Nothing like having a President who is completely unqualified to protect and defend us against our enemies. No, nothing like it.

…Bargisi isn’t sure yet what, if any, relationship the revolutionary toughs have with the Islamists. “It was organized by the jihadis, like Zawahiri’s brother. But that’s not who’s dominating the crowd right now. This Salafi guy I know comes over to fix stuff in my house. He’s a carpenter. He says, ‘Why care about this movie anyway? Have these people watched every movie ever made? I am quite sure this happens often. What’s new? America sucks, nothing new.’”

But to hear the media talk, it’s all Romney’s fault for talking out of turn. Melanie Phillips though, has another idea: what people are witnessing is a policy failure.

The Arab Winter has not brought forth democracy but unleashed anarchy and religious fanaticism, with Islamic mobs hitherto kept under control by Gaddafi and Mubarak now empowered, strengthened and rampaging out of control throughout the region.

We know who are the real guilty men here. Even now, Obama is stroking the enemies of the west while kicking its allies in the crutch. “Too busy” to see Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu when he comes to Washington later this month to beg for American help in preventing Iran from obtaining the nuclear weapons which it will use to achieve its declared aim of wiping Israel from the face of the earth, Obama will nevertheless meet Morsi, who has so far issued only qualified regret for the storming of the US embassy in Cairo, demanded that the US government take action against the maker of the anti-Islamic film — and who last spring released from an Egyptian prison Mohammed Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda’s current leader and who led the mob who stormed the Cairo embassy this week.

SNIP!

…But even NBC’s foreign correspondent in Egypt is scratching his head over an Obama pronouncement that Egypt is “not an ally or an enemy.”

I almost had to sit down when I heard that. For the last forty years, the United States has had two main allies in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the other ally in the Middle East being Israel. For the President to come out and say, well, he’s not exactly sure if Egypt is an ally any more but it’s not an enemy, that is a significant change in the perspective of Washington toward this country, the biggest country in the Arab world. It makes one wonder, well, was it worth it? Was it worth supporting the Arab Spring, supporting the demonstrations here in Tahrir Square, when now in Tahrir Square there are clashes going on behind me right in front of the US embassy?

That’s because Romney “shoots first and asks questions later.” But the NBC correspondent left out the best part. President Obama may not know who his allies are in the region at all. He’s pulled out of Iraq and refused to stand up to Iran. And the way things are going, it is increasingly unclear whether he’s sure that Israel — that other main ally in the region — is an “ally or enemy” either. The president has achieved the remarkable (possibly the historic) attainment of getting both the Islamic world and Israel mad at his policies. James Lewis at American Thinker tries to make sense of it.

In Egypt, Coptic Christian churches have been burned, and priests killed. Egyptian tanks — US-made main battle tanks — have been sent into the Sinai Desert near the Israeli border. Turkey is now run by a neo-Ottoman gang of thugs. Insanity is running amok again, and the New York Times can’t see anything wrong. But that’s the New York Times for you.

Obama has just publicly refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu while he is in our country attending the UN General Assembly. Too busy, says our hero. It’s too hard to schedule.

The Democratic Convention surrendered to American Muslims with an elaborate prayer meeting, while dropping God and Jerusalem from their official platform. American Jews are fast losing power and influence, and radical Muslims are bringing Shari’a to America. You can see it happening.

Most American Jews are still brain-locked, because they are liberals. Half of American Jews will still vote for Obama rather than admit they were wrong — disastrously wrong — about liberalism ever since the radicals took over in 1968.

Obama’s surrender signals are understood all over the world, except at home.

“Obama’s surrender signals are understood all over the world, except at home.” That is where Lewis gets it wrong. The surrender signals aren’t understood abroad either because the president is surrendering to everybody so indiscriminately that he’s got everyone confused. The very same chief executive who sends letters of condolence to the families of deceased SEALs with a form letter and an electric pen is engaged in the same promiscuous white-flag waving everywhere he goes. The message is: “To whom it may concern: I give up. I confess to Romney’s guilt and express regret for everything he has done in advance. Yours, the once-in-a-generation president.”

It’s not like such a “brilliant” scholar as himself, our president, isn’t aware that we’ve been at war with Islam since Jefferson’s time.

In March 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Upon inquiring “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury”, the ambassador replied:

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.

On the other hand, President Barack Hussein doesn’t seem to care much, one way or the other, if his lack of attendance at those pesky intelligence briefings POTUSes are expected to have daily is any indication.

How long had it been since President Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting in the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt and Libya? After all, our adversaries are known to use the anniversary of 9/11 to target the United States. According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.

Oh, wait a minute, that’s right! Campaigning to get reelected is definitely more important than some piddling duty like keeping the country and Americans abroad, including those serving U.S. (we, the people’s) interests overseas safe?

This is not to say, of course, that Misseur Obama doesn’t have his priorities straight in some areas.

The filmmaker of the anti-Islam film lives in the United States. If this is true, then why is our government tracking down any filmmaker for any reason? Let’s rehearse the First Amendment for our government officials:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In addition to protecting “the free exercise of religion,” even if it’s one religion criticizing another religion, the First Amendment also prohibits our national government from interfering with speech and the press.

Every day in America people attack worldviews they don’t agree with. Some do it with factual statements and reasoned argumentation, and others try to make their case with satire and ridicule. The First Amendment was put into place to protect people from tyrants who would use their power to prohibit speech that was critical of the way the governed.

SNIP!

There is nothing criminal in producing a film critical of Islam. The real criminals are the ones who killed four United States citizens on United States soil. Our embassies are an extension of the United States. If people attack an embassy, they attack the United States.

Not only has our government attacked the filmmaker but the media, who are protected by the First Amendment have also gotten into the act. For example,

“ABC journalist Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday compared the rioting and murder that followed Middle Eastern anger over an anti-Islamic movie to yelling ‘fire in a crowded theater.’ Regarding filmmaker Sam Bacile and the killing of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya, Amanpour derided, ‘So, now, one has to, really, try to figure out the extremists in this country and the extremists out there who are using this and whipping up hatred.’”

Crying “fire” in a crowded theater is not about inciting people to violence and rioting. No one’s going to shoot up the place if someone shouts “fire.” It’s the trampling that might take place as people race for the exits. The analogy is false.

Moving on, what about a general rehashment of the incumbent administration’s Middle East policy in general?

Obama’s Mideast Policy? What policy?

From Heritage’s The Foundry:

The breaking news keeps breaking when it comes to revelations surrounding the attacks and protests aimed at U.S. embassies going on throughout the Islamic world. Protests have spread to at least eight countries. Reports indicate that four people have been arrested relating to the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff there. That offers at least the promise of getting more information about the deliberate attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., government authorities identified the man behind the controversial film purported as the cause for the protests as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Californian with a shadowy past including many aliases and a criminal record.

Unlike a Brad Thor novel, however, we can’t just jump to the end of the story to find out what this all means for American policy in this troubled part of the world.

But (again, unlike a Brad Thor novel) without cheating we can predict how the story is going to end—because the result of the President’s Middle East policies was predictable from the start.

Obama’s strategy for this part of the world started out much the way Jimmy Carter’s did—with acts of conciliation and accommodation. The President narrowly focused his priorities on three objectives: 1) withdrawing from Iraq as quickly as possible; 2) engaging with Syria and Iran; and 3) transforming the U.S. into a neutral party—to negotiate peace between Palestine and Israel.

For starters, we know that all three of those objectives have met with abject failure.

Iraq was not only left a shaky state; it has become a shaky friend—defying U.S. requests to block Iranian flights that are rearming the Syrian military so they can kill more Syrian civilians.

After wasting three years of trying to find common ground with the totalitarian regimes in Syria and Iran, even the White House has acknowledged failure, calling for the government in Damascus to step down and asking for more sanctions on Tehran.

Finally, the peace process has collapsed—a blessing in disguise, because if Obama succeeded in creating a Palestinian state today, it would look an awful lot like the Syrian regime the rest of the region is trying to bring down—a corrupt state that oppresses its own people, a state sponsor of terrorism, and a tool of Iran.

The President’s policy, however, has been more than unsuccessful—the “Obama doctrine” has taken the cause of protecting U.S. interests in the region backward—because it relied on a self-imposed agenda of self-weakening. It included distancing the U.S. from Israel and playing politics with the U.S. defense budget—where even his own officials acknowledge that if the automatic cuts required under the Budget Control Act of 2011 go into effect, they will undermine the readiness and reduce the capabilities of the armed forces.

SNIP!

The breaking news keeps breaking when it comes to revelations surrounding the attacks and protests aimed at U.S. embassies going on throughout the Islamic world. Protests have spread to at least eight countries. Reports indicate that four people have been arrested relating to the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff there. That offers at least the promise of getting more information about the deliberate attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., government authorities identified the man behind the controversial film purported as the cause for the protests as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Californian with a shadowy past including many aliases and a criminal record.

Unlike a Brad Thor novel, however, we can’t just jump to the end of the story to find out what this all means for American policy in this troubled part of the world.

But (again, unlike a Brad Thor novel) without cheating we can predict how the story is going to end—because the result of the President’s Middle East policies was predictable from the start.

Obama’s strategy for this part of the world started out much the way Jimmy Carter’s did—with acts of conciliation and accommodation. The President narrowly focused his priorities on three objectives: 1) withdrawing from Iraq as quickly as possible; 2) engaging with Syria and Iran; and 3) transforming the U.S. into a neutral party—to negotiate peace between Palestine and Israel.

For starters, we know that all three of those objectives have met with abject failure.

Iraq was not only left a shaky state; it has become a shaky friend—defying U.S. requests to block Iranian flights that are rearming the Syrian military so they can kill more Syrian civilians.

After wasting three years of trying to find common ground with the totalitarian regimes in Syria and Iran, even the White House has acknowledged failure, calling for the government in Damascus to step down and asking for more sanctions on Tehran.

Finally, the peace process has collapsed—a blessing in disguise, because if Obama succeeded in creating a Palestinian state today, it would look an awful lot like the Syrian regime the rest of the region is trying to bring down—a corrupt state that oppresses its own people, a state sponsor of terrorism, and a tool of Iran.

The President’s policy, however, has been more than unsuccessful—the “Obama doctrine” has taken the cause of protecting U.S. interests in the region backward—because it relied on a self-imposed agenda of self-weakening. It included distancing the U.S. from Israel and playing politics with the U.S. defense budget—where even his own officials acknowledge that if the automatic cuts required under the Budget Control Act of 2011 go into effect, they will undermine the readiness and reduce the capabilities of the armed forces.

It’s time for a different course.

Read On…

Obama, our enemies’ best friend…

*********UPDATE***********

In the “Chickens Coming Home To Roost” Department, Obama’s Chamberlainian policies toward the Islamofascists seem to getting him/us exactly where such kow-towing always gets one when done with such people, as the Muslims show their true colors.

When, if ever, will this president learn?

Don’t blame me, that’s One News Now’s phrase, but it does fit, according to what we outside the boundaries of “progressive” ostrichity already know and what is described in this column by Peter Heck.

In Federalist #2, Founder John Jay addressed the dangers of foreign force and influence. In the course of the essay, he celebrated, “With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Jay understood that perhaps America’s greatest protection against the threat of foreign manipulation was our overriding sense of unity as a people.

That’s why Jay and the other Founders insisted that immigrants be willing to embrace and adopt our values and principles. George Washington wrote, “By an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendents, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”

Unfortunately, in the name of political correctness, we are trampling this very notion of unity in deference to the sacred cow of “diversity.” No clearer can this tragic reality be witnessed than in our developing societal embrace of Islam.

Well put. To truncate:

When Dr. Daniel Shayesteh (the former co-founder of the Islamic terror group Hezbollah) appeared on my radio program, I asked him whether true adherents to Islam could peacefully assimilate into American culture and embrace constitutional law and order. He responded, “It is impossible for a person who follows Mohammed and says, ‘I am a Muslim’ and follows the instruction of the Koran to align himself with other laws and cultural values. That’s impossible, because everything other than Islamic culture and principle is evil.”

That chilling admission should set off warning bells. Yet, despite this plainly stated position, Americans continue to suffer the foolishness of political correctness that tells us we should celebrate the growth of Islam here in America. Let me ask a hypothetical question: would you vote for someone who ran on the platform of obliterating U.S. sovereignty, discarding the U.S. Constitution, subjugating women, and executing homosexuals and executing?

The “chilling admission” hasn’t set off any warning bells with our PC politicians or the mainstream media.

What’s new? Nothing ever does, the result being that the citizens our politicians are supposed to serve are forced to weather tragedy after tragedy that could have been averted, such as the price we are now paying for their decades of ignoring the growth of illegal immigration in America.

The entire article.

From Wesley Pruden today,

Celebrating Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the most important holy day for Christians of all denominations, can be deadly in the Middle East. Reciting a Scripture or humming a hymn could cost your head in Saudi Arabia, and you could risk other highly valued body parts in the similarly benighted ninth-century neighborhoods abounding in the lands of caliphs, imams and ayatollahs.

Beheading is something of the national sport of Saudi Arabia, where the government has scheduled for Friday the gruesome ritual for a man, the father of five, accused of sorcery for “making predictions” in his native Lebanon. (Punditry can be risky there, too.)

Better to take your celebration to Israel, where the government will assist your visit. It’s the difference between Middle East and the cultural West, between the 8th and 21st centuries, between civilized and not-so-civilized. The Israeli guarantee of religious freedom, taken for granted in the nations of the West, is part of what invites hostility and belligerence from Israel’s neighbors.

Ah, yes. The sweet, sweet freedoms found in the Muslim world versus the liberty smothering, murderous, despotic aparthied of Israel. Right, Barack, Joe & Hillary?

Pilgrims proceed under protection today along the Via Dolorosa, believed to be the path that Christ took with His cross to the crucifixion at Calvary, and on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Many Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, believe Christ was buried on the site three days before the Resurrection. Christians and everyone else are welcome to join the procession. Unless a suicide bomber or other evil-doer slips through security, no one will be harmed. The Israeli government guarantees it.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1948, declares Israel to be a Jewish state, but further declares that the nation “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.” It’s a promise bereft of Jeffersonian eloquence, but it’s plain and to the point.

My emphasis there. Try and find anything like that on the “Arab street.”

Moshe Dayan, the defense minister who led the Israelis to victory in the Six-Day War, was clear about religious tolerance and protection in a radio broadcast the morning Jerusalem was captured. “This morning,” he said, “the Israel Defense Force liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour - and with added emphasis ‘at this hour’ - our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights.”

And in a column today from Carolyn Glick that is, as always, right to the point:

There is an element of irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office.

Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever. This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama’s White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist. Next, there was the somewhat anodyne — if substantively incorrect — written testimony by US Army General David Petreaus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations. In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petreaus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petreaus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally there is was the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Denis Ross of “dual loyalties.” Ross of course has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

Read the rest here.

The differences between Islam’s definition of “civilized” and the western interpretation of same are 180 degrees apart, and when you examine these differences from the point of view of even one iota of decency, the Muslims come out looking pretty evil while the rest of us emerge looking good.

Despite the glaring obviousness of this concept, Barack Hussein and his White House junta choose to attack Israel while all but worshipping the terrorist spawning fascism of Islam. No matter how they attempt to justify it, Obama, Biden and Clinton are profoundly transparent where the reality of their positions are concerned: They are wrongly supporting our enemies against our only true ally in the Middle East because they perceive Arab dictatorships and terrorism as being more in line with their own mindsets.

After all, the submission without quarter expected of a good Muslim is the same attitude they secretly wish they could provoke towards themselves among the American people, good facists that they are.

…on some of the content of my 9/11 post, there was an interesting article in U.S.A. Today* the other day regarding the differences of opinion as to how strong a threat the terrorist organization actually is, or remains to be.

In the eight years since the 9/11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has spent nearly the entire time focused on one enemy: al-Qaeda.

Thousands of terrorist operatives have been killed or captured. Terrorist safe havens and training grounds in Afghanistan where operatives were trained have been destroyed. Military forces largely have shattered al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who once closely managed al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations, have been driven into seclusion.

Now, Mueller and counterterrorism analysts are tracking the emergence of a new threat. Al-Qaeda has morphed into a fractured network of small terrorist franchises strewn across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Yemen, according to Senate testimony by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, a “jihadist battleground” is rising amid growing political upheaval and poverty. Blair says there are concerns that al-Qaeda could establish a “regional base of operations” in Yemen to train operatives and plot new attacks against the West.

Okay.

Al-Qaeda’s transformation raises an unsettling question: Does its splintering help make the USA and its Western allies safer, or does it complicate efforts to guard against terrorism?

“Yes, they retain the capability of striking overseas,” Mueller says in an interview, declining to specify whether the USA is vulnerable to such an attack. “They are still lethal.”

Although al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 command structure no longer exists, its smaller terror cells are freer to conceive and direct their own operations, making them increasingly unpredictable. Several analysts worried about a terror resurgence cite evidence that pieces of al-Qaeda are gathering strength in Yemen and Somalia. Yemen’s stability is especially crucial to U.S. interests because of its strategic location on the Arabian Peninsula, its access to critical shipping lanes and its vast border with the world’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia.

There is “growing concern that al-Qaeda will begin providing social and civil services to the people of Yemen on a scale that could challenge the Yemen government for allegiance,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst based at Princeton University.

This is not at all unheard of where sizeable Islamofascist guerilla organizations are concerned. As a prime example, look how Hamas perpetuated and strengthened its influence by becoming a political party among the “Palestinians”, and Hezbollah has done the same thing in Lebanon, ostensibly providing services and other positive social products that are either not delivered or are not delivered as well by official government.

If al-Qaeda and its affiliates expand in Yemen and other weakened states, he says, the “danger to the U.S. is quite great.”

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who oversaw the bureau’s Baghdad operations, says that “in one sense, you are safer because al-Qaeda no longer has that (pre-9/11) chain of command. On the other hand, al-Qaeda has become so decentralized, it can be harder to stop. … It’s like a dormant volcano.”

This is true — fragmented, without a central chain of command, al-Qaeda leaves no single chain to follow to any one nucleus of command. As I said in the 9/11 post, what we see now are what amount to a number of franchises. Basically autonymous franchises.

Other terrorism analysts, however, say government officials refuse to admit the threat al-Qaeda once posed largely has passed.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and prominent al-Qaeda analyst, citing his own analysis, which suggests that al-Qaeda’s capability to strike targets in the West is declining. “There is not much left of al-Qaeda except in the minds of those inside the (Washington) Beltway.”

Sure, and pigs might fly.

We still see the hand of al-Qaeda active in places like Indonesia (Jemaah Islamiyah, for example, led by a demon-on-earth called Noordin Mohammed Top) in which terrorist attacks, because of their remoteness on the globe in terms of “relevant” political hotspots, don’t get nearly the fanfare in the media that the same events taking place, say, in Britain, Spain or France would.

And of course when terrorists strike in Israel, the world media, the U.N. and the E.U. tend not to notice that anything’s amiss until the Israelis retaliate or otherwise defend themselves. But that’s another story entirely.

At any rate, these now splintered off, independent franchises merely make it harder for the good guys to focus on a single, tangible enemy entity.

Mueller says much of the danger now comes from a “genre” of hybrid groups spawned by the destruction of al-Qaeda safe havens. Separate groups, which share al-Qaeda’s philosophy of eliminating Western influence from Muslim areas, have been inspired by al-Qaeda.

Among those groups, Mueller says, is the Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which he says is responsible for last November’s attack in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen claimed responsibility for two strikes against the U.S. Embassy in Sana last year. One was a coordinated assault last September that killed 17 people, including the six attackers.

Remember, having not evolved along with the rest of mankind over the centuries, Islam still resides in the age when Mohammed cursed the earth with his satanic presence.

Fundamentalist Muslims live with a mindset totally alien to our own, one that countenances mass, cold blooded murder of men, women and children in the name of their so-called god (allah) and the martyrdom of their youth (never, of course, of the so-called “holy men” who preach martyrdom and/or send these naive fools out to die) in the performance of butchery of the innocent.

“These guys think in terms of decades and centuries,” says Phil Mudd, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch. “The challenge is whether you can keep the pressure on.

“It’s a shark’s mouth,” he says of al-Qaeda’s resiliency. “You have to keep taking the teeth out again and again. You can’t allow the teeth to rotate to the front.”

Well said!

Read the entire U.S.A. Today article here.

* U.S.A. Today does have its “moments”, and this is one of them.

Chuck here (the durn contributor drop-down menu’s still not working).

Knowing that Middle east affairs, especially those of concern to Israel, are also of concern to Seth, I thought I’d bring up three items from that region.

The first is in response to a column by the excellent Caroline Glick, titled Et tu, Netanyahu?, that comes as something of a shock, considering that Benjamin Netaniahu has always been a strong defender of Israel’s right to its status as the Jewish Homeland, and was expected to resist, without compunction, any attempts by the Obama Administration to engender anything less.

This week we discovered that we have been deceived. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s principled rejection of US President Barack Obama’s bigoted demand that Israel bar Jews from building new homes and expanding existing ones in Judea and Samaria does not reflect his actual policy.

Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Attias let the cat out of the bag. Attias said that the government has been barring Jews from building in the areas since it took office four months ago in the hopes that by preemptively capitulating to US demands, the US will treat Israel better.

And that’s not all. Today Netanyahu is reportedly working in earnest to reach a deal with the Obama administration that would formalize the government’s effective construction ban through 2010.

Netanyahu is set to finalize such a deal at his meeting with Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell in London next Wednesday.

Say what!?

Unfortunately, far from treating Israel better as a result of Netanyahu’s willingness to capitulate on the fundamental right of Jews to live and build homes in the land of Israel, the Obama administration is planning to pocket Israel’s concession and then up the ante. Administration officials have stated that their next move will be to set a date for a new international Middle East peace conference that Obama will chair. There, Israel will be isolated and relentlessly attacked as the US, the Arabs, the Europeans, the UN and the Russians all gang up on our representatives and demand that Israel accept the so-called “Arab peace plan.”

That deceptively named plan, which Obama has all but adopted as his own, involves Israel committing national suicide in exchange for nothing. The Arab plan — formerly the “Saudi Plan,” and before that, the Tom Friedman “stick it to Israel ‘peace’ plan” — calls for Israel to retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It also involves Israel agreeing to cease being a Jewish state by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as citizens within its truncated borders. The day an Israeli government accepts the plan - which again will form the basis of the Obama “peace” conference” — is the day that the State of Israel signs its own death warrant.

What the hell is the Israeli prime minister thinking? Has he caught Livni/Olmert Syndrome? How do you say “lemming” in Hebrew?

And if that’s not enough, well how about this?

Then there is the other Obama plan in the works. Obama also intends to host an international summit on nuclear security for March 2010. Arab states are already pushing for Israel’s nuclear program to be placed on the agenda. Together with Obama administration officials’ calls for Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — which would compel Israel to relinquish its purported nuclear arsenal — and their stated interest in having Israel sign the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty — which would arguably force Israel to allow international inspections of its nuclear facility in Dimona — Obama’s planned nuclear conclave will place Israel in an untenable position.

Meanwhile, Barack, Hillary & the gang continue to pussyfoot around a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran.

Moving on

Recognizing the Obama administration’s inherent and unprecedented hostility to Israel, Netanyahu sought to deflect its pressure by giving his speech at Bar Ilan University in June. There he gave his conditional acceptance of Obama’s most cherished foreign policy goal — the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland.

Netanyahu’s conditions — that the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; that they relinquish their demand that Israel accept millions of hostile Arabs as citizens under the so-called “right of return;” that the Palestinian state be a “demilitarized” state, and that Arab states normalize their relations with Israel were supposed to put a monkey wrench in Obama’s policy of pressuring Israel.

Since it is obvious that the Arabs do not accept these eminently reasonable conditions, Netanyahu presumed that Obama would be forced to stand down. What Netanyahu failed to take into consideration was the notion that Obama and the Arabs would not act in good faith — that they would pretend to accept at least some of his demands in order to force him to accept all of their demands, and so keep US pressure relentlessly focused on Israel. Unfortunately, this is precisely what has happened.

Ahead of Obama’s meeting Tuesday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Al Quds al Arabi, reported that Obama has accepted Netanyahu’s call for a demilitarized Palestinian state. Although Netanyahu is touting Obama’s new position as evidence of his own diplomatic prowess, the fact is that Obama’s new position is both disingenuous and meaningless.

Obama’s supposed support for a demilitarized Palestinian state is mendacious on two counts. First, Palestinian society is already one of the most militarized societies in the world. According to the World Bank, 43 percent of wages paid by the Palestinian Authority go to Palestinian militias. Since Obama has never called for any fundamental reordering of Palestinian society or for a reform of the PA’s budgetary priorities, it is obvious that he doesn’t have a problem with a militarized Palestinian state.

The second reason his statements in support for a demilitarized Palestinian state are not credible is because one of the central pillars of the Obama administration’s Palestinian policy is its involvement in training of the Fatah-led Palestinian army. US Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton is overseeing the training of this army in Jordan and pressuring Israel to expand its deployment in Judea and Samaria.

Like they say, “SNIP”

There is another way. It is being forged by the likes of Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon on the one hand and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee on the other.

Ya’alon argues that not capitulating to American pressure is a viable policy option forIsrael. There is no reason to reach an agreement with Mitchell on the administration’s bigoted demand that Jews not build in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. If the US wants to have a fight with Israel, a fight against American anti-Jewish discrimination is not a bad one for Israel to have.

Ya’alon’s argument was borne out by Huckabee’s visit this week to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Huckabee’s trip showed that the administration is not operating in a policy vacuum. There is plenty of strong American support for an Israeli government that would stand up to the administration on the Palestinian issue and Iran alike.

Netanyahu’s policies have taken a wrong turn. But Netanyahu is not Tzipi Livni or Ehud Olmert. He is neither an ideologue nor an opportunist. He understands why what he is doing is wrong. He just needs to be convinced that he has another option.

Must read the entire column (yeah, there’s quite a bit more in there).

Speaking of Iran, while this isn’t all that surprising, it’s not exactly something to be taken lightly.

Ahmad Vahidi, nominated Thursday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to serve as Iran’s defense minister, is a suspected international terrorist sought by Interpol in connection with a deadly 1994 attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina.

Mr. Vahidi, a former commander of the elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard known as the Quds Force, was one of 15 men and three women named to Cabinet posts by Mr. Ahmadinejad as he begins his second term in office. The choice is likely to further chill relations between Iran and the international community, especially Israel.

Interpol, the international police agency based in Lyon, France, placed Mr. Vahidi and four other Iranian officials on its most-wanted list in 2007 at the request of Argentine prosecutors, who say the men played a role in planning the July 1994 attack on the seven-story community center in Buenos Aires.

Obama’s friends, the Iranian government.

The bombing, which killed 85 people, is thought to have been carried out by members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia and political party with close links to Iran.

Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst on Iraq and Iran at the Congressional Research Service, said that Mr. Vahidi is also suspected of having played a role in a 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia known as Khobar Towers.

Mr. Vahidi is not the first prominent Iranian to be wanted in connection with terrorist attacks. Presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, a former revolutionary guard commander, was among the five Iranians identified by Interpol in 2007, as was former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

But Mr. Vahidi’s ascension to the high-profile post of defense minister suggests that Mr. Ahmadinejad will continue his policy of defiance toward the West.

Obama’s good friends, the Iranian government.

Lastly, there’s this Op-Ed in the Washington Post by Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.

We need fresh thinking if the Arab Peace Initiative is to have the impact it deserves on the crisis that needlessly impoverishes Palestinians and endangers Israel’s security.

This crisis is not a zero-sum game. For one side to win, the other does not have to lose.

The peace dividend for the entire Middle East is potentially immense. So why have we not gotten anywhere?

Our biggest mistake has been to assume that you can simply switch peace on like a light bulb. The reality is that peace is a process, contingent on a good idea but also requiring a great deal of campaigning — patiently and repeatedly targeting all relevant parties. This is where we as Arabs have not done enough to communicate directly with the people of Israel.

An Israeli might be forgiven for thinking that every Muslim voice is raised in hatred, because that is usually the only one he hears. Just as an Arab might be forgiven for thinking every Israeli wants the destruction of every Palestinian.

Essentially, we have not done a good enough job demonstrating to Israelis how our initiative can form part of a peace between equals in a troubled land holy to three great faiths. Others have been less reticent, recognizing that our success would threaten their vested interest in keeping Palestinians and Israelis at each other’s throats. They want victims to stay victims so they can be manipulated as proxies in a wider game for power. The rest of us — the overwhelming majority — have the opposite interest.

It is in our interest to speak up now for two reasons. First, we will all be safer once we drain the pool of antipathy in which hatemongers from both sides swim.

Second, peace will bring prosperity. Already, the six oil and gas nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council have grown into a powerful trillion-dollar market. Removing the ongoing threat of death and destruction would open the road to an era of enterprise, partnership and development on an even greater scale for the region at large.

That is the glittering prize for resolving the dilemma of justice for Palestine without injustice to Israel. Effectively, this is the meta-issue that defines and distorts the self-image of Arabs and diverts too much of our energies away from the political and economic development the region needs.

The wasted years of deadlock have conditioned Israelis to take on a fortress mentality that automatically casts all Palestinians as the enemy — and not as the ordinary, decent human beings they are.

Speaking out matters, but it is not enough. Our governments and all stakeholders also must be ready to carry out practical measures to help ease the day-to-day hardship of Palestinian lives.

The two communities in the Holy Land are not fated to be enemies. What can unite them tomorrow is potentially bigger than what divides them today.

Both sides need help from their friends, in the form of constructive engagement, to reach a just settlement.

What we don’t need is the continued reflexive rejection of any initiative that seeks to melt the ice. Consider the response so far to the Arab peace plan, pioneered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. This initiative is a genuine effort to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in return for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territory and a fair resolution of the plight of the Palestinians, far too many of whom live in refugee camps in deplorable conditions.

We must stop the small-minded waiting game in which each side refuses to budge until the other side makes the first move. We’ve got to be bigger than that. All sides need to take simultaneous, good-faith action if peace is to have a chance. A real, lasting peace requires comprehensive engagement and reconciliation at the human level. This will happen only if we address and settle the core issues dividing the Arab and the Israeli peoples, the first being the question of Palestine and occupied Arab lands. The fact that this has not yet happened helps to explain why the Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel are cold. They have not been comprehensive.

We should move toward real peace now by consulting and educating our people and by reaching out to the Israeli public to highlight the benefits of a genuine peace.

To be effective, we must acknowledge that, like people everywhere, the average Israeli’s primary window on the world is his or her local and national media. Our job, therefore, is to tell our story more directly to the Israeli people by getting the message out to their media, a message reflecting the hopes of the Arab mainstream that confirms peace as a strategic option and advocates the Arab Peace Initiative as a means to this end. Some conciliatory voices in reply from Israel would help speed the process.

Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.

Once we achieve peace, trade will follow. We can then create a “virtuous circle,” because trade will create its own momentum. By putting real money into people’s hands and giving them real power over their lives, trade will help ensure the durability of peace. The day-to-day experience would move minds and gradually build a relationship of trust and mutual interest, without which long-term peacemaking is impossible.

When stability pays, conflict becomes too costly. We must do more, now, to achieve peace.

The question is, is the crown prince truly sincere about finding a lasting, peaceful solution to the Israeli-Arab problem, or is this just more of the usual Arab hype?

…has Fitna, the Geert Wilders video, an absolute must-watch.

AOW, I salute you!

If ever a short-but-on-point video that was both really funny and a total “must watch” arrived in my in-box, it has got to be this one!

A major hat tip to Brenda.

…time on my hands, one thing I did to keep myself entertained was watch a lot of movies. One of them was Covert One: The Hades Factor.

I never saw it the “first time around”, as it were, and when I ran across it and saw that it was based (though loosely) on work by the late suspense/espionage novelist Robert Ludlum, I thought I’d buy it. So I did.

The premise of the film boiled down to Islamic terrorists smuggling a biological agent into the United States…by infecting themselves with it prior to entering the country, then coming into the U.S. before the symptoms became visible.

Had the bad guys been along the lines of, say, Nicholas Baader (though he reportedly, as did his girlfriend and co-terrorist Gudrun Enslin, hung himself in his prison cell at the end of things) most IRA types or the various and sundry terrorist groups in South America, I’d have done what I do with a lot of action films — let it go in one eye and out the other and enjoy the story and the action as intended, for its pure entertainment value.

However, most western fanatics plan and execute their operations with the intention of surviving them. They will place their explosive devices and then get out of Dodge before the big bang or they will open fire on their targets from safe vantage points and have their escape routes planned. They will kidnap and demand ransom or political concessions, or they will kidnap and murder. The ones with the brown curduroy pants, burgundy sweater vests and coke bottle glasses might email computer viruses to their “oppressors” while the eco-terrorists burn down peoples’ houses or hammer nails into trees so as to cause grave injury to loggers.

But they all have one thing in common: They don’t want to die in the course of “championing” their causes.

Islamic terrorists, however, thrive on the concept of murdering themselves along with the soft targets they specialize in killing.

The U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut over two decades ago. The scores of Muslims who strap on suicide vests in the name of Allah and walk into crowds, restaurants, hotel lobbies, board buses, etc and happily blow themselves up along with the people around them. The 9/11 hijackers, who knew long before that terrible day that when it arrived, they would be crashing airplanes into buildings.

Professionally, I’ve long considered the probability (as opposed to possibility) that al-Qaeda or affiliates thereof would one day lay hands on biological weapons. Looking at it from their point of view, a bio attack would be far more logistically feasible than one involving a suitcase nuke — radioactive materials are far more easily detected than are micro-organisms, and the technology used to address the former concern is abundantly deployed beyond, for obvious reasons, the radar of the mainstream media. The NYT would publish instantly, under the pretext of outrage that the jackbooted thugs of the Bush regime were invading the privacy and human rights of innocent Americans (including the children) by monitoring their radiation levels, or some such idiocy (liberals don’t pay much attention to the logic or intelligence employed in the course of their diatribes, they just spew whatever it is they spew and assume that those on the receiving end will perceive it as mature, sane and logical).

Back, however, to The Hades Factor.

Early on, the main character, played by Stephen Dorff (actually, to me the main character was Mira Sorvino’s, but that’s just me), an expert on biological warfare, is asked at a conference, as a speaker, if a bio attack is preventable, and he replies in the negative.

He is absolutely correct.

From Osama’s POV, while a mushroom cloud over Manhattan would be great PR, well, as a default scenario, millions of Americans writhing in the purest agony, emergency rooms overflowing and American cities and the commerce within paralyzed while the government scrambled helplessly and ineffectually to do something about it would be just fine. Hell, break open that bottle of non-alcoholic Piper-Hiedsieck and let’s party! C’mon, let’s get some good tunes playing in this damn cave, let’s dance! Eat hummus, be merry!

What’s to stop such an attack, once the bad guys get their hands on a bio agent, from happening? If a guy (or gal, for that matter) has no problem self-detonating anyway, why not simply become infected with an easily communicable virus and distribute it via the simple means of coming into contact with other people and infecting them as well? Ten family members alone would infect 30 or 40 people (spouses, children) who would in turn spread the bio agent to classmates, fellow PTA members, neighbors, employees at the grocery store, etc…

If there are a few hours or a couple of days before the symptoms become evident, the bearer of these grim tidings needs only pass through Customs and Immigration with a legitimate front. Yeah, yeah, there’s a terrorist watch list and all that. Right. They search Habib’s luggage and find nothing, because the national security threat is flowing through his veins or his lymphatic system or whatever.

Imagine 100 or so such terrorists entering this country as tourists, students or businessmen, deploying into all of our largest cities.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, I’m simply pointing out a very real, very grim reality.

The threat, however, doesn’t end with the above. Rather, it is enforced by our own legal system or, to be more precise, the liberal attorneys (think ACLU and that ilk) who are more concerned with defending the rights of our enemies than they are with protecting the very lives of Americans in America.

These cowardly folks of low degree simply assume that the government they assail will protect them from the disastrous results of their arguably treasonous lawsuits. Stupid idea. You don’t disable your protection and then expect to be protected.

To be blunt: Our most lethal and most immediate enemy consists almost homogeneously of Arab Muslims, and they demonstrated, on 9/11, that they are highly skilled at entering our country legally, studying the means of executing a terrorist attack against us in our own learning institutions and then carrying out their plan.

The Bush Administration has done a fantastic job of protecting the United States and those of us living here from terrorism for over six years, but…Dubya’s done so under artillery fire from the MSM, who have done all they could to undermine his efforts.

The long and short of it is that in order to at least attempt to prevent a bio attack, the administration (not only this one, but all those that follow until we’ve decisively beaten Islam in this war that our own government misnames “The War On Terror” –we are not at war with some guys in a cave, we are at war with a faschistic political system disguised as a religion) needs to become as tough, if not tougher, than the Israelis are when it comes to letting people fly into their country or even board one of their commercial airplanes.

Remember that old Bob Dylan line I quoted some time ago?

“And if my (thought) dreams could be seen

they’d probably put my head in a guillotine…”

Well, I know exactly where he was coming from….

…ah, yes, a four decades old, give or take a year, song recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

I suppose it’s not all that unusual for different cultures to perceive different meanings for the same old song titles, as is noted here.

A televised graduation ceremony at a Palestinian kindergarten in Gaza shows little boys dressed in black masks, camouflage fatigues, carrying toy guns, and waving green Hamas flags.

The children vow that their most “lofty aspiration” is death for the sake of Allah.

Not “I wanna be a doctor”, “I wanna be President”, “I wanna be an astronaut”, “I wanna be a truck driver, just like my dad”, as children might reply, in civilized societies, to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The boys shout, “Allah Akbar” (Allah is great).

“Who is your role model?” the boys are asked. “The Prophet,” they respond.

“What is your path?”

“Jihad,” they shout.

“What is your most lofty aspiration?”

“Death for the sake of Allah.”

And so many ignorant morons buy into the “Religion of Peace” bit, championing the bloody cause these people purport to represent in their aggressions against Israel? Last I heard, the Jews over there, like human beings in most parts of the world, raise their children to be productive and successful, have families of their own and continue the family line into the future.

These so-called “Palestinian” animals, on the other hand, raise their children to die at the earliest possible opportunity, and not even as soldiers, but as murderers who take innocent people with them.

And these evil pig-monsters call us the Great Satan?