Iran 191
An Iranian reader, Kourosh, tells us that “Iranians don’t care about Mahdi or any of those things. I’m Iranian and I can tell you that most Iranian youth hate Islam and love America/Israel. It’s the Arabs that are the problem. Remember that Iran is a multiethnic country, only 60% of Iran is truly Iranian.”
To illustrate what he says about Iranian youth hating Islam, he sent us video links.
Here’s one of the videos showing an Iranian burning the Koran.
And here we can see tides of men and women surging with ferocious violence, and great courage, in protest against the ruling regime of religious fanatics.
He asks us, “Why do you only show bad things about Iran and Iranians? Why do you dehumanize Iranians? Show something good about Iran.”
With those questions he sent us links to videos (here and here) showing the beauty and grandeur of Iran, both natural and manmade, with glimpses of monuments to its splendid history.
We admire the beauty and the grandeur. And we do not “dehumanize” anyone except those who act inhumanly – and they dehumanize themselves. But our business is to speak out against political evil and the cruelty of religion, and at present we find both in Iran.
It’s encouraging to see that many Iranians want regime change. We wish the US would support the protest movement. Obama’s refusal to do so is disgraceful and dangerous. Regime change in Iran would likely rid the world of the worst threat hanging over it – nuclear arms in the hands of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad.
We are grateful to Kourosh for the links, and for providing us with an opportunity to explain our views.
Israel may shelter Assad’s people 4
How can it benefit Israel to give Alawites asylum when the Assad government falls?
Apparently the Israeli government is preparing to do so.
Will a victorious Sunni majority in Syria hunt down the Alawites in revenge for the dictatorial Assad rule? Some Israelis seem to think so.
But why does Israel want to protect them? And would its hospitality extend to the vicious mass-murderer Bashar Assad himself? No, he would surely not flee to Israel. The very idea boggles the imagination.
How would Israel cope with thousands of hostile Alawites within its borders, even if only for a few months or years?
This is from the Cyprus Mail:
Israel is making preparations to house refugees from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect should his government fall, Israel’s military chief told a parliamentary committee today.
“On the day that the regime falls, it is expected to result in a blow to the Alawite sect. We are preparing to take in Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights,” a committee spokesman quoted Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz as saying.
Assad has faced 10 months of popular revolt in which more than 5,000 people have been killed, according to United Nations figures. Israeli officials have said they do not expect his government to last more than a few months.
In a speech today, Assad again blamed the unrest on a foreign conspiracy against Syria.
His “foreign conspiracy” accusation includes Israel, of course. Israel and the US.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said last week that Assad “is weakening” and will fall this year.
“In my opinion … he won’t see the end of the year. I don’t think he will even see the middle of this year. It doesn’t matter if it will take six weeks or 12 weeks, he will be toppled and disappear,” Barak said.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel rarely censured the Assad government for its domestic crackdowns and has said little about the crisis that erupted last March. …
But in May last year, Israel accused Syria of orchestrating deadly confrontations on the ceasefire line between the two countries as a distraction from Assad’s bloody crackdown. … Israeli sources note that Assad has not tried since then to turn the Golan into a “second front” in a bid to externalize his crisis.
Although Israel and Syria are technically at war, and Syria is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s foundation, the Golan Heights had long been quiet. …
Barak said Syrian weapons could be transferred to the militant Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, “something we view with great gravity. Syria is believed to possess chemical weapons.”
Assad, who is a willing cat’s paw for Iran, would transfer them to Hezbollah and probably has done so. It’s far less likely that a Sunni government in Syria would arm a militant Shia organization.
The elements of the story don’t add up. It is not Jewish lore, law, or pose to forgive enemies, and in this instance it would obviously be a very short-sighted, unjust, and dangerous thing to do.
Crushing protest and skulls 40
This is how the interim government of Egypt, which is receiving aid and diplomatic support from the Obama administration, deals with peaceful Copt protestors.
For more about this event, and a horrifying picture of a victim with a crushed skull, see our post More acts of religion, October 15, 2011. On US aid to the murdering military government see our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.
The UN’s R2P, the responsibility to protect civilians, on the pretext of which the US and NATO intervened in Libya, for some undisclosed reason is not applicable to Egypt. See our post The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011.
The axis of evil: a list of members 22
Zombie lists the “Occupy Wall Street” protest supporters, sponsors and sympathizers:
Communist Party USA. Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller
American Nazi Party. Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News
Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News
Barack Obama. Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York
The government of North Korea. Sources: Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India
Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam. Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly
Revolutionary Communist Party. Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance
David Duke. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com
Joe Biden. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones
Hugo Chavez. Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com
Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Sources: Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI
Black Panthers (original). Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune
Socialist Party USA. Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller
US Border Guard. Sources: White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog
Industrial Workers of the World. Sources: IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances
CAIR [the terrorism-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations]. Sources: in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York
Nancy Pelosi. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard
Communist Party of China. Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph
Hezbollah. Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia
9/11Truth.org. Sources: 911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)
International Bolshevik Tendency. Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine
Anonymous. Sources: Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement
White Revolution. Source: whiterevolution.com
International Socialist Organization. Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance
PressTV (Iranian government outlet). Sources: PressTV, wikipedia
Marxist Student Union. Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com
Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Sources: FightBack News, fightbacknews.org
ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an anti-war umbrella protest group]. Sources: ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua
Party for Socialism and Liberation. Sources: Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)
The list is far from complete. It doesn’t include George Soros or his front organizations, for instance.
But Zombie is not finished –
UPDATE: Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have made suggestions for additional entries on this list. I now have a large pile of potential new OWS supporters to investigate, and will work on updating this list over the upcoming weeks. When I’ve made it more thorough, I will re-launch an updated list that will be much more “official” in its comprehensiveness, sometime later this month.
We’ll be watching for it.
Radical leftism, a nasty ideology of nasty people 145
We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:
The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …
Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.
This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.
Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.
Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today.
As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:
The savage slaying of a savage chief 157
This is the video of Gaddafi being killed (its makers say). Or perhaps it pictures a man who has already been shot and bludgeoned to death. If it is Gaddafi lying there dead – good that he has gone. He was a cruel tyrant, smarmingly courted, through many years, by Western politicians, Blair, Sarkozy, and Obama most notably among them.
Those who are shrieking and baying round the man or the corpse are the savages that NATO forces – mainly British, French and American – have been helping to overthrow the tyrant and seize power. From this video alone it would be reasonable to suppose that they are unlikely to rule any more morally than did their prey.
See the Mail Online’s report and pictures here.
NATO bombards civilians in Libya 24
It’s never a surprise when a political act turns out to be a bitter mockery of the humanitarian values it’s supposed to serve.
So the news that civilians in Libya are being bombed by NATO, which intervened in the Libyan civil war to protect civilians, elicits little more than a world-weary sigh from our Roving Eye War Reporter.
REWR, having sent the news but no detailed dispatch home, refers readers to two posts of ours (find them through the research slot): The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011, in which it is explained that R2P stands for Responsibility to Protect, a UN declaration which provided NATO’s pretext; and A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011. They trace the idea of invoking that piece of lethal self-righteousness to three women in the Obama administration:
- Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multicultural Affairs at the National Security Council
- Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations
- Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State
To show just how NATO action in Libya is making a mockery of the R2P, we quote from a report by Mike McNally at PajamasMedia:
The fighters of Libya’s National Transitional Council, the rebel movement turned temporary government, have launched what they say is a “final assault” on Sirte — hometown of ousted dictator Colonel Gaddafi and one of the last redoubts of his supporters.
Thousands of civilians have fled the town, but thousands more are trapped inside, unable or unwilling to leave. The Red Cross reports that conditions inside Sirte are deteriorating, with people dying in the main hospital due to shortages of medical supplies, fuel, and water; food is also said to be in short supply.
There are no reliable casualty figures, although pro-Gaddafi forces — not surprisingly — are reporting hundreds of civilian deaths caused by both NTC fighters and NATO airstrikes. …
Even if rebel forces aren’t intentionally targeting civilians, the ramshackle nature of the rebel forces and much of their equipment suggests that much of the shelling and rocketing is indiscriminate. Red Cross workers have reported rockets landing among the hospital buildings. …
You could be forgiven for wondering what the NATO forces who are still engaged in Libya plan to do about the situation in Sirte, given that UN Resolution 1973, under which they’re operating, authorizes them to take “all necessary measures” to protect “civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”. …
But far from defending the civilian population of Sirte, NATO warplanes were as recently as Sunday still conducting airstrikes in and around the town in support of the rebels. “Why is NATO bombing us?” asked one man who had fled with his family. It’s a fair question.
NATO had already put a highly elastic interpretation on its mandate under 1973, transitioning swiftly from protecting anti-Gaddafi protesters to flying close air support missions for the rebels.
And adding effective contingents of NATO soldiers to the feeble rag-tag rebel militia for the assault on Tripoli – a fact that NATO has tried to keep under wraps. (See our post Letting Arabs lie, August 24, 2011.)
But even if one takes the view that NATO’s actions from the start of its involvement up to the fall of Tripoli were legally and morally justified, it’s hard to argue that the Gaddafi loyalists besieged in Sirte and elsewhere present an imminent threat to the civilian population in areas now under NTC control. Far from protecting civilians, NATO now finds itself in the position of abetting a humanitarian crisis. Civilians in Sirte face a choice between enduring the shelling and the all-out assault on the town that’s likely within the next few days, and fleeing the city if they’re able. The Red Cross estimates that some 10,000 have fled, but that up to 30,000 more may still be trapped.
So why are NATO and the American, British, and French governments that were so eager to take charge of the “humanitarian” intervention, not doing more to ensure their safety? And where’s the media outcry, along the lines of the reporting which helped to persuade the West to get involved in Libya in the first place? …
At the very least NATO … could arrange the delivery of food, water, and medical supplies …
This is a civil war, and the only crime most of the civilians trapped in Sirte have committed is being on the losing side. Are they now to be denied the protection of the “international community” which a few months ago proclaimed itself so concerned at the loss of innocent life in the country? What happened to the UN’s much-vaunted “Responsibility to Protect”?
Commentators on both left and right raised doubts over NATO’s Libya mission, myself included. The removal of Gaddafi is of course to be welcomed, but while a stable and democratic regime that poses no threat to Western interests may yet emerge, recent events have suggested that outcome is still in doubt.
In doubt? A stable democratic regime in Libya? As in any other Arab country, it’s one of the most unlikely things in the world.
Another Arab insurrection bloodily suppressed 78
You won’t find much about it in the news media, but the pro-Arab Guardian reports on the bloody suppression of the continuing insurrection in Yemen:
For the past few weeks Change Square in Sana’a has belonged to Yemen’s young revolutionaries. It has been filled with dancing and singing to protest against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
But there was no singing on Monday. Instead, the square was filled with the echoes of gunfire and screams as the young demonstrators carried injured friends to safety, their blood dripping in a long crimson trail that led to the field hospital.
It was one of the bloodiest days yet in Yemen’s nine-month uprising, with more than 22 killed and at least 350 wounded. The carnage followed an attack on Sunday that left 30 dead and set the scene for the violence that has broken new ground in the stand-off between anti-government groups and loyalist security forces. …
On Monday night [September 19] Sana’a’s hospitals said they were unable cope with the number of casualties. Demonstrators were urgently calling for blood donors and trying to ferry the wounded to hospitals on Sana’a’s outskirts. Many of the wounds appeared to have been caused by high-calibre rounds fired into the crowds from anti-aircraft guns.
[President] Saleh, who was wounded during an explosion as he prayed in a mosque earlier in the year, remains in Riyadh as the guest of the Saudi Arabian monarch, King Abdullah …
The day’s violence was vividly illustrated bya live video stream from a field hospital set up by protesters after skirmishes with forces loyal to the president. A dead 10 month-old girl with a head wound … a screaming man with no right arm … 23 bodies were laid out in a makeshift morgue.
As night fell the shooting appeared to have spread across Sana’a as rebel units clashed with loyalist forces in a series of running battles across the city. There were reports that security forces loyal to Saleh’s son, Ahmed, were stationed near several of the hospitals that were treating the defected soldiers. …
Anti-government activists in the capital blame state media for the chaos in Yemen, claiming they openly provoke attacks. …
And who does the government blame?
Yemen’s government blamed al-Qaida elements it claimed were inciting trouble inside the anti-government movement for sparking Monday’s violence.
Like all governments everywhere, this one – it will have you believe – has a soft heart and wants nothing more than to be just and to protect the people from harm:
“The government of Yemen expresses its sorrow and condemnation for all acts of violence and bloodshed as those that happened yesterday in Sana’a,” the foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Kurbi, told the UN human rights council. “The government will investigate and hold accountable all those who were in charge of these acts.” …
It sorrows. It condemns acts of violence and bloodshed. However –
As he spoke government helicopters patrolled the skies of Sana’a and reportedly targeted homes and property of senior opposition leaders.
“But, but – ?” you may splutter, pointing upwards.
It helps to know that in Arab culture, reality is what is said, not what is actually happening.
NATO and al-Qaeda “protecting civilians” in Libya 161
Abdel Hakim Belhadj, aka Abu Abdullah Assadaq, aka Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi
is the rebels’ military commander now in charge in Tripoli. He is an al-Qaeda operative who was captured and held for a time at Guantanamo Bay.
Here is more about him. Note what the reporter, Pepe Escobar, says about NATO bombing Sirte, the home city of Gaddafi where it is thought he might be hiding, regardless of probable civilian casualties.
Both sides are wrong in Libya 252
There are conflicts in which neither side is worthy of sympathy.
An example from the past is the Afghan Mujahideen versus the Soviet Union. The Western powers decided to give help to the Mujahideen. The result was the victory of the Taliban, the formation of al-Qaeda, and 9/11.
Another example, in the present, is the Libyan civil war in which again both sides are abominable.
This report comes from The Independent:
The killings were pitiless.
They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.
Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli.
“Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries,” shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed? Mr Sabri, more a camp follower than a fighter, shrugged. It was seemingly incomprehensible to him that anything wrong had been done.
The corpses were on the grass verges of two large roundabouts between Bab al-Aziziyah, Muammar Gaddafi’s compound stormed by the revolutionaries at the weekend and Abu Salim, a loyalist district which saw three days of ferocious violence. …
It is also the case that the regime has repeatedly unleashed appalling violence on its own people. But the mounting number of deaths of men from sub-Saharan Africa at the hands of the rebels – lynchings in many cases – raises disturbing questions about the opposition administration, the Transitional National Council (TNC) taking over as Libya’s government, and about Western backing for it.
The atrocities have apparently not been confined to Tripoli: Amnesty International [a nasty lefty organization which sometimes inadvertently tells the truth – JB] has reported similar violence in the coastal town of Zawiyah, much of it against men from sub-Saharan Africa who, it has been claimed, were migrant workers. …
Only a few of the dead found at the roundabouts yesterday were in uniform. However, regime forces have often worn civilian clothes during combat in Tripoli. The street-fighting for Abu Salim was particularly fierce with regime snipers taking a steady toll among the ranks of al-Shabaab volunteer fighters. The losses, and frustration at the continuing stubborn resistance by the enemy after an entry into the capital greeted with celebration by residents, has led to something approaching fury among some of the revolutionaries in the last few days.
“They were shooting at us and that is the reason they were killed,” said Mushab Abdullah, a 35-year-old rebel fighter from Misrata, pointing at the bodies. “It had been really tough at Abu Salim, because these mercenaries know that, without Gaddafi to protect them, they are in big trouble. That is why they were fighting so hard.”
His companion, Mohammed Tariq Muthar, counted them off on the fingers of his hand: “We have found mercenaries from Chad, Niger, Mali and Ghana, all with guns. And they took action against us.”
But, if the men had been killed in action, why did they have their hands tied behind their back? “Maybe they were injured, and they had to be brought to this hospital and the handcuffs were to stop them from attacking. And then something went wrong,” suggested Mr Abdullah.
What went wrong and stays wrong is the Arab culture, shaped by the Islamic ideology of cruelty and murder.
The Libyan rebels are no better and no worse than the savage regime they’re replacing.
Ghaddafi’s cruelty has been well documented. Here’s a titbit of information from CNN about a member of his family – what Aline, wife of his son Hannibal, did to their children’s nanny:
One of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she’d been burnt by Hannibal’s wife, Aline.
I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.
At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.
*
What do the Western powers expect of this new regime in Libya that they are helping to establish?
If the Europeans are expecting oil, okay, maybe they’ll get it. Libyans must sell oil to survive.
But what is America expecting? Gratitude? From that blood-thirsty rabble?
Why yes, it seems so.
This is from Investor’s Business Daily:
So the U.S. just spent $1 billion to liberate Libya from terrorist rule only to have Libya’s new rulers thumb their noses at extraditing the Lockerbie bomber? Explain to us again what we’ve been doing in Libya.
Presumably, President Obama’s slapped-together NATO mission to aid Libya’s rebels was to rid that country of its mad-dog dictator, who was a one-man nexus for global terrorism. …
His biggest atrocity was his own: killing 270 innocent people, many of them Americans, in the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Gadhafi’s on the run now, but his key man on Lockerbie, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, remains in a wealthy Tripoli neighborhood, incredibly enough because Libya’s new rulers have declared they won’t extradite him abroad to face justice.
“Extradition is what Gadhafi did,” the National Transition Council’s Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi said. “We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West.”
That’s some chutzpah coming from someone who’d be just another dead body in the street or a prisoner dangling from a meat hook had NATO not intervened on his behalf with airstrikes, training and aid since March.
It’s even more ungrateful because these rebels have made it clear they expect more military and humanitarian aid from the West.
Libya’s National Transitional Council chair Mustafa Abdul Jalil urged NATO at a meeting Monday in Qatar to continue its air campaign against Gadhafi’s forces. …
But with Libya’s rebels willfully sheltering one of the world’s worst terrorists — the latest report is he’s sick, a ruse Libyan officials used to get him prematurely released from a U.K. prison two years ago — it seems they aren’t interested in creating a new kind of democratic and law-abiding nation and ridding Libya of the taint of terrorism. …
Imagine that! Arab rebels including al-Qaeda not interested in democracy and getting rid of terrorism! What a revelation, what a shock!
Is the White House reminding the rebels that the U.S. taxpayers have just shelled out $1 billion to buy their freedom? Or that the U.S. has released several billion in Gadhafi’s oil assets abroad for their use? No.
There were plenty of good reasons to object to the NATO involvement in the Libyan rebellion, and perhaps the main one was that the rebels were an unknown quantity. With this refusal to release the Lockerbie bomber, they’ve shown their colors.
If the Obama administration doesn’t want to be seen as Uncle Sucker, it must make the Libyan rebels face consequences for their ingratitude.
Obama will do that? Oh, sure. Wait for it … … any moment now … …