The murder by Muslims of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was a cause for war because he was a US  ambassador.

The statement must stand without any qualification.

That said, we need to take a closer look at the man himself. He was the victim not only of Islamic savagery but also of US policy towards Islam over the past decade – a policy which under President Obama positively encouraged and finally enflamed that savagery. And we ask: To what extent did Mr Stevens himself accept, agree with, endorse, or even actively and enthusiastically promote the policy that brought him, as an official representative of it, to his violent death?    

Daniel Greenfield has also asked that question, and he writes:

Christopher Stevens was a Middle Eastern diplomat who typified the new breed going from the University of Berkeley and the Peace Corps to desks in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. He taught English to Moroccan children in the Peace Corps and helped Palestinian Arabs in the East Jerusalem Consulate, which has a firm policy of pretending that Israel does not exist.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Christopher Stevens that he “made other people’s hopes his own” and that may serve as a fitting eulogy both for Stevens and for the disastrous foreign policy of making “other people’s hopes” our own that brought on the Arab Spring.

Stevens, like Clinton and Obama, made the hopes of Islamists his own and they repaid him for it, just as Afghans repaid America for supporting them against the Soviet Union, as Lebanon and Somalia repaid America’s peacekeeping efforts by killing American troops and on down the litany of gratitude in bombs and bullets that have come America’s way from the Muslim world.

“He risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to build a better Libya,” Hillary Clinton said, but if anything his murder exposed the lie that there is a better Libya now than there was before Hillary and he intervened in Libya. Clinton’s eulogy comes perilously close to conceding Stevens’ real mission and the degree of American intervention in the overthrow of Gaddafi.

Stevens was the connection between the Islamist Benghazi rebels and the Obama administration’s illegal war to overthrow Gaddafi. His mission, like the true mission of the war, was secret, and the consulate, marginally fortified and devoid of Marines, reflected that secrecy. Stevens did not think that he had anything to fear from the Islamists because they were his friends.

And he wanted to be their friend because he romanticized them. He looked at them through a veil of pro-Third World “anti-colonialist” leftist sentimentality. It made him feel good.

In the Wikileaks cables…

Useful things, those!

… Stevens cheerfully described fighters who saw “resistance against coalition forces in Iraq” as “an important act of ‘jihad’” …

Of which campaign for world domination by Islam – one must therefore conclude – he heartily approved!

For years he had walked safely in their company without understanding that he was just as much of a target as a Marine in Baghdad, but without the training, the weapons or the survival skills.

The only reason Christopher Stevens had lasted this long is that the jihadist fighters had known a useful man when they met him. And Stevens proved to be very useful, but his usefulness ended with Gaddafi’s death. Once the US successfully overthrew Gaddafi and began focusing on stabilizing Libya, Stevens ceased to be a useful idiot and became a useless nuisance. Attacks soon followed on the Benghazi consulate and on other consulates as well, but the Marines were not brought in and Stevens continued relying on local goodwill to secure his offices. It was only a matter of time until the attackers got through.

Clinton, her State Department and its media allies appear unnaturally eager to paint Christopher Stevens as an American martyr to the cause of Libyan Islamism, a kinder, gentler Rachel Corrie who willingly died so that the Islamists might have their dream of an Islamic state in Libya.

We will of course never know what was going through Christopher Stevens’s mind on September 11, 2012, as he battled the choking smoke, experiencing what so many New Yorkers had experienced on September 11, 2001. Like them, he was faced with a terrible dilemma, a choice between remaining in the fire and committing suicide by going outside.

Many in the World Trade Center chose to jump to their deaths, but Christopher Stevens chose to remain inside and die rather than face the tender mercies of his attackers. Stevens had spent enough time in Libya to have seen what the jihadist fighters did to their captives and must have known what horrors he could expect at their hands. The photos that have been released, along with claims by Libyan jihadists that they sexually assaulted his corpse, suggest that he made the right choice. And perhaps in those final moments, facing that terrible choice, Christopher Stevens finally understood the true horror of the Muslim world that he had fallen in love with as a Peace Corps volunteer.

But could he, even at that moment, especially at that moment, have allowed himself to admit the unendurable truth?

“He was an avid student of Islam and the Middle East, and consistently strove to build the proverbial bridge between our two cultures in the face of sometimes overwhelming antagonism and bitter misunderstanding,” a friend from the diplomatic service tells us. But though Christopher Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.

“The world needs more Chris Stevenses,” Hillary Clinton said, but does it really? … Does it need men who give up the hopes and dreams of their country to take on the dreams of their enemies without ever realizing where the fatal road of those dreams leads?

Stevens’ former Peace Corps colleague says of him, “Chris devoted his career, and life, to improving relations between the Arabic/Islamic world and the West.” That he did and he died doing it …

And failing to achieve the impossible goal of course …

… losing whatever career or life he might have had if he had not embarked on a futile errand to make the Muslims who killed him and paraded his body around like him. And … the effort was to no avail.

“It’s especially tragic that Chris Stevens died in Benghazi because it is a city that he helped to save,” Obama said, repeating the same lie that he used to drag America into his illegal war. Benghazi was not in any need of saving, it was the Americans who came to Benghazi, like Chris Stevens, who needed saving.

That is the terrible blind spot in our vision which, like Christopher Stevens, tells us that we need to save the Muslims who hate us, rather than showing us that we need to save ourselves.

So it emerges that Christopher Stevens in his illusions and commitment is like John Walker Lindh, who “wanted to help” the Afghans and is serving a 20-year prison sentence for fighting with the Taliban. The only significant difference between them is that John Walker Lindh the Traitor devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting against American forces as their enemy, while Christopher Stevens the Martyr devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting with American forces as their ally.

And therein lies the stark proof of the confusion of values which arose when America, a nation idealizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was forced into a betrothal with Islam, a cult idealizing total control, joyless submission, and death.

More US embassies were attacked today by Muslim mobs.

Muslim leaders deliberately stoked up the flames of riot on 9/11 and again today. They needed a pretext and by a stroke of luck they found one in a movie. It was sent as a gift to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, through the Egyptian media, by a brainless American member of the minority it is persecuting, Coptic Christians. (Will not the Copts in Egypt pay dearly for it?) Others of the group made the film – and maliciously alleged that it was made by Jews.

This is from (Glenn Beck’s) The Blaze:

Protests in the Middle East that are being blamed on an anti-Islamic and anti-Muhammad film continue to rage. And as details unfold about the shadowy figures behind the film, the plot thickens. This morning, The Blaze provided more details about Steve Klein, a man who served as a spokesman for the film. And last night, we learned more about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker involved who has a criminal past.

Now, information is coming out about the man who is said to have intentionally translated and sent the video to Egyptian media, thus allegedly sparking a portion of the outrage. Since the initial violent reaction to the video emerged on September 11, many have wondered how the film came to the attention of Middle Eastern media and citizens, alike.

Religion News Service (RNS) is reporting that Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, translated the movie into Arabic and sent it to Egyptian journalists. He also allegedly promoted it on his web site and through social media, the outlet reports. RNS has more about his background:

Morris Sadek describes himself as a human rights attorney and president of a small group called the National American Coptic Assembly, based in Chantilly, Va. Sadek says on his website that he is a member of the Egyptian and District of Columbia bar associations who has “defended major human rights cases” …

But fellow Copts depict Sadek as a fringe figure and publicity hound whose Islamophobic invectives disrupt Copts’ quest for equal rights in Egypt.

The film is very badly made and acted, but at least it denigrates Islam. And neither its quality nor intention are important. Everyone in America is free to make a good or bad film with any intention whatsoever. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula the film-maker, Steve Klein the “spokesman for the film”, and Morris Sadek who translated the dialogue into Arabic and sent the thing to Egyptian journalists are very small fry indeed in the drama of chaos and destruction that is unfolding.

It is the use of the film by Islamic leaders to arouse Muslim mobs to riot, burn, wreck, assault and murder that is evil. Those leaders are guilty of the havoc, the fire and the spilt blood, but they could only do what they’re doing because the present American leadership prepared the way for them.

The events that are shaking the pillars of the world would have happened anyway, because Obama and his administration have over and over again by actions and by words, from his first speech abroad as president in Cairo in 2009 to Hillary Clinton’s speech yesterday, impressed on Muslims the world over that they have been injured by America. And this despite the fact that Islam initiated war on America and is relentlessly pursuing it.

There could be no stronger reason to impeach and severely punish a president of the United States. It almost certainly won’t happen, but it should.

The attacks on American legations in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were not spontaneous outbursts of indignation over an America-made movie. They were tactical onslaughts in the continuing war Islam is waging against the United States.

Caroline Glick traces the anti-America plot to riot, burn, and murder:

On June 4 the White House confirmed that the US had killed Abu Yahya Al-Libi – Osama bin Laden’s Libyan lietenant who had moved into Al Qaeda’s #2 spot … after the Navy SEALs whacked OBL.

The top man being Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor.

On Tuesday 9/11, a tape was released of Zawahiri announcing that Libi had been killed earlier this year by a US drone attack. … Zawahiri called for his terrorist underlings to avenge Libi’s death and especially exhorted Libyans to take revenge. 

The attack in Libya was well planned and executed. It wasn’t about a spontaneous protest against some ridiculous internet movie of Muhammad. The assailants came armed to the teeth, with among other things, RPG 7s. They knew that the US Ambassador was in Benghazi rather than Tripoli. They knew how to track his movements, and were able to strike against him after he and his colleagues left the consulate building and tried to flee in a car. …

Then there is the attack in Cairo. They were led by Mohammad Zawahiri – Ayman Zawahiri’s brother. …

Egypt’s US supported Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi recently released [Mohammad] Zawahiri from Egyptian prison.

The same Barack Obama who has no time in his schedule to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu next week in New York, is scheduled to meet Morsi.

The Egyptian government has not condemned the attack on the US Embassy in Cairo. But Morsi is demanding that the US government prosecute the film’s creator.

You may be wondering how some movie no one’s heard of has caused such a hullabaloo. Well, as it turns out, the film was screened on an Egyptian Salafist television channel. Obviously the Salafists – many of whom, like Zawahiri were released from prison by Morsi, wanted to stir up anti-US violence on the eve of 9/11. So if the film is responsible for the violence, a finger needs to be pointed to its chief distributor – Al Qaida’s Egyptian friends and members.

With these facts in hand, it is clear that the attempts to present these acts of war against the US as the consequence of some stupid nothing movie are obscene attempts to deflect the blame for these unwarranted attacks onto their victims and away from their perpetrators.

When the story broke about an anti-Islam film that (supposedly) sparked the riots in Egypt and Libya, the AP initially reported that an “Israeli Jew” named Sam Bacile [an unJewish and altogether improbable name] was the producer, and that it was funded by Jewish donors. All day, the questions have swirled over who this mysterious Bacile character was, but many Israel-bashers ran with the claim that the producer holds Israeli citizenship. …

Actually, there’s no evidence that “Sam Bacile” even exists. The closest person who fits that description (at least electronically) is a self-proclaimed Egyptian “movie-maker” in California, who calls himself “Sam Bassel” on Facebook. Bassel has been registered on Facebook since 2010, and has posted regularly about the movies he supposedly produces, including the one that was used as a pretext for the Egyptian riots.

“Hello, I am a producer in a America and I live in Hollywood California,” he wrote in a July 15 post, well before the controversy erupted in Egypt. “I recently produced a movie that I believe to be one of the most historically important movie of our times. It is a 2 hour long movie about the entire life of the Prophet Muhammad from start to finish. Everything that is depicted in the movie is very true and well documented in all historical books that are found and taught in all Islamic countries.”

Bassel has posted about the film often over the past few months. …

UPDATE: The Facebook page belonging to “Sam Bassel” was apparently taken down a few hours after I posted this, but PolicyMic published some screenshots.

Hold on, though, the story gets weirder. PolicyMic also flags an AP article that suggests Bacile/Bassel may actually be a man named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who claims to be a “manager” for the company that produced the film, as well as a Coptic Christian. Nakoula denied that he posed as Bacile, but the details dug up by the AP sure sound suspicious:

“Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced Innocence of Muslims, which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and may have caused inflamed mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.

“Nakoula denied he directed the film and said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Sam Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where AP found Nakoula. Federal court papers said Nakoula’s aliases included Nicola Bacily, Erwin Salameh and others. …

“Nakoula denied he had posed as Bacile. During a conversation outside his home, he offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found it and other connections to the Bacile persona.”

There must be a Jew behind it somewhere, though. [Note to the dense: We are being sarcastic. We are mocking anti-Semites.]

Trust the press agencies to keep looking for him.

Postscript, from Poynter:

A roundup of what has been reported about Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Islam film that contributed to attacks on U.S. embassies in Liby, Cairo, and now Yemen, killing US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three staffers, [suggests that] it may not exist. A squadron of reporters has failed to locate evidence that anything longer than the film’s extremely weird “trailer” has been produced.

The attacks yesterday (9/11) on American diplomats and their diplomatic compounds in Egypt and Libya, the killing of members of their staff, and most imperatively the atrocious murder and savage treatment of the dead body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens ought to be treated as acts of war.

This text by John Hinderaker and the pictures come from PowerLine:

Official accounts say that those who were in the vehicle with Ambassador Christopher Stevens as they tried to escape from the violence at the American consulate in Benghazi were shot, but that Stevens died of “suffocation.” This may have an ominous significance. Further, news accounts indicate that the ambassador’s body was dragged or paraded through the streets. This photo is said to be of Ambassador Stevens, and it certainly appears to be him. I can’t tell from the photo whether he was dead at this time or not. I hope so:

This picture is also represented to be of Ambassador Stevens. It is hard to tell; about all one can say is that the shirt appears consistent with the first photograph:

The appropriate reaction to what happened last night in Cairo and, especially, Benghazi is fury. The question is, what are we going to do – not say, do – about it?

UPDATE: This photo, said to be of Ambassador Stevens, has surfaced. It does seem to be him. The caption suggests that the people in the photo are “helping” him; that could be true, I suppose. He is also described as “unconscious.” It is unclear when in the sequence of events these pictures were taken.

Yes, we should rain shock and awe down on Egypt and Libya.

But the answer to the question John Hinderaker asks: “What are we going to do about it?” – considering that Barack Obama, an Islam-loving anti-America pacifist, is in charge of US foreign affairs – is: “Probably nothing more than issue an apology for annoying the murderous Muslim mobs in both countries.”

Indeed, such an apology has already been issued, to the disgust of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

From sea to shining sea Americans should sit down and weep.

Then rise, throw Obama out of the White House, put a fiery and decisive end to the jihad, and reclaim American greatness.

Reminder: United Airlines Flight 93 was one of the planes hijacked by Muslim terrorists on September 11, 2001. The passengers heroically fought the hijackers and the plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All forty of the human beings on the plane were killed. So were the four Muslim savages.

The following is from Alec Rawls, who has long been campaigning for the design of the Memorial to the heroes of Flight 93 to be changed. He demonstrates that the design honors the Islamic terrorists, not the courageous victims:

New Park Service images prove the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 is unchanged.

The original Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial (left) was laid out in the configuration of an Islamic crescent and star flag (right). The crash site sits between the tips of the giant crescent, in the position of the star on an Islamic flag.

When this apparent symbol of Islamic triumph caused a national uproar seven years ago the Memorial Project (a public-private entity overseen by the Park Service) promised to change the design, but as demonstrated by the images below, they never did make any significant changes:

Above: original Crescent of Embrace design. Below: a frame from the Park Service’s new virtual fly-by of the Circle of Embrace “re-design” as it is being built. (Comparison image thanks to MaxK.)

The most significant change is the few extra trees that are being planted outside the mouth of the original crescent (starting at the crescent tip on the right, where the flight path symbolically “breaks the circle,” and continuing down behind the Sacred Ground Plaza that marks the crash site). These few trees supposedly turn the crescent into a circle, but as you can see, they do no such thing, but only apply the most minor window dressing to what is still a bare naked Islamic-shaped crescent.

The circle-breaking, crescent-creating theme of the design also remains completely intact.

The Park Service web site explicitly describes the Circle of Embrace as a broken circle, proving that the terrorist-memorializing theme of the design is also unchanged. Way back in 2005 architect Paul Murdoch described his original Crescent of Embrace as a broken circle. The 9/11 attacks broke our circle of peace and the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. The terrorist memorializing intent is obvious, or in the words of Tom Burnett Senior (father of flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior), “blatantly obvious.”

The actions depicted in the memorial design are those of the terrorists. They break the circle of peace and the result is their flag planted atop the graves of our murdered heroes. Calling the design a broken circle instead of a crescent does not change this symbolism one whit. The unbroken part of the circle is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Instead of pointing 2° north of Mecca, the half-mile wide crescent now points 3° south of Mecca.

A crescent that points the direction to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Because Muslims face Mecca for prayer, every mosque is built around a Mecca direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.

As the Crescent of Embrace was originally designed, a person standing between the tips of the giant Crescent and facing into the center of the Crescent would be facing a little less than 2° north of Mecca. This almost-exact Mecca orientation was confirmed to the Park Service in 2006 by Daniel Griffith, a professor of “geospatial information” at the University of Texas who was brought in as a consultant by the Park Service.

Griffith’s report examined the analysis of Politicalities blogger Jonathan Haas, who had calculated that the crescent pointed .62° off of Mecca. Allowing some margin of error for the exact coordinates used for the crash site and for Mecca, Griffith confirmed Haas’ calculation of the direction to Mecca (“the arctangent value is correct”), and he accepted Haas’ calculation that the bisector of the giant crescent pointed a mere .62° off of this Mecca-line. The actual divergence is slightly larger — a bit less than 2° — but this is what the Park Service was told by Griffith: that the crescent pointed less than 1° from Mecca.

Even the Park Service realized this was bad but their response was pathetic, as Murdoch was only forced to make a slight change in the orientation of his giant mihrab. The conversation is easy to imagine: “How about if I change the orientation by five degrees?” Murdoch presumably asked. “Would that be enough?” So now instead of pointing 2° north of Mecca, it now points 3° south of Mecca, both of which are highly accurate by Islamic standards.

For most of Islam’s 1400 year history far-flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. (Many of the most famous mihrabs point 10, 20, 30 or more degrees off Mecca.) Thus it developed as a matter of religious doctrine that what matters is intent to face Mecca, which architect Paul Murdoch proves by elaborately repeating his Mecca orientations throughout the design.

They misled the public into thinking that the crescent was being removed.

Images of the Circle of Embrace “redesign” that the Park Service released in late November 2005 were calculated to fool the public into thinking that real changes were being made. Here is a comparison between the original Crescent of Embrace (top) and the phony redesign (bottom). At first glance the Circle of Embrace actually does look more like a circle than a crescent, but if you examine closely you’ll see that this is almost entirely due to re-coloring of the image. The only actual change is the addition of the extra arc of trees that extends from the circle-breaking crescent tip down the hill towards the crash site:

Because this extra arc of trees explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle it in no way alters the circle-breaking, crescent-creating theme of the design. Neither does it affect the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (the unbroken part of the circle) that is left standing in the wake of 9/11. It only looks like a real change, but the Memorial Project apparently decided that even this purely cosmetic alteration conceded too much to critics.

Look again at that screen-grab from the Park Service’s new animated fly-by of the design as it is actually being built. The bold extra arc of trees that was the only actual change in the Circle of Embrace redesign has been taken out and replaced with a wispy wave of trees:

These few trees, planted to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent, do not diminish in any way the crescent’s functionality as a mihrab/Mecca-direction indicator. You can plant as many trees behind a mosque as you want. It is still a mosque, or in this case, a terrorist-memorial mosque.

Feel like complaining? Give Flight 93 Memorial Superintendent Keith Newlin a piece of your mind, and please pass along any response that you receive. (Find the email addresses through the link to Alec Rawls here.)

There is also a petition you can sign, if you haven’t done so already.

Never forget!

Imagine that a core member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is running US foreign policy. Let’s say it’s a woman, and give her a name: Huma Abedin, we’ll call her. She has risen to become the power behind a nominal secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. By working Hillary’s strings with the knowledge, approval and encouragement of an Islam-sympathizing president, Huma has helped the MB – an organization dedicated to destroying the United States and bringing the world under cruel Sharia law – take power in Egypt. Then she arranges an invitation for the MB Egyptian president to visit the White House, and has the US cancel a third of the debt Egypt owes the US. Next she needs to organize a cancellation of a joint military exercise of the US with Israel, and switch it to Egypt instead. Powerful as she is, she does not quite manage to bring about the cancellation, but she does get the US-Israel exercise severely curtailed, and the Egyptian exercise launched.

The wider context of the story is that Egypt has troops and tanks deployed in the Sinai in breach of the country’s treaty with Israel. And, in addition, the new MB Egyptian government has embarked on a systematic and unrelenting persecution of the country’s Christian minority.

Could this wildly imaginative story possibly be realistic enough to convince the majority of US voters who think that President Obama is doing a fine job with foreign affairs that they may be mistaken?

Might do. But it’s not true, is it?

Okay, it’s true that Huma Abedin is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser.

It’s true that the MB has come to power in Egypt.

And that Mohamed Morsi, the new MB President of Egypt  has been invited to visit the White House.

And that Egyptian troops and tanks are in the Sinai in breach of the treaty.

And the MB government of Egypt is persecuting the Coptic Christians.

But what’s this about canceling Egyptian debt and switching visible military support from Israel to Egypt?

This is from Israel National news:

Just days after a report that the U.S. was sharply cutting its participation in a military exercise scheduled with Israel, U.S. planes landed in Egypt Tuesday for a joint exercise, the first since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Code-named “Eagle Arena 2012,” the exercise will include air and naval forays by US and Egyptian planes and boats, over the country, Sinai, and the Red Sea.

According to Egyptian media reports, the purpose of the exercise is to enable Egyptian forces to practice both defensive and offensive tactics. …

The exercise is one of a series of steps the U.S. has undertaken in recent weeks to build ties with the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, the new President of Egypt. According to U.S. reports, Washington is set to forgive a billion dollars of Egyptian debt as part of its international assistance program for Egypt. The debt will be dumped in the laps of U.S. taxpayers. Egypt currently owes the U.S. some $3 billion.

Imagine the mainstream media reporting these true stories with the outrage they deserve.

You could, perhaps – if you have a very strong imagination.

The following extracts come from an article at Front Page by Raymond Ibrahim. For a full understanding of how the Muslim Brotherhood has managed successfully to infiltrate the American Conservative Union the entire article needs to be read.

The conservative movement appears to be at a crossroads in its approach to the threat of Islamic supremacism — not only abroad but at home.

A few months ago … [an] incident took place at an irregular board meeting of the American Conservative Union, an organization usually intent on keeping wobbly Republicans honest. The rump group in attendance — several key board members … were not even aware the meeting had been called – voted “unanimously” to dismiss long-standing accusations against two ACU board members. The accusations had been made by Center for Security Policy head, Frank Gaffney. Their focus was on the activities of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, two prominent ACU board members, whom Gaffney claims are influential agents of Islamist agendas. The ACU’s dismissal of Gaffney’s claims was contained in a memo written by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who called them “reprehensible” …

Frank Gaffney is a former defense official in the Reagan administration and first made these claims public in 2003 in an article, “A Troubling Influence,” which was published on this site. In introducing the article, Frontpage editor David Horowitz … described Gaffney’s claims as “the most disturbing that we have ever published.” He further characterized them as “the most complete documentation extant of Grover Norquist’s activities on behalf of the Islamist Fifth Column.”

The Frontpage article documented Norquist’s links to supporters of Hamas and other Islamist organizations dedicated to “destroying the American civilization from within” … and its Israeli ally. These figures included Abdurahman Alamoudi—who is currently serving a lengthy sentence for his involvement in a terrorist plot —and Sami Al-Arian, who was the finance head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a terrorist organization responsible for over a hundred suicide bombings in the Middle East. Before Alamoudi and Al-Arian were arrested, Norquist and Khan served as key facilitators between them and the Bush White House. Now that both have been convicted of terrorist activities, there can no longer be any doubt that they were working on behalf of America’s terrorist enemies.

Among the Norquist-sponsored initiatives furthering the Islamist agenda …  was his effort to abolish the use of classified national defense intelligence evidence in terrorism cases. …

In addition … Norquist used his own organization, Americans for Tax Reform, to circulate and promote a letter from Republican Muslims attacking conservatives opposed to the controversial “Ground Zero Mosque.”

He also campaigned to protect the Iranian regime from sanctions, from its domestic opposition, and from military action against its nuclear program – all the while demanding draconian cuts in U.S. defense spending. …

Suhail Khan [is] a Norquist protégé with longstanding personal and professional ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders, in the 1960s, of the Muslim Students Association [MSA], the cornerstone of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. … The Muslim Students Association has been instrumental in indoctrinating young Muslims in Islamist ideology, and has an alarming legacy of senior members – Anwar Awlaki most prominent among them – graduating to positions of prominence in al Qaeda and other terrorist networks. In the 1980s, Mahboob Khan was instrumental in creating an MSA spinoff, the Islamic Society of North America or ISNA. ISNA became so deeply enmeshed in the funding of Hamas that it was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation. …

Suhail Khan’s mother, Malika Khan, was a close partner in her late husband’s work, and is a long-time leader of another Brotherhood front, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was created out of the Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network. Its parent organization was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Malika Khan currently serves on the Executive Committee of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, which distinguished itself in 2011 by promoting a conference that urged Muslims not to co-operate with FBI investigations.

These familial activities are not incidental because Suhail has publicly embraced his parents’ “legacy” and done so before Brotherhood audiences. Despite this background and thanks to Grover Norquist’s patronage, Suhail was able to gain access to the Bush 2000 campaign, and was then appointed to a position in the Bush administration. .. While working at the White House, Khan helped craft and disseminate deceptive notions such as “Islam means peace,” al Qaeda “hijacked” Islam, and jihad is only a “personal struggle,” never a holy war against infidels.

In 2001, Khan appeared on a platform with about-to-be-convicted terrorist and top Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abdurahman Alamoudi. The setting was an American Muslim Council conference in Washington. Alamoudi is the founder of the Council, and once explained to a Brotherhood audience: “I think, if we are outside this country, we can say ‘O Allah, destroy America’. But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it … ”

Shortly after 9/11 … [Suhail Khan’s father] Mahboob Khan had played host to Ayman Zawahiri, second in command to Osama bin Laden, who had entered the U.S. in the mid-nineties to obtain funds and recruits for al Qaeda. One of his stops was at the al-Noor Mosque in California, a mosque founded by Mahboob Khan.

After 9/11, Suhail Khan had to give up his role at the White House as a result of the fallout from his Brotherhood associations. Yet with the support of Norquist, he managed to land on his feet and was given a political appointment in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation. …

Despite these disturbing manifestations of Khan’s allegiances, Norquist sponsored Suhail to become a member of the board of the American Conservative Union in 2010. … The Muslim Brotherhood was infiltrating the very heart of the conservative movement.

This information must temper any hope that the election of Mitt Romney as president in November would save America from the pernicious influence of Muslim jihadists on the US government (see our posts: Too dreadful to contemplate, July 9, 2011; The conquest of America by the Marxist-Muslim axis, May 25, 2012; The State-whisperer, August 16, 2012; Whom the President praises, August 16, 2012; How Obama enormously assists the jihad, August 20, 2012.)

It seems that the (misnamed) “War on Terror” is over – not because Islam has been defeated, or Muslims have stopped waging jihad but because the US will no longer resist it.

America’s anti-America president would rather the US military does not fight. Maybe he’d allow it to do a little social work abroad now and then. But the US should have nothing as nasty as a formidable military capability.

This is from the Washington Post:

For most of the past year, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has stressed that the vast military complex over which he presides is at a “strategic turning point.”

A decade of grinding guerrilla war is drawing to a close. Defense budgets are shrinking. The implication is that major changes are coming to the military. …

And what is this civilian with no experience whatsoever of military service doing about it?

The watchword for Panetta’s tenure, senior defense officials said, has been “humble.”

“He’s told the service chiefs to be humble in their predictions of warfare,” one senior official said.

Be humble in their predictions? What does that mean? Humbly predict? Or predict US humbleness?

In an interview describing his defense strategy, Panetta said he has helped craft an approach that hedges bets against a range of potential enemies. “It really does provide maximum flexibility,” he said.

You bet they won’t attack you, and as you’re not committed to any kind of response  (“flexibility”) you won’t have to do anything in particular about it if they do?

“The military is going to be smaller … “

Ah-hah!

“… but it is going to be more agile, more flexible …”

No fixed orders, no fixed plan, no fixed aim?

… and more deployable so that it moves fast and stays on the cutting edge of technology.”

Drones then, mainly?

Panetta’s vision is notable for some of the big questions left unanswered. A highly touted promise to shift the military’s focus to Asia has produced little in the way of major new deployments. Nine months after it was unveiled, there is scant evidence of how it will be implemented.

“This is a time when you would expect an intense focus on where we want to go and what we want to be,” said Andrew Hoehn, a senior vice president at the Rand Corp. and a former Pentagon strategist. Hoehn said such a debate does not appear to be happening inside the Pentagon or in the presidential campaigns, which have largely ignored national security issues.

Although the war in Iraq has ended and troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, Panetta has not pressed the ground forces to conduct a tough and detailed examination of their performance in the two long and costly wars, said Eliot Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University and an adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

In recent years, Army and Marine Corps officers have tended to blame their struggles on the State Department and other federal agencies, which were unable to provide the necessary help to rebuild the war-torn countries’ governments and economies.

Were unable to rebuild the enemies’ economies?  Well then, the news isn’t  all bad. Though the US did waste a vast amount of energy and money trying to do just that.

Cohen said the finger-pointing has prevented the ground services from acknowledging their own shortcomings, such as their inability to produce a core of experts in the culture, politics, history and languages of the two countries where they have spent most of the past decade fighting.

But since when have countries needed to be familiar with the culture, politics, history and languages of their enemies? The only mission has always been to defeat them.

Panetta said he would like to see the military do more in this area. “I think we have to look at the lessons that we draw, particularly from these last 10 years of war,” he said. “I’m not satisfied. I think more needs to be done.”

Good grief! Far too much social work has been done by the US military in Afghanistan. (See our posts Heroic inaction May 19, 2010; No victory or something like that June 15, 2010; No reason at all April 19, 2011.)

The Obama administration’s defense strategy, meanwhile …

So they do have one?

… plays down the likelihood of the military fighting major counterinsurgency wars in the coming years.

Not a likelihood of their having to fight such wars, but just not fighting them in any circumstances.

To that end, Panetta has ordered the Army to shrink to about 490,000 soldiers by 2017, a reduction of about 80,000 that will leave the force slightly larger than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

A surprise pick to run the CIA in 2009, Panetta had spent most of his career as a congressman from California and … in the Clinton administration, including a stint as White House chief of staff.

Even after two and a half years at the CIA and 14 months at the Pentagon, Panetta’s speeches tend to steer clear of the kinds of detailed policy prescriptions and tough questions that were routine under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, his immediate predecessor.

“Do we really need 11 [aircraft] carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates asked a Navy audience in 2010. He also challenged the Marines to consider whether, in an era of increasingly precise cruise missiles, they would be called upon again to storm an enemy’s shore — a question that cuts to the core of the Marines’ identity.

Gates’s goal was to encourage lower-ranking officers to challenge military pieties. By contrast, Panetta sometimes sounds more like a congressman representing the “Pentagon district” than the leader of the world’s largest military. …

Contradictorally, he is against the devastating reduction in the defense budget that the Obama administration proposes.

“It’s mindless, and it will . . . do incredible damage to our national defense,” Panetta said last month in a speech in New York.

But then, he is not a man who worries overmuch about depleting public funds:

As he did during his days as a congressman, Panetta spends most weekends in California, commuting home on a military jet at a cost of more than $800,000 as of this spring, the latest figures available. …

Although the Washington Post states that “the current list of crises stretches from growing unrest in Syria and Iran’s nuclear ambitions to a new leader in North Korea and rising tensions between China and its neighbors around the South China Sea”, it blandly reports that Michele Flournoy, “the Pentagon’s top policy official”, declared that –

“For the first time in a decade, the urgent priority mission is not staring us in the face.”

Got that? No urgent priority mission staring the US in the face.

Though Iran is rapidly becoming a nuclear power.

You put Israel in

You put Israel out

You put Israel in

And you shake it all about.

Barack Obama said in a speech to AIPAC that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel.

But that was back in 2008 when Obama was still taking some trouble to woo Jews and other pro-Israel voters to support him.

The present Democratic National Convention omitted any mention of Jerusalem being the capital of Israel.

It also left out old platform statements about the status of Palestinian refugees, and of Hamas as a terrorist organization not to be dealt with or supported in any way. Obviously the guide to these decisions came from Obama whose State Department, since March this year, refused to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and who tried to order Israel to return to its indefensible 1967 borders. He wants to fund UN agencies that accept Palestinians as a member “state”.

Acceptance by Israel of the millions of Palestinians who claim to have been dispossessed when the State of Israel was declared, or a return to its 1967 borders, would be acts of suicide. As Obama must know this, he must desire the consequence. It could hardly be clearer that Obama does not like Israel and likes Islam very much, especially the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a calf).

But then something happened on the way to the third day of the DNC. Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole came under fierce criticism for making the changes, presumably from quarters they do not want to antagonize. So, according to the Wall Street Journal, the “language describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” was “swiftly reinserted … in an attempt to defuse controversy on the eve of President Barack Obama’s speech accepting his party’s nomination”.

Convention delegates, by a voice vote, approved a resolution restoring language the party had put in its 2008 platform, as well as earlier ones, referring to Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. But the vote was disputed. Three separate voice votes were called, and only after the third was the issue declared decided—and some delegates then booed.

(To our regret, the omission of “God” from the convention, which we praised in a post earlier, was also reversed.)

Far more maliciously and seriously, anti-Israel action is being taken by the Obama administration.

This is from Front Page by David Hornik:

In the same week that 120 “nonaligned” nations of the world were gathered in Tehran to give their blessing to its open genocidal anti-Semitism, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had doubled the number of centrifuges at its underground Fordo site since May, while increasing its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium to within 50 kilograms of a bomb. All this while continuing to block access — as it has been since November — to its Parchin facility for nuclear-explosives testing.

And that wasn’t all. Even though the IAEA’s findings vindicate all the warnings by Israeli leaders that Iran was exploiting the period of sanctions and diplomatic talks to race ahead toward the bomb, the Obama administration reacted — again — by coming down on Israel rather than Iran.

On Thursday the U.S. chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told reporters in London that an Israeli attack on Iran would delay but probably not stop its nuclear program, could unravel the “international coalition” supposedly “pressuring” Iran, and that “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

“Complicit”? As if such a pre-emptive act of self-defense would be a crime? Yes:

With a few words, then, Dempsey managed to convey that Israel was militarily incapable, a potential spoiler of an effective international strategy, and that it would be somehow criminal or illicit — “complicity” usually referring to illicit activity — if Israel did move to preempt the genocidal threat, something the U.S. would want no part of.

It was further reported by Time magazine that the U.S. was substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill, though so far that account has evoked denials from some of the officials quoted in media reports. But, on the whole, the developments didn’t impart the sense that the Obama administration “has Israel’s back” as it has been ritually claiming.

“… ritually and mendaciously claiming”, that should read.

As for “the U.S. substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill”,  this source gives some concrete details of the reported reductions, leading us to think they are very likely true.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are silent in the face of the avalanche of bad news coming in from official Washington.

In accord with the Dempsey  shout, this:

The Patriot anti-missile systems scheduled for what was to have been the biggest joint US-Israel anti-missile drill in October will remain packed in tarpaulin because they come without crews; even one – much less two – Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships may not be dispatched to Israeli waters; and the number of US servicemen sent over for the annual exercise is to be cut by more than two-thirds to 1,500.

This downgrade of US participation in an annual war exercise with Israel is more than striking. It adds up to the dismemberment by the Obama administration of the entire intricate strategy US and Israel have built over years for the deterrence – and interception if need be – of any Iranian/Hizballah/Syrian missile assault on Israel.

The inferences are cruel: The US defense or second-strike elements – which had been slotted into place by the military strategists of the two armies – will not be there. Their absence slashes the time available for Israel’s alarm-and-interception systems to spring into action – the moment the engines of Iranian ballistic missiles heading its way are fired – right down from the originally estimated 14 minutes’ notice.

It also means that Barak’s estimate of 500 dead in the worst case of a war with Iran must go by the board.

So Israel is to be punished by Obama because Iran is intransigent. Or would it be more accurate to say that Obama is positively helping Iran advance towards nuclear capability?

A story is going round that he sent messages to Iran through two unnamed European countries that he would “hold back” Israel, but the mullahs must agree not to attack US shipping in the Gulf. The Dempsey insult was perhaps part of this plot.

For instance, The Blaze reports:

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published a startling report Monday detailing a message it says was conveyed by the Obama administration – via two European countries – to Iranian officials. The request: if Israel decides to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, the U.S. will not support it and the Islamic Republic should refrain from retaliating on U.S. military installations in the Persian Gulf.

The story has of course been denied  by the White House.

But then it also denies disliking Israel, or wishing it anything but peace, prosperity, security and the continuing warm friendship of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.