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

From the Telegraph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The murder by Muslims of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was a cause for war because he was a US  ambassador.

The statement must stand without any qualification.

That said, we need to take a closer look at the man himself. He was the victim not only of Islamic savagery but also of US policy towards Islam over the past decade – a policy which under President Obama positively encouraged and finally enflamed that savagery. And we ask: To what extent did Mr Stevens himself accept, agree with, endorse, or even actively and enthusiastically promote the policy that brought him, as an official representative of it, to his violent death?    

Daniel Greenfield has also asked that question, and he writes:

Christopher Stevens was a Middle Eastern diplomat who typified the new breed going from the University of Berkeley and the Peace Corps to desks in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. He taught English to Moroccan children in the Peace Corps and helped Palestinian Arabs in the East Jerusalem Consulate, which has a firm policy of pretending that Israel does not exist.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Christopher Stevens that he “made other people’s hopes his own” and that may serve as a fitting eulogy both for Stevens and for the disastrous foreign policy of making “other people’s hopes” our own that brought on the Arab Spring.

Stevens, like Clinton and Obama, made the hopes of Islamists his own and they repaid him for it, just as Afghans repaid America for supporting them against the Soviet Union, as Lebanon and Somalia repaid America’s peacekeeping efforts by killing American troops and on down the litany of gratitude in bombs and bullets that have come America’s way from the Muslim world.

“He risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to build a better Libya,” Hillary Clinton said, but if anything his murder exposed the lie that there is a better Libya now than there was before Hillary and he intervened in Libya. Clinton’s eulogy comes perilously close to conceding Stevens’ real mission and the degree of American intervention in the overthrow of Gaddafi.

Stevens was the connection between the Islamist Benghazi rebels and the Obama administration’s illegal war to overthrow Gaddafi. His mission, like the true mission of the war, was secret, and the consulate, marginally fortified and devoid of Marines, reflected that secrecy. Stevens did not think that he had anything to fear from the Islamists because they were his friends.

And he wanted to be their friend because he romanticized them. He looked at them through a veil of pro-Third World “anti-colonialist” leftist sentimentality. It made him feel good.

In the Wikileaks cables…

Useful things, those!

… Stevens cheerfully described fighters who saw “resistance against coalition forces in Iraq” as “an important act of ‘jihad’” …

Of which campaign for world domination by Islam – one must therefore conclude – he heartily approved!

For years he had walked safely in their company without understanding that he was just as much of a target as a Marine in Baghdad, but without the training, the weapons or the survival skills.

The only reason Christopher Stevens had lasted this long is that the jihadist fighters had known a useful man when they met him. And Stevens proved to be very useful, but his usefulness ended with Gaddafi’s death. Once the US successfully overthrew Gaddafi and began focusing on stabilizing Libya, Stevens ceased to be a useful idiot and became a useless nuisance. Attacks soon followed on the Benghazi consulate and on other consulates as well, but the Marines were not brought in and Stevens continued relying on local goodwill to secure his offices. It was only a matter of time until the attackers got through.

Clinton, her State Department and its media allies appear unnaturally eager to paint Christopher Stevens as an American martyr to the cause of Libyan Islamism, a kinder, gentler Rachel Corrie who willingly died so that the Islamists might have their dream of an Islamic state in Libya.

We will of course never know what was going through Christopher Stevens’s mind on September 11, 2012, as he battled the choking smoke, experiencing what so many New Yorkers had experienced on September 11, 2001. Like them, he was faced with a terrible dilemma, a choice between remaining in the fire and committing suicide by going outside.

Many in the World Trade Center chose to jump to their deaths, but Christopher Stevens chose to remain inside and die rather than face the tender mercies of his attackers. Stevens had spent enough time in Libya to have seen what the jihadist fighters did to their captives and must have known what horrors he could expect at their hands. The photos that have been released, along with claims by Libyan jihadists that they sexually assaulted his corpse, suggest that he made the right choice. And perhaps in those final moments, facing that terrible choice, Christopher Stevens finally understood the true horror of the Muslim world that he had fallen in love with as a Peace Corps volunteer.

But could he, even at that moment, especially at that moment, have allowed himself to admit the unendurable truth?

“He was an avid student of Islam and the Middle East, and consistently strove to build the proverbial bridge between our two cultures in the face of sometimes overwhelming antagonism and bitter misunderstanding,” a friend from the diplomatic service tells us. But though Christopher Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.

“The world needs more Chris Stevenses,” Hillary Clinton said, but does it really? … Does it need men who give up the hopes and dreams of their country to take on the dreams of their enemies without ever realizing where the fatal road of those dreams leads?

Stevens’ former Peace Corps colleague says of him, “Chris devoted his career, and life, to improving relations between the Arabic/Islamic world and the West.” That he did and he died doing it …

And failing to achieve the impossible goal of course …

… losing whatever career or life he might have had if he had not embarked on a futile errand to make the Muslims who killed him and paraded his body around like him. And … the effort was to no avail.

“It’s especially tragic that Chris Stevens died in Benghazi because it is a city that he helped to save,” Obama said, repeating the same lie that he used to drag America into his illegal war. Benghazi was not in any need of saving, it was the Americans who came to Benghazi, like Chris Stevens, who needed saving.

That is the terrible blind spot in our vision which, like Christopher Stevens, tells us that we need to save the Muslims who hate us, rather than showing us that we need to save ourselves.

So it emerges that Christopher Stevens in his illusions and commitment is like John Walker Lindh, who “wanted to help” the Afghans and is serving a 20-year prison sentence for fighting with the Taliban. The only significant difference between them is that John Walker Lindh the Traitor devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting against American forces as their enemy, while Christopher Stevens the Martyr devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting with American forces as their ally.

And therein lies the stark proof of the confusion of values which arose when America, a nation idealizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was forced into a betrothal with Islam, a cult idealizing total control, joyless submission, and death.

More US embassies were attacked today by Muslim mobs.

Muslim leaders deliberately stoked up the flames of riot on 9/11 and again today. They needed a pretext and by a stroke of luck they found one in a movie. It was sent as a gift to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, through the Egyptian media, by a brainless American member of the minority it is persecuting, Coptic Christians. (Will not the Copts in Egypt pay dearly for it?) Others of the group made the film – and maliciously alleged that it was made by Jews.

This is from (Glenn Beck’s) The Blaze:

Protests in the Middle East that are being blamed on an anti-Islamic and anti-Muhammad film continue to rage. And as details unfold about the shadowy figures behind the film, the plot thickens. This morning, The Blaze provided more details about Steve Klein, a man who served as a spokesman for the film. And last night, we learned more about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker involved who has a criminal past.

Now, information is coming out about the man who is said to have intentionally translated and sent the video to Egyptian media, thus allegedly sparking a portion of the outrage. Since the initial violent reaction to the video emerged on September 11, many have wondered how the film came to the attention of Middle Eastern media and citizens, alike.

Religion News Service (RNS) is reporting that Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, translated the movie into Arabic and sent it to Egyptian journalists. He also allegedly promoted it on his web site and through social media, the outlet reports. RNS has more about his background:

Morris Sadek describes himself as a human rights attorney and president of a small group called the National American Coptic Assembly, based in Chantilly, Va. Sadek says on his website that he is a member of the Egyptian and District of Columbia bar associations who has “defended major human rights cases” …

But fellow Copts depict Sadek as a fringe figure and publicity hound whose Islamophobic invectives disrupt Copts’ quest for equal rights in Egypt.

The film is very badly made and acted, but at least it denigrates Islam. And neither its quality nor intention are important. Everyone in America is free to make a good or bad film with any intention whatsoever. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula the film-maker, Steve Klein the “spokesman for the film”, and Morris Sadek who translated the dialogue into Arabic and sent the thing to Egyptian journalists are very small fry indeed in the drama of chaos and destruction that is unfolding.

It is the use of the film by Islamic leaders to arouse Muslim mobs to riot, burn, wreck, assault and murder that is evil. Those leaders are guilty of the havoc, the fire and the spilt blood, but they could only do what they’re doing because the present American leadership prepared the way for them.

The events that are shaking the pillars of the world would have happened anyway, because Obama and his administration have over and over again by actions and by words, from his first speech abroad as president in Cairo in 2009 to Hillary Clinton’s speech yesterday, impressed on Muslims the world over that they have been injured by America. And this despite the fact that Islam initiated war on America and is relentlessly pursuing it.

There could be no stronger reason to impeach and severely punish a president of the United States. It almost certainly won’t happen, but it should.

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.

You put Israel in

You put Israel out

You put Israel in

And you shake it all about.

Barack Obama said in a speech to AIPAC that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel.

But that was back in 2008 when Obama was still taking some trouble to woo Jews and other pro-Israel voters to support him.

The present Democratic National Convention omitted any mention of Jerusalem being the capital of Israel.

It also left out old platform statements about the status of Palestinian refugees, and of Hamas as a terrorist organization not to be dealt with or supported in any way. Obviously the guide to these decisions came from Obama whose State Department, since March this year, refused to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and who tried to order Israel to return to its indefensible 1967 borders. He wants to fund UN agencies that accept Palestinians as a member “state”.

Acceptance by Israel of the millions of Palestinians who claim to have been dispossessed when the State of Israel was declared, or a return to its 1967 borders, would be acts of suicide. As Obama must know this, he must desire the consequence. It could hardly be clearer that Obama does not like Israel and likes Islam very much, especially the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a calf).

But then something happened on the way to the third day of the DNC. Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole came under fierce criticism for making the changes, presumably from quarters they do not want to antagonize. So, according to the Wall Street Journal, the “language describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” was “swiftly reinserted … in an attempt to defuse controversy on the eve of President Barack Obama’s speech accepting his party’s nomination”.

Convention delegates, by a voice vote, approved a resolution restoring language the party had put in its 2008 platform, as well as earlier ones, referring to Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. But the vote was disputed. Three separate voice votes were called, and only after the third was the issue declared decided—and some delegates then booed.

(To our regret, the omission of “God” from the convention, which we praised in a post earlier, was also reversed.)

Far more maliciously and seriously, anti-Israel action is being taken by the Obama administration.

This is from Front Page by David Hornik:

In the same week that 120 “nonaligned” nations of the world were gathered in Tehran to give their blessing to its open genocidal anti-Semitism, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had doubled the number of centrifuges at its underground Fordo site since May, while increasing its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium to within 50 kilograms of a bomb. All this while continuing to block access — as it has been since November — to its Parchin facility for nuclear-explosives testing.

And that wasn’t all. Even though the IAEA’s findings vindicate all the warnings by Israeli leaders that Iran was exploiting the period of sanctions and diplomatic talks to race ahead toward the bomb, the Obama administration reacted — again — by coming down on Israel rather than Iran.

On Thursday the U.S. chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told reporters in London that an Israeli attack on Iran would delay but probably not stop its nuclear program, could unravel the “international coalition” supposedly “pressuring” Iran, and that “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

“Complicit”? As if such a pre-emptive act of self-defense would be a crime? Yes:

With a few words, then, Dempsey managed to convey that Israel was militarily incapable, a potential spoiler of an effective international strategy, and that it would be somehow criminal or illicit — “complicity” usually referring to illicit activity — if Israel did move to preempt the genocidal threat, something the U.S. would want no part of.

It was further reported by Time magazine that the U.S. was substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill, though so far that account has evoked denials from some of the officials quoted in media reports. But, on the whole, the developments didn’t impart the sense that the Obama administration “has Israel’s back” as it has been ritually claiming.

“… ritually and mendaciously claiming”, that should read.

As for “the U.S. substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill”,  this source gives some concrete details of the reported reductions, leading us to think they are very likely true.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are silent in the face of the avalanche of bad news coming in from official Washington.

In accord with the Dempsey  shout, this:

The Patriot anti-missile systems scheduled for what was to have been the biggest joint US-Israel anti-missile drill in October will remain packed in tarpaulin because they come without crews; even one – much less two – Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships may not be dispatched to Israeli waters; and the number of US servicemen sent over for the annual exercise is to be cut by more than two-thirds to 1,500.

This downgrade of US participation in an annual war exercise with Israel is more than striking. It adds up to the dismemberment by the Obama administration of the entire intricate strategy US and Israel have built over years for the deterrence – and interception if need be – of any Iranian/Hizballah/Syrian missile assault on Israel.

The inferences are cruel: The US defense or second-strike elements – which had been slotted into place by the military strategists of the two armies – will not be there. Their absence slashes the time available for Israel’s alarm-and-interception systems to spring into action – the moment the engines of Iranian ballistic missiles heading its way are fired – right down from the originally estimated 14 minutes’ notice.

It also means that Barak’s estimate of 500 dead in the worst case of a war with Iran must go by the board.

So Israel is to be punished by Obama because Iran is intransigent. Or would it be more accurate to say that Obama is positively helping Iran advance towards nuclear capability?

A story is going round that he sent messages to Iran through two unnamed European countries that he would “hold back” Israel, but the mullahs must agree not to attack US shipping in the Gulf. The Dempsey insult was perhaps part of this plot.

For instance, The Blaze reports:

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published a startling report Monday detailing a message it says was conveyed by the Obama administration – via two European countries – to Iranian officials. The request: if Israel decides to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, the U.S. will not support it and the Islamic Republic should refrain from retaliating on U.S. military installations in the Persian Gulf.

The story has of course been denied  by the White House.

But then it also denies disliking Israel, or wishing it anything but peace, prosperity, security and the continuing warm friendship of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

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.

Kofi Annan, the UN’s and Arab League’s “special envoy” to Syria, tasked with ordering the incoming tide to go back … Oh no, sorry – that was King Canute’s futile endeavor. Easy to confuse it with Kofi Annan’s: to stop the civil war raging in Syria. Anyway, he has given up. He arrived, he chatted a bit, he went away.

Rick Moran writes at Front Page:

[Kofi] Annan’s futile efforts to stop the violence in Syria are added to other failures in his career that include an inability to stop the massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide where 800,000 were murdered, the tragedy in Darfur where upwards of 450,000 were killed, and Iraq’s oil for food scandal that hit close to home when his own son was accused of profiting from Saddam Hussein’s multi-billion dollar bribery schemes. Each of those horrific events occurred either while he was serving as Secretary General of the UN, or head of the world body’s peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda when he failed to act to prevent the slaughter of Tutsi tribesmen.

The writer’s heart is in the right place, but there’s nothing remarkable in such UN “failures” as keeping clear of massacres and profiting from helping the sort of despots who carry them out. That’s what the UN does. It’s what the corrupt, dim-witted men who run it do. The only remarkable thing is that the UN was set up to do the opposite, but as it never has and never will, pointing out the hypocrisy is almost as pointless as giving orders to the tides.

[Annan’s] mission was doomed from the start because the Security Council and the world community was unable to come together to address the tragedy. The lion’s share of the blame for that can be placed directly on Russia and China, whose vetoes of Security Council resolution after resolution gave Bashar Assad cover to carry out his war against his own people. But there is plenty of blame left for the United States, the European countries, and the Arab League, who clung for months to Annan’s moribund “peace plan” despite a mountain of evidence that it had failed almost as soon as it was negotiated last April.

Is there any good reason for the US or any Western power to intervene in Syria?

Rick Moran offers a fairly persuasive one:

The worst case scenario is to have President Assad eventually triumph which would strengthen Russia, Iran, and China in the region. Anything we can do to prevent that — including expending the same amount of energy in supporting the rebels that the Russians are using to prop up Assad — would be a welcome change in policy.

Yes. But who knows whether Assad’s successor, even if helped into power by the West, will be any less an ally and cat’s paw of Russia, China, and Iran? 

At the same time as the US president, Barack Hussein Obama, is smoothing the way for Islam to become a power in the world, he is weakening the defenses of the United States.

This is from Front Page, by Alan W. Dowd:

As the sequestration guillotine hangs over the Pentagon, Congress wants to know what the administration’s plan is in the event that a deal isn’t struck to avert a staggering $500 billion in automatic spending cuts to the U.S. military. These cuts, it pays to recall, would come in addition to the $487 billion the Pentagon has already carved from its spending plans over the next 10 years. The cuts would be disastrous, and making such cuts without any sort of plan or roadmap would compound disaster with irresponsibility. Could it be that the president may actually want the Pentagon’s budget to be cut by another $500 billion—or put another way, to shrink over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion?

Before scoffing at that possibility, recall that the Pentagon was the first place President Obama turned when the debt crisis emerged as a political issue. “We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities and our role in a changing world,” Obama said in 2011.

Recall, too, that the president halted F-22 production at 187 planes, far short of the planned 381; cut the nation’s strategic nuclear forces by 30 percent and has floated proposals to cut the deterrent arsenal to as low as 300 warheads (about the size of China’s); withdrew from Iraq, over the objections of his top commanders and diplomats; under-resourced Afghanistan, then undercut the mission he gave his commanders by announcing a withdrawal deadline; handcuffed U.S. foreign policy to the lowest-common-denominator approach approved by Moscow; and famously “led from behind” in Libya, letting America’s oldest, closest allies in NATO know that the scope, scale and duration of America’s involvement would be limited. (Early in the war, the allies were stunningly told that the availability of essential U.S. strike aircraft “expires on Monday.”) …

To meet the president’s targets, the Navy has been ordered to cut the number of surface combatants from 85 ships to 78, stretch the “build time” of new aircraft carriers from five to seven years, and had to seek a special congressional waiver to deploy just 10 carriers (rather than the legally-mandated 11) while the USS Gerald Ford is built and other flattops are retired or refurbished. Pressed by budget-cutters, the Air Force plans to reduce its fleet by 286 planes. The active-duty Army will be cut from 570,000 soldiers to 490,000; the Marines from 202,000 to 182,000. The administration has slashed $810 million from the Missile Defense Agency, cut spending on ground-based missile defense by 22 percent and reduced the number of warships to be retrofitted with missile-defense capabilities by seven. A DOD report on weapons-acquisition plans for 2013 reveals spending cuts in combat drones, F-35 fighter-bombers, F/A-18 fighter-bombers, V-22 heli-planes, UH-60 helicopters, KC-46 refuelers, M-1 tank upgrades, Stryker armored vehicles, aircraft carriers, submarines, and a number of satellites and space-based sensors. Remember, all of this is before sequestration.

For perspective, compare these numbers with some from the not-too-distant past. In 1991, the total active-duty force was 2 million; today, it’s hovering around 1.3 million—and falling. In 1991, the U.S. deployed 15 aircraft carriers, some 300 bombers and nearly 4,000 fighters; today, the U.S. deploys 10 carriers, 162 bombers and roughly 2,000 fighters. At the height of the Reagan buildup, the Navy boasted 587 ships. The size of today’s fleet is 285 ships. Current recapitalization rates will not keep up with plans to retire ships, leading to “a Navy of 240-250 ships at best,” according to former Navy Secretary John Lehman.Although the defense budget grew by $300 billion in the decade after 9/11, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments notes that just 16 percent of that increase was earmarked for modernization—and that a dozen new weapons systems were terminated and many systems had their numbers cut below end-strength goals (e.g., the F-22). “The aggregate effect is that a significant portion of DOD’s investment in modernization over the past decade did not result in force modernization.”

To get a sense of the modernization crisis, consider that the Air Force now plans to keep flying B-52 bombers through 2040. The first B-52 took to the skies in 1954. The CH-47 helicopter celebrates its 50th birthday this year, and the Army plans to deploy the heavy-lift chopper past 2040.

This benign neglect of the military might make sense if peace were breaking out. But we know the very opposite to be true. America is still at war in Afghanistan. Terrorist networks like al-Qaeda still have the ability to strike and are increasing their influence in the Horn of Africa and in Yemen. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is less stable and more paranoid than ever, as is nuclear-armed North Korea. Iran is racing ahead with its own nuclear-weapons program and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. The Arab Spring revolution has triggered a civil war in Syria. What happens if/when Assad starts firing off chemical weapons? What if the revolution spreads to the oil-rich Arab monarchies? And what path will the new governments in Egypt and Libya ultimately choose?

These, it could be argued, are not even our principal worries. As the U.S. declaws itself, China is boosting military spending by 11 percent this year, capping double-digit increases in nine of the past 10 years.According to the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military power, Beijing is pouring increasing sums into advanced cruise missiles, conventional ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, counter-space weapons, cyberspace capabilities, upgrades to its bomber fleet, 79 surface combatants and 50 submarines. These assets are “designed to enable anti-access/area-denial missions.” In other words, their mission is to deter and if necessary destroy the [US] Pacific fleet.

Similarly, Russia—in the midst of a planned 65-percent increase in military spending—is making claims in the Arctic, occupying parts of Georgia, blocking international action in Iran, providing arms and cover to Syria, buzzing North American airspace, and carrying out provocative maneuvers and weapons deployments in areas bordering NATO states. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has unveiled plans to deploy 2,300 new tanks, 600 new warplanes, 400 new ICBMs and 28 new subs—all in the next 10 years….

Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey warns of a Pentagon with “fewer options and a lot less capacity,” adding “we wouldn’t be the global power that we know ourselves to be today.”

Maybe that’s by design. It seems a smaller military may serve a larger objective for the president—namely an America that is less assertive; an America less able to act independently, and hence more deferent to and dependent on the UN; an America with fewer military resources, a shorter reach, slower reflexes and a smaller global role.

An America more defeatable.

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.