unlivable.

In 1965, there were 836 murders in New York at a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people. In 1976, the number of murders had increased to a grisly 1,969 to a rate of 7.2. By 1993, the last year of David Dinkins, New York City’s first black Democrat mayor, they peaked at 2,420 at a 13.3 rate. Only a little below Chicago’s current 15.65 rate. By Giuliani’s second year in office, the city was down to 1,550 murders, a low that it hadn’t seen since 1970. By the time he left office, there had only been 960 murders at a rate of 5.0 per 100,000 people. Giuliani had taken the city back to 1965 and its murder rate today is, incredibly, at the national average for the northeast.

The New York City success story was the triumph of prosperity and the police state. With enough cops on the street, given a free hand, New York City could have the murder rate of liberal paradises like Austin or Seattle. Giuliani made it safe for liberals to move back to New York City and play artist, uptown banker with social justice commitments, aspiring actress, foodie, tech guru or random trendy urbanite. And once they were there, the golden fountain began to flow, crime rates continued falling and the city could be taken off life support.

Reagan cleaned up the economy and allowed liberals to begin safely getting rich again. Giuliani cleaned up the city and allowed liberals to safely walk its streets. Both men fulfilled the traditional function of the Republican as the paternal figure who steps in when baby makes a mess and cleans it up while allowing baby to believe that it was done by magic.

Liberals cannot come to terms with what happened in New York City, because it would force them to acknowledge that their lifestyle is made possible by either right wing suburban cops violating civil rights or by fleeing to sheltered cities with low minority populations. And with a new Carter in office, the cycle of the seventies is coming full circle again, not just militarily or economically, but also when it comes to crime rates.

Urban liberals like to believe that it was unthinking city planners and the automobile that destroyed the city, when it was actually them. The city planners are still unthinking and the automobiles are still motoring, but the cities are back only to the extent that law enforcement has undone some of their worst mistakes. Now with an urban liberal in the White House, the mistakes are being repeated again, backed once again by the power of the Federal government.

The rural area is protected by the 2nd Amendment and the urban area by the police state. The liberal, who is only interested in enforcing laws against real criminals like people who fill in swamps or make politically incorrect jokes, would like to take away the firearms of the rural gun owner and dismantle the law enforcement defenses of the urban area.  [.......]

Down in the 40th, the boys in blue still walk the streets as they do in so many other cities. It’s a thin line here and everywhere else where everyone wants more cops, but can’t afford to pay them. [.......] Gangs, many of them even more dangerous than the ones you’ll find in the Bronx, are spreading across the country. Stopping them will take more than the police state that Bloomberg still oversees.

The old urban lesson of the seventies is that the difference between civilization and the jungle is security. And there is no substitute for security, whether it’s the security of one man with a gun, or a very expensive police department of men with guns carrying out the marching orders of statistical analysts.

The political left has forgotten the lesson of Willie Horton in its arrogance and its base of metal working artists in converted warehouses has forgotten the lessons of that old Times Square that they never visited, but still nostalgically pine for.  [.......]

Read the rest – Crime and Disarmament

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Echos from a New Years Eve 100 years ago

by Speranza ( 148 Comments › )
Filed under Elections, government, History, Liberal Fascism, Socialism at January 1st, 2013 - 9:00 am

The Knish notes some eerie parallels between New Years Eve 100 years ago and today.

by Daniel Greenfield

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

[.......]
While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912. The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. People use the word gay with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.  There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today’s urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York’s finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912, like that of 2012, ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

[......]

Americans of 2013 face the lightbulb ban. Americans of 1913 were confronted with the matchstick ban as the Esch bill in Congress outlawed phosphorus “strike ‘em on your pants” matches by imposing a $1,000 tax on them. This was deemed to be Constitutional. In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them.

A recession was here, after several panics, and though there was plenty of cheer, there was also plenty of worry. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis.

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it. The influence of corporations was heatedly debated and the Catholic Church clashed with Socialists.

“Unless Socialism is checked,” Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, “within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States.” Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932.

At New York City’s May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, “Take down that dirty rag” and “We don’t recognize that flag.” The site of the rally was Union Square, presently one of the locations where the rag ends of Occupy Wall Street hangs out.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.  [.......]
There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.
[.......]

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary. The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things. December 31, 2012 is likewise, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2112 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.  [........]
America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

Read the rest – December 31, 2012

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When an entire nation embraces the “Stockholm Syndrome”

by Speranza ( 158 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Dhimmitude, Islam, Islamic Terrorism, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Media, Military, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Politics, September 11, Taliban at December 28th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

The Knish shows us that the consequences of our obsession with “stability” results in the loss of our freedoms. We are sacrificing our liberty by trying to appease the unappeasable. The fact that a fanatic such as Nidal Hassan was allowed to remain in the United States Army all because he was a Muslim and after the Ft. Hood massacre the commanding officer of the United States Army was worried about our diversity efforts shows that the Stockholm Syndrome has penetrated the highest echelons of the United States government. This is not something that can all be blamed on the Obama administration as  his predecessor was the first to describe Islam as a “religion of peace”.

by Daniel Greenfield

Spain has begun deportation proceedings against Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan, for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby threatening the national security of Spain. If Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face the death penalty proving that it’s a short step from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani Inquisition.

The United States has a man sitting in prison for making another blasphemous movie, which the government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks on American embassies. And he isn’t the first man persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam. Offending Islam has become a national security issue involving all levels of government.

When Bubba the Love Sponge, a Tampa DJ, proposed to burn a Koran, the commander of the Afghanistan war contacted his girlfriend, who would later be stalked by Petraeus’ girlfriend, to contact the Mayor of Tampa to keep Bubba from burning a Koran. Instead of explaining how the American system works to the Lebanese temptress and her four-star general, the mayor wrote back that the city was working on it.

That month 50 percent more Americans were killed in Afghanistan in the long slow death march of the war, but a Koran was not burned in Tampa. Mission accomplished.

Muslims did not have to kill a great number of Americans to enforce blasphemy law in this country. Counting the various reactions to burnt Korans, rumors of a flushed Koran and assorted things of that nature, the number is still well below a hundred. Even counting every casualty in the war from September 11 onward, it took fewer deaths to make the United States give up on the Bill of Rights than it took to liberate it in the War of Independence.

But it’s not really about the deaths, if it were, then the United States wouldn’t be senselessly squandering the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan to avoid offending the natives. It’s not the death of men that our leaders are worried about, but the death of stability.

Knowing that a hundred men will die today in car accidents does not alarm anyone, but knowing that somewhere a dozen men might die in a bomb explosion, anywhere and at any time, can bring a nations to its knees. That is the difference between predictable and unpredictable death. Predictable death makes it possible for most everyone to go about doing what they normally do. Unpredictable death, however, erodes daily order.

Blasphemy makes terrorism seem predictable

Blasphemy makes terrorism seem predictable. It delivers that false sense of control that is at the root of Stockholm Syndrome, the seductive illusion that the thug can be reasoned with and that we can restore control over our perilous environment by accepting responsibility for the enemy’s violence. If we meet a set of conditions, then we will have peace. And what kind of lunatic wouldn’t want peace? The kind who needs to be deported or locked up in the name of peace.

When an entire country goes Stockholm, then it is no longer interested in winning the war, only in surviving the peace. In a Stockholm country, national security consists of locking up anyone who can be blamed for sabotaging the peacemaking. The less peace there is, the more the peacemakers go on the hunt for “extremists” who are to blame for the lack of it. The more their vision of a better world fails, the more stern measures they must take against their own people. Peace is always one more denunciation of extremism away.

[.......]

Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence.

Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence. Like Khrushchev banging his shoe on the United Nations delegate desk, they did their best to convince the rest of the world that they were violently irrational and liable to do all sorts of things if their demands weren’t met. And their demands were met. Rather than going medieval on their asses, the civilized world instead went medieval on anyone who offended the medieval cult of Islam.

Muslim blasphemy, like the ghetto hood’s respect, is an assertion of supremacy by identity. It isn’t a grievance, it’s a right of violence, and if you give into it, then you accept the inferior status that comes from being weak in a system where might makes right and killing people, or threatening to, is what makes one man better than another.

Islam is submission. If you submit to Islam, then you’re a Muslim. If you submit to a Muslim, then you’re a slave

Islam is submission. If you submit to Islam, then you’re a Muslim. If you submit to a Muslim, then you’re a slave. The western blasphemy trial is not the enforced submission of an Islamic legal system that would be crude and brutal, but at least comparatively respectable, it is the enforced submission to Muslim violence. The judges who preside over our blasphemy cases do not believe in Islam, they believe in the danger of Muslim violence. This is not theocracy, is it slavery.

[.......]

These trials are a contradiction, 21st Century legal codes built on sensitivity and tolerance being used to prosecute deviations from a medieval code of insensitivity and intolerance. But that very same contradiction runs through the modern state’s entire approach to Islam. It is impossible to embrace medievalism without becoming medieval. The need to accommodate Islamic medievalism is forcing the medievalization of the modern world’s political and legal systems.

The conflict between the modern world and the Muslim world is being waged by the modern rules of international law and peacemaking on one side and by the medieval rules of brutal violence, insincere offers of peace and bigoted fanaticism on the other. Rather than fighting it on its own terms, the modern world is instead trying to accommodate it on its own terms by accommodating its blasphemy codes.

Trapped in a long-term war, our leaders are looking for ways of making the conflict more manageable. If they can’t win the war, they can at least limit the number of attacks. It’s not the open book kind of appeasement, but the double book kind. The open book is still patriotic, but the second book in the bottom drawer is running payments to the terrorists and finding ways to accommodate them. And anyone who runs afoul of the second book, also runs afoul of national security.

War often compromises freedoms, but it rarely compromises the freedom to hurt the enemy’s feelings. But this is a different sort of war. A war with no enemies and no hope of victory. A war whose only hope is that one day our enemies will become better people and stop trying to kill us. Our enemies are fighting to take away our freedoms and we are fighting to take away our own freedoms in the hopes that if we give up some of them to the enemy, he will settle for them and give up on the rest.

Stockholm control points of appeasement

In this sort of war, blasphemy is a serious national security threat, not because it truly is, but because our leaders desperately need their Stockholm control points of appeasement, they need to believe that if they crack down on Koran burnings then they can reduce the fighting by 5 percent or 8 percent and that gives them hope that they can one day reduce it by 100 percent.

The actual numbers don’t matter. On the month after Bubba the Love Sponge did not burn the Koran, 50 percent more Americans died in Afghanistan, but the statisticians can always argue that if he had burned it, then 75 percent more or 100 percent more would have died. Islam runs on magical thinking and any effort to appease it must also embrace that same medieval magical thinking. Hoping that blasphemy prosecutions will reduce violence, is psychologically less of a strain than accepting that nothing will, that there is no magic bullet, only regular bullets.

The sort of men who deport filmmakers, when they aren’t locking them up, and treat the stunts of shock jocks as a matter of national security, fail to understand that they are not fighting some vague notion of “extremism” which is fed by “extreme” language and actions, but an organized ideology whose goal is not merely preventing Bubba the Love Sponge from burning the Koran, but compelling the Mayor of Tampa and the American commander in Afghanistan to compel Bubba not to burn a Koran.

[.........]

There are two laws that govern men; the law of faith and the law of force

There are two laws that govern men; the law of faith and the law of force. The law of faith is followed when you do a thing because you believe it to be right. The law of force is followed when you compel others to do a thing or are compelled to do it by them. Faith at its strongest is more enduring than force, and yet force can be used to change faith.

America has lived under the law of faith, following the laws that it believed to be right. Islam conducts its affairs under the law of force, as it has since the days of Mohammed. American leaders are abandoning their laws of faith to force, giving up on freedom of speech to accommodate the violence of Islam, while forgetting that when you give up faith to force, then you also abandon any further reason to resist that force. Without faith, it is easier to let force win.

Read the rest - Blasphemy as a National Security Threat

 

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Hamas Nazis and the Americans who love them

by Speranza ( 181 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Media, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians at December 20th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish reminds us that Hamas’s war with Israel is because Israel is not Islamic. They hate Israel because it is full of Jews and they do not hate Jews because of Israel (contrary to left-wing dogma)  but because they (Jews) are non Muslims.

by Daniel Greenfield

“For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” the introduction to the Hamas Charterstates. That isn’t the right way to say it of course. It’s supposed to say Israelis or Zionists. That way there would be plausible deniability. That way Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen could look at it and believe that Hamas doesn’t mean them.

Not them. Not the good Jews who go to work every day at 620 8th Avenue in Renzo Piano’s modernist New York Times skyscraper. Certainly Hamas might have issues with the bad Jews, the ones who cling to the hills of the West Bank, who walk the length of their farms and vineyards with assault rifles on their backs, but not with the good Jews. The Jews so good that they’re hardly Jews at all.

But Hamas, that long branch of the Muslim Brotherhood reaching from Cairo to Gaza, does say Jews. Not a political identity, but a racial one. Still Roger Cohen and Thomas Friedman might protest that if Hamas has come to hate Jews, it is only because of Israel. The Anti-Zionist chicken gave birth to the Anti-Semitic egg.  Hamas however would beg to differ.

“Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims,” Article 28 of the Charter says, proving that the Anti-Zionist chicken hatches out of an Anti-Semitic egg.

Hamas, like all Islamists, does not seek to kill Jews because of Israel. It seeks to destroy Israel because it is filled with Jews. The Jews are not hated because of Muslim opposition to Israel. Israel is opposed because of the Muslim hatred of Jews. There is no deal to be made here. The trouble with Israel is not that it sits on a piece of land that someone wants. The trouble with Israel is the ethnic and religious composition of its people. The trouble with Israel is that it’s in the way of Islamic Armageddon.

“Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take,” Article 7 states. “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The (end) time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

During the last Gaza conflict, Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas’ own propaganda station, aired a music video that included the message, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah.” When two Al-Aqsa TV operatives were killed during the conflict, the New York Times’ David Carr penned a furious piece accusing Israel of “using war to target journalists.”  [......]

[......]

Human Rights Watch criticized Israel saying, “Civilian broadcasting facilities are not rendered legitimate military targets simply because they broadcast pro-Hamas or anti-Israel propaganda.” And what could be more civilian than a genocidal propaganda facility run by a terrorist organization that is then run by a worldwide terrorist organization whose members have included Osama bin Laden? I am speaking of course of the famously moderate Muslim Brotherhood.

The Nazis used to fund the Muslim Brotherhood.  [......] And the Third Reich at least didn’t get around to shipping warplanes to the Brotherhood the way that the Obama Administration has.

Hamas, we have been told often enough in Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Washington Post, is pragmatic. And when Obama got on the phone with Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, he reportedly admired Morsi’s pragmatism. After Hamas’ electoral victory, the head of the PLO Washington mission said that power would make Hamas pragmatic. That was in 2006.

But pragmatism to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood does not mean what it does on 620 8th Avenue. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were pragmatists. They told foreign diplomats one thing while building mountains of skulls at home. Hitler had a pragmatic program. He wanted to conquer major portions of the world and wipe out the Jews. This is rather close to the pragmatic program of the modern day Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah,” say the famously pragmatic journalists of Al Aqsa TV. When an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood announces that “Jihad is its path and death for the cause of Allah is its most sublime belief,” then its forms of worship will by their very nature be very bloody.  [......]

The religion of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is killing Jews. And the latest survey of the Palestinian Arab public shows that 87.8 percent of them, or 9 out of 10, support Hamas’ war against the Jews. How do you find common ground with people whose form of worship is killing you? There is only one way. By joining the war on their side.

Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are pragmatists. That means that they are willing to sit down and chat with New York Times reporters until it becomes expedient to chop their heads off. Being a pragmatic serial killer is all about this kind of divide and conquer triage; figuring out which of your victims to kill now and which of your victims to manipulate into seeing you as a moderate serial killer. A serial killer who can be reasoned with and counted on to keep the unreasonable serial killers in line.

Hamas’ American supporters have found their common ground with a genocidal terrorist organization by counting on that same pragmatism to keep them alive. That is how Cindy Sheehan can troop down to Gaza or Pakistan. It is why New York Times reporters in Gaza don’t meet the same fate as Daniel Pearl.

The endgame for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is still that glorious genocidal apocalypse where every rock and tree will turn into a snitch. But they are willing to be pragmatists until they can get there. For the moment New York Times reporters are useful for covering up Hamas rocket launches from schools and hospitals. For the moment Human Rights Watch activists are good for faking a human rights crisis and allowing the terrorist group to rearm. For the moment America is good for some free money and even weapons.

For the moment the pragmatic serial killers will pick and choose which Jews they will commune with Allah by trying to murder. But moments pass quickly. And with enough F-16s, even pragmatically genocidal groups no longer need to be very pragmatic about their genocide at all.

Read the rest - Hamas Nazis and their American supporters

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Posted in Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Media, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians | 181 Comments »

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