Western Journalism’s analysis of the “Benghazi Accountability Report” in two parts

The following scene is fictitious. Any resemblance between the characters, or the events they refer to, and real people or real events, is purely coincidental.

*

A stretch of wasteground, deserted but for two figures approaching each other from opposite sides. No buildings in sight.  No road, no passing traffic or pedestrians. Both figures, one elderly female (Hillary), one elderly male (Tom), are muffled up to the ears and have hats with brims pulled down over their faces. Both look nervously about them to make sure they’re not being followed or observed.

When they’re close to each other Tom speaks.

Tom: Hi Hillary. So what is it you need to see me urgently and secretly about?

Hillary: It’s the Benghazi thing. We managed to keep it off the front pages, but you know what happened. I got Susan to stick her neck out trying to spread the video story. Told her I’d definitely tell Barack that she was the one to have my job at State when I retire if she’d do that little thing for me. But then some people may they rot in hell let out part of the truth about what really happened, and we just didn’t manage to make the video story stick, and now the Republicans are trying to make a scandal of it.

Tom: So where do I come in?

Hillary: I told Barack we must set up an official inquiry that can take some weeks so it only comes out when we’re safely over the election, and while its going on we won’t have to answer any questions  – we can say we don’t want to anticipate the findings. With luck by the time the inquiry’s finished the whole thing will be forgotten or at least seem very stale news.

Tom: And you want me to head this inquiry – right?

Hillary: It has to be you, Tom. You know the area. You know the people. You know how Barack feels about them. The same way you do.

Tom: But why the secrecy? You’ll be making a public announcement that I’ll be heading it, won’t you?

Hillary:  Of course. But we have to talk about what your inquiry will find out.

Tom: I get you. Okay, tell me what you want me to hide.

Hillary: Well, its really, really important to Barack to have everyone believe he’s defeated al-Qaeda. You know?

Tom: Sure, I understand that. Though I personally always thought that bin Laden guy was a fine looking fellow. Good at what he did too. Bit of a shame that he had to go. I understand Valerie nearly got Barack to leave him be, but the navy people just wouldn’t stop pushing once they’d found out where he was and they knew they could do it.

Hillary:  Thing is, the vast right wing conspiracy has found out that there may have been some al-Qaeda people among the mob who killed Chris.

Tom: Chris?

Hillary: Stevens. Our ambassador to Libya.

Tom: And you want that kept that out of my findings?

Hillary: Well, it’s out now so you may not be able to. They’ve even picked up leads to our weapons transfers.

Tom: Weapons transfers?

Hillary: Yeah – guns and stuff. Stuff left over from when we supplied the rebels against Gaddafi. Stingers – whatever they are. Chris was organizing their transfer through Turkey to the rebels in Syria.

Tom: Good. I mean – bad if anyone found out about that, eh?  By the way, who are these Syrian rebels, d’you know?

Hillary: Well, that could be even more embarrassing. Some of them are also al-Qaeda.

Tom: Okay. Okay. Sure. Fine.

Hillary: We don’t want that to come out in the inquiry. And certain other things that you’ll come across will have to be …. you get me?

Tom: Suppressed. Of course. So let me ask you this. What can come out in my report?

Hillary: You can find that Chris didn’t get enough protection. Everyone knows that much by now. But you mustn’t blame me or Barack. You mustn’t find his policies at fault. And Barack himself mustn’t  come into it at all. Or me.

Tom:  Okay. I see. Fine.

Hillary: Without actually naming names you can hold some of my underlings responsible for refusing protection. I mean, everyone knows we refused more protection when Chris asked for it so there’s no point in trying to hush that up.

Tom: You want anyone in particular named?

Hillary: No. No names. You can say that nothing anyone did is a firing offense. I mean, I might fire a few people anyway just to make it look as if I’m so angry with them that I’m ready to go beyond your recommendations.  Zeal.  I’ll show zeal.

Tom: And what about Chris himself? Can we put some of the blame on him?

Hillary: Sure.

Tom:  He asked  for too much?

Hillary: Er – rather  he didn’t make his needs clear enough.

Tom: They might call that “blaming the victim”.

Hillary: Well don’t make too much of that. What you can make as much as you like of is the Republicans in the House not voting us enough money for the proper protection of our embassies and diplomats.

Tom: Is it true?

Hillary: True enough. There’s a grain of truth …  and it’s  something people will believe. Above all, keep me out of the picture. Me and Barack.

Tom: Didn’t you make a public statement that you accepted responsibility?

Hillary: Yep. I thought that was a good move. Made me sound courageous. And honest. Didn’t it?

Tom: Sure it did.

Hillary: I was rather hoping it would  be enough and I wouldn’t have to do anything more.

Tom: Doesn’t the House want you to answer some questions?

Hillary: Yep.  That’s bad. They’ve got film of me saying it was all because of the video when Barack and I met the coffins coming home. I even told one of the dead guys’ father that we would punish the disgusting little man who made the video. But I think I can get out of having to testify. I have important engagements abroad. A wine-tasting in Australia, as a matter of fact. And after that – well maybe I’ll fall sick or something. Bang my head and lose my memory if the worst comes to the worst. I’ll think of something.

Tom: Is there anything else you should tell me now? I mean, what other cats are already out of the bag?

Hillary: Let me see. They may make a lot of noise about us paying local militias to guard our installations.

Tom: You hired Arabs to guard them? Armed?

Hillary:  Of course armed.

Tom: Trained to use arms?

Hllary: They knew how to use them. They were militants. No point in …

Tom: Hold it right there a moment. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you hired terrorists to guard our people in Libya?

Hillary: Don’t use that word!  You know Barack won’t allow it.

Tom: (Whistles) I didn’t realize he’d gone as far as that. Didn’t you tell him it would be dangerous? I mean, I know what he’s aiming at, but I thought he was better at the art of throwing dust in people’s eyes than that.  I think we should suppress that.

Hillary: It’s already known.

Tom: Already known? (Whistles again)

Hillary: Stop doing that, Tom. It’s not that bad. I don’t want it to be that bad.

Tom: This ain’t gonna be easy, sister. Anything else that could be an impeachable offense? Better you tell me now …

Hillary: Well, there was a secret CIA operation going on. Taking prisoners. Interrogations.

Tom: (Taking a deep breath) I don’t know if I can do this, Hillary. An illegal operation?

Hillary: I don’t know. Honestly, Tom, I don’t know anything about that.  I – I – . It wasn’t  my idea. I’ll have to get Petraeus to fill you in about that.

Tom: Speaking of Petraeus – he seems to resent Susan putting the blame on the info his people gave her. He seems to be wanting to tell the truth – I mean the real truth. Out loud. In public.

Hillary: Don’t worry about him. I promise you, we’ve got him where we want him.

Tom:  You have? I see. I see. But now tell me. What’s the real story why we didn’t send anyone to help them. Our people in Benghazi. Why didn’t we? Don’t worry, you know what you tell me here will go no further. But to satisfy my own curisity. After all, we could have, couldn’t we? We even got a plane from Italy to within a couple of hours from Benghazi. What happened then?

Hillary: I told them … I mean we told them … I mean, Barack said … At least, Valerie said … Jeez Tom, you expect me to know? You can ask Leon. But whatever he tells you, remember what I’m telling you now. Nothing that would be bad for Barack – or me  …

Tom: So let me be clear what you want from me. Bottom line – you’re asking for a whitewash?

Hillary: Well yes, of course. But it mustn’t seem like a whitewash. You know?   You must make it seem really, really tough. I want them to use words like “scathing”.

Tom: A scathing report. Yep. Sounds right.

Hillary: And make recommendations for how we should  get our act together and improve the way we deal with protecting our people abroad. That sort of thing. A whole lot of recommendations. And make them sound … draconian. Make it sound as though we take the whole thing to be a teaching moment and we really want to learn from it going forward.

Tom: Draconian.

Hillary: Yes. But  not so draconian that I can’t say I accept them. I need to say I accept them all. It will make me sound …

Tom: You’re setting me quite a challenge here.

Hillary: I know you’re up to it, Tom. Will you do it? For the cause. You know what I mean?

Tom: Okay, Hillary. I’ll do it. I’ll do my best … but  you understand it might not work?

Hillary: Just do it. We’ll make it work. Me and Barack. Between the two of us we can’t fail. I’m very experienced, you know, in getting out of tight corners. And Barack is incredibly –

Both together: LUCKY.

They laugh.

End

Why was Obama, the Islam-loving communist, twice  voted into the presidency of the capitalist, Islam-attacked United States?

Why do most Americans “think” that Obama is doing a good job – though they know the economy is bad, millions are unemployed, businesses are overburdened with regulations, travelers are manhandled and humiliated at airports, an American ambassador is killed abroad with impunity, the Taliban is back in business in Afghanistan, the Middle East is in flames since Obama assisted the displacement of allied rulers with Islamic fundamentalists … and so on and on?

Why do millions of Americans “think” that economic equality is morally desirable?

Why are tens of millions content to live on state support without attempting to improve their standard of living by their own efforts?

Why do millions of university students in America admire intellectuals who hate America, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and why do they make an icon out of the sadistic mass-murderer Che Guevara?

The broad general answer is simple. They’ve been told to. They’ve been told that good people do and “think” these things. They want to be good. They believe what they’ve been taught. This is so obvious that the statement “they believe it because they’ve been taught it” could be dismissed as a truism.

It is why Muslim women believe they must put up with being sexually mutilated and enslaved to men. Why multitudes the world over believe that there was a nation called Palestinians who were driven off their land by aggressive usurping Jews. Why Christians believe that a man who once lived and died lives on as one part of a three-part god. Why Muslims and Christians imagine that when you are dead you are still alive in another place. Why Jews believe that their benign and omnipotent God has some unguessable but just purpose in having six million of them enslaved, starved, tortured and murdered by Germans.

They believe it because they were taught it. It was drummed into them. They were raised to know that that is how it is.

Yet few if any ideas are easy to spread. To get an idea accepted by large numbers of people takes patience, persistence, conviction, tireless energy on the part of those who want to spread it. The idea need not make good sense, be reasonable, come with proofs that it will work as its advocates say it will. It doesn’t even have to appeal strongly to the emotions. It just needs to become what “everybody” accepts. How?

If you want your idea to prevail over others, this is what it takes. First the conviction that it is right and everyone should know it. Next, a decision to spread it. Then it takes energy, persistence, patience, time, repetition – and eventually force.

What made Christianity catch on? It wasn’t the life-style –  poor, austere, hard, humble. Even the promise of eternal life was not a reliable recommendation as anyone’s eternity could as easily be endless agony as endless bliss (it was a 50-50 tossup). The theology was so hard to make sense of that the Church itself to this day has not settled it. And the morality it demanded was against human nature. So what made it succeed? Energy, persistence, patience, time, repetition, force.

Look how long it took. From the time St Paul invented “Jesus Christ” to the time the emperor of Rome accepted the new god and the doctrines that had accreted to him, thus making it fashionable to be Christian (just a few decades before force was applied and it became compulsory), nearly three hundred years had passed. Three hundred years of persistent, patient, energetic proselytizing.  Even then, it was not securely implanted in the minds of the subjects. One Emperor – Julian – came along and actually tried to reverse the trend by suppressing Christianity and re-instating paganism. He didn’t have enough time. He died in battle, his successors went back to favoring Christianity, and finally the Emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was to be the religion of the state. With him the last phase of force arrived.

Marxist Communism took less time to get a real grip on the minds of multitudes. Means of communications had speeded up considerably between the 4^th and the 19^th centuries, but still it took half a century (if one arbitrarily dates it from the first publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867 to the success of the Bolshevik revolution  in 1917). And still the same method had to be employed: energetic, patient, persistent, repetitous proselytizing. The fever of enthusiasm had to be caught by two generations of intellectuals before the infection became a pandemic.

The creed must become the norm. So pervasive must the doctrine be that anybody who does not subscribe to it wholeheartedly will appear egregious; an oddball, a rebel, a danger to everyone else and even to himself. The orthodoxy must be accepted without question as good, so anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a bad person.

By the late 20^th century communications had become even faster, so  the New Left could achieve irreversible success in Europe in less than thirty years, in America in forty (1968 to 2008). It started as a weak revolutionary movement which brought nothing good with it to Western Europe and America, but much that was bad: recreational drugs, AIDS, terrorism as self-expression. New Leftists complained that they had too much freedom, too much choice, that tolerance of their politics was repressive. (That’s what Leftist theorists mean by “the dialectic” – every concept is also its own opposite.) And this irrational case was widely accepted, even while, on the other side of the iron curtain, a young man burnt himself to death to protest against the lack of freedom, choice, and tolerance.

The New Left movement was ignorant, blind, puerile, unreasonable, sadistic – yet it became, it has become, the prevailing belief-system of the greater part of the Western world, and at present in almost all “free” countries the standard ideology (or religion) of the state, no matter what political party is in power. How?

The plan was made. The plan was put into execution. Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party, proposed the strategy: “The Long March through the Institutions”.  It wasn’t enough that the New Left should protest, should threaten and carry out violent attacks, should shout and write and publish, should display their slogans, should bomb their native cities and maim and kill their neighbors. They must take over the institutions of power, every one of them, by achieving a majority of votes in them: from the smallest citizens’ groupings – such as library committees – to town councils, news media, boards of education, the schools, the universities, the civil service, the publishing industry, the legal profession, the law courts, a major political party, the country’s legislative body, and eventually prime-ministerships and presidencies. Police forces and the military were formidable challenges. The tactic with them was first to discredit them, then pressure them from outside by means of public opinion guided by the converted press, then to infiltrate them, and finally to bend them from within to conform to the doctrine and so advance the cause.

Books, films, articles, lessons, lectures, systems of reward, prizes must all promote the cause. It took the three or four decades, but it succeeded.

How otherwise could the free Western world, whose policies and armies opposed the oppressing, enslaving Communist Eastern world, have been successfully converted to the very doctrine that in the East oppressed, enslaved, tortured and mass murdered? The idea itself was no more innately and manifestly true and good than the idea of Christianity. But as in the case of Christianity, it took conviction, decision, planning, energy, persistence, repetition, and finally (now even  in America, under the Obama administration) force.

Only Lefist doctrine – government control of the economy, government provision of welfare, confiscatory and punitive taxation – is politically correct now in America. Collectivist thinking is the norm. Good people vote left. (When, in 2008, a Californian woman came upon a stall set up on a main street to canvass votes for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she called the police, and was astonished to learn that to solicit public support for the Republican Party was not illegal.) Again, as with Christianity, the allegiance to the doctrine has little or nothing to do with the innate worth of the ideas themselves. Most adherents to either Christianity or Leftism could not explain what the ideas are. But they know that good people find them good, that good people vote for them. And that is all they need to know. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a good person?

But the question of how did this become the case has not been fully answered. There is another aspect to the story. In order for one doctrine to succeed, it is necessary for counter doctrines to fail. If the ancient world had had enough confidence in paganism, enough enthusiasm for it, hadn’t taken it for granted, hadn’t become bored with it, hadn’t ignored the Christian missionaries with their crazy talk, could the weird, obscure, muddled, sorrowful, other-worldly new religion of Christianity have conquered it?

And the success of Leftism now – would it have happened if the conservative Right had been paying attention? The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Right  was not being vigilant. It took little notice of the Long March. It didn’t bother to argue against political correctness. It disregarded the cynical shenanigans going on in the United Nations as if it were nothing but a zoo housing many clamorous beasts who were safely confined and could in no way threaten American life, liberty or happiness. If the Right was made to feel now and then the bullying, deceitful, sly, sometimes violent tactics of the Left, it shrugged them off. Conservatives went on being civil when the world’s mood had changed to favoring crassness, vulgarity and abuse. They put their confidence in the fact that America had been founded as the political embodiment of the idea of personal freedom; had demonstrated to the world  – forever, they believed – that freedom brought prosperity and might and stunning innovation. They assumed that the rightness of individual liberty, the capitalist system, and government by the people had been established forever. So strong and free a country could afford to be tolerant. Let some wild, immature, misguided persons preach despotism (Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, Greenism, Feminism, whatever), the system was strong enough to be hospitable to alien ideas, and to allow dissent or even rebellion. Tested, it would prove itself inviolable. It could not only withstand opposition, it could absorb it and dissolve it. No special effort was required. American history was on the side of those who would defend freedom and the Constitution. The separation of powers would protect them. The free press would dilute propaganda. Open enquiry in the academies would ensure that all points of view were argued and the most rational, the most humane, would persuade serious scholars.  But they were wrong.

In their complacency they did not even notice the Long March. They could not mark its stations of success. Only now, late in 2012, the Republican Party has woken up with a shock on discovering, in the November presidential election, that most of America likes collectivism; that it doesn’t object to electoral fraud; that it has no objection to a failing economy; that it would rather live on government handouts than become rich; that being rich has become a bad thing; that it’s okay for foreign powers to develop weapons that could kill vast numbers of Americans; that the press does not report what is happening in the world but only what it wants to happen; that courts of law are willing to apply foreign laws; that it doesn’t matter if American representatives abroad are attacked and murdered; that the concept of personal freedom is worthy only of derision; that American history is a trail of shame; that aggressive Islam is being protected by the government.

How did this happen? It happened because people patiently, energetically, persistently planned it and made it happen.

What can we do about it? What needs to be done to change the minds of the people?

Those who would change this state of affairs must first be sure that they want the free republic the founders established; that they want to maintain free markets; that they don’t want a welfare state; that they do want to preserve national defenses; that they want to stop indoctrination in the schools; that they want to forbid the application of foreign law; that they do not want to go on funding  an institution – the UN – that consistently works against their interests; that Islam is inimical to their civilization. Then they must decide that their own political philosophy is right, uniquely right, and must be implemented at any and all costs. Then they must start teaching it with energy, persistence, patience and fiery enthusiasm. It will take time. Teach, preach, use every method of persuasion that works. Take back the institutions. Give up the idea that it’s better to be gentlemanly than sink to using the low methods of the opposition. The Left has made the fight low and dirty. Leftists will cheat, lie, turn dirty tricks. Will the Right, before it is to late, get down in the dirt and fight in the same way?

Have they – Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, the Tea Party – got the stomach for it? How badly does the conservative Right want to win power in America? How important is it to them that they should?

Are they prepared to shout down the shouters? Criticize and mock Islam? Make Communists feel passé and nasty? Tolerate only the tolerant and tolerable?

Will they start a process and persist with it, energetically and patiently? Or do they imagine that the innate rightness of their ideas, if politely explained, will win the electorate over to their side?

Will it be enough just to tell them?

Tell them that the free market is the only means of creating general prosperity, and why.  Tell them that central planning of an economy cannot work, and why. Tell them why competition is good for everyone, producers and consumers alike. Tell them what profit is and why it is essential for ensuring abundance. Tell them that only where people are free can there be discovery and innovation, improvement in everyone’s daily life, better technology, the advance of civilization. Explain why. Show them the proofs of history.

Tell them the truth about life in other countries. Not politically correct sentimental drivel, but the actual awful facts about life in most other countries.

Tell them why impartial justice is the only justice. Why all sane adult citizens must be treated equally by the law. That people must be judged by their actions, not their intentions or feelings.

Tell them why government should be kept small and its powers limited. Tell them what the essential tasks of government are: protection of the nation, of the individual, of the rule of law itself. And why government should not be allowed more powers and money than it needs to fulfill its few essential functions.

Will that do the trick?

No. It will not be enough just to tell them.

Just how low and dirty the fight will have to be, just how hard the task necessarily is, can be learnt from David Horowitz’s book Radicals*.  Here are a few indicators to be found in it:

Lenin “declared that the purpose of a political argument was not to refute one’s opponent but to wipe him off the face of the earth”.

“Because the left is inspired by the fantasy of a future that can never be realized, it is never defeated by its defeats.”

Alinskyites [eg Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] “will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.”

Alinsky’s advice: “Advance your radical goals by camouflaging them.”

“[Lenin] was always engaged in a total war, which he used to justify every means he thought might advance his goals. These included summary executions, concentration camps that provided a model for Hitler, and the physical ‘liquidation’ of entire social classes. Lenin was the most dangerous kind of political fanatic – ready to resort to any means to get what he wanted, even if it meant pretending to be a democrat.”

“This is the art [Alinsky] taught to radicals trying to impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom: Don’t sell it as socialism. Sell it as ‘Progressivism’, ‘economic democracy’, ‘fairness’,  and ‘social justice’.”

“[I]dentify one’s political enemies as instruments of evil and thus … justify the total war against them.”

“[Alinsky explains] to idealistic radicals who think of themselves as creating  a world of perfect justice and harmony that the means they must use to achieve that world are dishonest, deceitful, and ruthless – and therefore indefensible by the moral standards they claim to be upholding. The radical organizer has no such standards … he ‘does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.’”  [Italics in the original.]

“[Alinsky writes;] ’To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process … he who fears corruption fears life.’”

Terrible, terrible! And of course immoral means pervert the ends.

The moral Right cannot do as the immoral Left does.

So how will the Left be defeated?

 

Jillian Becker   December 17, 2012

 

* Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion by David Horowitz, Regnery,Washington D.C., 2012

 

 

The Ahlul Bayt News Agency released this video and comments:

The Syrian website al-Haqiqa posted a video which is the most horrific of all videos released so far about the Syrian crisis. [It shows] the terrorists bringing down the heads of the people on a piece of stone …

… and using children to behead them with a machete.

These “Takfiri armed rebels are affiliated to the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) who call themselves Khaled bin Walid Battalion.”

The Free Syrian Army is the the group that Obama and his European and Arab allies are supporting with communications equipment and probably with arms, to help them topple the dictator Bashar Assad and take power themselves in Syria. 

Occasionally we repeat articles from our archive. To follow our recent discussion of “religious tolerance” (The curse of religion, December 3, 2012), and in the aftermath of America’s re-election of the would-be dictator Barack Obama, we re-present this burning coal pincered from the still glowing embers of the Christian furnace that burnt so fiercely for so many centuries. Compared to Calvin even the dictator L (see the book ad in the margin) is mild in his cruelty.

*

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

 

Jillian Becker   April 25, 2010 and December 6, 2012

This video confirms that the Obama administration’s political correctness helps Islam wage its jihad.

 

Video and text from Creeping Sharia.

Victims who lost their lives in the jihad attack at Fort Hood:

1. Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, Havre de Grace, Md.

2. Maj. Libardo Caraveo, 52, Woodbridge, Va.

3. Cpt. John P. Gaffaney, 54, San Diego, Calif.

4. Cpt. Russell Seager, 41, Racine, Wis.

5. Staff Sgt. Justin Decrow, 32, Plymouth, Ind.

6. Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, Kiel, Wis.

7. Spc. Jason Hunt, 22, Tillman, Okla.

8. Spc. Frederick Greene, 29, Mountain City, Tenn.

9. PFC Aaron Nemelka, 19, West Jordan, Utah

10. PFC Michael Pearson, 22, Bolingbrook, Ill.

11. PFC Kham Xiong, 23, St. Paul, Minn.

12. Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, Chicago, Ill. and

13. Pvt. Francheska Velez’s unborn baby

14. Michael G. Cahill, Cameron, Texas [civilian]

 

32 others were wounded.

In our post The secret of Benghazi we listed questions that need to be asked and answered about the murderous attack on the American mission, but there was one question we omitted, perhaps the most important of all. Robert Klein Engler supplied it in a comment which we think needs to be put on our front page. It entails other, related, questions:

Many who have looked into the Incident at Benghazi are disappointed in the congressional investigation so far. The most important question that needs to be asked and answered is, “Who gave the order to ‘stand down’ at Benghazi?” Once that question is answered, the rest of what went on there will fall into place. “According to a Fox News report by Jennifer Griffin, former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty…were ordered to stand down three times following calls during the attack. The first two times occurred soon after they heard initial shots fired…and (they) requested permission to go to the consulate to help out…(Forbes).” The Examiner.com claims “…former House speaker Newt Gingrich…was informed by a U. S. senator that at least two media networks have recently been given…evidence about the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans… The networks obtained e-mail evidence from…the office of National Security Advisor James Jones…ordering a counterterrorism team to cancel a rescue mission at the U. S. consulate and CIA annex in Libya. According to Gingrich…they were told explicitly by the White House ‘stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.'” If this is true, why haven’t those e-mails been made public or asked for by those investigating the Incident at Benghazi? A newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post has resources they can use to seek out an answer and obtain those e-mails. What if there were a robbery at your local bank? Would a reporter investigate the robbery by first flying off to New York and interviewing a senior bank manager, only to discover an adulterous relationship and then spend time reporting that? It would be better to interview the bank tellers, customers and witnesses to the robbery at the local branch first. Why hasn’t something similar been done about the Incident at Benghazi? The FBI was at Benghazi, but for only three hours. How many witnesses did they interview? What did they find out? The man who led the attack on our “mission” at Benghazi is reported giving interviews on Arabic TV! Why has no US reporter contacted him and asked him what happened? The Incident at Benghazi should not disappear off the front page of our newspapers until the stand down question is answered. We are asking the media and our elected representative for help. Tell us the truth. Who gave the order to stand down at Benghazi? If for no other reason, answer the question to set the minds of our men and women in the military service at ease. They want to be assured someone has their back.

We suspect the answer to “who gave the order?” is “the President”. And we suspect that that is why the press is not investigating the Incident at Benghazi. Most journalists now see their job as protecting the President, helping him to achieve his far-left pro-Islam agenda; not reporting to us the events we need to know about, happening now in America and the rest of the world.  

*

And here is part of a highly pertinent comment on the above by our reader Liz. The question “who gave the order to ‘stand down’?” gives rise immediately to the question “why?” It had to be either given or allowed to be given by Obama.

The question should not only be who gave the order to stand down, but WHY did Obama allow it? Because no matter who gave the order, or even what the reason was, it is not a good enough reason to let four Americans die. And the responsibility for that is still Obama’s.

Liz thinks the fact that the order was given is cause to impeach the president, and we agree with her.

No religion can argue with any other religion about the truth of its doctrine because none can prove its truth. There’s no point in opposing one irrationality with another irrationality.

There’s little enough point in anyone’s trying to reason with the religious, since they haven’t come to their beliefs by reason.

The logic of any religious belief can only be that any other religious belief is wrong. To pretend otherwise is foolish. If a person of some particular faith says that other faiths are also true and that he respects them equally with his own, he’s either lying or he’s an idiot. Why does he believe what he believes if all other faiths are equally true? Perhaps only because his daddy told him to – the amazing excuse that the otherwise really impressive and amusing philosopher Kierkegaard gives for believing in (a personalized version of) Christianity.

There can be no wonder that Christians and Jews who live in Muslim lands are persecuted. The Muslim faith includes commandments to make life hell for Christians and Jews, by taxing them exorbitantly and murdering them at will.

The same must be said about Jews living in the old Christian lands. Christians were terrible persecutors, almost every branch of the Christian Church as intolerant and cruel as every other, until in very recent times – since the Second World War – Christianity began to bore most people in the West.

The ancient Jews, according to their own mythology, were intensely intolerant – far more than were the Greek and Roman pagans. What’s remarkable is that in the modern Jewish state, Christians and Muslims are not persecuted. (No, despite the propaganda, Muslims are NOT persecuted in Israel in any way whatsoever, and that eccentric break with custom is an historical anomaly, bound to irritate world opinion.)

Of course we sympathize with the unjustly persecuted, even though we think they should know it’s coming to them; and, in the case of Christians, even though their own doctrine reveres suffering.

This is from Front Page, by Raymond Ibrahim:

No matter how violent or ugly, no matter how many Islamic slogans are shrieked — thus placing their behavior in a purely Islamic context — Muslim violence against the West and Israel will always be dismissed as a product of the weak and outnumbered status of Muslims — their status as underdogs, which the West tends to romanticize. …

They may be screaming and rioting, firing rockets and destroying property — all while calling for the death and destruction of the “infidel” West and/or Israel to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Still, no problem. According to the aforementioned array of pundits, apologists, academics, and politicians, such bloodlust is a natural byproduct of the frustration Muslims feel as an oppressed minority, “rightfully” angry with the “colonial” West and its Israeli proxy.

Indeed, that is precisely how even the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda were rationalized away by many “experts” — even as al-Qaeda’s own words exposed their animus as a direct product of Muslim doctrine not temporal grievances.

Most recently, the New York Times, in the context of the rocket attacks on Tel Aviv, asserted that Israel “needs a different approach to Hamas and the Palestinians based more on acknowledging historic grievances,” thus taking all blame off the “aggrieved” and “underdog” Muslims and Palestinians.

But if Muslims get a free pass when their violence is directed against those currently stronger than them, how does one rationalize away their violence when it is directed against those weaker than them, those who have no political influence whatsoever? Consider the most obvious of these scenarios, the growing epidemic of Muslim persecution of Christians. From one end of the Islamic world to the other — whether in Arab lands, African lands, Asian lands, or Sinic lands, wherever Muslims are a majority — the largest non-Muslim religious group, Christians, suffer untold atrocities.

These Christians are often identical to their Muslim co-citizens in race, ethnicity, national identity, and language; there is no political dispute, no land dispute. The only problem is that they are Christian—they are the other—and so must be subjugated, according to Sharia’s position for all “others,” for all infidels—including Israel and the West.

Such is the true nature of Muslim rage throughout the world: it is a byproduct of doctrinal intolerance if not downright hatred for the other, who must always be kept in a state of subjugation and humiliation, according to the letter of the Quran. …

Consider: Christians and Jews are both constantly castigated in the Quran: Muslims are admonished not to befriend either of them (5:51) and to fight and subjugate them “until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves brought low” (9:29). Christians under Islam are suffering accordingly—as despised dhimmis, abused and “brought low,” routinely plundered of their lives, dignity, and possessions.

[But] Israel — the dhimmi that got away—actually has authority and power over Muslims. Now, if dhimmis are supposed to be kept in total submission to Muslims, how then when one of them actually lords it over Muslims? Hence Islam’s immense and existential rage against the Jewish state.

It could hardly be more obvious that if organized religion were to be universally abandoned, a major cause of human strife and misery would be removed. Which isn’t to say that strife and misery would cease. There will always be a rich store of other causes. But few as superfluous and absurd as religion.

In the light of all this, the efforts of some non-Muslim believers to make peace between religions, to bring sweetness and light where there there has always inevitably been hatred, fury, disgust and fear, strikes us as a particularly futile endeavor. It can only be attempted by clergymen keeping themselves in the rankest ignorance of what “the other’s” faith teaches.

This is also from Front Page, by Hillel Zaremba, who has become understandably exasperated with such efforts:

While it is all well and good to encourage the commonalities that unite Americans of all faiths –

What commonalities would those be, we wonder? We’ve not been able to discover any (unless secular values and loyalties are meant).

– it is equally important to inquire into the bona fides of organizations that only claim to promote tolerance. Philadelphia presents a sorry but enlightening example of how groups whose agendas directly challenge American values get a free pass from the interfaith establishment due largely to the firmly held belief that “diverse” (and disquieting) viewpoints must be respected — as long as they are Muslim.

A prime example of this is the Mayor’s Office of Faith-based Initiatives (MOFI), “the primary liaison between the Office of the Mayor and Philadelphia’s diverse communities of faith and their leaders.” Despite being provided with evidence of the U.S. government’s case against one of its partners, the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the office’s interim director, Reverend Malcolm Byrd, declared: “We will engage with CAIR. … We don’t have to endorse you to work with you.” After reviewing the evidence, MOFI decided to maintain the relationship. According to this twisted logic, MOFI [welcomes] the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan unabashedly declares Jews to be part of “the Synagogue of Satan.”

A similar approach is exhibited by the Interfaith Center of Greater Philadelphia (ICGP), “dedicated to interreligious dialogue, education, and community building.” It seemed reasonable to assume that the organization would want to vet its members to some degree, to be sure they truly embrace tolerance and respect for diversity. The ICGP … soon disabused us of that notion.

By ignoring the ideologies held by Muslim groups, the ICGP and others afford cover for those whose beliefs would otherwise be abhorrent to them, like the Villanova-based Foundation for Islamic Education (FIE) … [whose] leaders and faculty have sanctioned suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, defended the execution of Muslims who convert out of their faith, and threatened Copts for questioning the Qur’an. …

Another Walk congregation is the Quba Institute (QI), aka the “International Muslim Brotherhood, Inc.” (IMB). … According to QI’s old website …  the IMB “forged partnerships with the Muslim Student Associations [MSA] of local Universities” in the late 1960s, an organization identified by federal investigators as subscribing to the goal of teaching Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands.”

This interfaith partner has hosted major Brotherhood ideologues … An older version of the mosque’s website referenced the congregation’s core principles [as] including a commitment to U.S. law and rejection of terrorism … with one important caveat: armed jihad is permitted “in the context of self-defense or guarding the sacred, holy lands of Islam.” This is the same rationale used by Hamas to target Israel since it considers the entire state’s territory to be sacred to Islam. Bin Laden similarly justified his attacks against the U.S. in this way, viewing any American presence in Islamic lands as a form of infidel “occupation.” …

Interfaith organizations ought to, at the very least, probe the statements and associations of their constituent members or facilitate others’ attempts to do so.

The same admonition should be heeded by the Religious Leaders Council of Greater Philadelphia (RLCGP), another interfaith group which includes important Christian and non-Christian clergy, such as the archbishop of Philadelphia, the head of the Southeastern PA Lutheran Synod, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania … , [and which] welcomes into its fellowship … Imam Isa Abdulmateen …. [who has said]:

“Today, Arabs, Pakistanis… and other immigrants use the Qur’an [and] they tell us “Islam means peace” because they are afraid to upset the status quo, so we abandon jihad. … Our great leaders have become tame after 9/11. … When black men think of homos we think of weak, effeminate, flaming fags who disgust our sensibilities but are relatively harmless to all except themselves. Wrong! Homosexuality for whites is their heritage. … For blacks, homosexuality is crippling. … A black homosexual will never support revolution against the capitalist, racist republic because the capitalist, racist republic protects his homosexual lifestyle. …”

… What is particularly maddening is that key players in these interfaith groups were presented with this information and the best they could muster was a vague assurance that they would look into it.

The moral bankruptcy at the heart of such feel-good organizations is clearly on display. Like their fellow travelers in government and the mainstream media who ignore all available evidence, the collegial world of interfaith do-gooders burnish the credentials of bad actors, in an increasingly one-sided sense of tolerance, embracing the very haters they would otherwise oppose.

Our advice to all these feel-good organizations is, give it up. Interfaith dialogue never has, never will, never can achieve anything worth achieving.

And don’t say that ignorance of this or that faith breeds intolerance of it. The more a reasonable person knows about any religion, the less tolerable he is sure to find it.

A three-ring circus has been erected around the false video narrative, with the Petraeus/Rice/Clapper follies detracting attention from the three essential issues: the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya policy, the president’s dereliction of duty on September 11, 2012, and the troubling goings-on at the Benghazi consulate that wasn’t a consulate. 

We quote from Andrew McCarthy’s astute analysis of the devious political distractions from the main issues of Benghazigate being spun by the administration and the media.

CBS News is reporting that it was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that purged references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from talking points given to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice used those talking points to promote the lie that the Benghazi massacre resulted from a spontaneous mob protest rather than a planned terrorist attack. CBS adds that the CIA and FBI signed off on this false version of events.

This is all farce, of course. There being no more honor among con-men than among thieves, there comes a time in all busted conspiracies when the conspirators start pointing fingers at each other.

To pause briefly over details of the farce:

When the subject of Ms. Rice’s fitness to be secretary of state arose during last week’s press conference, the president summoned up some faux bravado, daring two Rice critics, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to “go after me,” not the gracious Madame Ambassador, if they wanted a fight. …

If Susan Rice is a weak little woman who needs the protection of a big strong male, then she certainly shouldn’t be appointed Secretary of State – or, for that matter, Ambassador to the UN.  It’s absurd to put women who need such protection into jobs that expose them to the storm winds of international conflict.

For decades now administrations both elephantine and asinine have appointed women as legates to Arab states – to Muslim states that despise women and regard them as obscene walking sex-organs that need to be covered up to the eyeballs – with disastrous results.  It was a woman ambassador, April Glaspie, sent by President George H. W. Bush to Iraq, who blunderingly gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990.

Now to return to the nub of the matter:

With their guy safely reelected, this spectacle has finally drawn the Obamedia’s attention to the president’s Benghazi travesty. Let’s not get lost here. It is critical to step back and bear two things in mind:

(a) All of the players here, including Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (both of whom the CBS report purports to absolve), are guilty of conspiracy — in this case, to mislead Americans about the cause of the attack and to aid the administration’s Islamist allies, whose objective is to impose sharia blasphemy standards on our country (a project on which the Obama administration has been colluding with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation since 2009). It was not for their own benefit that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Rice were, respectively, doctoring talking points and using them to create a false impression. Obama was the intended beneficiary. Patently the White House — which pitched Rice to the Sunday shows because Obama wanted to get the Mohammed-movie talking points publicly aired — was in the loop.

(b) Given that the conspiracy is a cover-up, there is the more salient matter of what is being covered up? The brain-dead mantra in Washington is always — all together now — “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” That is not true here. …

What is bad, very bad, is:

Four Americans were killed in Benghazi as a direct result of President Obama’s unprovoked and … unconstitutional war in Libya. This foolish gambit had the easily foreseeable result of empowering Islamists, very much including violent jihadists who now have access to much of the Qaddafi arsenal, in addition to other arms and training they received from the U.S. and NATO in the mission to overthrow Qaddafi (then, an American ally).

That was the first wrong step, whether a mistake or (as we suspect) action intended to promote revolutionary Islam.

Then what it led to:

The jihadist siege against the American installation in Benghazi lasted for over seven hours. The commander-in-chief knew the attack was underway while it was happening — which is obviously why he won’t answer questions about when and how he learned of it. He had military assets in proximity to Benghazi that could have come to the aid of the besieged Americans. Yet, Obama failed to take meaningful military action, an inexcusable dereliction of duty. Then, he told the American people he had done all he could do to protect those who were killed and wounded, an inexcusable betrayal of trust. Both counts of malfeasance are impeachable offenses. Rice’s false statements, Clapper’s purge, and Petraeus’s contradictory statements to Congress do not erase any of that. Obama has far more to answer for than anyone else in this debacle, and it is imperative that he be held accountable.

No help reached the beleaguered ambassador. So either Obama gave the order to go to their aid as he says he did and it was not obeyed, in which case he is ineffectual and his officials rebellious; or he did not give the order, in which case he is lying.

Andrew McCarthy goes on to discuss just what scandalous facts the cover-up is trying to conceal: Was the CIA station in Benghazi being used, without authority, to detain terrorist prisoners? Or was it gathering arms for shipment to Syria in whose civil war the policy is not to interfere? Or was it something even worse?

It’s the answers to those questions that we wait to hear, not who changed the wording of talking-points given to the little lady who parroted what she was told on TV in order to conceal shameful secret enterprises in the Arab world by the Obama conspiracy. What were those shameful secret enterprises?

Or as Andrew McCarthy puts it:

The cover-up here is not worse than the crime. Congress must not allow itself to get sidetracked. What matters most is what the administration is hiding — not the fact that the administration is hiding it.

In an article summarizing what is known about the events of 9/11/12 in Benghazi, Libya, where the US mission and CIA center were attacked and the ambassador and three other Americans killed, Mark Baisley raises not only the obvious questions but some new and awful possibilities. He writes at Townhall:

Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been found dead around 1:00AM by locals who sought to loot the embassy compound. Thinking he may yet be alive, they drove him to a medical center where doctors tried unsuccessfully to revive him from the effects of smoke asphyxiation.

So not necessarily “found dead’. If the doctors are telling the truth that they thought he might be revivable when he reached the hospital, it means that what we are seeing in the pictures is not the gross mishandling of a corpse, which would be bad enough, but the possible savage abuse of a living man, the high representative of the United States of America.

 

Having been subjected to weeks of YouTube video apologetics and obfuscation, the American electorate naturally has questions for the Commander-In-Chief.

Why was the site securityteam removed from Benghazi one month before the attack, in conflict with expert advice and requests?

Why would the Ambassador to Libya be meeting with the Consul General of Turkey?

Why was there no U.S. military response to an attack on American assets, including the assassination of a United States ambassador?

Why was America treated to such a hard-sell explanation of a YouTube video?

Why is the filmmaker in jail?

Why did the State Department produce a television ad about the YouTube video that was broadcast in Pakistan?

I can surmise three possible explanations, having received mountains of information and speculation …

Theory 1. There actually was reason to believe initially that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was motivated by anger at the YouTube video. CIA Director David Petraeus briefed members of Congress on September 14 that the YouTube video incited mob action against the Benghazi facility. Earlier on September 11, a mob had indeed stormed the U.S. Embassy in nearby Egypt. Americans heard little of that event because the Cairo embassy is built like a fortress and no Americans were hurt. The Washington Times reported that a witness in Benghazi “saw the militants gathering around 20 youths from nearby to chant against the film.” While the Administration has since learned the truth, they have simply been stalling the revelation of more accurate information in the face of an intense re-election campaign.

We discount this theory. It isn’t even worth considering. We know intelligence reached Washington very soon after the onslaught began that it was an attack  by a terrorist organization. And there are witness reports that there had been no protest demonstration.

Theory 2. Ambassador Stevens was set up for assassination. In this scenario, the Benghazi consulate is actually a front for the CIA annex which is gathering weapons left over from the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Those weapons are being shipped to Turkey in order to supply Syrian rebels in their quest to effect the same fate for President Bashar al-Assad. Fox News has reported on the initial shipment to the port town of Iskenderun, Turkey, a scant 25 miles from the Syrian border.

The theory here is that the Turkish General Consul lured Stevens to Benghazi for a late-day meeting where they knew of the relatively small security force in place to protect him. The timing of September 11 was important for using the YouTube video as a ready-made cover story.

This is a new twist to the story. That Turkish consul, whom we had thought a mere walk-on in the drama, a visitor calling on normal diplomatic business, having a quiet meeting with Ambassador Stevens who then politely walked him out to the street to see him off, actually played a central part in the plot? If so, the meeting was what the Ambassador had gone to Benghazi for on that critical day, and the Turk got him there in order to have him killed.

The theory raises new questions. Why would the Turks want Ambassador Stevens killed? The Turks want to aid the Syrian rebels. The Turks would surely want arms to reach the rebels. If Ambassador Stevens  was organizing shipments of arms to Turkey to be passed on to the rebels, was he not a valuable asset to the Turks?

But wait. It gets worse.

The complicity of the Obama Administration is reflected in the lack of a military response and the hard campaigning of the YouTube video to the American people.

The Obama administration was actually complicit in the luring of their own Ambassador – one, let’s remember, who shared Obama’s sentimental attachment to Islam and the Arab world – to his atrocious death?

We have blamed Obama’s policies. We have blamed his refusal to see the evil in Islam, or to acknowledge that Islam is waging jihad against America; but we had not thought that Obama and his gang actually wanted Ambassador Stevens murdered. Why would they? But the facts stare us in the face: he was denied adequate protection. When he asked for more they gave him less.The truth is being covered up. So what is it they feel so desperately needs to be covered up?

The third theory has Obama less guilty but far more helplessly incompetent  and weak:

Theory 3. The Obama Administration and the Clinton State Department are incompetent actors who prefer dreams of a utopian world over the harsh reality of extremists who take joy in killing. They assume the best about our enemies and the worst about patriotic Americans. When realizing that our facilities and people were under attack, the community organizer found himself frighteningly in the position of Commander In Chief. Barack Obama brags about the killing of Osama Bin Laden on the campaign trail. But we have all heard the rumors that Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton presented the President with the OBL mission only after it was well underway. They reportedly excluded White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett who is rumored to have stood in the way of previous opportunities to get Bin Laden.

An Alinskyite community organizer suddenly has to give orders as Commander In Chief of the armed might of the USA. How could he be capable of it?  But he would not have needed to find himself in such a crisis if his policies, formulated at leisure over four years and shaped by a lifetime of leftist ideology, hadn’t led to the critical moment. He is as guilty as he would be if his active connivance at the massacre, an actual plot involving him and the Turkish consul, were to be uncovered.