We do not think that Obama wants to appease the Muslim Brotherhood. We think he wants to encourage and promote that evil organization. Wants to, and does. He admits its members as advisers into US government departments. He continues to try to restore them to power in Egypt when clearly a majority of Egyptians want them gone. He had helped them get into power there in the first place.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the creator of Hamas, so no doubt he wants Hamas to be victorious too – and that means against Israel. It is also the parent of al-Qaeda, and Obama is helping al-Quaeda “rebels” win in Syria by arming them. Sure he finally let bin Laden get bumped off. Sure he lets drones kill other al-Qaeda leaders. Doing all that is excellent cover for pursuing his chosen mission – helping the Muslim Brotherhood win worldwide.

But the Muslim Brotherhood must not win. It would be an excellent thing if the Egyptian military were to crush the Brotherhood there where the monster was born, destroy it utterly, once and for all.

On this we are of one mind with Daniel Greenfield, who writes at Front Page:

Like all terrorist organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood has only one commodity to trade in. Blood.

In the war of ideas for the future of Egypt, the Brotherhood had nothing to offer but the blood of its followers and victims. It has no new ideas. It has no record of accomplishments. It has no vision for the future …

The outcome of any interaction with the Brotherhood could have been predicted from its motto; “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” 

In the streets of Egyptian cities, Muslim Brotherhood activists achieved their highest hope. They died in their Jihad against the liberal opposition and the military, fighting against human rights for women and Christians, against multi-party rule, freedom of speech, museums, libraries and the future in the way that the armies of Allah have died for over a thousand years.

Some died trying to kill Egyptian soldiers and police officers. Others were killed by their own people in order to maximize the death toll and spread shock and horror through the international community. …

An old Arab tactic that – exploiting the conscience of others. And it goes on working!

For the wealthy titans of the Brotherhood, their followers are pawns to be disposed of, human shields for their political ambitions. The Muslim Brotherhood spent their blood generously during the clashes with Egyptian police the same way that Hamas and Hezbollah spill the blood of their own people.

What it bought with their blood is the outrage of the world. Terrorist organizations are one-trick ponies. They unleash horrifying violence, blame it on the brutality of the authorities and wait for the world to step in and apply pressure on whatever government they are trying to overthrow. …

The Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders followed the oldest traditions of Islam by offering their followers paradise and atonement in exchange for unleashing their darkest passions. That the unleashing should have ended in hundreds of deaths is not at all unprecedented in the many wars and conflicts of Islam.

What any normal person would consider a massacre, the Muslim Brotherhood considers an opportunity.

The Muslim Brotherhood used the blood of its followers as currency to buy international outrage that will be used to pressure Egypt into releasing Brotherhood leaders like Morsi and and Khairat el-Shater. It wanted the clashes to be as ugly and bloody as possible. It wanted to outrage the world because it knew that was the speediest way of getting its leaders out of their prison cells and back into power.

These murderous tactics would be useless if the United States and Europe weren’t full of useful idiots and fellow travelers, in and out of the media, gasping at the carnage and demanding an immediate halt to the violence.

There is only one way to halt the violence and that is to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. …

The calls for Brotherhood participation in an Egyptian government are senseless insanity. Is there room for a movement that seeks nothing but death in the ranks of any government? Should murderous madness on such a scale really be the currency that purchases power? …

Western governments fear escalation in Egypt. And that fear is the secret weapon of every terrorist group. The terrorist groups always escalate, spending their currency of blood cheaply to break the will of their enemies. The only way to break that cycle is to out-escalate them by showing that their currency of blood is worthless because the people and governments they are terrorizing will not be bent under its terrible weight.

Wars aren’t won through de-escalation, but through escalation. America lost in Afghanistan because it wasn’t willing to fight harder and bloodier than the Taliban. The Egyptian government has shown that it is willing to match the Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthlessness without backing down.

To reward the courage of the Egyptian soldiers and police who fought the Muslim Brotherhood in the streets by forcing their government to stand down and surrender to the terrorists who nearly turned Egypt into a second Iran is an unmitigated crime.

Fortunately, it is unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood will be restored to power in Egypt. We hope it will become impossible.

Seeking the “origins of poverty”  is like seeking the “origins of nakedness”. Absurd. Nakedness and poverty are the natural state of man. (Quiet, feminists, or leave the room!)

But man found a way to become well-supplied with what he needs and a lot of what he desires in addition – those delicious luxuries. The magic goes under the name of Capitalism. It is the only magic that works. The Invisible Hand stirs the cauldrons of human voracity and ingenuity, and the rest is noisy market traffic.

The community organizers of the world don’t like it. It is chaotic, unpredictable, messy, uncontrollable. And some get more than others in their pursuit of sustenance and pleasure.

The community organizers think that’s immoral, wrong, unfair. So they want to abolish the market. They believe that wealth lies in or on the ground and can be dug up or cut down and distributed equally. They visualize wealth as a “pie” – a fixed amount. They know by gut feeling that poverty is caused by some people grabbing too much of it. Therefore, they hold, the rich are rich because the poor are poor, and the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Their solution to poverty is to slice up “the pie” and hand out the slices.

It would be an orderly procedure, totally under their control. Like handing out the bowls of thin gruel in Oliver Twist’s orphanage. And if you complain, they won’t hand you your slice or bowl – so there!

The UN wants to be the slicer and giver to the world. It had a plan to make the poor, wherever they are in the world (except any they don’t like), not-poor. Or anyway a bit less poor. Central planning on a grand scale would do the trick, the UN intelligentsia imagined.

But they have found – to their chagrin – that central planning does not work.  

Claudia Rosett, the go-to writer for reliable news of Evil Central aka the UN, writes:

At the United Nations, America’s new ambassador, Samantha Power, reported for duty on Monday. In remarks just before presenting her credentials, Power listed some of the top items on her UN to-do list, including working together “to alleviate global poverty.”

Let’s hope Power takes a look at a new study of UN development efforts, which the UN has declined to release — though it was done by one of the UN’s own staffers, Howard Steven Friedman, a statistician with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Friedman took a look at the results of the UN’s centerpiece development scheme, the UN Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.

Launched with great fanfare by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000, the MDGs were supposed to speed the the world toward an array of specific development targets set by the UN for the year 2015, including reducing disease and hunger, and halving [the number of people in] extreme poverty.

The UN, on its MDG web site, boasts that these UN targets “have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.”

But UN-galvanized efforts do not necessarily translate into the promised results. Friedman’s bombshell finding is that the Millennium Development Goals have made virtually no difference in the pace of development.

So, small wonder that the UN chose not to release his study — claiming, among other objections, that Friedman’s report does not count because he did it while on sabbatical. … [!]

Fortunately, Friedman’s study was published independently … You can find it here, both the abstract and the full report. Unlike the UN public relations machine, Friedman took the sensible tack of looking not just at the years since the program began, but at the longer-term overall trajectory of the development indicators involved, from 1992-2008 — starting eight years before the UN kicked off its global MDGs, through the eighth year of the program. He found that “the data show clearly that the activities following the MDG Declaration did not provide an acceleration in most of the development goals.” …

But broadly speaking, Friedman is highlighting data and questions that ought to be the subject of rapt attention and genuine debate at a UN that advertises itself as dedicated to helping the poor — and solicits billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of that cause. The MDGs have become one of the UN’s justifications for its ever-growing appetite for money. Meanwhile. the most highly visible and consistent beneficiaries of the UN Millennium Development Goals are not the poor. The clear beneficiaries are the first-class passengers on the UN gravy train — UN officials themselves, along with the constellations of well-paid consultants and jet-set conference-goers. The MDGs began with a huge New York summit for the signing of the Millennial Declaration, which Annan has since described as one of the highlights of his UN career. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has carried on in similar vein, touting and lauding the MDGs, and urging that member states pour resources into this UN campaign. The UN has held not only the initial 2000 Millennium Summit, but an MDG 2005 summit, a 2008 “High-Level Event,” a 2010 summit, countless conferences around the globe, and with the original MDG deadline of 2015 now getting near, there are plans afoot for a program of post-2015 MDGs.

The deeper problem here is that the MDGs, for all their lofty aims, amount in many ways to simply a UN-repackaged version of central planning. While we can all agree that it is profoundly desirable to end poverty, the real avenue to that goal is not a set of bureaucratically defined targets, but decent government, protecting a framework of law that leaves individuals free to choose for themselves the tradeoffs with which they try to improve their lives. At a UN where the majority of the 193 member states are not free market democracies, that’s a goal much harder to promote than a set of slickly packaged MDGs. But if the aim is to make a difference, that’s what needs galvanizing. Something the U.S. ambassador could usefully contribute would be to call attention to Friedman’s study, and ask the assembled worthies, in public, why on earth the UN would have the arrogance to consider such damning findings irrelevant.

We doubt Samantha Power will take that good advice.

On the harm that philanthropy does, especially government-to-government aid, Jerry Bowyer writes at Townhall:

Peter Greer of Hope International describes the ways in which government to government aid can be even more harmful [than private philanthropy]. The timing is lamentably good as the Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has managed to get himself ‘re-elected’ to another term as President and his first policy act is to appropriate property from white owned businesses to give to black citizens. …

Jerry: “What about government aid? Are the problems associated with that similar to, greater than, or less than the problems that you’re talking about when it comes to private philanthropy?”

Peter: “There are certainly a lot of similarities, but … [it] actually might be even worse. … By pouring in billions of dollars of aid, and by having it … go through corrupt governments, [it] might prop them up, might actually make it more difficult for development to occur. … [The] places that have received the largest amount of aid — they’re actually experiencing economic stagnation, and oftentimes decline, and part of that is because aid can sabotage the democratic process. …  When I was in Zimbabwe, this was when Robert Mugabe was having one of his “elections” … [and] he was using the international food aid to reward those places that voted for him and to punish those places that had not voted for him. So, the message was pretty clear: If you want any of the maize, if you want any of the food aid, you vote for me. …”

Power (pun intended) is the name of the game.

P.S. The UN must be destroyed.

We too generously ascribed the Benghazi cover-up to shame on the part of the Obama regime. On second thoughts we knew we were wrong. They ought to be ashamed, but Obama and Hillary Clinton are not capable of shame or guilt because they are not capable of self-criticism. They are arrogance in power. They were not, are not, ashamed. They just fear being found out. Found out for what? That still is not clear.

It is also still a mystery which of Obama’s henchmen or henchwomen decided to leave Ambassador Stevens and the other Americans who were at the Benghazi mission and in the near-by annex on the night of 9/11/12 to be slaughtered by their Arab terrorist attackers.

Obama himself does not make decisions. He is merely “present’. He keeps someone always at his side to make his decisions for him.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

The omnipresent power behind the throne some have called the president’s Rasputin had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden. She may have used that power again the night four Americans died in Benghazi.

The Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, came while America failed to mount a rescue mission despite sufficient time and assets. Included in that disaster were the unaccounted whereabouts of President Obama during eight critical hours, the lack of Situation Room photos, the failure by the president to follow up with subordinates before his trip to Las Vegas and the fabricated story that the whole thing was prompted by an Internet video. …

One of the people Obama always talks to is Valerie Jarrett. She emerged from the same Chicago cauldron of radicalism where Obama got his ideological baptism.

The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.

Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter’s book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.

It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before approving the Navy SEAL mission in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. …

Edward Klein, author of The Amateur, a best-selling book about Obama, asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, “Absolutely.”   

A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s friend and consigliere”.

Did Obama run the Benghazi decision not to send help past Jarrett that night?

We do know Obama had a face-to-face briefing from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, early in the evening.

After dinner in his living quarters, Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Iran and other issues in a two-hour phone call.

Present as the call was made, reports blogger Chip Jones at Conservative Report Online, was Valerie Jarrett, who, as the call was ending, went from the living quarters to the White House Situation Room, where the attack in Benghazi was being monitored by Dempsey, Panetta and other top-ranking officials.

What she may have said and whether the president sent her is unknown. We do know the president retired for the night, and no rescue mission was launched.

Once before, Jarrett had called off the military for political purposes. She may have done it that night as well — an action that would answer many questions and may be what the White House is really hiding.

America has its first female president.

Out of quite a pile of  biopsies of the Egyptian mess, we choose this one to bring to the attention of our reliably skeptical and well-informed readers. We don’t know if it’s the best, or even if it’s entirely right; but some of it fits with what we do know (eg the poverty of Egypt), we share quite a few of the author’s opinions, and we are amused by some of the writing.

Spengler writes in the Asia Times that Egypt is a banana republic without the bananas:

The vicious crosswind ripping through Egyptian politics comes from the great Sunni-Shi’ite civil war now enveloping the Muslim world from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean.

It took just two days for the interim government installed last week by Egypt’s military to announce that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States would provide emergency financing for the bankrupt Egyptian state. Egypt may not yet have a prime minister, but it does not really need a prime minister. It has a finance minister, though, and it badly needs a finance minister, especially one with a Rolodex in Riyadh. …

Finance Minister Fayyad Abdel Moneim … spoke of contacts with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait for urgent aid … Defense Minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi phoned Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz and UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nuhayyan yesterday on the latest developments in Egypt. King Abdullah was the first Arab and foreign leader to congratulate interim president Adly Mansour after his swearing-in ceremony.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s central bank governor, Hisham Ramez, was on a plane to Abu Dhabi July 7  “to drum up badly need financial support”, the Financial Times reported.  The Saudis and the UAE had pledged, but not provided, US$8 billion in loans to Egypt, because the Saudi monarchy hates and fears the Muslim Brotherhood as its would-be grave-digger. With the brothers out of power, things might be different. …

Egypt might now get its $8billion, or even more; but for how long will those oil-rich Arab states be willing to keep Egypt fed? There is no immediate or even distant prospect of Egypt’s economy improving.

Media accounts ignored the big picture, and focused instead on the irrelevant figure of Mohamed al-Baradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose appointment as prime minister in the interim government was first announced and then withdrawn on Saturday.

It doesn’t matter who sits in the Presidential Palace if the country runs out of bread. Tiny Qatar had already expended a third of its foreign exchange reserves during the past year in loans to Egypt, which may explain why the eccentric emir was replaced in late June by his son. Only Saudi Arabia with its $630 billion of cash reserves has the wherewithal to bridge Egypt’s $20 billion a year cash gap. With the country’s energy supplies nearly exhausted and just two months’ supply of imported wheat on hand, the victor in Cairo will be the Saudi party. …

The Saudis have another reason to get involved in Egypt, and that is the situation in Syria. Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, now guided by Prince Bandar, the new chief of Saudi Intelligence, has a double problem. The KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] wants to prevent Iran from turning Syria into a satrapy and fire base, but fears that the Sunni jihadists to whom it is sending anti-aircraft missiles eventually might turn against the [Saudi] monarchy. The same sort of blowback afflicted the kingdom after the 1980s Afghan war, in the person of Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been fighting for influence among Syria’s Sunni rebels … Cutting off the Muslim Brotherhood at the knees in Egypt will help the KSA limit potential blowback in Syria.

There wasn’t before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt.

The now-humiliated Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-inspired totalitarian party carrying a crescent in place of a swastika. If Mohamed Morsi had remained in power, he would have turned Egypt into a North Korea on the Nile, a starvation state in which the ruling party rewards the quiescent with a few more calories.

The head of Egypt’s armed forces, Field Marshal Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, is not a democrat, but a dedicated Islamist. …

The question is not whether Islamism, but whose. Some Saudi commentators claim al-Sisi as their Islamist. ..

[But] none of this matters. The will of a people that cannot feed itself has little weight. Egypt is a banana republic without the bananas.

Whether Egypt slides into chaos or regains temporary stability under the military depends on what happens in the royal palace at Riyadh, not in Tahrir Square. It appears that the Saudis have embraced the military-backed government, whoever it turns out to include.

It is conceivable that the Saudis vetoed the ascension of al-Baradei, hilariously described as a “liberal” in the major media. Al-Baradei is a slippery and unprincipled operator who did great damage to Western interests.

As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency until 2009, the Egyptian diplomat repeatedly intervened to distort his own inspectors’ reports about the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. In effect, he acted as an Iranian agent of influence.

Obvious Peace Prize material, Mr al-Baradei.

The Saudis have more to fear from Iran than anyone else. Iran … is trying to subvert the Saudi regime through the Shi’ite minority in Eastern Province. If Riyadh did not blackball his [el-Baradei’s] nomination as prime minister, it should have.

There isn’t going to be a war with Israel, as some commentators have offered. Israel is at worst a bystander and at best a de facto ally of the Saudis. The Saudi Wahabists hate Israel, to be sure, and would be happy if the Jewish State and all its inhabitants vanished tomorrow. But Israel presents no threat at all to Riyadh, while Iran represents an existential threat.

The Saudis, we know from WikiLeaks …

Have you noticed how much useful information WikiLeaks has given the world? How often a WikiLeak is quoted in news reports and opinion columns?

 …  begged the United States to attack Iran, or to let Israel do so. The Egyptian military has no interest in losing another war with the Jewish state. It may not have enough diesel fuel to drive a division of tanks to the border.

The Saudi regime, to be sure, sponsors any number of extremist malefactors through its network of Wahabist mosques and madrassas. But the present Saudi intervention in Egypt … is far more consistent with American strategic interests than the sentimental meanderings of the Barack Obama administration, or the fetishism of parliamentary form that afflicts the Republican establishment. The Saudi regime is an abomination by American standards, but the monarchy is a rational actor. …

The United States has less influence in the region than at any time since World War II, due to gross incompetence of the Obama administration as well as the Republican establishment. The Obama administration as well as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham courted the Muslim Brotherhood as a prospective vehicle for Muslim democracy, ignoring the catastrophic failure of the Egyptian economy as well as the totalitarian character of the Brotherhood.

We think there are ample indications that Obama likes the Muslim Brotherhood for precisely what it is. Its advance into positions of influence in the US government under the Obama administration seems to us one of the strongest signs that he positively favors it.

Americans instinctively ask about any problem overseas, “Who are the good guys?” When told that there are no good guys, they go to see a different movie.

There are no good guys in Egypt, except perhaps for the hapless democracy activists who draw on no social constituency and wield no power, and the endangered Coptic Christian minority. There are only forces that coincide with American interests for reasons of their own. It is a gauge of American foreign policy incompetence that the medieval Saudi monarchy is a better guardian of American interests in Egypt for the time being than the United States itself.

If the translation of what this kid is saying is accurate, he is Egypt’s best hope for its future:

According to Al Arabiya, what the video shows is this: Two young men who were  celebrating the overthrow of Morsi are tossed off the top of a building by Muslim Brotherhood supporters of the deposed president. One of the victims – probably the one struck on the head after his fall – was killed.

Is this the ultimate secret about the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12 that Obama is trying to cover up?

A conspiracy is a part of it, and conspiracies are hard to plot if they involve many people; harder to carry out; and hardest of all to believe.

Yet the story is plausible.

Raymond Ibrahim reports:

According to a Libyan intelligence document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Morsi, were involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where several Americans, including U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed.

On Wednesday, June 26, several Arabic websites …  quoted the intelligence report, which apparently was first leaked to the Kuwaiti paper, Al Ra’i. Prepared by Mahmoud Ibrahim Sharif, Director of National Security for Libya, the report is addressed to the nation’s Minister of Interior.

It discusses the preliminary findings of the investigation, specifically concerning an “Egyptian cell” which was involved in the consulate attack.

“Based on confessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene” six people, “all of them Egyptians” from the jihad group Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Islamic Law”), were arrested.

According to the report, during interrogations, these Egyptian jihadi cell members “confessed to very serious and important information concerning the financial sources of the group and the planners of the event and the storming and burning of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi…. And among the more prominent figures whose names were mentioned by cell members during confessions were: Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi; preacher Safwat Hegazi; Saudi businessman Mansour Kadasa, owner of the satellite station, Al-Nas; Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Hassan; former presidential candidate, Hazim Salih Abu Isma’il”.

The information that these particular people were involved in an anti-American action is not in itself surprising. All of them, including Mohamed Morsi, are known to be fanatical anti-American jihadists.

Prominent Brotherhood figure Safwat Hegazi … publicly declares the Brotherhood “will rule the world”; Saudi Mansour’s hate-mongering, pro-Brotherhood TV station repeatedly aired footage of the YouTube Muhammad movie inciting violence around the Muslim world; popular Sheikh Muhammad Hassan holds that smiling to non-Muslims is forbidden, except when trying to win them over to Islam; and Sheikh Hazim Abu Ismail is simply an openly anti-freedom, anti-infidel religious leader.

The report quotes a video which fell into the hands of “Libyan intelligence”. Was it made by one of the attackers? Or did it come from the US drone which was filming the incident? If the latter, its contents must be known to US intelligence. And if it is known to US intelligence, why hasn’t the American public been told about it?

As for President Morsi, a video made during the consulate attack records people speaking in the Egyptian dialect: as they approach the beleaguered U.S. compound, one of them yells to the besiegers, “Don’t shoot—Dr. Morsi sent us!”

Did Barack Obama, whose administration has taken great pains to keep facts about the Benghazi assault concealed, know that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the attack, perhaps from the very beginning by planning and financing it?

If Obama and his henchmen and henchwomen have known all along that the terrorist raid was a Muslim Brotherhood operation, would that be surprising?

The awful thing is, it should not be: not if it is seen in the context of Obama’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.     

The following is a summary of an article by Clare Lopez (formerly of the CIA):

With the June 13, 2013 confirmation by senior Obama administration officials that the president has authorized sending weapons directly to Syrian rebels, the trend can no longer be ignored. This is the third country and the third instance in which Barack Obama has leapt into the fray of revolution to the defense of al-Qa’eda and Muslim Brotherhood forces within days of an explicit call for action by Yousef al-Qaradawi, the senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood. In each instance — Egypt, Libya, and now Syria — it is completely clear that the United States is backing people who hate it.

The U.S. leadership is deliberately and proactively enabling the self-declared forces of Islamic jihad and shariah, who make no secret of their enmity and loathing for the U.S. and Western civilization in general, to come to power in country after country of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The results have been disastrous. … Strict shariah enforcement is spreading across the region. Since the fall of Qaddafi in October 2011, weapons have been flowing out of Libya in all directions, some of the weapons apparently with the active assistance of the former Benghazi U.S. mission, closed since the al-Qa’eda attack of 11 September 11, 2012.

According to a Libyan intelligence official, speaking to a reporter in a May 2013 interview, Libya has now become the main MENA base for Al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Barack Obama has hugely helped the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve its terrible aims. And he is still doing so.

Arnold Ahlert writes at Front Page:

In yet another remarkable display of Obama’s determination to secure the Middle East for Islamofascists, 400 U.S. troops will reportedly be deployed to Egypt to augment the police force of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. They will be part of a 13-country force stationed in Egypt in anticipation of protests, scheduled for June 30th, calling for the removal of Morsi. … [Having thrown] former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus in 2011, the White House is now eager to defend the regime of Morsi, who, like his Muslim Brotherhood sponsors, is well on his way to imposing the Saudi Arabian model of governance on Egypt. …

There is a burgeoning standoff between liberal secular Egyptians on one side, and dedicated Islamists on the other. One that could precipitate widespread violence in four days. And President Barack Obama has sent American troops to Egypt – to stand with the Islamists.

Adding to the spectacular absurdity …

We would say iniquity …

… of U.S. troops protecting Morsi’s thuggish regime – and by extension a Muslim Brotherhood that spawned al Qaeda and Hamas – is the reality that some of the troops deployed there come from the same military base where another Islamist, Maj. Nidal Hasan, killed 13 and wounded 32 of his fellow soldiers in 2009. That attack was labeled “workplace violence” …

rather than “terrorism in the name of Islam”, which it was.

As is often the case with the “most transparent administration in history”, the White House has maintained silence regarding American troops being deployed into a potential nation-wide firestorm. Egyptian military spokesman Ahmed Ali insists that media reports regarding the deployment are inaccurate and that American troops will be nothing more than part of “the periodical renewal routine for the US faction of the 13-state multinational force deployed in Sinai since the peace treaty”. He further insisted the MFO “is not armed with military operations gear”. …

In the meantime … Egyptians are stocking up on food, fuel and cash in anticipation of protests that “many fear will be the most violent and disruptive this year”. Furthermore, the U.S. embassy announced it would be closed on June 30, and warned Americans in Egypt to get enough supplies to make it through an “extended period of time”.

Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry released $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to the Morsi regime, despite a law that requires him to certify that the Egyptian government “is supporting the transition to civilian government, including holding free and fair elections, implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion, and due process of law”. Kerry waived that restriction …

In the year since he has come to power, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has done virtually everything in his power to undermine a more inclusive democratic process and the strengthening of key democratic institutions. Yet the beat goes on for a president and an administration so desperate to maintain its Arab spring narrative, nothing remotely resembling reality intrudes.

The Muslim Brotherhood has deeply penetrated the US government, and exerts extraordinary influence on the Obama administration. For how such a deplorable state of affairs came to be, see this article, also by Clare Lopez.

If it is true that the raid on the US mission in Benghazi on 9/11/12 was planned and financed by the Muslim Brotherhood, and if Obama knew it was, and if he wants to see the Muslim Brotherhood achieve its objectives –  as his actions towards it signal that he does –  everything is explained: the refusal to provide adequate and reliable protection for the Ambassador; the refusal to allow US forces to go to his aid or the aid of the men fighting at the CIA annexe; the pretense that the armed assault grew spontaneously out of a protest demo; the failure to find any of the raiders and bring them to justice; the evasion of questions from Congress about what happened before, during and after the disaster, and why; the intense irritation of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she was caught out in her lie about a movie-provoked demo …

But even if it proves to be true, is it an explanation that Americans could bring themselves to believe?

Two major terrorist groups are going about their savage work: al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. Both are Islamic, one Sunni and one Shia.

They are in violent conflict with each other in Syria, and other Islamic states. Both are at war with the non-Islamic world.

Cliff May writes (in part) at Townhall:

Back during the Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage famously called Hezbollah the “A Team of terrorists,” adding, “al-Qaeda is actually the B Team.” How do these two organizations compare today? …

Hezbollah and Iran [are] joined at the hip: the former is financed and instructed by the latter. That has not always been understood, despite the fact that, prior to 9/11/01, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization. And Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, has proclaimed, “Death to America was, is, and will stay our slogan.”

It’s well known that Hezbollah has been sending combatants into Syria in support of Bashar Assad, the dictator and Iranian satrap. Less publicized are Hezbollah’s operations in other corners of the world. A Hezbollah attack on a bus in Bulgaria last July killed five Israelis and one Bulgarian. In Nigeria, authorities recently broke up a Hezbollah cell, seizing what one Nigerian official called “a large quantity of assorted weapons of different types and caliber.” …

A 500-page report issued last week by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman reveals that Iran has established an archipelago of “clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents” in Latin America that are being used “to execute terrorist attacks when the Iranian regime decides so, both directly or through its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah.” The following are South American countries in which Iran or Hezbollah has set up intelligence/terrorism bases: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname.

Nisman provides additional evidence — not that more is needed — that Iranian officials and one Lebanese Hezbollah operative were responsible for two terrorist bombings in Argentina in the 1990s. There’s an American nexus too: Nisman charges that Mohsen Rabbani, Iran’s former cultural attaché in Buenos Aires — implicated in the 1994 attack on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were killed — directed “Iranian agent” Abdul Kadir, now serving a life sentence in connection with the 2010 plot to bomb John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Connect the dots, Nisman argues, and they draw a picture of Iran “fomenting and fostering acts of international terrorism in concert with its goals of exporting the revolution.”

All this considered, can al-Qaeda (AQ) still be considered a serious competitor? Yes, it can! Last weekend, my colleague, über-researcher Tom Joscelyn, pointed out that AQ and its affiliates now “are fighting in more countries than ever.”

In Afghanistan, AQ maintains safe havens in the provinces of Kunar and Nuristan. The Taliban, its loyal ally, is responsible for a level of violence “higher than before the Obama-ordered surge of American forces in 2010,” according to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.

AQ and its affiliates have bases in northern Pakistan. The Pakistani government, Joscelyn notes, “continues to be a duplicitous ally, sponsoring and protecting various al Qaeda-allied groups. The Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, remains a threat after orchestrating the failed May 2010 bombing in Times Square. The State Department announced in September 2010 that the TTP has “a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with al Qaeda.”

The AQ-affiliated al-Nusrah Front may be the most effective force fighting against Assad’s troops and against Hezbollah and Iranian combatants in Syria. AQ is resurgent in neighboring Iraq, with April 2013 being the deadliest month in that country in nearly five years, according to the U.N.

AQ has expanded operations in Yemen. In Somalia, Shabaab — which formally merged with AQ last year — is far from defeated and has managed to carry out attacks in neighboring Kenya and Uganda as well.In Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to slaughter Christians. In Egypt, al-Qaeda members and associates — including Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — are operating more freely than ever. On 9/11/12 they hoisted an AQ flag above the U.S. embassy in Cairo.

Libyan groups closely linked to al-Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11/12 attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb easily took over northern Mali until French forces pushed them out of the population centers. Al-Qaeda affiliates are becoming more visible and perhaps viable in Tunisia, too.

Despite all this, the State Department report asserts that “core” al-Qaeda “is on a path to defeat.” I am not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to substantiate that thesis. And even if it does prove to be accurate, who’s to say that a weakening core can’t be compensated for by a stronger periphery?

In the final analysis, “Which is the A Team of terrorism?” is not the paramount question. What is: in the years ahead, does the U.S. have what it takes to be the A Team of counterterrorism?

Better still, will America recognize and name the enemy at war with it – Islam? And at last begin to take effective steps to defeat it?

We found the picture via Front Page, and we quote from the article about it by Theodore Shoebat:

According to a report, the victim was a Syrian helicopter pilot who was journeying to bring food to army bases and villages around the Marraat Noman city in the Idleb province, until he was shot down, murdered and beheaded and his head cooked on a grill. …

It is vital to keep in mind that the act of cooking the head of an enemy is rooted deeply in the Islamic religion. The most famous warrior in Sunni Islam’s history, Khalid ibn Walid, decapitated the head of a man named Malik ibn Nuwayrah, before raping his wife; he placed it under a cooking pot in which he cooked food and from which he then ate …

The Hadith for this recounts:

And he [Khalid] ordered they bring his [Malik’s] head and he placed it with two other rocks and he cooked on top of the three a pot, and Khalid ate from it that night in order to terrorize the renegade Arabs and others.

This story is further substantiated by the Arab scholar Ibn Khallikan, who writes the story thus:

[T]he head was put in the place of one of the three stones which supported the flesh-pot. Malik, as we have said, surpassed most men by the abundance of his hair, which was so thick, that the meat was cooked in the pot before the fire had reached the skull. …Khalid seized on the wife of Malik – or by another account he purchased her out of the booty — and married her.

We must now realize: we have not seen the full face of Islam yet; true Islam is more than just terrorism with bombs and guns; it is a cultic system which emphasizes human sacrifice and cannibalization of Allah’s enemies. …

Al Azhar University decreed that it was permissible to cannibalize enemies of Islam … human sacrifice was promoted by Safwat Hegazi … a Syrian rebel grilled a man’s head … [and] we have actual footage, recently released, of a Syrian jihadist eating the heart of his enemy. …

(To watch the disgusting video, see our post Eating their hearts out, May 13, 2013 – two days ago. There can, we think, be some doubt as to whether this is really a human head or perhaps a rubber mask on the grill; but there is no doubt that the rebel leader in the video is taking a bite of a man’s internal organ. Later he confirmed that he ate part of the victim’s lung – raw.)  

What a curse on humanity religion is!

We borrowed this picture, and quote the text of the accompanying article by Faith J. H. McDonnell, from Front Page.

Christians slain in Nigeria by the Muslim  terrorist organization self-nicknamed Boko Haram

(The name means: Book-learning  – ie. literacy and Western culture generally – is forbidden)

(We cannot be certain that the picture shows the victims of the massacre reported here, but we are as sure as we can reasonably be that it is a picture of Christians slain by Muslims in Nigeria.)

Boko Haram’s latest attack, killing at least 42, took place on Tuesday, May 7  (2013), in the already battle-worn town of Bama, in Nigeria’s northeast Borno State. Borno, one of 12 states under Sharia, has suffered heavy losses under the Islamists. Some believe that Boko Haram has taken over northern Borno State much as Islamists took over northern Mali.

At least 277 had been killed by Boko Haram in Borno State in 2013 before this attack. … The Tuesday event involved “coordinated attacks by Islamic extremists armed with heavy machine guns” in multiple locations around Bama.

The jihadists also raided a federal prison, freeing 105 inmates. …

Boko Haram frequently attacks Nigeria’s police and military forces. In 2012 as documented by the Facts on Nigeria Violence website, there were at least 67 attacks, almost exclusively by Boko Haram, against military barracks, police stations, prisons, and other government facilities, as well as against individual soldiers, policemen, and civil servants.

But Boko Haram’s main targets are northern Nigeria’s Christians and churches.

The official name of Boko Haram, Jamā’a Ahl al-sunnah li-da’wa wa al-jihād, can be translated “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad”. Its goal is to establish a pure Islamic state in northern Nigeria, removing the Christian presence – either by conversion, expulsion, or extermination. Boko Haram appears to prefer the third option.

According to the World Watch Monitor (WWM) report on global Christian persecution, Nigeria had a higher death toll from anti-Christian persecution and violence than the rest of the world combined. WWM concluded that Nigeria is “the most violent place on earth for Christians” …

That is saying much if one considers how Christians are violently persecuted in countries ruled exclusively by Muslims.

But the government of the United States cannot, will not, hold Muslims responsible for the persecution.

In the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) 2013 report on Nigeria … [there] appears to have developed the same pathological impulse that afflicts the rest of the federal government, to never blame Islam. As a result, portions of the report mischaracterize certain acts of violence by both Boko Haram and other Islamists targeting Christians, and criticize northern Nigerian Christian leaders for calling the situation what it is: persecution.

USCIRF’s egregious observations and recommendations are actually State Department policy. For instance … former Asst. Sec. of State for Africa, Johnnie Carson … declared in a congressional hearing, “It is important to note that religion is not the primary driver behind extremist violence in Nigeria” and that “the Nigerian government must effectively engage communities vulnerable to extremist violence by addressing the underlying political and socio-economic problems in the North.” [And USCIRF argues that] “Boko Haram’s motivations are not religious but socio-economic.”

The State Department – which seems never to sigh the lightest sigh or shed a single tear for the savagely slaughtered Christians – would like this to be true. As Faith McDonnell says, the “Islamist apologist choir” has its choir stalls “located in the U.S. State Department, which not only refuses to designate the jihadists as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), but maligns and defames Boko Haram’s Christian victims, as well. Some of that choir’s most dreadful caterwauling today is in support of Nigeria’s yet-undesignated terrorists, Boko Haram.”

But Boko Haram are not driven by want.

Terrorists never are.

These are dedicated jihadists:

Boko Haram is well funded by outside Islamists. “Heavy machine guns” and “buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns” are just the latest examples to show that Boko Haram is not just a motley crew of impoverished, marginalized local Muslims. In February 2013 it was revealed that hundreds of Boko Haram members had trained for months in terrorist camps in northern Mali with the local “Ansar Dine” al Qaeda of Mali. …

Besides, Boko Haram themselves make it perfectly clear why they’re killing Christians; have plainly declared what their aims and motivation are:

In their many publicly released statements and videos, Boko Haram has never declared poverty and marginalization to be a motive for their actions. On the contrary, they state clearly that their actions are a “jihad (Holy War)”.  They said that “Christians in Nigeria should accept Islam, that is true religion, or they will never have peace,” and that they “do not have any agenda” other than working to establish an Islamic Kingdom like during the time of Prophet Mohammed.”

In the Nigerian states dominated by Muslims, as wherever Muslims dominate, “Christians are regarded as inferior to Muslims and suffer ongoing, systematic and comprehensive discrimination.” 

Thanks to pressure from the U.S. State Department, Nigeria’s Christian President appears more concerned with demonstrating that he is not biased in favor of his fellow Christians than seeing justice done for those who have suffered (even to the point of considering offering amnesty to Boko Haram). The State Department has pressured President Jonathan to give more federal resources and create a special ministry for “northern affairs.”  … Federal resources have provided the northern [Muslim dominated] states with “millions in public funds on forced mass weddings for widows, pilgrimages to Mecca, rams for sacrifice at Islamic celebrations, and payments to terrorists’ families”. [But] there has been no compensation to the families of Christian victims. …

The State Department’s passionate wooing of Islam drives it to astonishing lengths, however often it is proved that its yearning love is not reciprocated:

In April 2012, former Asst. Secretary Carson [announced] … that the US would soon open a consulate in Kano, one of the full-Sharia northern states [of Nigeria], to join the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and the existing consulate in Lagos.

And this despite warnings that the Muslims in Kano are in a violently rebellious mood:

Three months earlier, Boko Haram had carried out numerous simultaneous attacks on the security agencies in Kano – police stations, army barracks, intelligence headquarters – leaving some 200 dead.

The writer comments aptly:

What a great place to build a new U.S. consulate. Kano is about 200 miles from Abuja. About half as far as Benghazi is from Tripoli.