This from Oliver North:

The storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the brutal murders of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, produced chaos this week in the so-called mainstream media. Instead of asking about how the heck this could happen in the aftermath of the Obama administration’s Arab Spring euphoria, “reporters” started looking for scapegoats.

The potentates of the press first focused their ire on something few of them even had seen — a puerile Internet video titled “Innocence of Muslims” — and then they turned their guns on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. As usual, the O-Team’s media cheerleaders got it all wrong.

As Americans in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania participated in solemn ceremonies honoring our nearly 3,000 countrymen killed in the terror attacks 11 years ago, angry crowds were gathering around our embassy in Cairo. The U.S. Embassy responded by issuing an apologetic statement condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Instead of defusing the situation, the crowd swelled and stormed the embassy, tore down the U.S. flag and replaced it with a radical Islamic banner.

Truncating, as they say…

Gutting our defense budget, Obama’s “apologetic diplomacy,” kowtowing to foreign potentates, abandoning our ally Israel, delaying the installation of ballistic missile defenses and “leading from behind” have not worked. Nor have “harsh sanctions against Iran” deterred the ayatollahs in Tehran from the race to acquire nuclear weapons.

It’s now up to the Romney campaign to explain how he would do better. He has six weeks to do it. That’s no surprise.

C’mon, Romney, let’s please, please hear it!

The entire column by our favorite former U.S. Marine is here.

From The Investigative Project On Terrorism:

Anti-American violence throughout the Muslim world, ostensibly over a cheap Internet film denigrating the Muslim prophet Muhammad, may be misguided, but it’s a result of “the lack of dignity, the lack of respect that they’re being shown.” And it’s up to America to change policies to calm things.

That’s right. We’ll just scrap the First Amendment altogether and get with the program, because this heinous offending of the Religion of Peace has got to stop.

McGoldrick could have told his Iranian network interviewer that such a perception is not only wrong, but dangerous. He could have pointed out that Muslims in America, especially Shia, are freer to practice their faith than in most Sunni Muslim nations.

But he didn’t. Instead, he raised doubt over the most fundamental American freedom.

Americans enjoy “allegedly a freedom of speech, a freedom of expression –political expression and religious expression,” he explained. “And of course, that comes with it some rights, but also, of course, some responsibilities.”

The recent violence, including the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, might have be seen as “the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of Muslims’ patience with American and Western intervention,” McGoldrick said.

That puts the onus on the United States “to very critically think about how much more weight will we put on the Muslim world? How many more attacks? How many more drone strikes? How many more coups … until we realize that we need to take a principled stand, and a just stand, to make sure that we respect human rights, sovereignty and dignity all over the world.”

respect human rights, sovereignty and dignity — meaning kowtow to Islam, never, ever tell the truth about that “religion” unless it is pure positive hype.

Right.

That being the Mohammedan attacks on everything U.S. in various Mideast countries in response to a video that — surprise, surprise — offended Islam like so many things do. They are, after all, the “Religion of Peace”.

A novelist I read pointed out in one of his books that technically, peaceful, moderate Muslims are the ones who are not embracing Islam according to Mohammed’s directives (see the 9th Sura, or chapter, of the Unholy Koran, which orders all good Muslims to kill or subjugate all infidels), and that were Mo to return today, he’d be lopping off millions of heads, as a result, of “moderate” Muslims.

That said, what really takes a front row perspective is the response of the Obama Administration to the anti-American violence taking place the last few days as the result of a film made by a private citizen that, Allah forbid, has once again offended Islam.

From Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson, in an interview with Sun News.

Host: “Now this latest wave of violence in the Middle East has brought intense focus on American foreign policy. In fact that very topic seems to have supereceded the economy as the biggest issue in the presidential election, at least for now. Election issued aside, how the President handles this latest crisis is a topic for much debate. For more o0n this we’re joined via Skype by Steven Emerson. Steven is the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Thanks for taking time to speak to us today Steven.”

Emerson: “Good morning or good afternoon, whatever time it is up there. ”

Host: “Well it’s both actually. It’s the middle of the day so we’ll call it both. First question I guess, what do you think of the Obama administration’s reaction to the attacks and the internet video?”

Emerson: “Well I’m going to be perfectly honest. I thought it was the lowest point in his career and I was embarrassed by what they said. First of all the initial response was they condemned outrageously this video and to apologize for it when it wasn’t the US government that produced it; it was a private US citizen. Number two the second statement that was made by Secretary Clinton was almost like a regret that we had the First Amendment. And third, the fact that the President actually contacted Google to take it down betrays the whole bedrock of Western civilization, free speech. So the problem here is that we acted as if we did something wrong, the US government, and two we reacted as if free speech was a curse that we should try to limit. That’s why I thought that the response was craven, we should have stood up for free speech, and I think it also reflects on the fact that the new Arab Spring was intended to basically show that democracy in the Muslim world would allow new movements to emerge and use politics as a way of expressing themselves democratically. What it turns out is that they’re using it to basically impose autocratic or totalitarian rules. That is, they insist that free speech should not be allowed in the US and that criticism of Islam should be actually criminalized.”

Read the rest.

Emerson’s response is spot-on.

The First Amendment endorsed right of a private citizen to express his or her opinion, whether anyone else finds it offensive or not, is nonetheless a right, and as the government belongs to the people rather than the other way around, an individual’s expressed opinion is not the intellectual property of the government or, for that matter, the rest of the country, it is just that: An individual’s opinion.

So where does the Obama Administration get off apologizing on behalf of our entire country for the film made by one private citizen?

Where do they get off using Federal Law Enforcement to run the film maker down and the justice system to pursue ways to “get him”, so to speak, on probation issues, in order to appease a whole bunch of violent animals who follow a satanic cult mistakenly referred to as a religion?

From Wes Pruden:

Free speech takes a licking

President Obama and his men (and particularly his women) are having a tough time standing upright in the fierce wind blowing from the east. The troops are leaderless and the leader is rudderless. Their strategy, unique in American history, is making a wish for the barbarians to be nice.

The news from Libya gets darker, and the worst of the bad news for the president is that if everybody at the White House is “on message” it’s because everyone gets to make up his (or her) own message for nobody to believe.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who obviously needs a good night’s sleep, got in a war of adjectives with some of the caliphs of the Arabian knights. She fired the first volley of adjectives at the infamous video about the Prophet Mohammed, which the White House, against all available evidence, insists is the sole cause of the deadly riots. The video is “disgusting and reprehensible,” she said, “and it appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and provoke rage.”

SNIP!

The White House keynote of distraction was sounded first by Jay Carney, the president’s press agent, when he insisted the riots were not aimed at his boss, the government, or even at “the American people,” but only at the video. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., sounded even sillier when she insisted the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi was not planned and organized as a deliberate assault on America and its diplomats, but was a “spontaneous” happening against the movie. In her telling, it was probably a bunch of guys in Benghazi, loitering on the corner talking about the what was under the chadors the girls wore, and just happened upon a cache of automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, and when one of the good ol’ boys suggested they attack the American consulate from three directions, they thought, well, why not? Guys, you know, like, will be guys.

The Libyan government’s insistence that the riots were not spontaneous, but highly organized and led by outsiders from Yemen and Mali, sounds like special pleading – blaming outsiders is always tempting for governments under siege. But it comports with what everyone so far knows.

If the president wants to find someone to blame, he should look at the face in his mirror. He imagined that a few honeyed words would make the Islamic world love him (and maybe even tolerate the rest of us) merely by making goo-goo eyes at those who want to kill us. We’ve had three years of goo-goo and the Muslim red-hots are still killing American soldiers, occasional civilians and selected diplomats.

Now the government is playing movie critic. The video is not likely to win an Oscar this or any other year, but criticizing the religious faith of others, and not just the faith of Christians and Jews, is well within what Hillary Clinton calls “the outer limits of free speech.” Apologizing, whether by word or deed, for America is asking for trouble. Nobody does apology for America better than Barack Obama, but now we see what he gets for it, even if he doesn’t.

Well said.

As we observed in an earlier post here at Hard Astarboard and as others have said before, the problems posed by so-called “militant Islam” (which part, if the Koran is to be believed, is not militant?) aren’t new, are not even rooted in our lifetimes or even in recent centuries. The violence that began under Jimmy Carter, intensified under Clinton and now flourishes during the watch of Barack Hussein Obama, despite what liberals and other collaborationists would have us believe, is not in response to anything America or the west has done in recent years, that is all an excuse intended to force us, through political correctness, to cede ground, as it were, to the Islamofascists so they can press an attack, with more and more impunity, that has been incubating since The Great Pedophile…

…

Was Mohammed a pedophile?

The literature “Sahih Al-Bukhari” comes in nine volumes and contains thousands of Hadiths describing Mohammed’s life. It talks about “Aisha” the girl in Volumes 5 and 7. Since taking a child bride was so unusual, it seems Mohammed claimed Allah had spoken to him in order to overcome the strong protests of the child’s father. Thus, the marriage ceremony occurred when the girl was 6 and finalized through intercourse when she was nine.

…walked the earth centuries ago, not since any American or European made any remark or performed any action “offensive to Islam” anytime in the last 1500 years.

Islamophobia, right.

It must be a nice surprise when, in the course of trying to subjugate a strong country, you find their leader to be sympathetic to your cause.

That is, referring to a vote for Gingrich being a vote for Obama or, as she has titled her latest column, Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt

To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning. They denounce Mitt Romney as a candidate being pushed on them by “the Establishment” — with “the Establishment” defined as anyone who supports Romney or doesn’t support Newt.

Gingrich may have spent his entire life in Washington and be so much of an insider that, as Jon Stewart says, “when Washington gets its prostate checked, it tickles [Newt],” but he is deemed the rebellious outsider challenging “the Establishment” — because, again, “the Establishment” is anyone who opposes Newt.

This is the sort of circular reasoning one normally associates with Democrats, people whom small-town pharmacists refer to as “drug seekers.”

Anyway, read the rest of her column.

On another, unrelated matter:

A prominent group of Muslim advocates is calling for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and his chief spokesman’s resignations over what they allege was an “attempted cover-up” of Kelly’s participation in an anti-Islamic video.

In a story posted late Tuesday, the New York Times quoted Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne saying that Kelly had indeed participated in the filming of “The Third Jihad,” on Browne’s recommendation.

The admission came a day after Browne told the paper that clips of Kelly in the video had been lifted from an old interview and that he had not cooperated with the controversial film, which was reportedly shown “on a continuous loop” to nearly 1,500 police recruits without Kelly’s knowledge.

Kelly’s role and the apparent reversal have left Muslim advocates fuming, following a year of increasingly strained relations.

“We’re at a breaking point,” said Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY), which is expected to call for Kelly and Browne’s resignation Thursday morning.

“For the Police Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne to be caught taking part in and helping in the production of an anti-Muslim propaganda film is just so mind-boggling that there really cannot be anything short for resignation,” he said, adding that had the film portrayed any other ethnic group, “heads would be rolling.”

Nermeen Arastu, a staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and a member of MACLC has called on the NYPD to retrain all of the officers who watched the film.

The latest incident comes after a year of growing tension between the NYPD and Muslim community, fueled by a series of reports alleging that the NYPD has been involved in a comprehensive domestic surveillance program, targeting Muslims.

Browne told the Times that Kelly found The Third Jihad “objectionable” and said he “should not have agreed to the interview” with the filmmakers, whom he described as having been “part of an ‘Emmy-nominated ‘Dateline NBC’ team.”

The NYPD did not respond to questions about Kelly’s participation.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed police for exercising “terrible judgment” when they repeatedly played the film to new recruits.

A spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on Kelly’s involvement in the film Wednesday.

This looks to me like more of that same interference running muslims always do for terrorism. Anytime anyone speaks the truth about so-called “radical Islam”, there is a PC-related backlash from the usual suspects CAIR and other Islamic groups intended to make people afraid to tell the truth, on the theory that a population and its protective arms that are dumbed-down about the threat of Islamic terrorism remains more vulnerable to attacks than a well informed society.

It never fails to amaze me that, like our not-so-beloved liberals “progressives”, factions like those composed of or supporting malevolent Muslims of foreign origins can so easily get away, through proper intimidation, with censorship in America, a supposedly free country whose freedoms, it seems, only extend to those who wish to bring this great nation to her knees.

…the same tired blackmail, which of course is working, as always.

Without exception, every time anything happens anywhere that is “offensive to Islam”, Muslims everywhere immediately riot, burn property and murder innocent people, yet Islam promotes itself as a peaceful religion.

It seems to me that any religion whose believers respond to every insult or perceived gesture or act of disrespect with extreme violence is anything but peaceful, anything but capable of intelligent or semi-adult discourse (hell, their now predictable responses are not any different from the tantrums thrown by spoiled pre-adolescent children, except in the sense that people who have nothing to do with the matter at hand are killed or crippled, when they don’t get their way), anything but fit to exist among civilized human beings.

If a non-Muslim citizen threatens to indulge in criminal activity as a response to an insult or other slight, he or she is forcefully reminded that such behavior will result in prosecution and sentencing to prison. This does not apply, apparently, to “the faithful”.

The Cordoba House imam threatens, without threatening directly (the “penalty” is, of course, understood, as violence is an established standard of global Islamic response), that if his project does not go ahead as planned, in its close proximity to Ground Zero, murder and mayhem by peaceful Muslims worldwide.

General Petraeus, President O and others fear the same sort of backlash if that pastor in Florida burns Korans tomorrow.

Of course, it’s a violation of Muslims’ religious rights to prevent them from opening mosques here in America that preach death to infidels.

Meanwhile, possession of a Judeo-Christian Bible in Saudi Arabia is a crime punishable by imprisonment or worse, and woe be to anyone who dares try and build a church or synagogue there.

Burning American flags is also a popular pass-time in some Islamic countries, as is loudly and joyously celebrating the aftermath of successful terrorist attacks in western countries.

The way things are going, Islamofascists won’t have to use actual violence to deprive us of our right to worship as we believe or of our most basic liberties; They’ll only have to bully our politicians with threats of Muslim riots and other violence to obtain unconditional surrender.

As Erick Erickson of Red State fame puts it, you cannot win with these people.

Uh, sorry, couldn’t resist.

Well, speaking of Muslim countries…When you attempt, even if you happen to run the government, to keep the terrorist, stone age mentality, baby murdering, fanatical, fascistic, satanic Islamic fundamentalist factions from committing global acts of terror, you definitely have your job cut out for you.

Why?

Because you are an Islamic nation, and there are, therefore, a plentiful supply of Muslims in your country, who believe in doing things the Islamic way.

SAN’A, Yemen (AP) — Four suspected al Qaeda gunmen blasted their way into the intelligence headquarters of Yemen’s second largest city Saturday and freed several detainees in the group’s most spectacular operation since a U.S.-backed government crackdown began late last year.

The attack on the heavily protected security complex killed 11 and further bolstered U.S. concerns that Yemen’s weak central government may not be up to tackling an increasingly effective foe seemingly able to strike anywhere inside or outside the country.

“We were hit where we least expected it,” Yemeni Information Minister Hassan al-Lozy told the Al-Arabiya news channel. “This is a serious escalation from these terrorist elements.”

U.S. officials say insurgents, including Americans, are training in militant camps in Yemen’s vast lawless spaces and allying with powerful tribes opposed to the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

This is obviously a case of runaway Islam!

The fact that one of the most important security institutions in the country’s second largest city could be attacked reflects the state’s weakness, said analyst Mansour Hael, hinting that the attackers must have had inside help.

“The question to ask is how these attackers were able to infiltrate such a fortified security area. This raises a number of suspicions,” he said.

the attackers must have had inside help.

Ya’ think?

Islam, the Religion of Peace.©

Here’s another typical antic performed, in the name of Allah, no doubt, by a follower of The Religion of Peace©:

An al Qaeda-linked insurgent shot and killed his own father as he slept in his bed Friday for refusing to quit his job as an Iraqi interpreter for the U.S. military, police said, a rare deadly attack on a close family member over allegations of collaborating with the enemy.

The whole story.