… not a little video made by a Coptic Christian in America.

This is from the Examiner:

Islamic militants affiliated with al-Qaeda are leaving clues behind at U.S. diplomatic missions that demonstrations are being orchestrated directly by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, with some social networking assistance and logistics, with campaign resources, suggesting ties to Iran.

Militant message boards started lighting up on Sunday with specific instructions regarding recruiting, communication between mosques and followers in primarily Islamic communities, and organization for protests, following the release of a video by al-Zawahiri …

Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda, is the brother of Mohamed al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian imam who had the video shown again and again, and called for its insults to the Prophet Muhammad to be avenged on Americans.

What Ayman al-Zawahiri really wanted to avenge were the killings of two al-Qaeda leaders, Abu Yahya al-Libi and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.

Al-Libi was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan on June 4, while al-Rahman is believed to have been killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan on August the 22nd. Al-Rahman relayed Osama bin Laden’s messages, and served as al-Qaeda’s representative in Iran. He became the operational directorof al-Qaeda following the death of Osama bin Laden. Most considered al-Rahman’s death to be a significant loss to al-Qaeda, creating a leadership crisis.

Ayman al-Zawahiri gave the orders. Others carried them out:

In Egypt, the protest was organized by Wesam Abdel-Wareth, a Salafist leader and president of Egypt’s Hekma television channel, who called for a gathering on September 11 at 5 p.m. in front of the United States Embassy, to protest against a film that he thought was named “Muhammad’s Trial” [actually, a  scrappy crappy “trailer” made of short video clips titled Innocence of Muslims].

State-backed Islamic scholars in Sudan called for a mass protest after Friday prayers over a film [the same one] denigrating the Prophet Mohammed that originated in the United States, and an Islamist group threatened to attack the US embassy.

That the demonstrations are not spontaneous but organized is indicated by the fact that they all follow common patterns:

Crowds are chanting common slogans – The three most common chants heard have been “death to Obama”, “death to America”, “death to Israel”, and “death to Jews”.

Also: “Obama! Obama! We are all Osama!”

Cameras are present – Cameras have been in abundance at all disturbances.

U.S. flags are burned in every demonstration. 

When rioters have entered U.S. diplomatic compounds, the U.S. flag has been taken down [and] the black flag of al-Qaeda, also known as the battle standard of Muhammad, has been displayed and flown above U.S. diplomatic compounds and buildings.

Defensive perimeters are being tested, and witnesses have spoken of drawings and diagrams of compounds being drawn on location.

Several attempts have been made to infiltrate the interior defenses within U.S. diplomatic compounds to reach areas where sensitive intelligence information is stored.

Protesters have been providing visual screening to al-Qaeda operatives moving in and among the large groups. These operatives are actively gathering on-site intelligence about U.S. diplomatic security measures and personnel. …

Foreign service officer Sean Smith observed before his death, “We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” …

Yet the Obama administration sticks to its absurd story that the video film traveled about the Muslim world, as if by its own volition without anybody deliberately sending it, and inevitably enraged tens of thousands of Muslims everywhere and set them thirsting for American blood. The State Department singing in harmony with the leaders of the mobs!  

The video film had nothing to do with the pre-planned attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, where Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans – former SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, and Sean Smith a computer expert – were murdered.

While the Obama administration appears to be operating in a combined state of chaos and denial, the administration’s position of “we’re not going to talk about this until investigations are complete”, in regards to releasing further details about the attack on the U.S. consulate office in Benghazi, Libya, signals that the Obama administration is closing ranks to prepare for the congressional investigations that are sure to come in the near future. …

Following the attack that left four dead, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, the messages coming from Barack Obama’s cabinet signal a disconnect between President Obama’s statements, and the reality of events on the ground this week, during well coordinated demonstrations in over twenty countries worldwide. …

The White House still shows no signs that it intends to veer from it’s “the film made them do it” response to attacks on U.S. diplomatic installations. There has been no change in the posture at U.S. Africa Command, and the only sign of activity in regards to consular security and intelligence protection at the administration level was President Obama issuing an order to increase security at diplomatic posts worldwide. ..

U.S. intelligence sources continue to downplay the possibility of al-Qaeda involvement in Libya.

[But] the head of Libya’s newly elected Congress, Mohamed Al-Magarief, pointed at al-Qaeda as the prime suspect. Mr. Magarief didn’t say how far in advance the attack had been planned. He said, however, that he believes the militants went to the consulate with violence in mind. “I think this was al-Qaeda,” Mr. Magarief said in the interview. “If you take into account the weapons used, like RPGs and other heavy weapons, it proves that it was preplanned. It’s a dirty act of revenge that has nothing to do with religion.” Now U.S. intelligence officials are being forced to consider an al-Qaeda possibility, even if they are not announcing that they are, due to mounting evidence of intelligence in the system, at the time of the attack, that was not acted upon by the White House. …

A Washington Post report stated that a senior U.S. intelligence official did acknowledge there were indications of al-Qaeda involvement in the attack, but none were “significant”. [!] The report stated that armed militants began moving into Benghazi one hour before the attack, and that none of them carried signs or shouted slogans during their time outside the compound walls. As many as 50 heavily armed men, carrying AK-47’s, rocket propelled grenades, and mortars were spotted before the attack commenced. The shooting began soon after militants had organized themselves.

There was no protest by Libyan citizens going on outside the Benghazi consulate. All was quiet until the terrorists converged on it.

This is from the Star-Telegram:

A Libyan security guard who said he was outside the U.S. Consulate when it was attacked Tuesday night has provided new evidence that the assault that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was a planned attack by armed Islamists and not the result of anger over an online video that mocks Islam and its founder, Muhammad.

The guard was interviewed Thursday in the hospital where he is being treated for five shrapnel wounds in one leg and two bullet wounds in the other.

He said that the consulate area was quiet — “there wasn’t a single ant outside” — until about 9:35 p.m., when up to 125 armed men descended on the compound from all directions.

The men lobbed grenades into the compound, wounding the guard and knocking him to the ground, then stormed through the main gate, shouting “God is great” and moving to one of the many villas that make up the complex. …

“Wouldn’t you expect if there were protesters outside that the Americans would leave?” the guard said.

This is from CNN:

Three days before the deadly assault on the United States consulate in Libya, a local security official says he met with American diplomats in the city and warned them about deteriorating security.

His warning was apparently ignored.

The attack came. The building was set on fire. The ambassador may have been trapped.

The main building in the compound is in charred ruins. … The suite where the body of the ambassador was found was protected by a large door with steel bars; the windows had steel bars.

His body was recovered after looters broke into the room. It appears his security detail left him in the room while they tried to deal with the attack.

All that may be true. But CNN then falsely reports –

There are numerous questions about what happened at the consulate where protesters had gathered to demonstrate against the film Innocence of Muslims, which reportedly was made in California …

As the guard attested, there was no protest. No one says they saw the film.

But here (in a video clip from PowerLine) is Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, contradicting President Mohamed al-Magarief of Libya who asserts that the attack was planned, and telling the official Obama lie: 

Who is the man who showed the video that was used as a pretext for the planned Muslim rioting?

From the Telegraph:

His inflammatory chat show on satellite television has long prided itself on baiting liberals, Christians and Jews, but last week saw Sheikh Khalid Abdullah stage the broadcasting controversy of a lifetime.

Note the bruise on his forehead, a visible boast of how much he prays, head-on-floor-butt-up, to the Muslims’ tyrant-god “Allah”.

The rabble-rousing Egyptian tele-Islamist knew he had found a ratings-grabber when he found an obscure, badly-made film on the internet called the Innocence of Muslims.

It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed …

“Scornful criticism of ”  is what a Western newspaper ought to say, not “crude libels against”. Though the film itself is crude.

 … until Mr Abdullah’s showed broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed.

Actually, it seems the film may consist of nothing but those “clips”.

And Mr Abdullah’s whole intention was to incite rage.

Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who watch his programme, and who have been growing in strength since last year’s revolution, were demonstrating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and outside the US embassy, which they stormed on Tuesday, burning the US flag.

Protests in Tahrir Square were in any case scheduled for last Tuesday, the anniversary of 9/11, which Muslims celebrate as a day of victory as Americans mourn their thousands killed in that atrocious act of religious terrorism. The video clips provided a convenient pretext for violence.

Thus came the spark to a week of violent protests against the film, leading to the killing of the US ambassador to Libya on Tuesday evening and assaults on Western embassies across the Middle East, leaving at least nine dead and hundreds injured.

The killing of the ambassador was most probably planned in advance. The question of who betrayed his “secret” whereabouts has still not been answered. Since the Obama administration has embraced terrorism-supporting Muslims (see our posts: Obama legitimizes terrorism, August 2, 2012; Whom the President praises, August 16, 2012; How Obama enormously assists the jihad, August 20, 2012), something of the sort was all too likely to happen. It’s even possible that Ambassador Stevens, who kept company with armed Muslims (see our  post immediately below), gave away the secret himself.

Footnote: The FBI is now harassing the man, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who putatively produced the film. Obviously they are doing this on orders from Obama’s Department of Justice. The guy is a nasty piece of work; a crook and a liar, he tried to shift blame for the making of the film on to a (fictitious) Jew and (imaginary) Jewish backers. But despicable though he is, he should not be hounded.

The Obama administration’s policies have done much more than the little movie could possibly do to bring about the violent Muslim protests. What it is doing through the FBI to scapegoat this one man is tyrannous jackboot stuff.

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.

Ikhwan is the Arabic for brothers.

Jamiat al-Ikhwan al-muslimun means the Muslim Brotherhood.

The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

The following quotation is from a letter to the editor of Noozhawk, Santa Barbara, by Donald Thorn. It is a useful timetable of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power with the help of the Obama administration. We came to it via Creeping Sharia which has coined the word “Ikhwanization” to sum up the process.

Today, Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood hard-liner president (Mohammed Morsi), and there are more calls for the destruction of Israel. There are new fears that the regime will invite al-Qaeda back into Egypt and open up a front with Israel along the Sinai.

Who helped the Muslim Brotherhood gain control? [The State Department] and the White House helped train the Brotherhood during Egypt’s elections, selling out Israel and U.S. interests in the Mideast. Even more troubling is the untold story of how the Obama administration secretly helped bring Islamofascists to power.

Consider the timeline:

»1) 2009: Brotherhood spiritual leader Qaradawi writes President Barack Obama and argues terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

» 2) 2009: Obama travels to Cairo and apologizes to Muslims and invites the Muslim Brotherhood, but snubs Israel and Mubarak.

» 3) 2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied-Islamist, Rashad Hussain, as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which supports Muslim Brotherhood.

» 4) 2010: State Department lifts visa ban on Tariq Ramadan … grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder.

» 5) 2010: Hussain and Ramadan meet at an American sponsored conference attended by U.S. and Brotherhood officials.

» 6) 2010: Hussain meets in Egypt with Brotherhood’s grand mufti.

» 7) 2010: Obama meets with Egypt’s foreign minister, Gheit, who claims Barack said he was a Muslim.

» 8) 2011: The Brotherhood’s supreme leader calls for jihad against the United States, and Qaradawi calls “days of rage” against Mubarak and pro-western Mideast regimes. Cairo erupts into violence.

» 9) 2011: Obama fails to back his ally, Mubarak, then sends intelligence czar Clapper to Capitol Hill to claim the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and secular.

» 10) 2011: The Brotherhood wins control of Egyptian parliament, vows to tear up 30-year peace treaty with Israel and re-establishes ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

» 11) 2011: Obama demands Israel relinquish land to Palestine …

» 12) 2011: State Department formalizes ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, letting diplomats deal directly with Brotherhood officials in Cairo.

» 13) 2012: Obama releases $1.5 billion in foreign aid to new Egyptian regime.

» 14) 2012, June: Morsi becomes Egypt’s president and vows to instate Shariah law, turning Egypt into an Islamic theocracy.

» 15) 2012, June:  A delegation of once-banned Brotherhood terrorists join a Muslim Brotherhood delegation at the White House, meeting with a national security official.

» 16) 2012, July: Obama invites Morsi to visit the White House in September.

What does all this mean? The Muslim Brotherhood’s didn’t just suddenly take over in the Mideast or Egypt. It was helped along by a U.S. president sympathetic to its interests, over those of Israel and the United States.

It certainly looks that way. It looks like there has been an Ikhwanization of the US administration.

How should the US deal with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Karl Schake of the (estimable) Hoover Institution writes:

There is little doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood is not going to be a comfortable partner for the United States. …

The Muslim Brotherhood operates with decentralized national branches in many countries (including the United States). The different branches, however, share core beliefs. They clearly seek to attain political power in order to foster wide-ranging social change. Make no mistake, the Brotherhood is not a status quo political party. It would institute Sharia law, deny women the political and social latitude of men, and, if history is a precedent, be hostile to non-Muslims. …

In Egypt, the influence of the Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda accounts for less of their appeal than their long-standing opposition to the Mubarak government. Egyptian politicians are keenly aware that while most Egyptians support an Islamic government, polling of public attitudes indicates Islam is not a priority for Egyptian voters — only 3 percent of respondents in recent polls considered Sharia law an important issue. Egyptians are overwhelmingly concerned about security, the economy, and justice.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is not Hamas or Hezbollah …

Note that Hamas, an actively terrorist organization, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood …

…  at least not yet. It does not bring violence into the political sphere. It was not the motivating force in toppling Hosni Mubarak; in fact, its members were late to the revolution. But the Brotherhood capitalized on its decades of political organization and social activism to dominate the elections.

This should not have been surprising; the Brotherhood had a structural advantage over all of the other political parties just forming. But the sharp decline in support for Brotherhood candidates in Egypt’s June 2012 presidential elections suggested that voters were irritated at the Brotherhood’s ineffectualness in Parliament, concerned that it broke its promise not to run a candidate in the presidential elections, and worried about Islamist domination of Egypt’s politics.

Though Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi did win the election, the Egyptian voters expressed real concern about these issues during presidential polling. Exit polls suggest voters were even more distrustful of the military’s candidate, worried the secular candidate represented the Mubarak past. Voters also resented the military’s moves to usurp Parliament and the Constitution drafting process. For now, it looks like Egyptians are holding the Muslim Brotherhood accountable for their political actions, not just their ideological appeal. …

What they all agree on is that the US should continue providing Egypt with massive aid regardless of who is in power:

Even those political actors deeply suspicious of U.S. policies and resentful of our past actions want the United States to be a major participant in their countries’ transitions. … They want  American [economic] assistance — and they don’t have much sympathy for our current economic straits, given how much more dire are their own are. … They want us to actually care about their futures, not what they can do to advance our interests. …

But if what happens to them in no way serves US interests, why should the US care about them? There is something childish about such thinking.

The most worrisome thought dealing with Brotherhood and even Salafist politicians is not what will happen should they succeed, but what will happen should they fail. Moderate Muslims have been winning the argument over the past decade that al Qaeda’s nihilist vision isn’t the path. Restoration of the caliphate by any means is not the Islam most Muslims want. 

How can he possibly know that?

He is basing his conclusions on what diplomats said to each other when they met at Doha. How far are the communications of diplomats likely to reflect “what most Muslims want”?

He takes an optimistic view of what “the people” in the Arab world want, but issues a warning:

Elections in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya — even the glacially slow political change that the Gulf’s authoritarian governments are quietly experimenting with — demonstrate the people of the Arab world want accountable and transparent governments. They want institutions to constrain the power of rulers; they want grievances addressed; and they want the means by which to change their leaders if those leaders aren’t responsive to their concerns. The revolutions of the Arab spring have given citizens of those countries hope that political change can achieve those ends. If governments fail to produce that change, the al Qaeda narrative could again get traction in the disillusionment and despair that follows.

Is that something the US should fear? How much worse would al Qaeda be than the Muslim Brotherhood? How bad the Muslim Brotherhood will be, only time can show.

It is an interesting essay. Read it all here.

The religious terrorism of 9/11 was the first act in the Muslim conquest of America. The campaign was carried forward by the election, seven years later, of Barack Obama, lover of Islam, to the presidency of the United States.

This is from Canada Free Press, by Doug Hagmann:

Imagine yourself standing among the rubble of what once were the World Trade Center towers, still smoldering and riddled with the carnage of nearly three thousand people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks just a few days earlier. Smell the sickening and acrid smoky haze of death as it invades your nostrils and clings to your clothes. Regardless of where you look, all 360 degrees of your vision is filled with nauseating devastation. …

Like the rest of mainstream Americans, you are still stunned by the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor, [by] some obscure Muslim group known as al Qaeda.

Now imagine that I walked up to you and told you that ten years from that date, a man named Barack Hussein Obama II, who as a youngster in Indonesia studied the Qur’an and as a man, publicly admitted that the Muslim call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” would occupy the White House. Then I proceeded to tell you that the construction of Islamic mosques would be at an all-time high across the United States, including the push for a new Islamic center less than a hundred yards of the very site on which we stood. I then added that a Muslim advocacy group known as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (the ideological predecessor of Qaeda and Hamas), would be heavily involved in shaping U.S. policies ranging from domestic security to the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law) inside the United States.  …

I then tell you that the man in the Oval Office will not only apologize for America’s historical foreign policy to the Muslim world, but embrace the very entities behind the attacks. He will be the impetus behind a major change of the landscape in the Middle East that not only allows for our abandonment of Israel, but an antagonism toward our ally. It’s all part of a larger, more sinister globalist plan of an Islamic-Marxist alliance that’s been planned and in place for decades. He will open his office, and the whole of the U.S. government, to the Muslim Brotherhood, and will not only change fundamentally America, but will “change the world.” 

Convinced of my lunacy, you hastily leave, walking over the dust covered but still visible bloodstain on the walkway where at least one of the bodies landed after jumping from the raging inferno inside one of the towers. …

Back to the present day, I now ask that you be as intellectually honest with yourself as possible as you consider what your reaction would have been at that time, in that place and under the circumstances I described. Frankly, even I would have departed in disbelief. …

Few Americans in September, 2001, outside of the 13th Congressional district of Illinois or fellow politicians, knew the name of the man known as Barack Obama II, who was serving only his second term as a state senator. Few could have anticipated his meteoric rise from a community organizer just over a half decade before to White House denizen. I suspect that even fewer would have envisioned the rapid changes to the geopolitical landscape that resulted from this man after assuming the seat of power over the free world. …

Let’s take a look at what looked like lunacy in 2001.

On June 4, 2009, less than six months after assuming office, Barack Hussein Obama II delivered a speech in Cairo, Egypt, that ushered in dramatic changes within the Muslim world that would forever alter the political landscape of the Middle East. Perhaps acting in response to correspondence by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama is openly apologetic to the Muslim world while being passively aggressive to the nation of Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East. At the same time, he opens his arms to the Muslim Brotherhood while tactically omitting any reference or acknowledgment to then-Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Less than a year later, Obama advances the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood by appointing a young lawyer named Rashan Hussain to the position of Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. … Hussain has tangential ties to the Muslim Brotherhood via common and connected entities.

That same year, the United States State Department under the direction of Hillary Rodham Clinton, lifts the visa ban on Tariq Ramadan, the Egyptian-born grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Also in 2010, Rashan Hussain wastes no time in meeting with Tariq Ramadan at a U.S. sponsored conference, and meets with the Mulsim Brotherhood’s grand mufti in Egypt.

Promoting change in Egypt, … Obama has a private meeting with Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s foreign minister. Gheit recounts the meeting to an audience of millions on Egyptian television [and says] that “the American president [Obama] told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

Events in Egypt move quickly, and the Mubarak government loses the support of the United States. Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi calls for “days of rage” in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, ultimately prompting riots in Egypt and elsewhere. Within months, Qaradawi, who was in exile from Egypt for 30 years, is welcomed back after the orchestrated fall of Mubarak.

The power vacuum that exists in post-Mubarak Egypt is quickly filled by the Muslim Brotherhood with the help of the U.S. State Department. It is at this time that Egypt’s new power structure advises Israel and the rest of the world that the peace treaty with Israel will be null and void.

While the Muslim Brotherhood assumes control in Egypt, Obama … makes demands that Israel revert land back to the Palestinians, calling for Israel to go back to their indefensible 1967 armistice lines. Obama also authorizes $1.5 billion in foreign aid to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in Egypt, while instructing his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to assure congress that the Muslim Brotherhood has changed from their extremist roots to a secular organization. …

Obama also orders Department of Justice head Eric Holder to cease and desist any further criminal prosecution of the Muslim Brotherhood front groups and offshoots identified as co-conspirators who ultimately funded Hamas and other Islamic terror groups.

The Hillary Clinton State Department, meanwhile, dispatches William Taylor, special envoy to the Middle East and an associate of members to the Muslim Brotherhood, to Egypt to assist in the transition from the Mubarak regime.

It is disclosed that Hillary Clinton’s “body person,” Huma Abedin, the wife of disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner, has close and personal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and by association, to Muslims connected to al Qaeda. This is further detailed in correspondence from U.S. House of Representative Michelle Bachman.

Today, well over a decade after the attacks of 9/11, we find infiltration of Islamists, Marxists, Communists … in nearly every area of American government. What Progressives have gleefully praised as a wave of democracy sweeping the Middle East known as the Arab Spring is nothing more than the foundation for a New World Order, where Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood are working in conjunction with their secular partners to forever change the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Egypt is just one country, one regime, one piece of the global puzzle. There have been others, and there will be more. …

Obama exists and remains in the Oval Office to advance a specific agenda … [which] was set for him. It is an ambitious globalist agenda, one that will neutralize the United States while elevating the very people, groups and nations that attacked us on 9/11. But that’s only the first part. The rest of the agenda has yet to be implemented.

Lunacy? Let’s talk in ten years, perhaps as we stand on the rubble of what once was.

The conquest of America by the Marxist-Muslim axis is not yet complete. It can be  stopped in November if the electorate throws the Muslim-sympathizing Marxist, Barack Obama, out of the White House. It may be the last chance the Republic has of saving itself from subjugation to the worst of tyrannies.

*

As a postscript to the above, here is part of an article by Daniel Greenfield endorsing the pessimistic view that Obama has a vision of a New (Muslim) World Order, which he shares with the Muslim Brotherhood:

Tunisia, like Turkey and Egypt, had gone from being moderate and pro-Western to a Jihadist state run by Islamists drunk on apocalyptic visions of empire. And all of it had happened with Obama’s support and approval. Where the mobs didn’t do their job, Obama did it for them.

Obama did it for them in Libya … and his next target is Syria. The unification of Egypt and Syria was an old objective for both countries and had already taken place before on a temporary basis. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood has Egypt, it also must have Syria to recreate an Islamic version of the United Arab Republic. If the Brotherhood succeeds in overthrowing the Jordanian monarchy, there will be a golden Sunni Islamist chain stretching from North Africa down to the Persian Gulf and up to Turkey.

Obama’s backing for the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria will mean the fall of the last major non-Islamist regional power. With Iran and Iraq governed by Shiite Islamists, and Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia ruled by Sunni Islamists — Syria is the last great prize. Its conventional and unconventional weapons and its territory offer great rewards for either the Sunni Islamists, who will be able to push toward Iran, or the Shiite Islamists who will push toward Turkey.

This deadly tug of war is a crucial point in the rise of an Islamic regional order, and it is a tug of war in which Obama intends to play the definitive role. Obama paid tribute to Islamist tyrants in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, he helped orchestrate the fall of Egypt and now as the election approaches, the last missing piece [towards establishing the] Sixth Caliphate of the new Islamic world order is almost within his grasp.

The map shows the spread of Islam round the tiny state of Israel – which President Obama wants to make even smaller – as it is now.

In the latter half of this century the greater part of Europe, if present demographic trends continue, will also be predominantly Muslim and governed by sharia law.

Think of it: a vast expanse of Asia from Bangladesh to Turkey, from Turkey across Europe to Britain, from north Africa to the top of Norway, all Islamic lands, all governed by sharia.

And no, it is not likely to be a “milder form” of Islam in Europe than in Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is only one Islam and it’s only name is Islam.

We take these extracts from an article, which needs to be read in full, by Andrew C. McCarthy at Family Security Matters. It is titled Islam is Islam:

Islam … is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. …

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image … We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels … Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

There is a “real Islam” – McCarthy’s “we” pretend – which is  a “religion of peace”. “The vast majority of Muslims,” it is said ad nauseam, “are peaceful and law-abiding”. Abiding by what law given a choice? It’s a question “we”  don’t want answered.

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.”

Samuel Huntington famously called the conflict between the West and Islam “a clash of civilizations”. But it’s better described as a clash of Western civilization with Islamic barbarism.

Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. …

An all-purpose societal code. That is what sharia is.

Most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means. …

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.”

Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. …

[Yet] the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. …  Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunchBrotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate. …

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. …

Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel. …

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

Wednesday night, the Iranian parliament began drafting a bill prohibiting foreign warships from entering the Gulf without Tehran’s permission. …  Saudi Arabia has warned the Obama administration that Iranian leaders mean what they say; their leaders are bent on provoking a military clash with the United States at a time and place of their choosing, rather than leaving the initiative to Washington. To this end, Iranian officials are ratcheting up their belligerence day after day.

If this report is accurate, either Iran is eager to be at war with the United States, or the mullahs do not believe that anything they do will put them in danger of military retaliation by the Obama administration:

The armies of Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council states stood ready Thursday Jan. 5, for Washington to stand up to Iranian threats and send an aircraft carrier or several warships through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. Riyadh has been leaning hard on the Obama administration not to let Tehran get away with its warning to react with “full force” if the USS Stennis aircraft carrier tried to reenter the Gulf or Iran’s pretensions to control the traffic transiting the world’s most important oil route. …

America’s failure to rise to Iran’s challenge will confirm its rulers in the conviction that the US is a paper tiger and encourage them to press their advantage for new gains.

The assessment of British military experts was that the question now is: Who will blink first? Will the US follow through on the Pentagon’s assertion that the deployment of US military assets in the Persian Gulf will continue as it has for decades? Or will Iran act on its warnings and block those waters to the entry of American warships?

President Barack Obama can’t afford to cave in to Iran, especially while campaigning for reelection in Nov. 2012; Tehran, for its part, has made too many threats to easily back down. The entire region is now on tenterhooks for the next move, with US, Iranian and Gulf armies on the highest war alert. American and Iranian war planners both accept that their advantage lies in surprising the enemy – without, however, catapulting the Persian Gulf into a full-dress war.

In anarchic Libya, militias are engaged in a power struggle with each other. In Egypt the religious parties are engaged in a power struggle with the military. To what extent, we wonder, is the “Arab Spring” a struggle between those who want to enter the modern world as shaped by the West and those who want to remain in the unchanging darkness of the Islamic past?

We think that if Iran were hit so hard now that all its nuclear and military installations were incapacitated  –  by Israel or the United States, better still by both acting together – not only would the threat of nuclear attack from that belligerent country be averted, but the strike would send a shock wave through every Islamic state, every mosque, every terrorist group, and the heart of every West-hating Muslim. It could halt, or at the very least strongly discourage, every form of jihad, violent or stealthy, open or insidious.

The Muslim world would stand appalled.

It would be the victory for civilization that civilization urgently needs.

Is Obama – the pro-Islam weakling in charge of the American giant – likely to hit Iran? Not willingly. But maybe force majeure is about to move him too.