These pictures illustrating the fatuous, rude, jeering behavior of Vice-President Joe Biden during the October 11, 2012, vice-presidential debate between him and Paul Ryan, come from PowerLine:

Not only did Biden lie about the administration’s attempted cover-up of the 9/11/12 murders at the US legation in Libya, but he put on a clown’s performance with grinning, grimacing, and shouting his opponent down, while smugly defending the indefensible, apparently impervious to the fact that a national tragedy has recently occurred.

It wasn’t a debate – only one side arguing his points – but a bullying session. And as Joe Biden, the bully, was under the orders of his Party, he personified the Democrats in all their collective nastiness – the bullying Party.

These extracts are from an article by Ryan Mauro at Front Page:

The House of Representatives began its hearings on Wednesday regarding the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The picture painted by sworn testimonies is one of extreme negligence and incompetence on the part of the Obama administration in protecting our fellow citizens in the field. The Obama administration is also under fire for its embarrassing insistence that the tragedy wasn’t a pre-planned terrorist attack until a mound of evidence forced it to reverse course, long after the truth became obvious. 

The need for strong security at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya was more than apparent. The country was in a state of civil war a year ago, and violent incidents are common. The central government lacks authoritative control, and militias, including ones of jihadist orientation, are all over the war-torn country. Al-Qaeda-type terrorists are known to be organized in Libya. Ambassador Stevens himself feared that he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list. Special precautions on the anniversary of 9/11 should have been a common-sense measure. 

The House heard the story of Eric Nordstrom, whose job it was to oversee security for American diplomats in Libya. In both March and July, Nordstrom urged the State Department to maintain security in Benghazi because current forces were “overwhelmed and could not guarantee our protection.” He didn’t hear back. Nordstrom says he was told by a senior State Department official that he shouldn’t request reinforcements again because “there would be too much political cost.”

“Too much political cost” for the Obama administration to maintain security for the US legation in Banghazi? What might that “political cost” be? One can only suppose that Obama and his incompetent Secretary of State didn’t want to show any sign that the US recognized such a thing as Arab Islamic terrorism.

But there is such a thing. And trying to substitute wishes for reality is a formula for disaster.

Lt. Col. Andy Wood has a similar story. He led a 16-man Site Security Team in Tripoli from February 12 to August 14. He was told, “You’ve got to do with less.” He says that Stevens wanted his team to stay through August and the U.S. embassy was worried when they left.

Wood further testified that “diplomatic security remained weak” and “The RSO [regional security officer] struggled to obtain additional personnel there, but was never able to attain the numbers he felt comfortable with.” The State Department says the RSO never made a request for more forces and that Wood’s team was replaced with one of equal capability.

We think Andy Wood is telling the truth. We think the State Department is so used to lying that it can’t stop.

There was a steady stream of warnings about the situation on the ground. The consulate was actually attacked twice before with an explosive creating a hole in the gate “big enough for forty men to go through” on June 6. One memo documented 230 security incidents and said there was a “HIGH” risk of U.S. personnel coming under attack. On August 27, the State Department issued a travel advisory cautioning against trips to Libya. Stevens told a retired senior military official not to come.

A travel advisory against trips to Libya? So someone in the State Department possessed some common sense. (A pro-American mole perhaps?) But a little common sense wasn’t enough to spread realism through the whole castle dedicated to lies. So what was anticipated, but not guarded against, happened:

On September 11, 2012, only five U.S. agents and four militiamen were protecting the consulate. The attackers broke through the perimeter in just 15 minutes. Back-up forces could not arrive in time to foil the attack and save Stevens and his colleagues.

Did the terrible death of the ambassador and three of his staff shock Obama and Hillary Clinton into a realization that their policy is lethal? D0 they care if it is?

Apparently not. The substituting of make-believe for facts continues apace, quickens, heats up. Their instincts command: “LIE again. SAY it wasn’t Arab Islamic Terrorism. SAY it was America’s fault because someone in America had produced an an-Islam video that they’d aired over in Egypt to rouse a protest on the same day the massacre was carried out in Libya. LIE, LIE, AND LIE AGAIN.”    

The inability of the U.S. government to convey basic facts to the American public in the aftermath is also unsettling….

“Inability?”  No – refusal! “Unsettling”? No – outrageous! Much as we appreciate Ryan Mauro’s article, we think he is understating the moral case at this point.

But we hope he is right when he predicts:

The Obama administration is in serious trouble if it is discovered that the [Libyan] militia hired to protect the consulate included conspirators in the attack. It is reported that an electronic intercept show the militia’s leader asked his men to stand down in advance of the attack. He is a member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and one of his commanders is the brother of Brotherhood cleric Ali Al-Salabi. Who made the decision to hire an Islamist militia to guard an American facility?

So now we know. So determined were Obama and Hillary Clinton to pursue their fantasy that the enemy of the US is it’s friend and ally, that they actually hired Muslim Brotherhood militants to guard the US legation! 

The Arabic paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on October 7 that the militia had complained about being inadequately prepared for an attack. One of the consulate’s Libyan guards claims that he was informed on August 28 about a possible forthcoming attack on the facility. He says he was told on September 9 that there was intelligence about an attack timed for an anniversary …

Another guard says that on the morning of September 11, the consulate sent a request for additional security and then canceled it.

Who canceled it? Why?

The State Department has responded with unacceptable excuses. It claims that it never believed that the attack was the spontaneous work of outraged protesters. Yet, White House spokesman Jay Carney incredulously said on September 14, “These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region. We have no information to suggest it was a pre-planned attack.” U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said on September 16, “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.” …

Lie, lie, and lie again. 

The Libyans were loudly telling us that it was a well-planned terrorist attack. …

But the State Department went on denying it.

And even now will admit no fault:

The State Department is holding to the line that the security at the consulate was adequate based on what was known. The attack was “unprecedented” and therefore, it could not have been reasonably anticipated. This is yet another disingenuous and unacceptable excuse from the Obama administration. Al-Qaeda has carried out similar attacks with fighters on facilities many times before. Everyone knew Al-Qaeda was in the country and had sympathetic militias available in the region. Ambassador Stevens himself felt inadequately protected from the jihadist threat howling at his door.

In the Benghazi fiasco, a wealth of warnings were available for anyone with eyes to see. Yet on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the U.S. in recent history, our consulate in the backyard of our enemies was left pitifully fortified. Threats were not taken seriously, and four Americans were left to the wolves.

To Arab Islamic terrorists pursuing the jihad that is being persistently waged against us, and that Obama and his cohorts refuse to recognize –  and so aid and abet.

One important question not yet asked  – or not loudly enough for the public to learn the answer:

Why was Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 when an attack was most to be expected, rather than in the better (if not well) guarded embassy in Tripoli?

We took this  extract from an article by Abdulateef al-Mulhim in the Saudi Arabian paper Arab News: 

The question now is who is the real enemy of the Arab world?

The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.

These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars. …

He describes the atrocities. They provide a true and dreadful picture of the Arab world.

Then he goes on to relate some history, far more accurate than the usual Arab accounts of the same events:

On May 14, 1948 the state of Israel was declared. And just one day after that, on May 15, 1948 the Arabs declared war on Israel to get back Palestine. The war ended on March 10, 1949. It lasted for nine months, three weeks and two days. The Arabs lost the war and called this war Nakbah (catastrophic war). The Arabs gained nothing and thousands of Palestinians became refugees.

And in 1967, the Arabs led by Egypt under the rule of Gamal Abdul Nasser, went to war with Israel and lost more Palestinian land [it was never “Palestinian” land, but never mind that now – JB] and made more Palestinian refugees who are now on the mercy of the countries that host them. The Arabs called this war Naksah (upset). The Arabs never admitted defeat in both wars and the Palestinian cause got more complicated.

And now, with the never ending Arab Spring, the Arab world has no time for the Palestinians refugees or Palestinian cause, because many Arabs are refugees themselves and under constant attacks from their own forces. Syrians are leaving their own country, not because of Israeli planes dropping bombs on them. It is the Syrian Air Force which is dropping the bombs. And now, Iraqi Arab Muslims, most intelligent brains, are leaving Iraq for the east. In Yemen, the world’s saddest human tragedy play is being written by the Yemenis. In Egypt, the people in Sinai are forgotten.

Finally, if many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy (Israel)? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure.

Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail an Israeli-Palestinian?

The Arab Spring showed the world that the Palestinians are happier and in better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis. Now, it is time to stop the hatred and wars and start to create better living conditions for the future Arab generations.

How many fellow Arabs will he persuade to his point of view? How many quietly share it?

Berkeley … Peace Corps … Democratic Party … Middle East …

Christopher Stevens, US Ambassador to Libya, bien pensant par excellence, walked a sure path of romantic self-deception to an early, cruel, and violent death.

News Track India reports:

London, Oct. 5: A group of atheist students were thrown out of their fresher’s fair in London because they displayed a pineapple labelled ‘Mohammed’ on their stall.

The Reading University’s Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society (RAHS) said they wanted to celebrate free speech and promote their upcoming debate ‘Should we respect religion?’ But they were ordered to remove the offending fruit by [students’] union staff who said their actions were causing ‘distress’ to a number of Muslim students and other societies.

RAHS refused to remove the fruit, citing that they had labelled the pineapple after the Islamic prophet to ‘encourage discussion about blasphemy, religion, and liberty’.

“We wanted to celebrate the fact that we live in a country in which free speech is protected and where it is lawful to call a pineapple by whatever name one chooses,”  …  a spokesman from RAHS [said].

But they do not live in such a country. There is no such country in Europe.

They claimed the union then issued them with the ultimatum: “Either the pineapple goes or you do”.

According to RAHS, a group of students surrounded their stall and removed the pineapple’s name tag before the society was ‘forced to leave the venue’.

This implies that action was taken by students who were not members of the RAHS and which was against the atheists’ will. It does not say whether or not the RAHS chose to remain there after its pineapple was vandalised and its message silenced.

We hope they did not remain. Or if they did, that they stuck another “Mohammad” name tag on the thing.

The revolutionaries who founded the United States of America were willing to kill and die to establish a Republic in which all would be free. The First Amendment, enshrining the principle of free speech, was passed on December 15, 1791,  two and a half years after the final ratification of the Constitution on June 24, 1787.

Are there still Americans willing to kill and die to preserve freedom? They may be found in the armed forces, but are there any in government? Or among those who vote for a government which urges the nation to submit to an aggressive enemy of freedom?

[That America] remains one of the very few places in the world, even among Western democracies, where freedom of speech is absolute, came about through stirring speeches, deeply felt debates, classical ideas and a passionate political culture — but most of all it came about because large numbers of people were willing to kill over it.

Currently large numbers of people are willing to kill over the idea that Islam is the supreme religion, that Mohammed is a deity whom all mankind should respect and that the infidels living in the suburban sprawl of a thoroughly explored continent should accept that or die. Our government calls those people a tiny minority of extremists. Our unofficial name for them is, “Muslims.”

Laws are decided by many things, but sweep away all the lawbooks, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and final law is still the law of force.The law begins with the power to impose its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.

Law either has force behind it or it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.

Islam has made laws that it expects all of mankind to abide by. These laws are not backed by novel legal theories or by petitions, though its practitioners are willing to offer both, they are backed by the naked practice of force. And the imposition of these laws can only be defended against by force. …

The lawyers who run all our national affairs have chosen to respond to the Islamic legal briefs of bombs and bullets with the equivocation with which they meet all difficult questions. They will not abandon the principle of freedom of speech, but they will lock up the filmmaker whose imprisonment the murderous Muslim legalists called for. They will not censor YouTube, but they will encourage YouTube to censor itself. They will not ban speech that offends Islam, but they will strongly condemn and discourage it.

These equivocators offer to abandon the practice of freedom so long as they are allowed to retain the theory of freedom. The Bill of Rights will not change, but as in the Soviet Union it will not apply. The authorities will pay lip service to the freedoms that we only think we have until we actually try to use them and then we will discover that we don’t actually have any of these freedoms left in stock.

In theory America will be an independent country, in practice it will be a vassal state of the Muslim world whose displays of outrage will be our law telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot think, and what we can and cannot do.

This is the typical kind of bargain that decadent empires make with the barbarous warlords on their doorstep. The empire will keep its splendor and its titles, while the barbarians will tell the empire what to do. …

A demand for a code of conduct backed by violence is law. It is not our law, it is not the law of the civilized man, but it is the law that we are slowly adopting. It is the law of the decadents appeasing the savages. …

Under this code, Muslim violence dictates our permissible forms of speech. To know whether a thing may be said, drawn or filmed, we must first determine how Muslims will react to it. If they will react with violence, as they do to a sizable percentage of things, then it becomes incitement, retroactively, that must be punished and condemned.

Muslim violence has become our law. It is the law of action which determines our laws of speech. To understand what we can say, we first have to decide what Muslims will do about it. …

When we were revolutionaries, our government saw force as a way of dealing with other countries who wanted to tell Americans what to do. But since then our government has really gotten used to telling us what to do. …

Our new breed of lawyer-kings is composed of urban utopianists ruling through central government. To them the Bill of Rights is a piece of incomprehensible lunacy that prevents them from getting anything done. They are not concerned with rural government trespasses, they are worried about bombs and riots in their cities and they are terrified of their global goals being sabotaged by some movie trailer.

They are making Muslim violence into our new law, just as they made urban violence into our new law, just as they have made their own bureaucratic mandates backed by SWAT teams and prisons into our new law.

The age when laws were made by men, rather than machines of social progress composed of lawyers and activists, bureaucrats and think-tanks, lobbyists and judges, is long since gone. There is no law in our laws, but the law of force. The Constitution sits on a dusty shelf while the judges bang their gavels and practice the law that mandates something because those in power want it that way.

And now our utopian lawyer-kings, our armies of bleeding-heart social justice activists, our legions of bureaucrats stamping their papers over our skulls, our grinning black-robed activist judges wielding their gavels like swords, are cringing in terror before a Muslim mob. The bullies who have bullied us for so long have proven to be cowards. While they dismantle our army to sell it for scraps so that the EPA and HUD and the cowboy poetry festivals can get their billions, they order us to fall on our knees before the Army of Allah.

The liberal bullies who bullied us for so long have been successfully bullied and have handed us over to the bully’s bully. But bullies, of the liberal or Muslim kind, are cowards. Their bullying only works until they are successfully bullied and without their threat of force, their laws wither and blow away on the wind.

These quotations are from an article by Daniel Greenfield  at Canada Free Press.

Read it ALL here.

We see a logical link between the appalling murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, and the infiltration of the Obama administration by the Muslim Brotherhood.* 

There can be little doubt that diplomatic secrets – the Ambassador’s whereabouts, and the location of the “safe-house” belonging to the consulate – were betrayed from inside the legation. (How else would a “safe-house” become known?) Also, that there was a policy of trusting local Arab security personnel to guard America’s representatives and their staff. How could it come about that legations in that part of the world, recently emerged from violent uprisings and still in a state of instability and internal strife, should be exposed to such obvious risk? Why were those Marines – too few of them – who were nominally on guard at the Cairo embassy not issued with ammunition? These policy decisions issued from the State Department. The head of the State Department is Hillary Clinton, and her closest adviser, Huma Abedin, is intricately  and intimatetly involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, the  jihadist organization that has come to power in Egypt.**

But, you might point out, Ambassador Stevens was killed by al-Qaeda, not the Muslim Brotherhood. (See our post The Gitmo alumnus, September 28, 2012.) Yes, but observe  that the imam who preached protest in Cairo against the “anti-Muhammad” movie deliberately shown to Egyptian audiences for that very purpose is  the brother of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. (For a full account of this, see our post Al-Qaeda incited the Islamic world to riot, burn and kill, September 16, 2012.) Does that not suggest that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are co-operating with each other?***

Are we alone in finding it irresistible to “connect the dots” and see a picture emerging of the worst betrayal of America in all its history?

The administration has become tangled in a web of deceit in trying to cover up what really happened in Benghazi. The motive for the cover-up is ascribed to President Obama’s wish to claim that the “War on Terror” is over; that with the killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda was defeated – while in fact al Qaeda is bigger, stronger, and operating lethally in many more countries than it was before bin Laden’s death.

The estimable Rep. Peter King puts this argument forward in this video:

It may be, however, that the really terrible secret Obama and his henchmen are trying to cover up is that the betrayal stems not just locally from the inside of the US legation in Libya, but from Foggy Bottom and the White House.

*A thoroughly researched study of this, The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration by Frank Gaffney, is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and is available from them.

**Huma Abedin’s close connections to the Muslim Brotherhood are documented in Frank Gaffney’s study.

*** Go here to read about every al-Qaeda leader’s membership of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Times of Israel reports – quoting a British newspaper, the Sunday Times:

Israel could destroy Iran’s electric network with a specially designed electromagnetic bomb in the event of a military conflict between the countries …

[It] would be detonated above the ground, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would “disrupt all the technological devices working on the ground,” an American expert was quoted as saying to the London paper.

The use of the new technology by Israel was brought up in discussions regarding a possible attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities …

Such a move would send Iran “back to the stone age,” the British paper said.

Such a bomb would not kill people, or destroy buildings. It would wreck communications systems.

This kind of bomb would operate based on the nonlethal technology of gamma rays… The outburst of energy would “fry” electric devicesand currents around the source of the explosion.

Will Israel use this powerful weapon?

In his speech to the United Nations last Thursday (September 27, 2012), Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb. The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.

But he did not go on to say that if Iran crossed that red line, Israel would destroy those nuclear installation by whatever weapons it deems most effective. Having sounded strong and determined up to that point, the Israeli Prime Minister suddenly sounded weak.

I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down. This will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program altogether.

Sanctions and diplomacy, tried for years now, have spectacularly failed.

As long as Barack Obama is president of the US, no red line will be drawn. He won’t even consider it.

Will Israel yet save the world from a nuclear-armed Iran? Will it even act to save itself? If it will, and if not now, when?

“The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),”, to quote Wikipedia, “is a nonpartisan non-profit organization whose stated mission is to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

But “not in the case of the Muhammad movie”, Investor’s Business Daily reports, referring to the video film titled “Innocence of Muslims”, which has been absurdly blamed by the Obama administration for Muslim protests and uprisings across the globe, violent attacks on US embassies, and the torture, sodomizing, and murder of US Ambassador Stevens in Libya.

The silly little film had been on YouTube for months without being taken notice of. Then it was found, pounced on and used by Arab media men, politicians, al-Qaeda leaders, and imams to boost an Islamic campaign to put an end to freedom of speech in the West, particularly in the US. And the Obama administration, ever sympathetic if not passionately devoted to Islam, is doing its best to help them achieve their aim.

And they’re not being opposed in this by the ACLU which exists to defend rights and liberties in America.

Here is more from the IBD report:

The ACLU’s executive director failed to release an official statement condemning the outrageous efforts of the White House to deep-six the film including pressuring YouTube to remove its trailer from the Web. …

Not until The Daily Caller contacted the ACLU did it speak out, and only meekly so. It said it was “concerned” about the White House request to censor the “repellant film.”

The ACLU’s strangely muted response contrasts sharply with its militant reaction to post-9/11 measures to crack down on Islamic terrorists.

“The government has gone to extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent (in the Muslim community) — from censorship and surveillance to detention,” it says on its website, complaining it was “encroaching” on the “free speech rights” of Muslims. …

Where is this bias coming from? Muslims. The ACLU now counts at least eight on its national executive staff alone. In fact, a Muslim runs the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, while another heads its National Security Project.

The irony is not lost on Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The ACLU was founded on the basis that there shouldn’t be any blasphemy laws,” said Emerson … “Yet in the last 10 years, they’ve appointed (to their boards) members of the Muslim Brotherhood who believe in blasphemy laws.”

The top Muslim lawyer in ACLU’s stable is [a Canadian named] Jameel Jaffer, … [who] successfully sued the U.S. to reveal CIA secrets for interrogating terror suspects. …

[Jaffer is] a Muslim activist closely tied to major Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups. [He] now heads the ACLU’s Center for Democracy after heading its National Security Project.

[He is] pals with Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood .. [who] was denied a visa in 2004.  …  Jaffer successfully sued the U.S. to get Ramadan’s visa restored. …  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the six-year ban in 2009. …

Jaffer has lobbied the Justice Department to remove CAIR and other Brotherhood and Hamas front groups from its blacklist of groups complicit in a criminal conspiracy to raise money for terrorists.

He’s also pressured the FBI to purge names of Muslim terrorist suspects from the no-fly list.

What’s more, Jaffer wants to deny the feds one of its most effective weapons in the war on terror — freezing the assets of terrorist front groups.

He’s also sued to kill the government’s drone program, perhaps its most effective weapon of all.

This is who’s controlling the agenda at the ACLU these days. It was bad enough when the group was run by leftists. Now it’s also run by Islamists.

The purposes of Islam could not be more different from the purposes for which the ACLU was created. Plainly the ACLU no longer exists to protect liberty. It is now run by adherents of a movement which opposes liberty.

Is there an American institution of any importance which has not been infiltrated and corrupted by Islam?

… and get an unwelcome answer.

Do Muslims “have a right to be offended?”  Right or no right, human beings take offense. But which is more offensive to a rational mind: a bad video, or acts of atrocious cruelty?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, self-emancipated from Islam, superbly intelligent, superbly lucid, speaks truth to a morally deaf TV interviewer, and is sharply cut off when she makes an inarguable point.

(Video clip via Creeping Sharia)