On our Facebook page, Leila Howell Cook writes:

I would like to see someone write a good post on the differences between conservation and environmentalism because I think too many people consider them one and the same and they’re not. I don’t think there is anyone that considers taking care of our natural resources a bad idea. If we want it there for use in the future, especially for our children, then we have to preserve it now. That concept goes back as far as human time, I think. It just makes good sense to take care of what is around us and to try and not misuse it. Environmentalism is a politically driven movement that uses as its facade the concept of conservation but only as a smoke screen for a bigger agenda. To me, providing incentives for companies to adopt practices that don’t pollute is much more positive than limiting commerce. You catch more flies with honey. Educating the public on why they need to be mindful of resources and the positive benefits it provides is much nicer than being shamed into it. Education has always proven to offer the most progress in society – not the government acting as the mean nanny.

As we’re in full agreement with her opinion, and as she asks …

I don’t suppose the Atheist Conservative would want to write one, would you?

… we take up her suggestion.

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Conservation is a conservative cause.

But conservation of what exactly?

We speak of conserving what has been achieved by our civilization: ideas and inventions from classical Greece and Rome, from the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution, from our own Age of Science and the Computer and the Internet; and what we hold to be the greatest product of history, the idea of individual liberty under the rule of law realized in the establishment of the United States of America.

But the subject in hand is conservation of the natural environment.

Russ Harding, director of the Property Rights Network at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan, wrote an essay in October, 2008, in which he came to the conclusion that conservationists and environmentalists viewed the relationship of human beings and nature so differently, it’s hard to see how they can come to any agreement or act together to look after the environment.

His essay is titled Conservationist or Environmentalist?  Here’s an extract:

The impetus for the conservation and environmental movements may be similar, but the two movements have developed distinctly different value systems, the result of very different world views.

Conservationism, properly understood, employs traditional values of environmental stewardship. A good steward takes care of what has been entrusted to him or her, thereby leaving an inheritance for the next generation. This worldview allows that it is ethical to employ natural resources for the betterment of humankind, as long as they are properly cared for and managed with a concern for future generations.

It is permissible to cut trees, for example, as long as new ones are planted in their place.

Similarly, wildlife and fish can be harvested as long as they are left in sufficient numbers to ensure future populations.

Humanity is seen as an integral part of the ecosystem rather than an intruder in the natural world. 

By contrast, the worldview of many modern-day environmentalists is much different. The mindset of such adherents is pantheistic – in which nature is deified and worshipped while the welfare of humans is prioritized beneath the animal and plant kingdoms and other aspects of the natural world.

According to this worldview, humans exist separate from nature and act immorally when they disturb or disrupt nature. Even the slightest disturbance – such as cutting and replanting trees – represents a violation of nature by humans.

But –

Everything man does impacts the earth.

So let’s try conservationism. Conservationism recognizes that mankind is on the earth and is part of the system. It asks that we think before we slash and burn a rain forest in the Amazon and seeks to find ways of preserving forests and people.

The differing worldviews between conservationists and environmentalists makes agreement on environmental and natural resource public policy all but impossible. …

When clean air, water and land are not as important as protecting the sanctity of nature from human intrusion, agreement on practical solutions to real environmental threats becomes difficult. …

Let us hope that the traditional worldview of the conservationists prevails. A future based on the environmentalist worldview is too bleak to contemplate”

There are environmentalists who believe that the “health” of the planet requires the total elimination of the human race. (See our post Fresh wild raw uninhabited world, January 2, 2012.)

No ideal could be more radical. It is true nihilism. Those who hold it fail to understand that if there are no human beings, if there is no human consciousness, not only is there is no “health” or “sickness”, there is  no “earth”, no “nature”. These are concepts, and (as far as we know) ours is the only conceiving consciousness in the universe. We are the namers and arrangers of our world, the inventors and granters of meaning and value. As well as using and nursing the physical world and other beings that it contains, we endow it for our kind with ideas and creations: language,  knowledge, explorations, music, mathematics, inventions, artifacts, commerce, laws, institutions, philosophies, history, fantasies (including gods), and jokes.

To extreme environmentalists all that counts for nothing. Pfui! Away with it!

For the milder sort, we may exist as a species but in small numbers, disturbing the wild as little as possible, content to be little more than food for beasts or worms.

Environmentalists with their contempt for humanity are devotees of Leftism. They are not sure whether they want to control us in order to foster wild nature, or use the pretext of caring for wild nature in order to control us.

Conservatives are the real conservationists. A good conservative is a good conserver. He practices good stewardship by looking after, in his time, in his turn, the home he inherited and will hand on to the generations coming after him. The Greek word for a Home is Oikia, from which we get our words economy and ecology. Most of us want the house we live in to be pleasantly clean and in reasonable order. We want the greater Oikia wherein we dwell, the natural world that sustains us, to be pleasant too. We want the air we breathe and the water we drink to be fresh, the soil to be fruitful, the climate benign.

It’s enough. It’s good. And our huge planet, largely unpeopled, is not only oblivious to our doctrines and feelings, but also not much altered or long harmed by what we do.

Day by day, step by step, Islam advances towards dominance in every Western country, including America.

This is from Front Page, by David Solway:

Terrorism is an effective Islamic tactic, but “entryism” — the penetrating of academia, the media, government, labor unions, protest groups and the very social climate — is even more so. What we are observing is the practice of subversion … The neighborhood mosque, as we have seen, is only the beginning of our troubles. If its pacific nature cannot be guaranteed and its respect for local statutes and civic life assured, its effects will spread outward in waves of destabilization, one of the chief aims of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The mosque’s “pacific nature” and “respect for local statutes and civic life” certainly cannot be assured. And while they last, the forms and institutions of Western civic life are all too easily exploited by the quiet invaders.

Here’s an example of how it’s being done in Britain (via Vlad Tepes):

Note how easily the polite, reasonable, unaggressive voices of opposition are overruled by the bad-tempered chairwoman.

And here we quote from an article by Alan Caruba at Family Security Matters:

“The Faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. Save for a cataclysmic event that will shatter demographics, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation’s dominant religion.”

The author quotes from a book by Paul L. Williams titled Crescent Moon Rising: The Islamic Transformation of America.

Williams offers facts that are nothing less than astounding.

“Muslims continue to pour into the country occupy positions (vacated by aging Americans) as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrived to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food-processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others with ‘diversity’ visas to enrich America’s racial composition.”

“In 1992, nearly fifty thousand Muslims arrived in the United States and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000. In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslim immigrants are presently living in the country.”

“In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, eighty thousand refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly seventy-five thousand from Islamic countries.”

“Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country, with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.”

“Islam provides an antithesis to secular America”, says Williams, offering a version of “traditional values” that would impose restrictions that few Americans anticipate; a ban on liquor, a reduced status of women, dress codes, and much more. “Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths,” warns Williams. …

And those few – Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism – that they do recognize as “legitimate”, are suffered to exist, but sharia requires their adherents to be subjugated, and blood money (the “jizya” tax) to be extorted from them.

In an earlier America, there were restrictions on immigrants from various parts of the world deemed antithetical to the nation’s values. The early waves of immigrants came mostly from England and Nordic nations. They were followed by those from Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe as the need for more workers for America’s growing industries required more immigrants. Asians were not particularly welcome and Arabs were even less welcome. This changed with the Hart-Celler Act, signed into law by President Johnson in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. It ended an immigration quota system that had governed America for most of his history. It was, for the record, widely opposed by a two-to-one margin. It is a legacy from Edward Kennedy who shepherded the bill through the Senate.

It wasn’t until the shock of 9/11 that most Americans became aware of the hostility, the malevolence, and the spread of Islam.

Williams notes, “September 11, 2001, was not a day that changed everything. It was rather the day that revealed how much had changed. The real shock came not only from the devastation, but also the demographics. The world for many Americans became a place suddenly unrecognizable.”

This has already become a fact of life for Europeans and is rapidly become one for Americans, particularly in large urban centers where the presence of Muslims is visible for their dress, the many restaurants and outlets that cater to them, and the increasing number of mosques found everywhere. USA Today reported in February 2012 that “The number of Islamic places in the United States soared 74% in the past decade…the overall number of mosques quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010.”

Largely unseen and unknown are the many Muslim organizations throughout the U.S., some of which have been found to have terror connections, and all funded not merely to spread the faith, but to ultimately impose it on our present political structure and open culture. …

Even so, Americans elected and reelected Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim father and adopted son of a Muslim step-father. He is a President who keeps insisting that al Qaeda is receding as a threat when it is, in fact, a growing threat everywhere. And, soon enough, here again.

On the other hand, offering a ray of hope, there is this by David Goldman, aka Spengler:

By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran — converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 — especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits. The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so.

My 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) assembled evidence that the decline of Islam as a religion explained collapsing fertility, just as the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Quebec. Iran’s total fertility rate plunged to an estimated 1.6% in 2010, barely above Europe’s rate of 1.5 children per female. In 1979, when the Islamists took power in Iran, the average woman bore seven children. Nothing like this sudden snapping shut of the national womb has ever happened before in all of history. And the rest of the Muslim world is headed in the same direction. …

Islamist leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been shouting from the rooftops about the trend for the past five years, as my book reports. Excluding the independence-hungry Kurdish minority, Turkey’s fertility rate is probably around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s, and a guarantee of national decline.

We are cheered by this information. Though we don’t understand why David Goldman writes: “In September 2006 I warned that the Muslim world was heading towards a demographic catastrophe.”

It may be a catastrophe for the Muslim world, but if the Muslim womb really is “snapping shut”, it is surely extremely good news for the rest of us.

At present the Muslims who are colonizing Europe are bearing children at a higher rate than the indigenous populations. Will the European Muslim womb “snap shut” too?  And if so, will the snap come in time to save Europe from falling under the savage totalitarian rule of Islam?

CNN television host Piers Morgan accuses one of his interviewees, in this debate on gun possession, of stupidity. But it is his own stupidity – and self-righteous arrogance – that emerges in the video.

America is under threat from that cruel and pompous gang, led by Kim Jong-un, who rule over the long-suffering North Koreans. And it seems they have the power to obliterate our civilization.

According to this report in the Washington Times, they have developed  a Super-EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) with which to strike the United States:

North Korea is a mortal nuclear threat to the United States— right now.

North Korea has already successfully tested and developed nuclear weapons. It has also already miniaturized nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery and has armed missiles with nuclear warheads. In 2011, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Ronald Burgess, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea has weaponized its nuclear devices into warheads for ballistic missiles.

North Korea has labored for years and starved its people so it could develop an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the United States. Why? Because they have a special kind of nuclear weapon that could destroy the United States with a single blow. …

Not just incapacitate – which would be extremely bad –  but worse: destroy.

Any nuclear weapon detonated above an altitude of 30 kilometers will generate an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy electronics and could collapse the electric power grid and other critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans. All could be destroyed by a single nuclear weapon making an EMP attack.

A Super-EMP attack on the United States would cause much more and much deeper damage than a primitive nuclear weapon, and so would increase confidence that the catastrophic consequences will be irreversible. Such an attack would inflict maximum damage and be optimum for realizing a world without America.

Both North Korean nuclear tests look suspiciously like a Super-EMP weapon. A Super-EMP warhead would have a low yield, like the North Korean device, because it is not designed to create a big explosion, but to convert its energy into gamma rays, that generate the EMP effect. Reportedly South Korean military intelligence concluded, independent of the EMP Commission, that Russian scientists are in North Korea helping develop a Super-EMP warhead. In 2012, a military commentator for the People’s Republic of China stated that North Korea has Super-EMP nuclear warheads.

A Super-EMP warhead would not weigh much, and could probably be delivered by North Korea’s ICBM. The missile does not have to be accurate, as the EMP field is so large that detonating anywhere over the United States would have catastrophic consequences. The warhead does not even need a re-entry vehicle, as an EMP attack entails detonating the warhead at high-altitude, above the atmosphere.

So, as of Dec. 12, North Korea’s successful orbit of a satellite demonstrates its ability to make an EMP attack against the United States — right now.

The Congressional EMP Commission estimates that, given the nation’s current unpreparedness, within one year of an EMP attack, two-thirds of the U.S. population — 200 million Americans — would probably perish from starvation, disease and societal collapse.

Thus, North Korea now has an Assured Destruction capability against the United States.

The consequences of this development are so extremely grave that U.S. and global security have, in effect, gone over the “strategic cliff” into free-fall. Where we will land, into what kind of future, is as yet unknown.

Nevertheless, some very bad developments are foreseeable. Iran will certainly be inspired by North Korea’s example to persist in the development of its own nuclear weapon and ICBM programs to pose a mortal threat to the United States. Indeed, North Korea and Iran have been collaborating all along. …

We are fast moving to a place where, for the first time in history, failed little states like North Korea and Iran, that cannot even feed their own people, will have power in their hands to blackmail or destroy the largest and most successful societies on Earth. North Korea and Iran perceive themselves to be at war with the United States, and are desperate, highly unpredictable characters. …

What is to be done?

The president should immediately issue an Executive Order, drafted for the White House earlier by the Congressional EMP Commission, to protect the national electric grid and other critical infrastructures from an EMP attack. The Congress should pass the SHIELD Act (HR 668) now to provide the legal authorities and financial mechanisms for protecting the electric grid from EMP. The Congress should enhance Defense Department programs for National Missile Defense and Department of Homeland Security programs for protecting critical infrastructures.

Better still: how about us doing it to them first? Like now.

On November 5, 2009, at the military base of Fort Hood in Texas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) and shot 43 people, killing 13 of them.

President Obama’s Departments of Defense and Justice have classified the murderous onslaught as “an act of workplace violence” rather than the act of terrorism in pursuance of Islamic jihad, which it was. Classifying it as an act of workplace violence leaves the mass murder completely motiveless. It also means that the victims are not entitled to be treated as combatants wounded in the course of duty, which they were.

And that means: whether or not the perpetrator is found guilty at his long delayed trial; whether or not he is sentenced to death; whether or not he is actually ever executed, President Obama and his Islam-friendly administration have handed a victory to the mass murderer and his fellow worshippers of the appalling Arab deity “Allah”, the hordes of Islam who are waging war on America.

ABC News reports:

Three years after the White House arranged a hero’s welcome at the State of the Union address for the Fort Hood police sergeant and her partner who stopped the deadly shooting there, Kimberly Munley says President Obama broke the promise he made to her that the victims would be well taken care of.

“Betrayed is a good word, … Not to the least little bit have the victims been taken care of,” [Sgt. Munley] said. “In fact they’ve been neglected.” …

Thirteen people were killed, including a pregnant soldier, and 32 others shot in the November 2009 rampage by the accused shooter, Major Nidal Hasan, who now awaits a military trial on charges of premeditated murder and attempted murder. …

Munley, since laid off from her job with the base’s civilian police force, was shot three times as she and her partner, Sgt. Mark Todd, confronted Hasan, who … had shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire on soldiers being processed for deployment to Afghanistan.

As Munley lay wounded, Todd fired the five bullets credited with bringing Hasan down.

Despite extensive evidence that Hasan was in communication with al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki prior to the attack, the military has denied the victims a Purple Heart and is treating the incident as “workplace violence” instead of “combat related” or terrorism.

Al-Awlaki has since been killed in a U.S. drone attack in Yemen …

Munley and dozens of other victims have now filed a lawsuit against the military alleging the “workplace violence” designation means the Fort Hood victims are receiving lower priority access to medical care as veterans, and a loss of financial benefits available to those who injuries are classified as “combat related”. 

Some of the victims “had to find civilian doctors to get proper medical treatment” and the military has not assigned liaison officers to help them coordinate their recovery, said the group’s lawyer, Reed Rubinstein.

“There’s a substantial number of very serious, crippling cases of post-traumatic stress disorder exacerbated, frankly, by what the Army and the Defense Department did in this case,” said Rubinstein. “We have a couple of cases in which the soldiers’ command accused the soldiers of malingering, and would say things to them that Fort Hood really wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t combat.” …

Some of the victims in the lawsuit believe the Army Secretary and others are purposely ignoring their cases out of political correctness.

“These guys play stupid every time they’re asked a question about it, they pretend like they have no clue,” said Shawn Manning, who was shot six times that day at Fort Hood. Two of the bullets remain in his leg and spine, he said.

“It was no different than an insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan trying to kill us,” said Manning, who was twice deployed to Iraq and had to retire from the military because of his injuries.

An Army review board initially classified Manning’s injuries as “combat related,” but that finding was later overruled by higher-ups in the Army.

Manning says the “workplace violence” designation has cost him almost $70,000 in benefits that would have been available if his injuries were classified as “combat related”.

“Basically, they’re treating us like I was downtown and I got hit by a car,” [Manning said].

For Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times at Fort Hood and blinded in one eye, the military’s treatment is deeply hurtful.

“It’s a slap in the face, not only for me but for all of the 32 that wore the uniform that day,” he told ABC News.

Lunsford’s medical records show his injuries were determined to be “in the line of duty” but neither he nor any of the other soldiers shot or killed at Fort Hood is eligible for the Purple Heart under the Department of Defense’s current policy for decorations and awards.

Army Secretary McHugh says awarding Purple Hearts could adversely affect the trial of Major Hasan.

“To award a Purple Heart, it has to be done by a foreign terrorist element,” said McHugh. “So to declare that soldier a foreign terrorist, we are told, I’m not an attorney and I don’t run the Justice Department, but we’re told would have a profound effect on the ability to conduct the trial.”

Members of Congress, including the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, say they will introduce legislation to force the military and the Obama administration to give the wounded and dead the recognition and honors they deserve. “It was clearly an act of terrorism that occurred that day, there’s no question in my mind … I think the victims should be treated as such.”

Former Sgt. Munley says she now believes the White House used her for political advantage in arranging for her to sit next to Michelle Obama during the President’s State of the Union address in 2010.

This video and the text are from The Foundry of the Heritage Foundation:

“The North Dakota Miracle.”

That’s what it’s been dubbed by many. The recent boom of the Bakken oil fields — made possible by a perfect storm of sensible state regulations, the often maligned fracking process, and the fact that most drilling is taking place on private lands — has produced a whirlwind of economic growth in a formerly sleepy corner of northwest North Dakota. …

During our short, 3-minute video, you will hear from the people themselves about the impact the boom has had on their families and their community. But the most striking takeaway for many who watch may well be the stark contrast between an electric local economy and the more familiar picture around the rest of the country still saddled with high unemployment and a sputtering economy. Dakota is only one of many states that is beginning to reap the economic benefits of fracking and other advances in drilling technology to harvest previously inaccessible oil deposits.

That is, of course, if the federal government does not disrupt the whole process. …

John Kerry, newly appointed Secretary of State, starts off badly.

In an article at Commentary, Rick Richman explains:

The State Department said yesterday it is seeking release of $495.7 million in U.S. funds for the Palestinian Authority designated for 2012, and another $200 million designated so far for 2013 – all of which is currently subject to a congressional hold imposed after the PA sought UN recognition as a “state” and began yet another “reconciliation” with Hamas. At yesterday’s State Department press conference, spokesperson Victoria Nuland was asked to “give us a sense of where things are with Congress” on this issue and responded that the administration is working with Congress to get the money released to the PA, because:

“[W]e think it’s very, very important that they remain effective in supporting the needs of the Palestinian people … So we’re continuing to work through this. I would simply say that the Secretary feels extremely strongly that it is time now to get this support to the Palestinian Authority.”

Ms. Nuland said Secretary Kerry has been raising this issue “in every conversation he’s had with his colleagues” in Congress. But if it is very, very important to get the money to the PA, and if Secretary Kerry feels extremely strongly that now is the time, the people he should be talking to are not in Congress. They are in the PA.

The PA can get the money released by assuring the U.S. that they will (1) not take further steps to change the legal status of the disputed territories outside negotiations with Israel (since the Palestinians promised in the Oslo agreement not to take “any [such] step”); and (2) not reconcile with an organization [Hamas] designated by the U.S. government as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT), and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) — particularly when the PA promised in the Road Map to dismantle the FTO/SDT/SDGT, which has now waged two rocket wars against Israel and refuses to endorse any of the Quartet requirements for the “peace process.”

If it is not important to the PA to provide such assurances, it is hard to see why it is important for the U.S. to provide more money (much less nearly $700 million), nor why anyone would feel that now is the time to do it. On the contrary, this would seem to be the appropriate time to communicate that violating promises – and refusing to promise to abide by them in the future — has consequences. The administration should be telling the PA it feels extremely strongly that it is very, very important to provide the assurances now. Instead, it is pressing Congress to waive them.

In his first week in office, the new secretary of state has just sent a strong message that he believes the PA’s refusal to confirm its two central promises should draw no penalty. He thinks the problem is not the PA, but the Congress.

Heckuva job, John.

The Western powers have been conniving with the Arab states for 65 years to keep the Palestinians (Arab refugees displaced by wars of aggression the Arab states launched against Israel) in a state of dependency. The Arab states keep them as refugees, refusing to integrate them, so that their condition might be a permanent reproach to the conscience of Israel and the West. Not to their own conscience. They don’t have such a nuisance of a thing. And the Western powers have let them do it, played along, salving that conscience of theirs not by insisting that some of the 21 Arab states assimilate them, but by giving the refugees charity, so making a beggar nation of them. And the Palestinians have made themselves into a nation of terrorists – not against their fellow Arabs who are responsible for their abject condition, but against Israel.

John Kerry, it transpires, wants them to continue in this deplorable way. Living on handouts. Lobbing rockets at Israel. From schools, hospitals, houses, so retaliation will hurt children, the sick, and helpless families.

So the Western conscience will be wrung again.

How long can this state of affairs continue? How many generations must be sacrificed to Arab hatred, revenge, and spite, with the generous support of the Western powers acting out of well-meaning stupidity?

The Arab reply is: “Until Israel ceases to exist.”

Obama and his three new appointees, John Kerry at State, Chuck Hagel at Defense, and John Brennan heading the CIA, will do all they can to weaken Israel. While pretending that they are Israel’s friends, acting in Israel’s own best interests – if only those dumb Israelis could see it.

We wait to see if our prediction is right. We’d be more than happy to be proved wrong.

John Brennan is a convert to Islam? And Obama wants him to head the CIA? While Islam is waging war against us?

This is a 2 hour 49 minute video. For the talk about Brennan being a Muslim watch it between the 11 and 52 minute marks.

We cannot be sure it is true, but we think it is all too possible, and if true, very dangerous.

From RightScoop comes this about John Guandolo, the speaker who breaks the story in the video:

John Guandolo is not just some guy with an opinion; he’s a guy with sources who have access to the highest levels of government; he’s a guy who has a resume that is beyond impressive  [he served in the Marines and is a former FBI agent and a SWAT team leader];  and he’s a guy who claims to know people with firsthand accounts who say they witnessed John Brennan – Barack Obama’s nominee for CIA Director – convert to Islam while in Saudi Arabia.

And from Free Republic, these comments:

The issues are that (i) it has been concealed and (ii) he was evidently “recruited” to Islam by members of the Saudi Arabian government…

Moreover, not all forms of Islam are equal. Salafi Islam – what we in the West often refer to as Wahhabi Islam – is the most virulent, intolerant form of Sunni Islam extant.

On November 17, 2012, in our post America’s counter-jihad chief, we reported this:

The Head of Counterterrorism at the CIA is a Muslim. He can only be known by his cover-name, Roger.

Roger, according to our source, was a convert to Islam.

Are Roger and John Brennan one and the same?

If not, will there be two powerful “secret” agents working for Islam in the CIA?

The night the US mission in Benghazi was attacked, Ambassador Stephens was hideously murdered, and three other Americans were killed …

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not concerned …

and nor was President Obama.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta seems to be telling the truth – until he says: “Nobody knew really what was going on there.”

This is from a Washington Times report published December 11, 2012:

Live video from a drone flying over the U.S. Consulate during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, was monitored at a Defense Department facility, but was not fed  to the White House, senior officials say.

The Obama administration has declined to respond to media requests for details about who was watching the live video,  but a senior defense official told The Washington Times that “the surveillance aircraft captured footage of events on the ground” and “it wasn’t available that night at the White House”.

“Not available” because not asked for. The Commander in Chief was otherwise engaged.

Panetta had met with Obama at 5 o’clock  for a half-hour pre-scheduled 30-minute session, where, Panetta said, they “spent about 20 minutes talking about the American embassy that was surrounded in Egypt and the situation that was just unfolding in Benghazi”. So the President knew that the Benghazi mission and the ambassador were under attack, but throughout that night he made no enquiries about how the crisis was developing.

Will Obama ever be held to account for his gross and callous dereliction of duty on that fatal night?

John Brennan, picked by President Obama to head the CIA, has his Senate confirmation hearing today.

Andrew C. McCarthy writes at PJ Media:

A country that was serious about its national security would never put John Brennan in charge of its premier intelligence service.

Of course, it is by no means clear that the United States is any longer a serious country in this regard. Serious countries do not fund, arm and “partner with” hostile regimes. They do not recruit enemy sympathizers to fill key governmental policy positions. They do not erect barriers impeding their intelligence services from understanding an enemy’s threat doctrine … All of these malfeasances have become staples of Obama policy, under the guidance of Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism guru.

Still, the installation of a Beltway operator whose métier is misinformation as director of central intelligence would be an epic mismatch of man and mission. It would expand unseriousness to new frontiers of self-inflicted peril.

The reason is as elementary as it gets: The purpose of intelligence is to see what your enemy is trying to hide, to grasp how your enemy thinks, and how he cleverly camouflages what he thinks. That, to be certain, is the only security against stealthy foes who specialize in sabotage, in exploiting the liberties that make free societies as vulnerable as they are worth defending.

Mr. Brennan, to the contrary, is the incarnation of willful blindness. His tenure as Obama’s top national security advisor has been about helping our enemies throw sand in our eyes and thus enabling the sabotage. …

Sabotage is the [Muslim] Brotherhood’s defining practice. Indeed, “sabotage” is the word the Brothers themselves use to describe their work. It appears in an internal memorandum, which elaborates that the organization sees its mission in the United States as “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” Besides that long-term goal, the Brotherhood’s network of American affiliates have pursued the more immediate aim of materially supporting Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization to which the provision of material support is a felony under federal law.

None of that is new. It was not merely well known but had been proved in court by the Justice Department a year before Obama took office. I refer to the Justice Department’s 2008 Hamas financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case. Yet, counterterrorism czar Brennan remains undeterred, a driving force of the Obama administration’s “Islamic outreach” – a campaign to give Islamist organizations influence over U.S. policy. That several of those organizations were proved in the HLF case to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network is clearly of no moment.

Two such organizations are the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). They were among a slew of Islamist groups who wrote to Brennan in October 2011 to demand a purge of information about Islamist ideology that was being used to train U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agents. Much of that information was developed in federal investigations that have led to the convictions of violent jihadists. Nevertheless, the Obama administration has slavishly complied …

The training materials the Islamist groups insisted be removed include documentation of the fact that terrorism committed by Muslims is driven by an ideology rooted in Islamic scripture. …

Maybe the State Department and the White House press office have the luxury of trading in convenient fictions in order to reduce international tensions. Not intelligence agencies. The point of intelligence – a bedrock of national security – is to see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Here is how it is: Islamic supremacism, the sharia-based ideology of Islamists, is an interpretation of Muslim doctrine that is entirely mainstream among the world’s Muslims. That is why Islamists are winning elections in the Middle East even as they are found aligning with violent jihadists. Islamic supremacism is, in fact, widely promoted by the Brotherhood, and by such tentacles of its American network as CAIR and ISNA, when they are not otherwise deceptively disavowing its existence.

This Islamist ideology is incorrigibly anti-Western and anti-Semitic. It is deeply hostile to principles of equality and individual liberty (free speech, freedom of conscience, privacy, economic freedom, etc.) that undergird our Constitution, the American conception of civil rights, and the West’s conception of human rights. Understand Islamist ideology and you will readily understand the ferocity of Islamic resistance to American efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East – not merely jihadist resistance but broad Islamic resistance.

Yet, in a propaganda campaign reminiscent of those waged by the Nazis and the Soviets, Islamists and their fellow travelers (Brennan-types who might be thought of as “anti-anti-Islamists”) purport to be champions of human rights. When it suits them, they even feign reverence for individual liberties (particularly when it comes to the rights of Muslim in America … but don’t you dare ask them how non-Muslims fare in, say, Saudi Arabia).

The counter to such a propaganda campaign is a job for intelligence agencies. The point of having a sprawling intelligence community on which American taxpayers annually lavish $55 billion – far more than the vast majority of countries spend on national defense – is precisely to see through the deceptions of those who mean us harm, to perceive the threats against us for what they are. That the competent performance of this essential function may be fraught with political complications is supposed to be a challenge for our politicians, not our intelligence agents. The latter’s mission of unearthing hidden and often excruciating truths is hard enough.

Brennan’s agenda is the antithesis of the intelligence mission. His goal has been to portray our enemies as a small, unthreatening fringe of charlatan “violent extremists,” who kill wantonly and are unconnected to any “legitimate” Islam. Thus, he maintains for example that the only “legitimate” interpretation of the “tenet of Islam” known as jihad is: a “holy struggle … to purify oneself or one’s community.”

Even taken at face value, Brennan’s assertion is absurd. There is between Islam and the West no common understanding of the good, and thus no consensus about “purity.” In Islam, to “purify” something means to make it more compliant with sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework. Sharia is anti-freedom and anti-equality, so to purify oneself in an Islamic sense would necessarily mean something very different from what we in the West would think of as struggling to become a better person.

But there is an even more fundamental reason not to take Brennan’s remarks at face value: they run afoul of what mainstream Islam itself says about jihad. … It is quite straightforward on the matter: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.”  …

In Brennan’s world, there is … no need to fret over anti-American terrorists who return to the jihad with alarming regularity once they are released from Guantanamo Bay. After all, Brennan observes, common criminals have high recidivism rates, too. Mass-murderers, pick-pockets … as they say in the administration, “What difference does it make?”

And then there’s the skill of offending our friends while enabling our enemies. Brennan refers to Jerusalem, the Israeli capital, as “al-Quds.” That is the name used by Islamists who reject the Jewish state’s right to exist, who claim Jerusalem and the rest of Israel as their own. …

Brennan’s sense of outrage, unnoticeable in response to slights against a faithful U.S. ally, is instead reserved for the “ignorant feelings” of Americans riled by jihadist attacks against our country. For Brennan, Americans’ anger at Islamists, our perception that the ideology that breeds terrorists is just as much a problem as the terrorists themselves, is “Islamophobia” – a smear cleverly concocted by Islamists to deflect examination. Brennan claims to have seen Islamophobia rear its racist head in the public reaction to the Fort Hood attack – the worst jihadist mass-murder in America since 9/11, but one the Obama administration prefers to think of as “workplace violence”.

Brennan claims that Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese terror militia, is a “very interesting organization,” whose “moderate elements” have evolved it from “purely a terrorist organization” into a political party whose members now serve in the Lebanese government. This, again, is rose-tinted nonsense, bespeaking breathtaking ignorance about the history and operations of jihadists who, until 9/11, had killed more Americans than any other terror network. … Its objective … is to advance the Islamic revolution at the expense of non-Muslims by any method that shows promise under the circumstances.

Hezbollah is part of the Islamist vanguard waging a global campaign against liberty. But with their Brennan blinders on, the Obama administration chooses not to see it. They see “moderates” committed to participating in a “political process.” This same thinking has led the administration to issue a visa to an admitted member of the Blind Sheikh’s terrorist organization (the Islamic Group) so he could come to the White House with other newly minted Egyptian “parliamentarians” to discuss U.S. policy in the Middle East.

This mindset also explains why the administration negotiates with the Taliban …

There is no place … for deceiving the American people by politicizing intelligence. That Brennan specialty, an exhaustive effort to miniaturize the threats against our nation and appease the president’s Islamist allies, is the antithesis of what we have a CIA for. …

If intelligence is to be politicized so that we let our guard down, then the United States would be better off with no CIA than with a CIA headed by John Brennan.

Andrew McCarthy believes, however, that feeble Republicans will let him be appointed.

Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing last week only bolstered concerns that he is utterly unfit to serve as secretary of defense. Yet, some Republicans have announced that they will vote for him anyway, and some others who purport to oppose him have signaled that they have no intention of mounting a filibuster, the only procedure that could derail him. Consequently, they’ve ensured that he will be confirmed. So let’s not kid ourselves: Senate Republicans who will let Hagel take control of the Defense Department, and who just joined Democrats in a 94-3 landslide confirmation of John Kerry – a devotee of Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood empowerment strategy – are not going to put up a fight over Brennan.

Such Republicans are also in the business of sabotage. They sabotage Republican principles. They sabotage liberty, of which the USA was meant to be the political embodiment. Thus they sabotage America.

 *

How can all that  Andrew McCarthy accurately reports about John Brennan be reconciled with the fact that the policy of going after Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders with drones* is his brainchild?

Come to that, how does President Obama reconcile his generally pro-Islam policies with his endorsement of the drones tactic?

Leaving aside for the moment the rights and wrongs of using drones to target American traitors fighting with the Islamic enemy, the present question is: what makes Barack Obama and John Brennan, both of whom do all they can in every other way to encourage and assist America’s Islamic enemies, so persistently pursue and kill jihadis – and anyone who happens to be with them – with drones? 

We are all for eliminating as many of the enemy as possible by all available means. But Brennan and Obama are not. So the question needs an answer.

Theories that answer it are welcome.

So are opinions on the targeting with drones of American traitors abroad.

*There are known US drone bases in Afghanistan, Turkey, Djibouti, the Seychelles, Qatar, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Ethiopia.