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

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

This is from the Washington Post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The military is going to be smaller … “

Ah-hah!

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

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

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

Drones then, mainly?

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

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

Although the war in Iraq has ended and troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, Panetta has not pressed the ground forces to conduct a tough and detailed examination of their performance in the two long and costly wars,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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Obama administration’s defense strategy, meanwhile …

So they do have one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though Iran is rapidly becoming a nuclear power.

Photo and text are from MEMRI:

On August 27, 2012, a member of the leading jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam posted a YouTube link to a video showing a man accused of spying for the U.S. by placing chips to direct drones targeting terrorists being crucified on an electric pylon in Abyan province in south of Yemen. A sign placed above the man’s head shows the group’s flag and verse 5:33 of the Koran, which reads: “The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.”

The crucified man is Saleh Ahmed Saleh Al-Jamely who was executed on February 12, 2012 after being convicted by a court managed by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al-Shari’a.

And Reuters reports: (We don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. Reuters talks about the Taliban as if they might have actual human motivation instead of just being the wild beasts they are.)

An adolescent boy and a young girl have been beheaded in two separate incidents in Afghanistan …

A 12-year-old boy was kidnapped and killed in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, his severed head placed near his body to send a warning to police, said provincial governor spokesman Jawid Faisal.

The brother of the boy, neither of whom were named by officials, was a member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a U.S.-trained militia charged with making Afghans in Taliban strongholds, like Kandahar, feel more secure …

Separately, a 6-year-old girl was beheaded in eastern Kapisa province on Thursday, said provincial police chief Abdul Hamed.

How would those who believe in a merciful and all-powerful God – as the Taliban do – explain that?

A rhetorical question only. We know the answers. Muslims think doing such things positively qualifies them for an eternity of bliss. Christians would say “it’s His mysterious ways.”

The murders follow the shooting or beheading of 17 young revelers attending a party in southern Helmand province this week …

In Kandahar’s Zhari district, officials also said on Friday that a 16-year-old boy accused by the Taliban of spying for the government was beheaded and skinned in late July.

*

There are many reports of Muslims crucifying Christians, for instance here and here. We cannot be sure that any particular report is true*, but we don’t doubt that atrocities of the kind are commonly committed.

* We are not convinced that the figure crucified in the picture was ever a living man. The head may have belonged to a man, but the whole thing is probably a dummy. The arms, shown in close-up in the video from which the picture is taken, look decidedly artificial. However, as we say in the text, we don’t doubt that Islam uses crucifixion as a punishment. The Koran commands it in the quoted verse.

The British government believes that the way to rehabilitate released terrorists is to train them to be violent.

This is from an article by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page:

UK officials have taken naivety and wishful thinking to a new level: not only are some of the most violent Islamic terrorists being released onto the streets, but in order to “rehabilitate” them, they are being trained by a former radical Muslim in one of the most violent forms of sports — cage-fighting, which even the Olympics refuses to acknowledge.

“Former radical Muslim”? They’re sure?

CNN’s “Cagefighter ‘cures’ terrorists,” by Nic Robertson and Paul Cruickshank, has the details.  …

And states plainly that “the Probation Service’s Central Extremism Unit, the lead UK government agency dealing with released terrorist convicts, now regularly channels cases” to this “former” Muslim extremist. 

While the entire 2,300-word report is worth reading, for its eye-opening (or eye-popping) qualities, the following lengthy excerpt summarizes:

“In the shadow of London’s Olympic stadium, home of the Summer Games, is a hotbed of radical fundamentalism dubbed Londonistan, from where al Qaeda has already recruited for some of its most ambitious plots. In past months, dozens of convicted terrorists have been released in the UK, including onto the same London streets…. At the same time a no-holds barred fight for security is under way. It is unorthodox, but British officials say it is working, producing results which have never been seen before — and at its epicenter is a veteran Muslim cagefighter. … “Unfortunately, we know that some of those prisoners are still committed extremists who are likely to return to their terrorist activities,” Jonathan Evans, the director of British domestic intelligence service MI5, warned two years ago. The task of managing the re-integration into society of these young men has proved beyond the capabilities of most Muslim community groups.”

They tried? If so, it’s the first we’ve heard of it.

“But one east Londoner, proud to be both British and Muslim, has felt religiously compelled to take on the fight. Usman Raja, the 34-year-old grandson of a Pakistani immigrant is not tall but he is built like an ox, with a close shaven head, short beard, and otherwise pure muscle….Raja is one of the UK’s most renowned cage-fighting coaches… He is also a man of deep ideas, including harnessing Islamic teaching to defeat the ideology of the terrorists.”

What? “Harnessing Islamic teaching”? “To defeat the ideology of terrorists”?

“Three years ago, Raja began taking under his wing some of the most dangerous offenders being released from the highest security wings of the British prison system; men convicted of carrying out terrorism on behalf of al Qaeda in murder, assassinations, bombing, and arson plots. His aim was to rehabilitate them into mainstream society …  Raja tried a novel approach with some of the most challenging freed convicted terrorists; he coached them cage-fighting skills. Raja says it proved a remarkably effective way of breaking them out of their pro al Qaeda mentality and opening up their minds to his counter-extremist message.”

Some questions:

Where is the proof that training violent jihadis in cage-fighting is a great success, “producing results which have never been seen before”? …

The closer one reads, the more it appears that the only proof for Raja’s success is that the released jihadis he is training have not (yet) been rearrested on terror charges.Is that really proof that this approach is working? … Is it inconceivable that they could still harbor the same jihadi inclinations, yet have learned to be patient, in accordance with jihad’s prescribed tactics …  even as they continue training in acts of violence?

Likewise, exactly how does the specific act of cage-fighting help rehabilitate jihadis? Again, the closer one reads, the fewer answers one receives. Instead, one gets more of the usual: during their training, Raja “impresses on them [the released jihadis] that true Islam is spiritual, tolerant and humanistic, and not the narrow-minded, divisive message of hate peddled by self-serving radical preachers,” who exploit the fact that, in Raja’s words, “some of them [UK’s Muslims] are very angry.”

In short, this jihadi cage-fighting business is being hailed by CNN simply because it has all the ingredients to validate leftist ideas: 1) “true Islam is spiritual, tolerant, and humanistic”; 2) jihadis are simply “very angry,” presumably at Western foreign policy; 3) this pent up frustration and hostility is nothing that some good old-fashioned cage-fighting won’t alleviate (apparently “art therapy” and Play Station were deemed insufficient).

On the other hand, this story can also be interpreted according to Islam’s perspective: 1) jihad is not about instantaneous terrorism but long-term preparations. Even the Muslim Brotherhood — which recently boasted “we will be masters of the world, one of these days” — showcases the word “prepare” in their logo, which comes directly from Koran 8:60, which commands Muslims to “prepare” for jihad “so that you may strike terror into the hearts of Allah’s enemies and your enemies”; 2) according to most Arabic legal manuals on jihad, combat sports — cage-fighting being ideal — are essential for jihadis in training.

Despite all this … no doubt those UK officials who myopically think only in the short-term and according to their leftist paradigms are now fully convinced that training jihadis in cage-fighting — that is, preparing them for extreme acts of violence — is the way to go.

Astounding. And yet, on reflection, we should not be surprised by this.

Governments are not only inherently inefficient, they are also inherently stupid.

American and Afghan officials in Afghanistan’s Farah province were holding an inauguration ceremony last Friday for new recruits to a village police force. As part of the ceremony, the new policemen were given weapons that they would use for training. As soon as one of the recruits, Mohammad Ismail, received his, he turned it on the American soldiers who were present, murdering two. This was the seventh such attack in two weeks — and each one is emblematic of just how foolish and wrongheaded our national adventure in Afghanistan has become.

These are extracts from an article by Robert Spencer at PJ Media:

These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.

Does any Afghan Muslim support American troops? Why would he?

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is urging Afghan President Hamid Karzai to come to a settlement with the Taliban …

What is the difference between Karzai and the Taliban?

… has secretly dropped charges in the case of a Florida man accused of funding the Pakistani Taliban … 

Why can the president of the US interfere in the process of law like that?

 … and is considering sending Taliban detainees back to Afghanistan as a gesture of goodwill.

America feels good will towards the Taliban?

This is manifest denial and self-delusion. …

A  Taliban jihadist who murdered an American soldier, Ghazi Mahmood (“Warrior Mahmood”), said … when asked, “Are there others who will carry out attacks similar to what you have?,” … replied: “Yes. There are some people who are looking for the opportunity to kill infidels. They will carry out their jihad and join us.”

Some? Or a lot? The whole male population of that ghastly country maybe?

Note also that Mahmood characterizes the Americans as enemies of his religion. Yet American authorities insist that this conflict has nothing to do with religion, and that even to study Islam in order to understand the motives and goals of people like Mahmood is unacceptable.

Thus have Muslim Brotherhood elements in the U.S. rendered us complacent and defenseless before the advancing jihad that we refuse to understand.

What are we fighting for at this point, anyway?

Yes, that is the question.

The Taliban are never going to surrender. …

American forces have supervised the implementation of an Afghan constitution that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land. Yet Islamic law is nothing like the democratic principles that we went into Afghanistan to defend (over here) and establish (over there). Sharia institutionalizes the oppression of women and non-Muslims, extinguishes the freedom of speech, and denies the freedom of conscience.

Was that what we were fighting for?

Nonetheless, America continued to pour out her blood and treasure for this repressive state, with no clear objective or mission in view other than a never-defined “victory.” No one has defined what victory would look like in Afghanistan. What would victory have looked like? What could it possibly have looked like?

Has the Karzai regime ever allowed women to throw off their burqas and take their place in Afghan society as human beings equal in dignity to men? Does the Karzai government, or any Afghan government that would follow it, ever intend to guarantee basic human rights to the tiny and ever-dwindling number of non-Muslims unfortunate enough to live within its borders? Of course not.

And no matter how long American troops stay in Afghanistan, no Afghan regime is ever going to do such things.

In July, the U.S. designated Afghanistan a “major non-Nato ally” … [which]  gives the Afghans “preferential access to U.S. arms exports and defence co-operation.” Thus unless Afghanistan is stripped of this status, we could be funding the Taliban with billions annually for years to come … 

So the next time an Afghan soldier murders a group of American troops, remember: you paid for his weapon.

Could the story of the sacrifice of American soldiers to the cause of the Taliban be any more outrageous?

Yes. It could be and it is.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

It’s now clear why so many U.S. troops have fallen prey to Afghan insider attacks: The administration disarmed them while arming their Afghan trainees, making them sitting ducks.

It was a standing order “requiring troops to remove their magazines from their weapons while quartered inside bases with their trusted Afghan partners”!

The number of insider attacks this year already exceeds the total for last year. Since the start of 2012, there have been 32 attacks resulting in 40 deaths, many more than last year’s 21 total attacks.

Earlier this month, an Afghan security commander ambushed U.S. troops. The officer, who was helping U.S. special forces train the local police force, lured elite U.S. soldiers to a Ramadan meal at his outpost to talk security. He then opened fire on them at close range, killing three and wounding one. 

The Taliban took credit for the attack. The terror group released a video indicating it has heavily infiltrated the Afghan national army and police force. …

Now, after years of denying the attacks were anything but an “isolated” problem, U.S.-led command has finally let American soldiers carry loaded weapons at all times to protect them not just from terrorists but from the Afghan security forces they’re training.

The policy reversal exposes the suicidal nature of the prior order. Even as our disarmed soldiers were being systematically ambushed and gunned down by their Afghan counterparts, high command continued to co-locate entire Afghan military units inside U.S. bases.

As a gesture of trust toward these Muslim partners, commanders ordered U.S. soldiers to remove their magazines from their weapons while training and working alongside them. The Afghans, however, were allowed to remain armed. Further exposing them to “friendly fire,” American troops generally removed their heavy Kevlar body armor once they got inside the base.

Trust should not be, cannot be a matter of gesture. Trust has to be earned, and what Afghan has earned American trust? Lives should not be hazarded on the off-chance of trustworthiness. By doing just that, the politically correct high command of the US defense forces have been feckless with American lives.

Disarming the Afghans would have been the obvious solution. But of course that would expose this whole “training partnership” as the farce it really is.

Training and standing up a national security force in Afghanistan is the linchpin of President Obama’s withdrawal strategy.

His hand-victory-to the-Taliban strategy, more like.  The US should have got out of Afghanistan ten years ago, when they’d given the Taliban a thorough beating. But if US troops were going to stay there, it should have been to destroy the Taliban, not to help it back into power as Obama is doing now.

The Pentagon is reducing troop presence … Many of the remaining soldiers will switch from fighting to training and advising Afghan forces. This means even more of them will be exposed to insider attacks.

But we’re not just training Afghans to replace soldiers. We’re hiring them to protect our soldiers right now, and many of them have also turned on our soldiers.

Obama has insisted on using Afghan security guards for base security as a way to limit the size of the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan. …

[His]  rush to withdraw has needlessly cost at least 100 soldiers’ lives and wounded countless others.

The only thing that should matter to Americans about Afghanistan is that it should not plot or carry out any attacks on the US or its interests. If it does that it should be hit again extremely hard. If it does not, let it return to its savage ways, to cruel Taliban rule, to the miseries of sharia. Not one drop of American blood should be spilt to save it from itself.

The persecution Christians are suffering in Islamic countries is apparently of little or no concern to the ever-bleeding hearts of the American Left.

The Obama administration is positively ignoring it.

We quote from an article by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page:

The Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies means lack of U.S. support for their enemies, or, more properly, victims — the Christian and other non-Muslim minorities of the Muslim world. …

On May 24 this year the US State department released the Country Reports on Human Rights.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom …

The State Department “refused to list Egypt as ‘a country of particular concern,’ even as [Coptic] Christians … were being murdered, churches destroyed, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. ”

Legislation to create a special envoy for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia … has been stalled by Sen. James Webb (D-Va). In a letter sent to Webb Wednesday night, Rep. Frank Wolf [R-Va, who introduced the envoy bill] said he “cannot understand why” the hold had been placed on a bill that might help Coptic Christians and other groups “who face daily persecution, hardship, violence, instability and even death.” … Webb spokesman Will Jenkins explained the hold by saying that “after considering the legislation, Senator Webb asked the State Department for its analysis.” In a position paper issued in response, State Department officials said “we oppose the bill as it infringes on the Secretary’s [Hillary Clinton’s] flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions …  The new special envoy position is unnecessary, duplicative, and likely counterproductive”.

The word “flexibility” has a special meaning when used by the Obama gang. Obama quietly informed the Russians that after he’d won the election in November he would have more “flexibility” – presumably to meet Putin’s demands more fully than he can before it. So the word may be taken to mean “ability to accommodate the wishes of America’s enemies”.

Once this reasonable deduction is made it is easy to see that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s need for “flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions” means she does not want to have a pro-Christian or anti-Muslim envoy. (The same thing in the circumstances.)

In regard to which it should be recalled that among Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers – possibly standing alone as her closest adviser – is Huma Abedin, a Muslim with close ties (see here and here) to the Muslim Brotherhood.

With that fact in mind, no one should be surprised when “flexible” decisions are  seen to be implemented.

The administration … had nothing to say when Islamic terrorists bombed Nigerian churches on Easter Sunday, killing some 50 Christians and wounding hundreds. And when the Egyptian military indiscriminately massacred dozens of unarmed Christians for protesting the nonstop attacks on their churches, all the White House could say is, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides”—as if Egypt’s beleaguered Christian minority needs to “restrain” itself against the nation’s military, a military that intentionally ran armored-vehicles over them at Maspero.

In light of all this, naturally the Obama administration, in the guise of the State Department, would oppose a bill to create an envoy who will only expose more religious persecution for the administration to suppress or obfuscate.

Such is the current state of affairs. In its attempts to empower its Islamist allies, the current U.S. administration has taken up their cause by waging a war of silence on their despised minorities — the Christians and other non-Muslims of the Islamic world.

The Obama administration cannot allow Islam to be guilty of anything, even of deeds carried out insistently in its name. It will have America and the world know that Islam is irreproachably innocent of any aggression, persecution,  intolerance, or terrorism.

As an example of the administration’s campaign to “suppress knowledge” both of “the sufferings of religious minorities under Islam”  and of “knowledge concerning Islam itself” in connection with them, Raymond Ibrahim provides a link to this instructive video clip:

Obama is not just pro-Islam, he is pro-terrorist, pro-terrorism – at least when it is carried out by Muslims. For all his boasting about the killing of Osama bin Laden – which in fact he only reluctantly permitted, no doubt for the gain of political kudos – he is not against what bin Laden stood for, or even what bin Laden did.

How can we know?

Here is the evidence, presented with commendable indignation by Andrew C. McCarthy at PJ Media:

The Obama administration will not explain how it came to issue a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a known member of the Egyptian terrorist organization Ga’amat al-Islamia, the Islamic Group (IG). The explanation is not forthcoming because what it portends is even more sinister than this one infuriating incident.

To call the IG a “terrorist organization” is not just purple prose. The IG is a terrorist organization that has carried out actual mass-murder attacks. There is a formal legal process under which such groups are “designated” as terrorist organizations. The IG has long been formally designated under that process. Once that process has occurred, any American citizen who tries to provide material support to members of a designated terrorist organization — i.e., any American citizen who tried to do what the Obama administration has done for Eldin — would be in jeopardy of being convicted of a serious federal felony worth upwards of 15 years’ imprisonment.

And Hani Nour Eldin is, indisputably, a member of the IG — we are not speculating here. Eldin is quite proud of his membership. He has been unabashed about it. The Obama administration, moreover, does not even attempt either to deny that Eldin is an IG member or to suggest that the issuance of a visa to him — to say nothing of the subsequent meetings he was invited to have with top American national security officials — was the result of some misunderstanding or monumental screw-up. Eldin was very intentionally brought to Washington. Despite the fact that the leader of his organization — the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman — is responsible for massive terrorist attacks against American civilians, Eldin was hosted here as if he were a politician rather than a terrorist. 

So what does the administration tell us about how this could have happened — how it could be that hordes of American citizens, as to whom there is not the slightest suspicion of terrorist sympathies, are forced by the Department of Homeland Security to undergo an appallingly intrusive physical search just to board an airplane, yet a known member of a designated terrorist organization is intentionally invited to board a plane so he can enter our country, be admitted into highly secure government buildings – like the White House — where top national security officials work, and be consulted as if he were a foreign dignitary rather than a jihadist?

The Obama cabinet, in the person of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, tells us that the administration was well aware that Eldin was a terrorist organization member; yet, she maintains that he was carefully vetted by three different government agencies. The administration then made a determination that his admission did not pose a threat to the United States — i.e., that he would not personally endanger anyone he encountered and that the signal conveyed to every other terrorist in the world by Obama’s rolling out the red carpet for a member of the Blind Sheikh’s cabal would not encourage terrorism globally. 

Think for a second about how lunatic that is.

Before the Obama administration came to power, the whole point of such background investigations was to determine if a person was somehow affiliated with an organization notorious for violence or criminality. That was the objective of the exercise. Once you found that there was an affiliation with terrorists, that was the end of the matter — no visa, no invitation into our country, no security clearance, no government employment, no admission to highly secure government locations or access to top government security officials, no benefit from our government, period.

Look at what has happened under Obama. Now, the government takes as a given the very thing the background investigation used to be conducted to find out: namely, that the person at issue is affiliated with known terrorists, terrorist financiers, and/or terrorist organizations. In Obama’s America, that turns out not to be the end of the investigation — it’s only the beginning. Astonishingly, it is only after you confirm that your subject has undeniable terror ties that you start vetting him for dangerousness. Terror ties are no longer a bright-line disqualifier; now they’re just a trigger for conducting more investigation — which actually means, to figure out a way to rationalize accommodating the terrorist.

As with nearly everything Obama, this is such a mind-blowing perversion of longstanding policy that we are paralyzed by the Eldin incident itself. We don’t come around to asking the vital follow-up question: What is going on here? Why is Obama working to change our basic understanding of what a background investigation is? Of what terrorism is? 

Here is what you need to understand. Here is what Mitt Romney needs to be highlighting as a major campaign issue: President Obama is laboring to shift the United States away from the post-9/11 conception of counterterrorism. Our government is steadily adopting the Islamist conception that has gained so much traction on the European Left. The Islamist conception has two elements.

(a) What we refer to as “terrorism” — ideologically driven mass-casualty attacks designed to extort changes in government policy — is not actually terrorism; it is resistance. That is, violence is a legitimate, or at least quasi-legitimate reaction to government policies that progressives deem inappropriate, if not downright immoral. Why change our understanding of the concept of terrorism? Because terrorism is a universally condemnable atrocity. Resistance, by contrast, is just hardball politics — like community organizing. For the Left, engagement in “resistance” is merely an aggressive form of negotiation; it does not disqualify the aggressor from a seat at the policy table …

(b) It seems like only yesterday that terrorists were seen as the pirates of yore: hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind. No more. For transnational progressives, operatives of organizations like the IG are merely members of a political movement. Welcome to the alchemy of “Islamic democracy,” which is better understood as a laundering operation for Islamic supremacists than as a social transformation for Islamic populations.

In terms of substance, there is nothing democratic about the wave of “democracy” said to be sweeping the Middle East in the “Arab Spring.” Democracy is a culture; holding an election is a mere procedural exercise. The most antidemocratic organizations in the world conduct votes from time to time. If sharia — the Islamic comprehensive legal code — is installed by popular election rather than violence, that does not make it “democratic” in the Western sense of the term. …

Nevertheless, because these procedural exercises now have the effect of placing terrorist operatives in governmental positions, Obama-think urges us to see terrorist organizations as political parties pursuing ordinary policy agendas, not ideologically driven hardliners pursuing a jihad. …

This counterterrorism shift is not merely a misjudgment. It is a profound moral wrong.

Eldin and the IG, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are savages, not politicians. No one would give a hoot what they thought about the direction of their countries but for the fact that they have murdered and maimed their way to a seat at the diplomatic table. And, in fact, they have not moderated their positions: they still deny the right of Israel to exist. They don’t simply disagree with a sovereign adversary’s policies; they maintain that this sovereign is illegitimate and must be destroyed, whether by violence, political processes, or — better — political processes leveraged by violence. To adopt the administration’s position is to guarantee more terrorism. If you illustrate to the terrorist that his methods work, why on earth would he stop using them?

The Middle East’s new Islamic supremacist rulers are not championing democracy; they are championing the imposition of repressive sharia by means of popular vote rather than extortionate killings. Ironically, it was Mubarak, the dictator, who imposed laws that promoted equality for women and prohibited … heinous sharia practices …  Do we actually believe the Islamists are the real “democrats” just because Islamist populations have elected them?

President Obama is not just inviting terrorists to consult with American national security officials. That’s not the half of it. Obama is determined to change our perception of what terrorism is, and to do it in a way that will encourage more savagery.

The terrorism practiced by Egyptian jihadists, you’re to understand, is really just “resistance” against oppression … Get used to it: It is just an aggressive form of politics … one that works because the Obamas of the world indulge it.

Ikhwan is the Arabic for brothers.

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

The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

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

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

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

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

Consider the timeline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How should the US deal with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Karl Schake of the (estimable) Hoover Institution writes:

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

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

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

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is not Hamas or Hezbollah …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can he possibly know that?

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

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

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

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

It is an interesting essay. Read it all here.

…  to which there’s a simple and obvious answer.

(The video comes from Weasel Zippers)

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

This is from Canada Free Press, by Doug Hagmann:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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