Tariq Ramadan is the General of Soft Jihad. For years he persisted in trying to get into the United States, and was sensibly refused entry.

Now, just when the weakness and incompetence of the Obama administration’s dealings with jihadists have been direfully exposed, and are being most angrily criticized, this Supremo of the Islamic campaign to conquer the world is suddenly allowed in, by order of Hillary Clinton.

Tariq Ramadan’s particular role is to direct Islamic conquest not by violence but by means of mass immigration and propaganda. He has defended wife-beating and all the cruelties of sharia, including stoning to death. Now he may freely spread his poisonous message in the United States to advance his menacing mission of subjugation.

From the Weekly Standard:

In a controversial move, the Obama administration has decided to lift Tariq Ramadan’s ban from the United States. Who is Tariq Ramadan? By birth, he is the grandson of Hassan al Banna – the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). By word and deed, he is today a leading member of the European branch of the MB.

The MB is the mother organization for some of the terrorist groups that became part of al Qaeda’s core, including Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Osama bin Laden himself was first wooed to the dark side by Muslim Brothers teaching in Saudi Arabia. The MB has also spawned other hardcore jihadist organizations, including Hamas. While the MB’s descendents have publicly disagreed over tactics at times (for example, Zawahiri has taken issue with Hamas’s participation in Palestinian elections), they still share the same long-term strategic vision: the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate capable of ruling the Muslim world and challenging the West. And that is what Tariq Ramadan believes in too.

Douglas Farah provides more information:

The lifting of the ban, ordered by Secretary of State Clinton, is a significant victory for the Brotherhood, who has sought to frame the issue of Ramadan’s exclusion as one of academic freedom rather one of national security.

Ramadan was ecstatic, saying on his blog:

Today’s decision reflects the Obama administration’s willingness to reopen the United States to the rest of the world, and to permit critical debate. Coming after nearly six years of inquiry and investigation, Secretary Clinton’s order confirms what I have affirmed and reaffirmed from day one: the first accusations of terrorist connections (subsequently dropped), then donations to Palestinian solidarity groups, were nothing more than a pretense to prohibit me from speaking critically about American government policy on American soil. The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation. Today I am delighted at the decision. …

A rock star in the European Muslim scene, Ramadan, despite weak academic credentials, has been offered a teaching position at Notre Dame University….

This is typical of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is eager to use the freedoms that would never exist under the caliphate it so desires to create, in order to promote its totalitarian vision. It demands the right to be heard while being unequivocal in its unwillingness to view as equal anyone who does not embrace its view radical Islamism. While it is willing to use the democratic process to achieve its goals, often putting it at odds with militantly violent groups such as al Qaeda, in the end the Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden share an identical vision of what the world should look like under Allah’s rule.

The Washington Post, reviewing Obama’s first year in office, stops short of hagiography, but scrapes the bottom of an almost empty barrel to find justification for its praise.

What does it pull out? Well, he made a good shot in a basketball game in front of servicemen, although he had a painful hip:

Obama was tired from the long flight, and a hip injury limited a basketball game to an informal shoot-around session. But the Senate staff members accompanying him were stunned when, on arriving at the gym, they discovered that more than 1,000 service members had packed the stands to watch. Some of Obama’s aides worried that a poor showing would yield images of Commander Air Ball. “Just make a shot or two, and that’ll be all right,” Antony J. Blinken, then the director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and now Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, told Obama.”Oh, I’ll make the shot,” he answered. He squared up behind the three-point arc for a jump shot that zipped through the net. The troops erupted, and a potentially awkward encounter ended in a moment of schoolyard glory, with future commander and troops appearing largely as equals.

And he made a few decisions that sounded good to most ears:

In his first year in office, Obama has set in motion plans to triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; expanded operations against U.S. enemies in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, in one early instance of his willingness to use deadly force, authorized Special Forces snipers to kill three Somali pirates holding an American hostage.

Yes, that was good. But the article, more remarkable for what it leaves out than what it found to spin, does not mention, for instance, any of the administration’s foreign policy failures with Iran, the Middle East, China, Russia, or North Korea.

And what of all the intense criticism of his failure to act as a president might reasonably be expected to do in moments of crisis? For instance, when ‘on Christmas Day, a 23-year-old Muslim man from Nigeria allegedly tried to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit’ he waited three days to condemn what was manifestly an act of terrorism. Ah, the Washington Post can reveal the deep wisdom behind that:

On vacation in Hawaii at the time, Obama took several days before addressing the nation. By waiting, he had hoped to deprive al-Qaeda of a public relations victory of a presidential overreaction.

But why did he delay for months to decide on General McChrystal’s request for more troops in Aghanistan? Well, you see, it’s like this:

He has emerged as a president uncomfortable with the swagger and rhetoric traditionally used to rally troops, favoring an image of public solemnity as he wrestles with the moral consequences of war.

In any case, says the Post, he has been pretty aggressive really, when you come down to it:

Even as Obama has sought to convey an image of a deliberate leader preoccupied with the battle’s human toll, he has used military power at least as aggressively as his Republican predecessor did during the waning years of his administration.

Bravo, say we all. Or not quite all. Aren’t those the very things that his leftist base objects to? Yes, but look, says the Post to them, hasn’t he done or nearly done what you want?

Within days [of being in office], he banned the use of torture in interrogation and ordered the closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010 —

All right, it is ‘a deadline that will be missed’ – but give him credit for his intentions:

The executive orders were part of a review of the Bush-era protocols that framed the “global war on terror,” a term Obama immediately discouraged his advisers from using because he said it overstated al-Qaeda’s strength. To the former constitutional law lecturer, the refinements in language and policy strengthened the moral argument for war.

He needed a moral argument for war because of the demands of ‘civil libertarians’:

Obama, in his new role, disregarded the advice of his military commanders and heeded the demands of civil libertarians after a campaign in which he promised a more transparent government.

The Post does not tell us what happened to that promise. But it has an explanation for why he hardly ever met with his generals between his promise to send more troops to Afghanistan at the beginning of his presidency – the promise the Post has held up for admiration – and his eventual decision made late in the year to send 30,000:

Obama intended a more formal, arm’s-length relationship with his generals than the one favored by George W. Bush, who spoke frequently with his then-commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, even though several officers were above him at the time.

“This is a president who is going to respect the chain of command,” said another senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s thinking. “He feels like it is the most efficient way to receive information and maintain control of the process.”

So that was why. Dismiss any thoughts that he did not seem to be very concerned about Afghanistan, or that he was ‘dithering’; because, you see, he was brooding on it all the time:

During White House deliberations on national security, Obama has kept his own counsel as he has made decisions, according to his aides and senior officials. But this methodical style, during the fall review of the Afghanistan strategy, provoked criticism — mainly from Republicans — that he was dithering.

In any case, don’t you see, he had those critics on the left to worry about who thought he should be brooding instead (which we suspect he was, actually) on the ‘domestic reform agenda’ (read: transformation of America into a socialist state):

Obama’s Democratic Party worried that a novice commander in chief would succumb to the wishes of his generals at the expense of his wide-ranging domestic reform agenda, which was already threatened by the rising costs of war.

How does he square his ideological pacifism, his desire that America give up its nuclear arms, and his acceptance of a Nobel peace prize, with his role as commander in chief while America is engaged in war on two fronts? He tried to explain how in his Nobel lecture. To make a case for a ‘just war’ he had his speech-writers delve into the theological works of Thomas Aquinas and Reinhold Niebuhr. It seems that the Post thinks he brought off the stunning trick of simultaneously assuring the judges that he  really was a man of peace and assuring America that he took his responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seriously. To help one assess whether he did, there’s the speech itself and the passages about it in the Post, which would take up too much space here. What we saw in Oslo was a man struggling, not with his conscience, but with the impossibility of reconciling irreconcileables.

The President told the truth (uncharacteristically) when he conceded, some days after a terrorist tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, that America is at war.

But he did not tell the whole truth when he said who the enemy is. He named al-Qaeda, but that’s like naming one battalion in a conventional engagement. There are many battalions on the enemy’s side in this fight: Hizbullah, Hamas, the Taliban, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and many more.

It is absolutely necessary to say plainly who the enemy is.

To call it ‘terror’ was always a misnomer. Terror is an emotion. Even the more accurately referential ‘terrorism’ would not be right. Terrorism is a method, a tactic, a means, not a movement or a cause.

What else has been tried?

‘Extremists’ and ‘extremism’ ?  Wide of the mark.

‘Islamism’ ? Nearer. But wait – ‘Islamism’ does not exist. There is no ‘Islamist Manifesto’. There is no tradition of ‘Islamism’.  Can it even be defined?  It is an invention of Western pundits who want to avoid offending what is charitably called ‘the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims’.

For years now American politicians have been pretending not to see it, refusing to speak it, but they know very well the name of the enemy. And it brings them up against a peculiar difficulty, because it is the name of a religion, and freedom of religion is a foundation stone of the Union. The United States of America is a conscientiously tolerant nation. Within its boundaries, no religion may be prohibited.

Or is that not entirely true? Would religions that require human sacrifice be tolerated? They still exist in Africa and India. Immigrants have brought them to Europe. A couple of years ago the remains of a child was found in the Thames and  investigators found that he had been ritually sacrificed by an African religious sect.

It may be argued that such tribal cults of ritual magic cannot deserve the same respect as a moral religion that has well over a billion followers worldwide, as is the case with Islam.

And Islam is the name of the enemy. In must be said however shocking it feels to say it: The name of the enemy is Islam.

It certainly has over a billion followers, but is it a moral religion? ‘An immoral religion’ would describe it more accurately.

In view of the difficulty Western civilization has in declaring a religion to be inimical, even when it has declared itself to be so, it’s better to think of Islam as an ideology – which it is. All religions are ideologies, even if all ideologies are not religions.

Islam is the religio-political ideology of an illiterate warlord of the dark ages.

It is a totalitarian ideology.

It is a collectivist ideology, and like all collectivist ideologies, it claims to be the unique repository and disseminator of truth, and demands unquestioning submission to its authority.

It is centered on a dual power, a divinity and a particular man inseparably bound to each other. The man, as the sole conduit of divine truth, dictated a book and a body of sayings that established a code of conduct and set of laws. These can never be altered and must be taken literally. They ordain that to kill and be killed for their deity is the highest duty of the faithful. They declare that females are inferior to males, and imply that females exist solely to serve the physical needs and appetites of males.

It is universalist. It assumes the obligation to bring all mankind into its community, or umma. It holds that everyone is born a member of the umma but many fail to realize this and are drawn away to false beliefs and practices. It is the duty of all the faithful to recover the lost members. It will use persuasion, offering to welcome ‘reverts’, but those who cling obstinately to their false beliefs must be forced to capitulate or die. It is therefore unremittingly at war with the rest of humanity. Peace will only come, it teaches, when the whole world is Muslim. In the meantime Islam will allow certain other religions to continue if they are not overtly polytheistic and if their devotees accept social abasement and legal discrimination, and pay tribute to their Muslim overlords.

That is the nature of the enemy. It has always been in a state of war against the rest of us by the compulsion of its beliefs. From time to time since its inception in the 7^th century, it has risen and hurled itself in furious battle against the ramparts of our culture. For the last half-century or so it has been in active conflict with the West in general and the United States of America in particular. From its own point of view it is continuing the war it has always waged to subdue the world in accordance with the will of its god and prophet.

This is the war being waged against us now. We have no choice but to fight it.

The name of the enemy is Islam, and once it is identified the next thing to do is devise ways to vanquish it.

How then? If another country is your country’s enemy, you can invade it, or wait for it to invade you and defend yourself from its attack, or you can do both at the same time.

American armed forces are engaged with this enemy in two of the countries where he predominates and in which he plots against us. We may win those battles, but if we do we’ll not have won the war. Victories on geographical battlefields will not vanquish this enemy. Psychological warfare will achieve much more.

Consider this for an act of psychological warfare: At the heart of the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are enjoined to make at least once in their lives, is the holy Kaaba, a huge cube of a building covered with black silk in the middle of a mosque. Although it existed before Muhammad was born, it is Islam’s holiest site. All Muslims everywhere turn towards it every time they pray. It shelters the Black Stone, a piece of a meteorite that Islam dates ‘from the time of Adam and Eve’. If the Kaaba were bombed and the Black Stone pulverized, just think how demoralizing that would be for the enemy.

And how else can we defeat a foe who is not only spread over many countries but is also here in our midst, thriving and increasing dangerously amongst us, and striking at us unpredictably and at random?

(More to follow.)

How unintelligent do you have to be to get a job with the CIA?

Here are two quotations from the Telegraph.

The first is by Con Coughlin:

As if Abdulmutallab’s bombing attempt was not a crushing blow for the CIA’s morale, the organisation is also trying to come to terms with a suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA officers last month at their base at Khost, close to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. US officials say that those killed included five of their leading experts on al-Qaeda, who agreed to attend the meeting because they believed they would receive key information as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

Instead, it now appears they were set up by the Haqqani clan, the pro-Taliban tribe that is widely held to be protecting bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership in north-west Pakistan. The CIA officers were so convinced of the bona fides of their source, a Jordanian doctor, that they did not even bother with basic security procedures – such as searching his belongings – before allowing him on to the base, with the inevitable catastrophic consequences.

If this is how the CIA takes care of its own security, we should not be surprised by its failure to address that of the wider public.

The second is by Toby Harnden:

Check out this passage from the unclassified six-page summary of the President Barack Obama’s review of the intelligence failures that led to the attempted attack by the Knicker Bomber on Flight 253 on Christmas Day:

‘Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s potential radicalization. A misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name initially resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa.’

So this means that the US government’s computers apparently don’t have an equivalent of Google’s “Did You Mean?” tool that picks up misspellings and finds results for similar words.

If it had been realised immediately that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has a valid US visa then presumably the alarm bells would have begun to ring weeks before he actually flew – but they believed he had no visa because the State Department database or whatever database it was could only recognise a particular version of an Arabic name.

That’s reassuring, isn’t it?

An Arabic name? If so, transliteration can make for numerous variations. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is a Nigerian, and Nigeria is an ex-British colony still using English as its official language. In his passport and on visa application forms his name would be spelt just like that. It must have been carelessly copied. Still, Harnden is right that the State Department should have a more efficient database. (It should have a great deal that it hasn’t got – a far better Secretary of State to start with, and diplomats who are on the side of America rather than its enemies.) In any case, the  young man with a bomb of a phallus has a Muslim name, and should have been ‘profiled’ for special investigation for that reason alone.

Shocking information on how US homeland security and anti-terrorism policy has been designed by the Islamic jihadist enemies themselves, is provided by Clare M. Lopez, a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, who writes this plain-speaking article for Human Events:

Counterterrorism policy is being formulated under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the lead international jihadist organization charged with “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” It’s important to note that the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood coincide exactly with those of al Qaeda and every other Islamic jihadist organization in the world today: re-establishment of the caliphate/imamate and imposition of Shari’a (Islamic law) over the entire world. …

Former North Carolina State Senator Larry Shaw, elected CAIR Board Chairman in March 2009 stated that he “looks forward to partnering with the Obama administration…” In case anyone failed to notice, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror funding case and an acknowledged affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, just how close is that partnership?

The policy implications of Brotherhood influence are both startling and evident. For example, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano sets the tone for the Obama administration view of Islamic jihad, but in April 2009, she rejected any notion that the enemy is either Islamic or a jihadi. Absurdly, she even refused to even use the word “terror,” instead preferring the inane “man-made disaster.” She was joined in planting the collective U.S. national security leadership head firmly in the sand by senior counterterrorism advisor to the president, John Brennan, who, apparently oblivious of Islamic doctrine and law, claimed in August 2009 that the meaning of jihad is to “. . . purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”

Following the foiled Christmas Day airliner bombing, Brennan made a frenzied round of the Sunday talk shows, shocking most of us with the off-hand announcement that a plea deal was “on the table” for Abdulmutallab (who lawyered up and shut up the moment he’d been Mirandized). Treating Islamic jihad as a legal problem or as though it doesn’t exist cripples U.S. national security policy making. 

Where did such ideas come from? How could our most senior officials entrusted with the defense of national security be so far off the tracks? It matters critically, because policy executed in ignorance of the essential linkage between Islamic doctrine and terrorism is bound to miss warning signals that involve Muslim clerics, mosques, teaching, and texts. A key indicator about our counterterrorism officials’ failures may be found in their advisors: their jihadi and Muslim Brotherhood advisors.

The inability of the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”) to connect the dots is no accident. It is not meant to connect the dots. In the summer of 2008, the NCTC organized a conference on U.S. Counter-Radicalization Strategy. According to a 4 January 2010 posting by Patrick Poole at Pajamas Media, one of the leading speakers at that conference was Yasir Qadhi, a featured instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. But by his own public admission, Yasir Qadhi was on the U.S. terror watch list! 

Yes, a key speaker for an NCTC discussion about Counter-Radicalization Strategy is on the terror watch list. He’s obviously there for good reasons. For one thing, Qadhi’s Ilmquest media company featured audio CD sets of sermons by al Qaeda cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, on its website and for sale at Ilmquest seminars. Yes, that al-Awlaki — the one linked to both Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Muslim Ft. Hood shooter, and Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim would-be Christmas airline bomber. 

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As noted above, the influence of the enemy extends to the very words we use to describe that enemy and his campaign of conquest. … Back in 2008, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued lexicon guidance to their employees, counseling avoidance of words like “jihad” or “ummah” or “Caliphate” when describing the enemy. They refused to identify the Muslim American sources who’d advised them on their decisions.

But it is enlightening to note the list of Muslim Brotherhood front groups that endorsed the vocabulary list once it had been issued: the Muslim American Society (MAS — founded by the Muslim Brotherhood); Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC — which lobbies to remove Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and Hizballah from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list); ISNA; and CAIR. When Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee, led by Congressman Peter Hoekstra, proposed an amendment to the 2009 Intelligence funding bill that would have prohibited the Intelligence Community “from adopting speech codes that encumber accurately describing the radical jihadist terrorists that attacked America and continue to threaten the homeland”, the Democratic majority rejected it outright.

Congressional Democrats would appear to be thoroughly influenced by the MB …

These are the Jihad wars, and they are nearly 1400 years old. The U.S. has only been confronting Islamic jihadis since our 18th century naval campaigns against the so-called Barbary pirates but liberal democracy will not see the 22nd century if we do not acknowledge and confront this enemy here and now in the 21st. Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack.

We applaud Dick Cheney for saying this last Tuesday, December 29 (reported by Politico):

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war.

He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war.

But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.

Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.

President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

Has anything been heard from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lately?

Has she nothing to say about al-Qaeda in Nigeria apparently plotting to blow up a plane over Detroit?

What about the incident in Israel when the driver of a car carrying US diplomats tried to run over an Israeli border guard?

Why did the diplomats refuse to show their identification papers?

And why did a US consulate car try to transport a Palestinian woman without permits between Jerusalem and the West Bank?

The identification of American diplomats from the consulate at IDF checkpoints has been a major sticking point for several years.In January 2008, the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria filed complaints with the Foreign Ministry after both US Security Coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton and then-consul-general Jacob Walles refused to roll down their windows or open their car doors and show identification papers at a checkpoint.

However, Israel’s ire reached a new level after an incident on November 13 in which a five-car convoy of consulate vehicles with diplomatic plates arrived at the Gilboa crossing.

According to a detailed official Israel Police description of the incident obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post, the drivers refused to identify themselves or open a window or door. The drivers, according to the report, purposely blocked the crossing, tried running over one of the Israeli security guards stationed there and made indecent gestures at female guards.

The entire incident was documented by cameras at the crossing.

Following the incident, the head of the police’s Security Department, Lt.-Cmdr. Meir Ben-Yishai, convened a meeting on November 18 at police headquarters inJerusalem with the regional security officer at the consulate, Tim Laas. Also present were officials from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, and the regional security officer at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, Dan Power… [read more here]

Are these diplomats acting under orders? Whose? And why such orders?

Is it true that the US now recognizes East Jerusalem as the ‘capital of Palestine’, while refusing to recognize the city as the capital of Israel?

Why is a person known to have terrorist connections granted a multiple-entry US visa?

Please tell us, Mrs Clinton.

A Nigerian engineering student from University College, London, tried to blow up a plane with 278 passengers as it was approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.

Wonder what his religion is? Don’t let such a thought sully your mind.

Fox News reports:

A male passenger on an international flight bound [from Amsterdam] for Detroit Friday tried to blow up the plane with an explosive device in an incident that the White House is labeling an attempted act of terrorism.

An attempted  act of ‘terrorism‘ ?! Not an attempted  ‘man-caused disaster’?

The suspect, who ABC reported suffered second-degree burns, told federal investigators he was connected to Al Qaeda …

No … surely not?

… authorities are questioning the veracity of that statement …

We should hope so! Likely story! At any rate, nobody’s being so racist and Islamophobic as to mention the words ‘Islam’, or ‘Muslim’, or jihad’.

A federal situational awareness bulletin noted that the explosive was acquired in Yemen with instructions as to when it should be used …

Yemen? Hey! What’s going on here?

Eyewitness Peter Smith said one passenger climbed over passengers, went across the aisle and tried to restrain the alleged attacker. The heroic passenger appeared to have been burned.

Afterward, the suspect was taken to a front-row seat with his pants cut off and his legs burned. Multiple law enforcement officials also said the man appeared badly burned on his legs, indicating the explosive was strapped there. The components were apparently mixed in-flight and included a powdery substance, officials said.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) identified the suspect as 23-year-old Abdul Mudallad [full name Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab] of Nigeria, and King said Mudallad “definitely has connections” to Al Qaeda. …

Naaa! Couldn’t have! Anyway, things like that will be taken care of in a caring way by Obama.

White House officials confirmed Friday that the attack was an attempted act of terrorism. “He appears to have had some kind of incendiary device he tried to ignite,” said one of the U.S. officials. …

One law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the case, said Mudallad’s name had surfaced earlier on at least one U.S. intelligence database, but not to the extent that he was placed on a watch list or a no-fly list.

Of course not. No profiling please. Better to risk a plane full of people than descend to that sort of thing.

President Barack Obama was notified of the incident and discussed it with security officials, the White House said. It said he is monitoring the situation … Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been briefed on the incident and is closely monitoring the situation.

There you are! They’re monitoring. Told you it would be okay.

Could anyone explain why a jailed al-Qaeda terrorist deserves to have his every wish gratified, every demand for his greater comfort and convenience supplied?

From The Sun:

Hate preacher Abu Hamza has got huge new wardrobes in his prison cell – after he whinged about his robes getting creased.

Taxpayers paid hundreds of pounds for the Ikea-style furniture after he moaned a lack of storage was crumpling his Islamic prayer garments.

Belmarsh prison staff ordered and built the flat pack just days after the request by hook-handed Hamza, who is wanted in the US over al-Qaeda-linked terror charges.

A source at the South East London nick said: “Once again, Hamza demands special treatment and the authorities cave in. Everyone’s joking about what they’ll do next for him – perhaps a butler.”

Hamza, 51, jailed in 2006 for inciting hatred, had £650 lever taps put in his cell this year.

President Obama’s speech on what he is planning to do about the war in Afghanistan was the speech of a deeply committed radical with a mind soaked in the toxic ideology of the Left, challenged to explain to himself and his ideological comrades just why he was continuing to wage war in a Third World country in defiance of all their passionately held ideals.

Pity the man! What a task he was forced to set himself!

As president of the United States, addressing men serving in his country’s military, he had to present his decision to commit 30,000 more troops to the war as a move reflecting an unswerving appreciation of their willing sacrifice, a determination to win, and a passion for upholding the honor of the country he leads. In  none of this he believes, but he had to say he did. He had to come across as encouraging, dedicated to the cause, intent on achieving goals for which his audience were willing to give their lives. He had to sound sincere when he was not. As part of the act, but making his task even harder for himself, he chose to announce his new strategy for the war at the Military Academy at West Point, which Chris Matthews of MSNBC called, speaking for peaceniks of the left everywhere, the ‘enemy’s camp’.

At the same time he had to be true to his political faith, which is in absolute opposition to any war waged by the United States on or in a Third World country, especially against an Islamic movement. His speech had to signal to the pacifist faction of the American left, the whole of the international left, and to Muslims world-wide that he was in principle against the war, against all war, against America being militarily strong, against America being the mightiest power and the most successful capitalist country in the world.

No wonder it took him months to work out what to do and how to spin it. Did he succeed? Superficially, yes. The speech, amazingly, so well fulfills his contradictory needs that it could almost be called a masterpiece of equivocation. At least until it is scrutinized in detail. Then the irreconcilable bits show up all too plainly.

How did he do it?

Pick the speech apart and you can see how it was done. For instance, for the voters and the patriots, for the generals and the soldiers, for the fulfillment of the duties of his office – let’s put all of these into a category headed Patriots –  he says:

‘On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children …’

Then for the left revolutionaries, for the pacifists, for Islam, for America-haters, for the panel of Marxist advisers in his White House, for his dead communist father, his  hippy mother, his wife, his best friends, for his Marxist professors and mentors and benefactors, his pastors, his erstwhile Alinsky-team employers,  for his  terrorist associates, for ACORN and the SEIU, for his whole revolutionary base, and for Islam their ally – let’s put all these into a category headed the Left – he says:

‘… without regard to their faith or race or station.’

What could this mean?  What faiths or races or stations in life could have been regarded, taken into consideration, which would have qualified the evil of the act? We know the answers. If the only people to be hit had for certain been white, been captains of the ‘military-industrial complex’, been Christians and Jews, then the attack would have been more understandable, perhaps excusable, perhaps even justified. No, it isn’t said. But it is implied. What other meaning can be found in the words?

In paragraph after paragraph the pieces stand out as these for the Patriots, these  for the Left. (And there are a few that do for both, such as those strongly condemning al-Qaeda – safely enough since many Islamic states are fervently against it.)

First for the Patriots: He tells the soldiers that he has been very good to them; they really have nothing to complain about. He has ’signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars’; he has read the letters sent to him by ‘the parents and spouses of those who deployed’; he visited wounded warriors at Walter Reed; and he ‘traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place’. And here are more sops to Patriots: ‘A testament to the character of our men and women in uniform’; ‘thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance’; ‘as cadets you volunteered for service during the time of danger’; ‘as your commander in chief I owe you a mission that is clearly defined and worthy of your service’; ‘I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan’; ‘we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban’s momentum’; ‘to abandon this area now would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies’; ‘the struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly’; ‘it will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world’; ‘where al-Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships’; ‘we have to improve our intelligence so that we stay one step ahead of shadowy networks’; ‘our country has borne a special burden in global affairs’; we have spilled American blood in many countries’; ’we have not always been thanked for these efforts’; ‘more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades’; ’unlike the great powers of old,  we have not sought world domination’; ‘we do not seek to occupy other nations’; ‘we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom’; ‘men and women in uniform are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice that has made government of the people, by the people and for the people a reality on this Earth’.

Most of the rest of the speech is primarily to placate the Left and Islam. It would be tediously long to quote, so here’s a summary and interpretaion:  Al Qaeda  has ‘distorted and defiled Islam’; it has even attacked Muslims, for instance in Amman and Bali; our use of force in Afghanistan was fully sanctioned by both Congress and the UN’s international approval;  then we were distracted from pursuing it properly by  the unjustifiable, illegal war that Bush (not named but fully blamed) waged on Iraq;  although I am going to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, after 18 months all our troops will begin to come home; after that we’ll keep a kindly eye on the progress the Afghans make in becoming a country that is not corrupt, holds elections without fraud, and grows something more desirable than opium;  we must exercise restraint in the use of military force; in any case we cannot afford to wage war because we have an economic crisis and what resources we have must be used to change America to you-know-what; I don’t really like bothering with foreign affairs at all very much, but since I  have to let me remind you that we’ve got other tasks to do in the world, for instance in ‘disorderly regions’ (such as, not needing to be named to those who know, the Middle East); we’d rather negotiate peace than fight for it, even with the Taliban; but if the Taliban has to be fought let Pakistan do the fighting, we’ll pay them to do it; I am pursuing the goal of a world without nuclear weapons; I’ve prohibited torture; I’ll close the prison at Guantanamo Bay; I’ll speak out for human rights everywhere in the world (okay, not in China, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia, or … No, he doesn’t imply this, it just happens to be the case.)

But he fears he might not have pleased both sides after all. He anticipates disagreement and rebukes it:

‘This vast and diverse citizenry will not always agree on every issue — nor should we. But I also know that we, as a country, cannot sustain our leadership nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse.’

He ends with a series of grandiose but entirely empty rhetorical flourishes designed to elicit applause, which they did as a mater of courtesy and custom, though most of the speech was listened to without it. No wonder. It was a self-serving exercise, not improved by the flattery bestowed on the audience.

‘America, we are passing through a time of great trial. And the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear: that our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might, and with the commitment to forge an America that is safer, a world that is more secure, and a future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes. …’

Are the Patriots deceived? Is the Left placated and are Muslims appeased?  It remains  to be seen.

Jillian Becker  December 2, 2009