Blog Page
President Obama is leading from behind once again. He has decided to participate in a new round of unconditional negotiations with Iran. He still remains under the illusion that, under the pressure of the very late in the day sanctions, Iran just needs a little more time to come to its senses at the bargaining table.
The European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Catherine Ashton, issued a statement on behalf of China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. accepting Iran’s invitation to resume talks on what Iran vaguely referred to as “various nuclear issues.”
Of course, there is only one nuclear issue that matters – Iran’s abandonment of its nuclear enrichment program aimed at achieving a nuclear arms capability. Iran’s history of lies, deception, interference with the work of United Nations inspectors and stalling tactics would indicate to anyone with his eyes open that negotiations with Iran at this juncture are not only useless, they will play right into Iran’s hands by helping them to run out the clock until they reach their goal.
Recall candidate Obama’s presidential campaign promise. He vowed to engage in “unconditional” negotiations with Iran. Nearly four years later, President Obama is still wearing rose-colored glasses.
During his March 7th press conference, Obama emphasized the negotiation route:
At this stage, it is my belief that we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically…And, as a consequence, we are going to continue to apply the pressure even as we provide a door for the Iranian regime to walk through where they could rejoin the community of nations by giving assurances to the international community that they’re meeting their obligations and they are not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
There is not a single shred of evidence to support Obama’s willingness to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt on anything. Indeed, the results of Obama’s failed “engagement” policy towards Iran have proven precisely the opposite. Obama bent over backwards from the very beginning of his administration to enter into the “unconditional” talks with the Iranian leaders that he had promised during his campaign. Most notably, he turned his back on Iranian dissidents in June 2009 so as not to offend the thugs running the Iranian regime.
What was the answer of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei? In 2010, Khamenei said:
The late Imam Khomeini never gave any concession and we, on behalf of the Iranian nation, will never give any concession.
Where is Iran today in its nuclear program compared with 2008? By December 2008, Iran had accumulated enough of the uranium isotope U-235, which fissions in first-generation nuclear weapons, to fuel one bomb according to a study cited by Iran Watch. Each year thereafter during Obama’s presidency, Iran added to its stockpile enough U-235 to build at least one additional bomb a year if it decided to “raise the level of U-235 in its low-enriched uranium stockpile (3.5 percent U-235) to weapon-grade (90 percent or more U-235).” By the end of November 2011, Iran is estimated to have had enough U-235 to fuel a fifth bomb if it wishes to proceed in that direction.
Obama seems to be counting on the hope that Iran will not make the leap from its increased nuclear enrichment capability to actually building bombs. He thinks that a combination of his charm offensive at the negotiating table and escalating sanctions will give Iran’s leaders pause. But the record indicates otherwise.
Iran is busy building facilities deep underground to hide what it is doing and to better protect them. It has refused unrestricted inspections by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose recent reports have raised alarming concerns about Iran’s nuclear weaponization ambitions.
“The Agency continues to have serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” the IAEA said in its latest quarterly report about Iran’s atomic activities.
At Natanz, the IAEA report said 52 cascades – each containing around 170 centrifuges – were now operating, up from 37 in November. At Fordow, Iran’s underground facility, almost 700 centrifuges are now refining uranium to a fissile concentration of 20 percent and preparations are under way to install many more, the IAEA report concluded. Iran had now produced nearly 110 kg of uranium enriched to 20 percent since early 2010, according to the IAEA report.
Back in September 2011, the IAEA reported that it was “increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations.” These included “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
In May 2011, the IAEA said it had evidence that Tehran has conducted work on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts say could be used for only one purpose, namely to set off a nuclear weapon.
President Obama is obviously aware of these facts. Yet he appears to ignore them. He has not insisted on even one confidence builder from Iran first, such as allowing the UN inspectors to examine all of its enrichment sites without restriction, before agreeing to more time-consuming, fruitless negotiations.
Even the logistics of setting up the talks will eat more time, all to Iran’s advantage. First, there will have to be preliminary discussions between European and Iranian diplomats to decide on details such as the location of the talks. That could take at least two weeks to complete. Then there will not be any formal negotiations begun before the New Year holiday in Iran this month, which pushes the starting date for the formal negotiations until the beginning of April at the earliest. And it goes on from there. During all this time, Obama will be trumpeting the opening of his “window of opportunity” for diplomacy to work.
While the window remains open we can virtually hear precious time ticking away and the whirring sound of Iran’s centrifuges.
On January 4, 2012 President Obama announced four unilateral appointments, citing the Recess Clause of the Constitution. These involved the appointment of the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, and appointees to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. Predictably, the Obama Justice Department ratified his abuse of his constitutional recess appointment power. In a legal memo dated January 6, 2012, Virginia A. Seitz, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the Senate’s “pro forma” sessions counted as recesses even though the Senate did not regard them as recesses. Why? Because the president says so.
The only real difference – there is now a Democrat occupying the White House.
Under the Constitution, as Seitz acknowledges, “[n]either House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.” (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 5, cl. 4 ). But Seitz tries to turn this provision around to her favor by arguing that, since the House prevented the Senate from adjourning for more than three days even if it wanted to, the president can help the Senate out and decide for himself that the Senate was really on an extended recess.
Seitz proceeds to take quotes out of context from the Daugherty opinion, which she uses to support her argument, such as the following:
"[T]he president has broad discretion to determine when there is a real and genuine recess making it impossible for him to receive the advice and consent of the Senate."
Such arguments are too weak to overcome the legislative branch’s sole constitutional authority to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings” (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 5, cl. 2). There is no authorization in the Constitution for the president to impose his own understanding of whether the pro forma sessions have the legal effect of interrupting a recess of the Senate for any purpose if the Senate has determined otherwise. There is only one express provision in the Constitution that gives the president the power to interfere with the legislative adjournment decision. Under Article II, § 3, the president “may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In other words, Obama had a constitutional remedy to resolve any differences between the House and the Senate on the length of adjournment and could have even set the length of adjournment for them. He chose not to do so. He did not use the one express constitutional recourse available to him to prevent an inter-house disagreement over legislative adjournment schedules from interfering with his executive recess appointment powers.
"
In other words, it does not matter to the Obama Justice Department that the Senate has demonstrated within the last month its ability to pass a major piece of legislation such as the payroll tax cut extension, pushed hard by Obama himself, during a pro forma session. Seitz, Obama’s assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, asserts that the president nevertheless still has the right to deem the Senate in recess for the purpose of making his unilateral appointments without even having formally requested Senate “advice and consent” during a pro-forma session by the same means used to pass the tax cut extension.
For three years, Barack Obama’s engagement policy with Islamists, most notably in Iran, has proven dangerous. The Iranian regime exploited Obama’s show of weakness by moving ahead aggressively with its nuclear weapon program. Now the Obama administration is doubling down on its disastrous engagement policy. It is serving as the midwife to the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and of Afghanistan by the Taliban. And there is a distressing link between the two.
A front page article in the New York Times on January 5th reported what has been obvious since Obama took office. The administration has sought to “forge close ties” with the Muslim Brotherhood – “an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.”
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and recently joined with the ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, for a meeting with top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, compared the Obama administration’s outreach to President Ronald Reagan’s arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. “The United States needs to deal with the new reality,” Senator Kerry said. “And it needs to step up its game.”
That is a ridiculous analogy. Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union, but never waivered from his belief that the Soviet Union was an evil empire whose ideology must be defeated. The Obama administration’s outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood is based on its mistaken belief that it has reformed in a way that brings it much closer to the Western model of a pluralistic party committed to individual freedoms.
To the contrary, when push comes to shove, the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the civil government in Egypt, by virtue of its parliamentary election victories, will mean the imposition of sharia law and jihad against infidels. Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact. Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start.
Jihad remains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s DNA. Its motto includes the words: “Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood’s new offices are emblazoned with its emblem of crossed swords.
The Obama administration’s ostensible rationale for engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood is that it is simply bowing to political reality. Based on the results of Egyptian parliamentary elections so far, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party looks set to play a dominant role in Egypt’s new parliament and in the civil government to which Obama administration officials are pressing Egypt’s military to hand over the reins of power. But, in fact, the Obama administration is not simply being reactive. It helped bring about what is now unfolding in Egypt by throwing Egyptian president Mubarak under the bus and lending its hand to legitimize the false image of the Muslim Brotherhood as some sort of alternative moderate advocate of peace, pluralistic democracy and freedom for all Egyptians.
At the same time, in order to find a face-saving way out of the quagmire in Afghanistan in which the Obama administration finds itself after escalating the war there while simultaneously announcing a timetable for withdrawal, the administration is pursuing talks with the Taliban. It is using an untrustworthy Muslim Brotherhood connection to do so.
According to a report appearing in the Indian newspaper Hindu, diplomatic sources have said that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has emerged as a key mediator in secret talks between the U.S. and the Taliban:
Mr. al-Qaradawi helped draw a road map for a deal between the Taliban and the United States, aimed at giving the superpower a face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan which is due to begin in 2014.
In return for the release of prisoners still held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, the lifting of United Nations sanctions on its leadership and its recognition as a legitimate political group, the Taliban was expected to agree to sever its links to transnational organisations like al-Qaeda, end violence and eventually share power with the Afghan government.
But what can the Taliban negotiators really deliver, even if it were serious in wanting to reach a peaceful settlement? There is no indication that these negotiators are in a position to turn over the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his inner circle, who harbored al Qaeda when the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan. Nor will they be able to diffuse the growing power of the new generation of Taliban commanders ideologically committed to al-Qaeda’s vision.
The Obama administration’s idea of negotiations is to consider releasing Taliban detainees who are likely to return to jihad against U.S. forces without even any commitment reported to date that the Taliban would return the U.S. soldier it kidnapped. The only concrete step the Taliban negotiators have reportedly agreed to undertake in the short term is to set up an office in Qatar for talks.
It’s bad enough that the Obama administration is even considering talks on such terms – a prescription for appeasement. The fact that the Obama administration is foolish enough to trust al-Qaradawi as an intermediary with the Taliban is mind-boggling. Have they not read what this jihadist has been preaching?
The Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader’s call for jihad extends not only to the conquest of Israel and the killing of Jews. It includes the conquest of Europe and beyond.
In 2003 al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa declaring that
Islam will return to Europe as a victorious conqueror after having been expelled twice. This time it will not be conquest by the sword, but by preaching and spreading [Islamic] ideology […] The future belongs to Islam […] The spread of Islam until it conquers the entire world and includes both East and West marks the beginning of the return of the Islamic Caliphate [.]
A 2009 State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks, quoted a sermon by al-Qaradawi in which he condemned Jews for spreading “corruption in the land” and called for “the revenge of Allah” upon them. And he didn’t spare the United States. He condemned the United States for acting “like a god in this world” and cautioned the U.S. and the West that “according to the law of Allah, they should collapse.”
Yet this is the man in whom the Obama administration places its trust to help mediate a peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Just as the Obama administration trusts al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide for the Muslim Brotherhood, to help it escape the mess in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has come to believe in the good intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood itself in how it plans to govern in Egypt.
Interestingly, President Obama himself, during his 2011 Super Bowl Day interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, wanted viewers to know he was concerned “there are strains of their [Muslim Brotherhood] ideology that are anti-U.S.” But he dodged the question whether the Muslim Brotherhood represented a threat to the U.S., saying that they were only “one faction in Egypt” that lacked majority support.
Despite that brief glimmer of Super Bowl Day reality about the Muslim Brotherhood coming from Obama himself, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said just a few days before Obama’s interview that any new Egyptian government “has to include a whole host of important non-secular actors that give Egypt a strong chance to continue to be [a] stable and reliable partner,” a remark most likely directed at U.S. support for the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in any future government.
In February 2011, U.S. director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood “pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera….. There is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.” However, his characterization of the Brotherhood as “largely secular” went a bit too far, even for the Obama administration.
In June 2011, well before the recent parliamentary elections, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the Obama administration’s decision to ignore the “anti-U.S.” strains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and engage them in concert with its policy to deal with “peaceful” organizations. She said that “We welcome, therefore, dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.”
Now, with the election results pointing towards a possible Muslim Brotherhood majority in the parliament, the Obama administration is throwing caution to the winds and wholeheartedly embracing the Muslim Brotherhood – “anti-U.S. strains” and all. It is willing to accept at face value assurances by Muslim Brotherhood officials that its lawmakers will reach out across the Egyptian political spectrum in order to build a modern democracy committed to the individual freedoms of all Egyptians.
The Obama administration evidently swallows the propaganda put out by the Muslim Brotherhood for the benefit of gullible Western governments and opinion leaders or does not care one way or the other whether it is true. For example, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party head, Mohamed Mursi, said that while his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated party uses “Islam as the basis of our party which means that our general framework is Islamic sharia,” they “don’t issue religious rules in individual cases.” Mursi also said that “All political forces and intellectuals in Egypt, regardless of their political and religious allegiances, will take part in writing the constitution.”
These are comforting words to the Obama administration, reinforced further by the Muslim Brotherhood agreement to an 11-clause declaration of principles known as the “Al-Azhar Document around the future of Egypt.” Al-Azhar is Egypt’s 1,000-year-old seat of Islamic scholarship, which Obama referred to as the “beacon of Islamic learning” during the 2009 speech he delivered there to the Muslim world. Muslim Brotherhood members attended Obama’s speech, by the way, at the invitation of the Obama administration.
The Al-Azhar Document is intended to serve as a guiding framework for the constituent assembly that will be in charge of drafting Egypt’s new constitution. This document, which was read on national television on June 20, 2011 by Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyib, purportedly commits Egypt’s intellectual, religious and civil political elite to establishing an open democratic society in Egypt that respects the right of “other divine religions’ followers to appeal to their religions in their personal issues.”
But there is a big catch. The Al-Azhar Document’s first clause stipulates that “the modern and democratic state” it has in mind would operate “in accordance with the true Islamic aspects.” It goes on to say that “Islamic jurisprudence is the main source for the legislation.”
True democracy, which respects the freedom of all its citizens, is inherently inconsistent with “Islamic jurisprudence” that is based on Islamist supremacy and sharia law. While the Al-Azhar Document pays lip service to granting some measure of freedom of expression, it does so only within the strict confines of Islamic principles and morals.
The Al-Azhar Document also envisions an expansive role for Al-Azhar itself. It is to be the institution Egyptians must refer to “in order to define the way in which the state relates to religion (taḥdīd ‘alāqat al-dawla bi’l-dīn) and to clarify the foundations of the correct siyāsa shar‘iyya that it is necessary to pursue.”
This will invest the unelected Al-Azhar Imam Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyib with significant power, since his institution will be arbiter of “the true Islamic aspects” governing Egypt going forward. Secularist writer Salah Elissa argues that “if new laws need the consent of al-Azhar, then that immediately means we are in a religious (not civil) state.” The power of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party in the new parliament will help ensure that al-Azhar’s decisions do not stray too far from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda.
Where does al-Azhar Imam Tayyib stand on core democratic freedoms such as freedom of expression? As one indication, he praised Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s landmark fatwa banning insults to early historical Islamic figures, particularly the first two Muslim caliphs and A’isha, child-wife of Prophet Muhammad.
Indeed, Tayyib admires the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah. “I hope relations between Iran and the Arab countries will improve, and the good neighbor policy as well as brotherly ties on the one hand and the fight against the common threat against Muslim nations on the other hand will improve these relations,” al-Tayyib said after meeting with Iranian and Hezbollah officials last July.
The Muslim Brotherhood leadership agrees with Tayyib. Kamal al-Halbavi, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, expressed gratitude to the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei for his support of the Egyptian revolution and said he hoped that Egypt would have a “good government, like the Iranian government, and a good president like Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is very brave.”
The Obama administration is trying to deceive the American people into thinking that Islamism – whether the Taliban or Muslim Brotherhood flavor – is anything other than our ideological enemy. The administration may not be able to stop either the Taliban or the Muslim Brotherhood from eventually taking control of Afghanistan and Egypt, respectively. But actively helping them along, as the administration is doing, recklessly jeopardizes the security of the American people and the cause of freedom everywhere.
President Obama Misleads the Public on Iran
Speaking from the lush Hawaiian venue of the Asia-Pacific economic summit, Obama falsely claimed during a televised news conference on November 13th that "we are in a much stronger position now than we were two or three years ago with respect to Iran."
The truth is precisely the opposite. Iran poses a graver and more immediate danger to world peace and security, and to the security of the U.S. homeland, than ever before. Iran is moving, virtually unimpeded, ever closer to developing a nuclear arms capability. Iran is also planning, or already building, at least one missile base in Venezuela, which will be equipped with medium-range missiles capable of reaching the United States mainland.
Moreover, Iran has announced that it will send its warships to establish a presence along the marine border with the eastern and southern coasts of the United States. Iranian Rear Adm. Seyed Mahmoud Mousavi said in July 2011 that its frigates and destroyers have been equipped with "surface-to-surface missiles."
Iran's sponsorship of terrorism and military reach have extended beyond the Middle East, including to the Western Hemisphere. Its Quds forces, along with Hezbollah cells, are using Venezuela as a base from which to expand their activities throughout Latin America and to form collaborations with drug cartels in Mexico, for the purpose of infiltrating the United States through its porous southern border. And let's not forget the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
All of these serious provocations are happening during Obama's watch. His appeasement policies, including his naive engagement-without-conditions approach to negotiating with Iran, have exacerbated the dangers.
Valuable time was lost as Obama continued his quixotic quest for unconditional talks with Iranian officials. And when there was a real opportunity for regime change during the Iranian "Green Movement" uprising against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent re-election in June 2009, Obama was AWOL.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations watchdog body dealing with nuclear power security, issued an alarming report last week with more detailed evidence than ever before that Iran is working toward developing a nuclear bomb capability. The report laid out information on the secretive Iranian program to enrich uranium, its development of a payload system to carry a nuclear weapon on a missile, and the computer modeling and testing of high explosives to trigger a nuclear device.
According to an ex-CIA agent, who had penetrated inside Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian regime "now has enough enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs." Other more conservative experts have said that Iran now has the capability to make weapon-grade uranium and build at least one atomic weapon within six months. Either way, we are clearly running out of time to stop Iran from becoming a full-fledged nuclear arms power.
What has been Obama's public response? More sanctions on top of the ones that have not stopped Iran's progress. Obama even lauded Russia and China for standing with the United States in support of the past ineffective sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council, and held out the hope for a continued unified approach to Iran.
"When I came into office, the world was divided and Iran was unified around its nuclear program," Obama said at his news conference. "We now have a situation where the world is united and Iran is isolated. And because of our diplomacy and our efforts, we have, by far, the strongest sanctions on Iran that we’ve ever seen. And China and Russia were critical to making that happen."
Referring to the Russian and Chinese presidents with whom he met at the Asia-Pacific summit, Obama said that he spoke with "President Medvedev, as well as President Hu, and all three of us entirely agree on the objective, which is making sure that Iran does not weaponize nuclear power and that we don’t trigger a nuclear arms race in the region. That’s in the interests of all of us."
What Obama failed to mention is that Russia in particular opposes any further sanctions or other punitive measures against Iran. In fact, Russia was angry that the IAEA report was even made public. A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry said that the report was “nothing but an intentional — and counterproductive — whipping up of emotions.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was quoted by Interfax as saying that any new sanctions "will be seen in the international community as an instrument for regime change in Tehran. That approach is unacceptable to us, and the Russian side does not intend to consider such proposals."
Russia and China, along with significant emerging countries like India, Brazil and South Africa, have complained that NATO misused the UN Security Council resolution authorizing military action to protect civilians in Libya as a pretext to force regime change in Libya. They are using that precedent as justification to oppose other Western initiatives in the Security Council against rogue regimes, including with respect to Syria as well as Iran.
Even if Medvedev were inclined to be cooperative with Obama at this point to bring more pressure to bear on Iran, which he is not, Medvedev will soon be replaced by the more hardline, bellicose Vladimir Putin.
Moreover, the Obama administration itself is reluctant to impose the one additional sanction that could have a real bite - cutting off Iran's central bank from the international financial system. Iran's central bank is the clearinghouse for much of its petroleum trade, which is the key driver of its economy. Cutting off Iran's central bank from the international financial system would effectively freeze much of its oil export market with crippling effects on Iran's economy. But fearing a spike in global oil prices that would likely result from such a cut-off and a potentially negative economic impact on U.S. allies which currently depend on imports of Iranian oil for which they make payments linked with the central bank, the Obama administration is unwilling to take the one bold step short of military action that could actually make a difference.
Obama did declare during his news conference that he was not taking any option off the table, presumably including the military option: "I have said repeatedly and I will say it today, we are not taking any options off the table, because it’s my firm belief that an Iran with a nuclear weapon would pose a security threat not only to the region but also to the United States."
What that warning means is hard to say. Hopefully, the Obama administration is using covert actions to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program in cooperation with Israel, such as the Stuxnet virus that slowed down, but did not cripple, Iran's nuclear enrichment program. Was last Sunday's explosion at a Revolutionary Guards arms depot, which killed at least seventeen members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards Corps including the architect of Iran’s missile program, General Hassan Moqaddam, an accident as Iran is claiming or was it an act of sabotage that may harbinger more such acts to come?
To what extent the Obama administration would provide support for an outright attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel or launch one itself is unclear, although it should be noted that the Obama administration has sold bunker-busting bombs to Israel. This is not to suggest that such an attack would be a good idea. It would be almost impossible to take out all of Iran's nuclear facilities and end its program entirely. Thus, the benefits of causing merely a further delay in Iran's weapons development would have to be weighed against the potential costs. As United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said, "You've got to be careful of unintended consequences here. It could have a serious impact in the region, and it could have a serious impact on U.S. forces in the region."
A naval blockade against Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would likely lead to counter-attacks on U.S. naval forces by Iran, disruptions of key oil transport routes and the unleashing of Hezbollah rockets against Israel and other targets. Again, the costs may outweigh the benefits unless a truly crippling blow could be assured against Iran's nuclear program.
However, a blockade to prevent the introduction of Iranian missiles or missile parts into Venezuela or other Latin American countries allied with Iran would send the kind of signal to Iran that President John F. Kennedy sent to the Soviet Union when he ordered a military "quarantine" of Cuba to prevent offensive weapons from being delivered to Cuba. If an overt military option is needed, this could be one that would show the U.S. means business and would be the easiest to carry out.
Perhaps Obama will surprise us and show the boldness he displayed in making the decision to take out Osama bin Laden. But his record to date on Iran is dismal. His pathetic attempt at his news conference to spin his record as placing us in "a much stronger position now than we were two or three years ago" is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.The U.N. House of Lies Fawns Over Abbas
In a fiery, no holds barred speech on September 23, 2011 to the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas presented Palestine’s formal application for full membership to the United Nations. Although he was speaking on the first day of fall, Abbas proclaimed that the “Palestinian Spring” had arrived, which he repeated to cheering crowds welcoming him home Sunday in the West Bank.
Holding up a copy of his letter requesting full UN membership, Abbas declared to the General Assembly:
“The time has come for my courageous and proud people after decades of displacement and colonial occupation and ceaseless suffering to live like other peoples of the earth free in a sovereign and independent homeland. Mr. President, I would like to inform you that before delivering this statement I, in my capacity as president of the state of Palestine, and chairman of the executive committee of Palestine Liberalization Organization, submitted to his excellency Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations an application for the admission of Palestine on the basis of the borders of June 4, 1967 with al Quds al Sharif [Jerusalem] as its capital as a full member of the United Nations. This is a copy of the application.”
Abbas received a rousing hero’s welcome as he stepped up to the same podium where the PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat had received a rousing welcome in 1974.
Abbas also received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his speech, as raucous cheers erupted from the gallery, where minutes before, a rambunctious standee got into a violent clash with UN security guards.
Little has changed at the United Nations between the Arafat and Abbas General Assembly speeches. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it during his own speech to the General Assembly following Abbas’s speech, the United Nations has become both a “house of lies” and a “theater of the absurd” in its obsession to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and to falsify the history of the Palestinians’ own self-inflicted wounds.
“Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel — the one true democracy in the Middle East,” said Netanyahu. “Well, this is an unfortunate part of the U.N. institution. It’s the — the theater of the absurd. It doesn’t only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles.”
Netanyahu’s speech did not receive the wild applause that Abbas’s speech had received just an hour or so before from Abbas’s fawning listeners. But, as the Israeli prime minister said, he was not aiming for applause lines. “Today I hope that the light of truth will shine, if only for a few minutes, in a hall that for too long has been a place of darkness for my country,” Netanyahu told his listeners. “So as Israel’s prime minister, I didn’t come here to win applause. I came here to speak the truth.”
Abbas, on the other hand, came to the United Nations to embed his lies even deeper into the fabric of the UN by using them as a foundation for pushing the Palestinians’ bid for full UN membership. “I do not believe that anyone with a shred of conscience can reject our application for a full membership in the United Nations and our admission as an independent state,” he shamelessly declared.
The truth is, however, that no one with “a shred of conscience” should have submitted an application for full membership in the United Nations as an independent state in the first place, while at the same time boasting of having aligned himself with the terrorist organization Hamas in a “reconciliation” government that would rule the new state.
Article 4 of the United Nations Charter states that membership is “open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.” Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter states that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
Abbas’s partner in a future new government, Hamas, has pledged in its own death-to-the-Jews charter – a pledge repeated by its leaders to this day – to destroy the UN member state of Israel. Yet in the “Declaration of the State of Palestine,” signed by Abbas in his self-anointed capacity of “President of the State of Palestine” and included in the UN membership application material, Abbas “solemnly” declared that “the State of Palestine is a peace-loving nation and that it accepts the obligations contained in the Charter of the United Nations and solemnly undertakes to fulfill them.”
Abbas’s declaration is neither solemn nor truthful. His application for membership in the UN cannot be accepted by anyone with “a shred of conscience” or a “shred” of familiarity with the United Nations Charter’s most fundamental of membership qualifications. However, instead of performing his duty to question the truthfulness of the application in light of the Hamas-Abbas partnership, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon immediately passed along Abbas’s application to the current president of the UN Security Council, the UN representative of the Hezbollah-dominated government of Lebanon. A closed-door Security Council consultation on the application was scheduled by Abbas’s Lebanese ally for September 26th.
In his General Assembly speech, Abbas blamed the failure to reach peace with the Israelis entirely on the “occupying power,” particularly on Israel’s settlement policy. He tried to portray a Palestinian leadership that had extended its hand in peace to Israel, only to have it cut off by the nasty Israeli “colonialists.”
Netanyahu responded that Israel had repeatedly offered the Palestinians virtually all of the territory they were seeking in the West Bank, but Israel was consistently rebuffed. He pointed out that the Palestinian negotiators had no interest in listening to Israel’s genuine security concerns. “The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace,” said Netanyahu.
The core problem is not the settlements, Netanyahu argued. In an effort to compensate for the amnesia pervading the General Assembly audience that had so loudly cheered Abbas, Netanyahu observed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had raged “for nearly half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank … The core of the conflict is not the settlements. The settlements are a result of the conflict.”
With history unambiguously on his side, Netanyahu made the case that the fundamental cause of the conflict was the Palestinians’ refusal, going back to Israeli independence in 1948, to “recognize a Jewish state” within any borders at all.
Abbas confirmed the correctness of Netanyahu’s diagnosis of the root cause of the conflict when the Palestinian leader referred in his speech to the original UN-approved creation of Israel within the pre-1967 lines as “al-Nakba” – “the catastrophe.” Abbas had also demonstrated his true feelings a few days earlier when he said that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 63 years. “He didn’t say from 1967; he said from 1948,” Netanyahu remarked.
Abbas Zaki, a Central Committee member of Abbas’s Fatah Party, filled in the blanks of Abbas’s General Assembly speech with the Palestinians’ true intentions during an interview that aired the same day on the Al-Jazeera network. “The settlement should be based upon the borders of June 4, 1967,” said Abbas Zaki. “When we say that the settlement should be based upon these borders, President [Abbas] understands, we understand, and everybody knows that the greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go.”
Abbas continues the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge the Jews’ right to a Jewish state in their historic homeland. He reflects the same rejectionism that led to the warning given by the secretary general of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, to Abba Eban on the eve of the UN’s original 1947 partition resolution: “The Arab world regards the Jews as invaders. It is going to fight you.”
Ironically, Abbas’s application to the UN for full membership refers several times to the UN’s November 21, 1947 partition General Assembly Resolution 181 as one of the primary legal bases for its application. Yet that resolution itself refers to “the territory of the Jewish State,” “Independent Arab and Jewish States,” and “the establishment of the independence of the Arab and Jewish States.” Part II of the resolution, which Abbas’s application referenced specifically as establishing the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and independence and the vision of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” contains separate sections describing the boundaries of an Arab state and of a Jewish state.
The two-faced Abbas has no problem citing Resolution 181 in order to justify obtaining his half of the partition resolution’s peace formula, which the Arabs had rejected at the time – an independent Arab state. But he refuses to acknowledge and accept the other part of the original two-state solution, a Jewish state….
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/26/the-united-nations-house-of-lies-fawns-over-abbas/#idc-container
Successful Palestine Statehood Vote Looms
The New York Times ran a banner front page headline on September 14, 2011 titled “U.S. Scrambles to Avert Palestinian Vote at U.N.”
The Times headline should have read, “The Obama Administration Scrambles to Avoid Its Own Self-Fulfilling Prophesy.”
Next week, the United Nations General Assembly will almost certainly approve an upgrade of the status of the Palestinian Authority from nonvoting “observer entity” to “observer state,” placing it on par with the Holy See. This will happen whether or not the Palestinians try for full UN member state status, which would first require approval by the Security Council.
President Obama has promised to veto such a Security Council resolution. However, the United States has only one vote in the General Assembly and cannot stop the General Assembly – packed with Palestinian supporters and Israel-bashers, including craven European countries – from granting observer state status to the Palestinians if they request it.
While a vote in the General Assembly alone would not confer full UN membership rights to a Palestinian state, it would open the door for the Palestinians to join various UN bodies and treaties. Of most concern to Israel, an observer state status might well allow the Palestinians to become a treaty member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and pursue claims there against Israel for alleged war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Although Israel is not itself a member of the ICC, the court could still take jurisdiction of such claims if they are alleged to have arisen within the territory of a Palestinian state that is an ICC member.
Outgoing U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell used the phrase “train wreck” in an interview last May to describe the upcoming UN vote.
Yet it was President Obama who helped set this train wreck in motion in a speech he delivered on September 23, 2010 to the UN General Assembly. In his speech, President Obama made a prediction that the Palestinians are now exploiting in support of their statehood bid. Obama declared to the UN General Assembly that “when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
As Reuters reported on September 7, 2011, President Obama’s words are being used by the Palestinians to make international recognition of their statehood a reality. “If he said it, he must have meant it,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said during a 36-second radio spot promoting the Palestinians’ upcoming statehood campaign at the United Nations. Although Obama administration officials have stressed that Obama was speaking aspirationally within the context of reaching a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Abbas has chosen to characterize Obama’s words to the General Assembly last year as an “Obama promise.”
“We are reminding [Obama] of what he said in the United Nations in 2010,” said Ahmad Zaki ElAreedi, director of Voice of Palestine radio.
President Obama’s terms for what he proclaimed in his 2010 UN speech would be “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine” would jeopardize Israel’s security.
From virtually the very beginning of his presidency, President Barack Obama has gone out of his way to push Israel into making unreasonable unilateral concessions. He demanded a freeze on all settlement building, including expansions of existing settlements. He validated the Palestinians’ bogus claims to East Jerusalem. And he threw Israel under the bus earlier this year with his irresponsible proposal that Israel negotiate borders with a new Palestinian state based on the indefensible pre-1967 lines, with some unspecified mutual land swaps.
Egypt’s UN ambassador, Maged Abdelaziz, explicitly linked President Obama’s “peace” proposal with “the efforts by the Palestinian leadership to garner the most possible number of recognitions of the state of Palestine on the borders of 1967, with those swaps.”
While expecting Israel to essentially return to pre-1967 conditions, Obama did not demand that the Palestinians simultaneously give up their “right of return” claim for millions of Palestinian refugees to relocate to the pre-1967 Israel territory, which would extinguish Israel’s identity as the world’s only homeland for the Jewish people. At the same time as demanding the “right of return” for Palestinians to pre-1967 Israel cities and towns, along with their own independent state, the Palestinians hypocritically do not want any Jews living anywhere in their independent state, according to the Palestinians’ ambassador to the United States. “I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” he said, in a two-faced remark that ignored the contrary consequences of implementing the Palestinians’ “right of return” demand.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has only lightly criticized the Palestinians’ plans to set up a so-called “unity government” backed by both Palestinian President Abbas, whose authority now extends only to the West Bank territory, and by the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas, which controls Gaza and refuses to recognize Israel.
In the meantime, those arguing for a General Assembly observer state vote now believe that it could be just the jolt that is needed to push the parties towards a final resolution of their differences. This may well be how the Obama administration tries to spin the General Assembly vote after the fact.
The problem with such specious reasoning – aside from the potential complications of opening the door to ICC involvement in a political territorial dispute – is that it puts the cart before the horse. A General Assembly vote recognizing Palestinian statehood will be on the Palestinians’ terms. It would ratify all of the Palestinians’ claims regarding the reversion to pre-1967 borders, East Jerusalem and the so-called “right of return.”
Instead of begging the Palestinians not to go forward with their plans for a UN vote on Palestinian statehood, the Obama administration should have been resolute from the beginning in pointing out publicly and repeatedly that the General Assembly cannot supplant the authority of the Security Council on the issue of recognizing a Palestinian state for any purpose. Security Council Resolution 242, which is still in force, calls on the parties to the conflict to negotiate a solution to create “secure and recognized boundaries.”
Article XII of the United Nations Charter clearly states that while the Security Council is “exercising in respect of any dispute or situation the functions assigned to it in the present Charter, the General Assembly shall not make any recommendation with regard to that dispute or situation unless the Security Council so requests.”
Security Council Resolution 242 sets forth how the path to resolution of the territorial dispute, which is a pre-requisite to Palestinian statehood, is to proceed.
Eugene V. Rostow (distinguished fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and former US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs), who was involved first-hand in the drafting of Resolution 242, explained the intent of the Security Council resolution this way:
Resolution 242, which as undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” is achieved.
In other words, international recognition of Palestinian statehood must come only after there is a “just and lasting” negotiated resolution between the parties of the territorial boundaries issue, not before it. Recognition of a Palestinian state with a government comprised of Hamas terrorists, who refuse to recognize Israel and call for it to be destroyed and replaced by an Islamic state covering all of historic “Palestine,” flies in the face of Security Council Resolution 242.
The General Assembly does not get to pre-empt the process the Security Council laid down pursuant to the Security Council’s powers under the UN Charter. The General Assembly has no legal authority to confer recognition of Palestinian statehood for any purpose based on the Palestinian definition of what the borders with Israel should be, unless first requested to do so by the Security Council.
President Obama will be coming to New York next week to address the UN General Assembly once again. Instead of repeating his bromides about peace and understanding that the Palestinians regularly ignore in practice, and instead of reiterating his call for more unilateral Israeli concessions, it would be so nice if the president told the General Assembly what they can do with their vote to recognize Palestinian statehood status. Obama, once the president of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor in Chicago, should reach into his legalese toolbox and tell the General Assembly unequivocally that their vote upgrading the Palestinians’ status to an observer state is void ab initio.
President Obama should also follow the lead of those in the U.S. Congress, who want to curtail aid to the Palestinian Authority if it presses forward with the statehood bid at the UN and cut funding to any UN agency that admits the Palestinians as a state with full voting privileges in that agency. Funding for General Assembly projects that target Israel should also be curtailed, including any funding that supports next week’s Durban III anti-Semitic “anti-racism” conference.
Of course, that is not likely to happen. Instead, expect to be treated to more of President Barack Obama’s empty rhetoric and continued pressure on Israel to make more concessions for a non-peace.
If President Obama is re-elected and no longer feels constrained by political considerations to worry about what Jewish voters will think of his stance towards Israel, we can also expect that by 2013, Palestine will be admitted as a full-fledged member state of the United Nations, with all rights and privileges, irrespective of the status of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. A Security Council resolution, approved by the United States, requiring Israel to abandon all West Bank territory and East Jerusalem or face potential economic and military consequences, will be likely to follow.
Free Gilad Schalit Now
A teenage Israeli soldier named Gilad Schalit was abducted from Israeli territory by Hamas terrorists on June 25, 2006. More than 1900 days later, Gilad – now 25 years old – is still in captivity. He is held incommunicado, denied even a single visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The last time that Gilad’s family heard from him was two years ago. His whereabouts today are unknown.
Holding Gilad Schalit hostage under such gruesome conditions is a war crime in blatant violation of international law.
On September 8, 2011 Gilad Schalit’s family members made a heartfelt appeal to the United Nations press corps to keep the story of Gilad’s inhumane captivity from being forgotten. “Not a minute goes by that we do not feel the terrible pain of separation from our son,” said Gilad’s father, Noam Schalit. “Not a minute goes by that we do not feel overwhelming anxiety about his well-being and fear for his life.”
On September 7th, Noam Schalit met with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. Ambassador Rice issued this statement following the meeting:
“I expressed to Mr. Shalit the solidarity of the United States with him and his family, and I reiterated our strongest condemnation of his son’s detention. As I have said repeatedly in the UN Security Council, Hamas must immediately and unconditionally release Gilad Shalit.”
Rice’s statement is good, as far as it goes. But she should have also singled out Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for criticism.
As far back as July 2006, Abbas said he was doing his utmost to secure the release of kidnapped Gilad Schalit. In April 2007, he promised that Gilad Schalit would be released “soon.” Now, in September 2011, the Schalit family’s request for a meeting with Palestinian UN representatives while the family members are in New York – sent through French UN mission channels – was denied without any explanation.
Palestinian President Abbas is either a liar or an increasingly irrelevant figurehead (or maybe a combination of both). His government won’t even extend the courtesy of allowing a visit of Palestinian UN representatives with the Schalit family, more than four years after Abbas’ empty promise that Gilad would be released “soon.”
There are two promises Abbas is intent on keeping. The first is to move forward with the agreement he signed with the Hamas terrorist organization to share power in a new Palestinian government. The second is to move forward with the Palestinian bid for recognition as a UN member state. “Whatever the pressures are,” Abbas said at his presidential compound in Ramallah on September 8th, “I think we are going to the UN . . . this month to submit our application for membership of the UN. When we are a state, we will be a state under occupation. . . and we will talk accordingly and negotiate accordingly.”
While a U.S. veto at the Security Council is expected to block the Palestinians’ bid for full UN member state status, they are likely to go to the General Assembly to obtain Observer State status on par with the Vatican, allowing them to join various UN agencies and treaties. Even if the Palestinians succeed in only obtaining an upgrade to an Observer State status, they are counting on the fact that they will then be permitted to sign and become a treaty member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would entitle them to bring trumped-up war crime and genocide charges against Israeli officials.
Ironically, as the Schalit family pointed out in a letter sent this month to UN member states, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court stipulates that the unlawful taking of hostages is a war crime and that “the ‘Elements of Crimes’ promulgated by the International Criminal Court make it clear that an integral element of such a war crime is the intentional use of a hostage for the purposes of extortion.”
If the Palestinians get their wish and become a state party to the ICC, they may find themselves on the receiving end of a prosecution for war crimes based on Gilad’s abduction and inhumane detention, as well as on the rocket attacks launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians.
It is an open legal question whether a General Assembly vote granting Palestine Observer State status would be enough to permit Palestine to join the ICC, however. United Nations legal officials have refused to respond to requests from reporters for clarification of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s discretion, if any, regarding his handling of documents that must be filed first with his office requesting that the Palestinian Observer State become party to the ICC’s Rome Statute. Must he immediately pass the documents on to the Court for review, or does he have the authority to delay their transmission to the ICC if he has reason to believe that there are defects in the documents?
Although rumors are circulating that Ban Ki-moon has requested an opinion on his authority from his legal staff, it will not make much difference at the end of the day. Ban Ki-moon would be under enormous political pressure to transmit the Palestinian documents immediately to the ICC for the ICC’s own review. Moreover, the Palestinians would undoubtedly end-run the UN Secretary General if they felt they were being stone-walled, and take their case in their new Observer State capacity directly to the ICC where they would expect a positive reception.
The Schalits’ letter to UN member states is an appeal to the world’s conscience – if there is such a thing. “We count on the heads of the United Nations member nations, as well as their respective ambassadors to raise their voices on behalf of Gilad – held illegally in dreadful captivity,” they wrote in their letter. They argue that the Palestinians lack the moral right to obtain any upgrade in their international status – in the United Nations, ICC or any other international forum – while they continue to detain Gilad in blatant violation of international law.
When asked if he would like to see a provision about his son included in any draft resolution on Palestine statehood, Noam Schalit replied that his “interlocutors” had promised to convey the issue to their capitals.
If the Schalit family’s reception by members of the UN press corps is any indication, they will have a tough time succeeding with their message. Although the family members made it clear that they were not speaking for the Israeli government, but only as private citizens on behalf of their loved one, several correspondents insisted on equating the plight of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails with Gilad’s captivity. These reporters questioned Gilad’s father why he would not show the same compassion for the families of these prisoners as he expects others to show for Gilad’s plight.
Noam Schalit handled the reporters’ moral equivalency argument in a calm and dignified manner. First, he did express compassion and said that he had tried in vain to make contact with affected Palestinian families. Second, he pointed out that at least 1000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody could have been released in exchange for the release of Gilad, but the Palestinians refused Israel’s offer. They preferred to hold Gilad as a bargaining chip to extract even more concessions. Third, while Hamas has refused access to Gilad by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and has allowed minimal contact with his family over the last five years, Israel provides the Red Cross with regular access to its prisoners. Moreover, family members of Palestinian prisoners are given access on at least a monthly basis.
The Palestinians’ imprisonment of Gilad Schalit for more than five years under inhumane conditions in clear violation of international law is yet another action that disqualifies them to join the community of nations without a final negotiated peace treaty with Israel. Abbas, who promised Gilad Schalit’s release more than four years ago, is as guilty as his governing partner Hamas for Gilad’s continued incommunicado imprisonment.
Free Gilad Now!
The Qaddafi and Assad Summer
In scenes reminiscent of the jubilation in Cairo's Tahrir Square when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, cheering Libyans, firing gunshots into the air, filled Tripoli's Green Square on Sunday August 21st to celebrate what they believed to be the downfall of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime. While the dictator himself remained elusive, the rebels claimed that they had two of his sons in custody.
It turns out that Qaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, thought to be under arrest, made a triumphant appearance instead at a hotel with foreign journalists. And the loyalists are fighting back, although retreating even from Qaddafi's fortress compound, which the rebels took over yesterday.
For more than five months, NATO forces have been pounding the Libyan regime's military forces, weaponry and facilities from the air. It has also been reported that, in contravention of the United Nations Security Council resolutions banning arms shipments to anyone in Libya and authorizing only air attacks to protect civilians, France has been supplying the rebels with arms while French and British special ops forces have been on the ground to clear out resistance to the rebels' final march into Tripoli. Alternatively, after the euphoria over Qaddafi’s downfall fades, competing tribes vying for power may descend into civil war... To be clear, international military intervention in Syria is not the answer. With Iran’s full financial, military and technical support, Assad knows that he is in a far stronger position to repel any attempt at international military intervention than the Qaddafi regime which, as previously mentioned, is not going quietly. We could also expect to see Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees living in Syria and Lebanon unleashed on Israel, as a diversionary tactic. Assad does not have to worry. He knows that Russia and China are watching his back at the UN Security Council, which would have to pass a resolution authorizing international military action to give the Obama administration and its NATO allies “legitimacy” to attack Assad’s regime. Moreover, even if there were international military intervention which ultimately leads to Assad’s overthrow, what then? A fundamentalist Sunni Islamist regime could emerge that retains Syria’s alliance with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, as well as with Sunni Hamas, for strategic and tactical reasons in opposition to the West, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps Syria’s increasing isolation amongst its fellow Arab countries, and Turkey’s reversal of its warming relations with Syria (and, by extension, Syria’s patrons in Iran) will be the best we can hope for, unless the powerful Syrian business class gets fed up enough with Assad to press for change in a more secular direction and is backed up by significant portions of the Syrian military. But that change will have to come from within, helped along by as much economic pressure as the West, the Arab Gulf nations and Turkey can muster.
Yet the Qaddafi regime - while pummeled and teetering on the verge of collapse - is not yet completely dead. But even assuming that the last chapter of the Qaddafi regime is very near its conclusion and Qaddafi does go down, the epilogue is not likely to be a happy one.
A power vacuum is being created that may well be filled by Islamist forces, who will not permit true democracy to take hold. In a sign of what may be coming, Part 1, Article 1 of the draft constitutional charter for the transitional state reads as follows: “Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia).” If the Islamists prevail and set up an Iranian-style theocracy, they will pose a far greater danger to the strategic interests of the West than Qaddafi has posed in recent years.
Meanwhile, during the same dog days of August that have seen the Libyan rebels enter Tripoli with victory so tantalizingly close, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have killed dozens more people on top of the 2000 or so already massacred, with the support of Iran and its terrorist arm Hezbollah. While agreeing to allow a UN humanitarian team to enter Syria, Assad’s forces shot dead three people in Homs during a visit by a UN humanitarian team on August 22nd.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/39727
Syria Guns Down Palestinians
In addition, Iran agreed to fund a new multi-million-dollar military base at Latakia airport on the Syrian coast. As reported by the Telegraph: "Teams of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers are to be stationed at Latakia on a permanent basis where they will co-ordinate the arms shipments with officials from Syria's Mukhabarat intelligence service." The arms are said to include machine guns, rockets and medium-range missiles. Now it turns out that the Iranian regime, which professes to be the Palestinians' biggest supporter, has been helping a dictator who is not only brutalizing his own citizens, but also the Palestinian refugees living in Syria in a camp not too far from where the new Iranian-funded military base will be located. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said: “We urge the Syrian authorities to stop the attack on the refugee camp immediately. It is unacceptable, we cannot accept it.” Iran's rulers are willing to sacrifice some Palestinian lives if it means propping up their ally Assad. They view the Syrian regime and Iran's terrorist arm Hezbollah as major instruments to help achieve their goal of destroying Israel...
Iran's Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said earlier this week that it is "the duty of all Muslims to help stabilize Syria against the destructive plots of America and Israel." He is echoing the opinion of Iran's supreme ruler Ayatolla Khamenei, who considers himself to be the representative of Allah on earth and the deputy of the last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi. Khameni declared last spring that the protesters in Syria were "God's enemies."
The thugs running Iran have carried out their "Muslim duty" by intervening on the side of their Syrian ally President Bashar al-Assad against "God's enemies." They have deployed snipers in Syria, for example, to support Assad's brutal crack-down against protesters, according to a former member of the regime's secret police. They have sent Assad's regime arms, riot control equipment, intelligence monitoring technical support, oil and personnel assistance from the Iranian Republican Guard. Khameni is also reported to have ordered the transfer of $9 billion in unconditional aid to prop up Assad's regime.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a Palestinian refugee camp near Latakia had been shelled from the sea. Several people were killed and thousands of Palestinian refugees fled or were forced to leave their living quarters. This was no accident. There was firing directly into the refugee camp. The Syrian authorities have to date refused the UN agency access to the camp where it is feared that wounded and elderly residents are stranded.
Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo called the targeting of Palestinians and Syrians "part of the crimes against humanity."
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/18/syria-guns-down-palestinians/
Exploiting the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the Islamists and their supporters are busy preparing a disinformation campaign to whitewash sharia law and Islamic ideology under the banner of a campaign they call "Prepare New York." The intent is to use the front of "interfaith" alliances with progressive groups in order to marginalize those who are trying to expose the truth about the Islamist agenda and to exploit the 9/11 anniversary for propaganda purposes. Prepare New York is following the blueprint laid out by the Muslim Brotherhood in its 1982 manifesto entitled Toward a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy, a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic Power on the earth.” To do this, the Muslim Brotherhood set out to "channel thought, education and action," to "influence centers of power both local and worldwide to the service of Islam", and to "work within various influential institutions and use them in the service of Islam." In a document entitled the Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America, written in 1987 and published in 1991, authored by the Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram, the work of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in America was described as "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." The method for "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within" would include developing "a mastery of the art of 'coalitions', the art of 'absorption' and the principles of 'cooperation.'" Prepare New York is a leading example. It describes itself as "a coalition of New York based interfaith organizations who have joined together to help create a city-wide climate that promotes healing and reconciliation in anticipation of the tenth anniversary of 9/11." Their website mentions such "Steering Committee Partners" as the Interfaith Center of New York, Intersections International, Odyssey Networks, and the Tanenbaum Center. Prepare New York was formed, its website says, "in part as a response to the national and international headlines surrounding last summer’s proposed Muslim Community Center in lower Manhattan. The purpose of the coalition is to shift the discussion from one of fear and mistrust targeting any belief or group to one that celebrates New York’s extraordinary diversity of religious freedom and expression." With such lofty goals and with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an array of prominent progressive Christian and Jewish groups supporting the mission of Prepare New York, how can anyone criticize it? It all sounds so warm and fuzzy until you look behind the facade and examine common threads amongst at least some of the coalition partners and you discover how they are really all about preparing to "channel thought, education and action" and to "work within various influential institutions and use them in the service of Islam." Let's start with the fact that one of Prepare New York's "Action Partners" is the unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council for American Islamic Relations. Then there are the connections of various Steering Committee Partners of Prepare New York to the Cordoba Initiative and to its founder, Imam Feisal Rauf. Rauf was the imam behind the Ground Zero Mosque project and a co-founder of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, an organization receiving funding from a number of leftist organizations and from foreign nations that are members of the Organization of Islamic Conference and whose objective is to promote a positive image of Islam to the American public. Rauf, who withdrew from direct involvement with the Ground Zero Mosque after a number of his controversial statements came to light, has praised Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a prominent Muslim scholar and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who supports the killing of Jews, the death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality, and the right under sharia law for Muslim husbands to beat their wives, as "a very, very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world." Intersections International, one of Prepare New York's Steering Committee Partners, lists Rauf as one of its "partners." Intersections International receives funding from Odyssey Networks, another Steering Committee Member which is also a direct funder of Prepare New York. Odyssey Networks includes as one of its members the American Society for Muslim Advancement and lists as one of its "personalities" none other than Feisal Rauf. Odyssey Networks features on its site a video in which "Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf shares his insights on immigrant rights in the USA in the context of Islam and other religions." It is listed as one of the Cordoba Initiative's supporting partners. Odyssey Networks' blog also published scathing criticisms of Congressman Peter King's congressional hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims. The Interfaith Center of New York, another Prepare New York Steering Committee member which boasts the word "interfaith" in its title, lists Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf as one of its Vice-Chairs and a donor. It too is listed as a supporting partner of the Cordoba Initiative. One of the key "Advisory Committee Partners" of the Prepare New York coalition is the Abraham Path Initiative. Contributors to the Abraham Path Initiative include the Saudi Arabian Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation. On the Board of Directors of the Abraham Initiative is Amir Mohammed Mahallati, former UN Ambassador from Iran who is said to have been one of the early moving forces behind the idea of another downtown mosque in New York. Mahallati also happened to have served on the Board of Directors of the Interfaith Center of New York where, as already noted, Rauf is one of the Vice Chairs. Recall that part of the Muslim Brotherhood's grand strategy, in its own words, is to "channel thought, education and action" and to "work within various influential institutions and use them in the service of Islam." This would include working with progressive organizations to the extent they serve the Islamists' purposes, such as George Soros' Open Society Foundations and One Nation, both of which are helping to fund Prepare New York. One Nation is not only helping to fund Prepare New York. It is putting out a totally whitewashed version of Islamic law on its website regarding such core issues as the treatment of women and religious tolerance. The One Nation website falsely claims that "the Islamic faith has historically upheld beliefs that respect women and their role in society, although these teachings have often been misrepresented and misinterpreted by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. When Islam first developed on the Arabian Peninsula 14 centuries ago, women and girls faced oppression in many forms. Women were denied basic human rights... With the introduction of Islam, women in the region gained many rights." As usual, the propagandists who try to make sharia law look benign rarely if ever deal with what sharia law actually says, as embodied in the Koran and the recorded sayings and deeds of Mohammed (the Sunna, consisting of the Hadith and the Sira) on which sharia law is based. The classic sharia law text, certified as accurate by the greatest Islamic scholars of today, is the Reliance of the Traveller, which contains the Koran and Sunna passages quoted in this article. Whatever One Nation or other Islamist propagandists claim about Islamic law that is inconsistent with these texts is evidence of their blatant deception. As to women, the Koran 4:34 says: "Allah has made men superior to women because men spend their wealth to support them. As for women whom you fear will rebel, admonish them first, and then send them to a separate bed, and then beat them." Hadith, Abu Dawud 11:2139-2142 says: "The Prophet ( peace be upon him ) said: 'A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.'" But aren't these texts so ancient that the respected Muslim scholars of today do not interpret literally? Since Imam Rauf has claimed that Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a Muslim scholar and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is "a very, very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world," why don't we see what he has to say about women's role under sharia law? This Islamic scholar said: "Because of his natural ability and his responsibility for providing for his family, the man is the head of the house and of the family. He is entitled to the obedience and cooperation of his wife, and accordingly it is not permissible for her to rebel against his authority, causing disruption." If the wife will not obey after the husband has tried to persuade her to end her rebelliousness, said Qaradawi," it is permissible for him to beat her lightly with his hands." Qaradawi does believe in equal rights for women in one sense - to participate in suicide bombings... http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/14/exploiting-the-911-tenth-anniversary/
Michele Bachman Is Right About The Founding Fathers
More importantly than whether John Quincy Adams was or was not one of the original Founding Fathers, Michele Bachman's defense of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers as anti-slavery is historically correct within the context of the times.
There would have been no Constitution or United States in the first place without some compromise with the Southern states that insisted on retaining their slaves. But the Founding Fathers who objected to the continuation of slavery, which included John Adams, Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin, managed to insert a date certain after which Congress could end the importation of slaves into the United States. The ultimate goal of abolishing the institution of slavery starts with cutting off the flow of outside sources for the replenishment of the exisitng slave population. The importation of slaves was outlawed by Congress in a bill that was signed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1808 - a slaveowner to be sure but also a Founding Father who tried to stop more slaves from being imported into the United States.
The representation of the slave states in the new House of Representatives was diluted through the "infamous" 3/5 clause of the Constitution. The South had tried to have it both ways - not allow their slaves to vote but nevertheless be counted fully in determining representation in the House. The 3/5 clause was intended to defeat the South's attempt to use the counting of its slaves to dominate Congress and maintain slavery permanently. None other than the former slave and one of the nation's greatest abolitionists Frederick Douglass recognized this fact.
In 1789, the fruit of the dilution of the South's power in the House was exemplified by the new Congress's passage of a reaffirmation of the Northwest Ordinance banning slavery in the newly organized territory that Virginia had ceded.
Benjamin Franklin was an abolitionist. For example. In 1787 he began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Two other Foounding Fathers - Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush - also joined this Society. He wanted the new Congress to abolish slavery right away but was unsuccessful in petitioning Congress to do just that.
However, while the Founding Fathers who opposed slavery could not instantly abolish it as some such as Franklin would have preferred, they set up mechanisms which would have gradually abolished it peacefully over time. The amendment process to the Constitution itself was one such mechanism that could have been used, particularly once the replenishment of slaves from future imports was cut off.
Tragically, it took the Civil War to finally end the scourge of slavery in the United States. Generations following the Founding Fathers didn't keep faith with their vision. But to call the Founding Fathers pro-slavery as the elite media and progressives today are trying to claim is a complete lie. Congratulations to Michele Bachman for sticking to her convictions and telling the truth.
The Merchant Ships of Hamas Propaganda
The pro-Hamas flotilla of international ships planning to defy Israel's lawful naval blockade of Gaza is getting underway, despite some delays caused by insurance and mechanical problems. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was spot on when he told Israel Radio that the so-called Freedom Flotilla II participants are nothing more than "terror activists, seeking to create provocation and looking for blood."
The merchant ships of Hamas propaganda are supporting the terrorist organization that is the governing authority in Gaza and whose covenant calls for the killing of all Jews, the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state. The flotilla's purpose is to rally international public opinion against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, striving to achieve on the propaganda front what their Hamas comrades are aiming to do with their rockets and their suicide bombers.
Their method is to create an international incident by replicating last year's flotilla confrontation that led to the death of nine Hamas sympathizers on board a Turkish ship. These extremists attacked Israeli soldiers who were seeking to enforce Israel's lawful maritime blockade. At least one of the vessels that are due to participate in this year's flotilla is reportedly carrying "sacks of dangerous chemical materials" to be used against the Israeli troops, according to Israeli intelligence. The flotilla organizers are making sure that sympathetic press from the likes of Al-Jazeera, CNN, NBC will be on hand to beam Israel's 'brutal' response to the world.
These merchant ships of Hamas propaganda are not "the Freedom Ride of this era" nor a continuation of the fight against slavery, as one of the American flotilla leaders, Alice Walker, tried insanely to claim:
“When black people were enslaved for 300 years, it took a lot of people from outside our community to help free us. This is a fine tradition–going to help people who need us anywhere on the planet. I look at you in the room; if we have salvation as humankind, it is in the room.”
The abolitionists and Freedom Riders risked their lives to peacefully secure freedom and civil rights for our nation's African-Americans. It is an insult to their memories to equate them with the flotilla agitators who have aligned themselves with terrorists trying to kill Jews simply because they are Jews.
The flotilla organizers deny they are on the side of Hamas. They claim they are just ordinary people moved by the human suffering of the Gazan people and who want to do what they can to bring the suffering to an end. Yet the truth gets in the way of their fairy tales. For example, the Free Gaza Movement is an affiliate of the International Solidarity Movement, which opposes the existence of the Jewish state. Adam Shapiro, an American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and leader of the Flotilla II brigade, had this to say about violence back in 2002:
"Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics, both violent and nonviolent. But most importantly, it must develop a strategy involving both aspects."
Sounds like the model for Shapiro's flotilla comrades to use in their upcoming manufactured confrontation with Israel's defense forces.
Then there is Hamas activist and United Kingdom Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Kazem Sawalha, who has been identified by Iranian media as the coordinator of the current Gaza flotilla. And there is the European Campaign To End The Siege On Gaza, which is playing a leading role in organizing the flotilla. It just happens to operate from the same address and has the same telephone as the Palestinian Return Centre, which just happens to have strong ties to Hamas and the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
The flotilla is certainly not the humanitarian mission that some of its propagandists would continue to have us believe. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Recognizing that the humanitarian fiction is being exposed, the activist Palestinian lawyer Huwaida Arraf tried to change the subject. She admitted to a press conference that the flotilla is not about humanitarian aid after all. It is intended to support Palestinians' demand for liberation.
Even the chairman of the board of the Islamic University, who has led Gaza’s Popular Committee Against the Siege, Jamal El-Khoudary, conceded that the siege on goods is now mostly over. The flotilla participants and supporters know they can get whatever true humanitarian aid they wish to provide to the Gazan people delivered to them through internationally recognized channels.
As reported by the New York Times on June 25th:
"For the past year, Israel has allowed most everything into Gaza but cement, steel and other construction material — other than for internationally supervised projects — because they are worried that such supplies can be used by Hamas for bunkers and bombs."
Humanitarian and consumer goods enter Gaza on a daily basis. The Israeli Defense Force itself transports to Gaza 5800 tons of goods a day, roughly double what the flotilla claims to be bringing.
Considering Hamas' use of its control of Gaza to launch more than 10,000 rockets into Israel aimed at its civilian population , Hamas's ongoing state of armed conflict against Israel which it has vowed to destroy, and its blatant attempts to smuggle in arms by land and sea, Israel is fully entitled under international law to protect its citizens by inspecting goods entering Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas. This is the purpose of the naval blockade. Ships' cargo is inspected and can be delivered to bona fide recipients in Gaza once it is determined that no arms and materials for military use are included. Regardless of the security risks, Israel has made sure that the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza continue to be met.
According to the Times report, "health conditions remain better than across much of the developing world." Unemployment is down and there has been a building boom in Gaza:
"Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall — with escalators imported from Israel — will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off."
Serious problems persist in Gaza, to be sure. But they are largely of Hamas's own making, as it focuses more on planning and launching attacks against Israel than taking care of its own people. The flotilla is nothing more than a propaganda diversion from that hard truth.
President Obama Shreds The Constitution Over The Shores Of Tripoli Things are heating up over Libya and I do not mean just NATO's sustained aerial bombing campaign. President Obama is facing a challenge in Congress and in court to his failure to seek congressional authorization for U.S. military involvement in the Libyan war in accordance with the United States Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. And while the Obama administration seems to think that all it needs to do is to act within the authority granted by the United Nations Security Council, tempers are beginning to fray at the Security Council too as the war drags on. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sent a letter to President Obama on June 14th warning the White House that its continued deployment of U.S. military troops in the North African country appeared to violate the law requiring any U.S. President, within 60 days of his first reporting the launching of a military engagement, to secure Congressional authority for doing so. The letter told President Obama that he was out of time and demanded a legal justification for passing the deadline. Meanwhile, ten congressmen, led by Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Walter Jones (R-North Carolina), filed a bipartisan complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on June 15th challenging the legality of Barack Obama's military intervention into Libya without congressional authorization, alleging it violates the United States Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. The complaint seeks "injunctive and declaratory relief to protect the Plaintiffs and the country from a policy that a president may commit the United States to a war under the authority of the United Nations without authorization from Congress." The White House responded on June 15th with a report that purported to legally justify why President Obama could go it alone in Libya without congressional approval, even though the Obama administration has acknowledged that the Libyan war is not a response to a direct threat to the United States. Indeed, on March 28, 2011, President Obama described the Libyan conflict as one of the “times . . . when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are.” President Obama also said that the United States would be involved for a matter of days or a few weeks. We have now been involved for three months and counting. The administration is trying to argue that it does not matter since we are not really involved in hostilities over the 'shores of Tripoli.' According to the Obama administration's reasoning, our limited support for our NATO allies who are doing the heavy lifting in conducting the aerial bombing does not rise to the level that would trigger the congressional approval requirements of the War Powers Resolution. In a joint interview to explain their rationale, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, and Robert Bauer, the White House counsel, argued that American forces had not been in “hostilities” at least since early April when NATO took over leadership of the bombing campaign. The Obama administration lawyers also sought to justify their position that the War Powers Resolution does not apply to Obama's involvement of U.S. military forces in Libya because there are no troops on the ground and American forces face little meaningful threat from an exchange of fire with Libyan forces: "We're not engaged in any of the activities that typically over the years in war powers analysis is considered to constitute hostilities within the meaning of the statute. We're not engaged in sustained fighting. There's been no exchange of fire with hostile forces. We don't have troops on the ground. We don't risk casualties to those troops." Who knew that the estimated expenditure of $1.1 billion by this September at the current scale of operations ($715.9 million, from mid-March through June 3), the flying of missile-firing drones in Libyan airspace, search and rescue missions and the continued flying of about a quarter of all air missions over Libya, including refueling and intelligence sorties, was so trivial? Speaker Boehner's spokesman Brendan Buck said that there were a number of questions regarding "the creative arguments" being made by the White House. That is an understatement. Without getting too technical, the first thing to note in the War Powers Resolution is that it is not limited to requiring congressional authorization for U.S. military intervention in a foreign country when only ground troops are involved. Section 4 (a)(2) refers to the introduction of United States Armed Forces "into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair or training of such forces." What is it about the words "airspace of a foreign nation" that the Obama administration does not understand? Are they prepared to argue that our troops providing surveillance and logistical support are not "equipped for combat" in case they do meet armed resistance from Libyan government forces? Moreover, according to public reports, U.S. personnel with Army Special Forces units and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been on the ground in Libya to assist the rebel forces. And does anyone seriously believe that if one of our unarmed drones were to go down we would just leave it there and allow the Libyan forces to get hold of our valuable technology for possible sale to one of our adversaries such as China? The exception in Section 4 (a)(2) of the War Powers Resolution for "deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair or training" applies to those activities in support of our own troops, not those of other NATO countries engaged in an offensive military operation nor those of the Libyan rebel forces. Section 8 (b) of the War Powers Resolution does allow "members of United States Armed Forces to participate jointly with members of the armed forces of one or more foreign countries" without any further specific congressional authorization, but only "in the headquarters operations of high-level military commands which were established prior to the date of enactment of this joint resolution." In other words, our high-level military commanders can work with their NATO counterparts within the structure of pre-existing "headquarters operations" without further specific congressional approval. But this does not mean that the President is free to unilaterally put American military forces in harm's way in support of NATO's ongoing military intervention within the airspace of a country in which NATO has intervened without invitation. The Obama administration makes much of the fact that the term "hostilities" is not specifically defined in the War Powers Resolution and then tries to put its own spin on the term by equating "hostilities" with direct combat operations, the use of ground troops and the likelihood of American casualties. This is important because the Resolution applies where United States Armed Forces are introduced "into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances." (Sec. 3) The fundamental flaw in the Obama administration's argument is that the authors of the War Powers Resolution apparently foresaw such a potential loophole and made it clear that our armed forces do not have to be involved in direct combat to be considered potentially engaged in hostilities. Section 8(c) defines the "introduction of United States Armed Forces" to include "the assignment of member of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities." It is preposterous to argue that our close support of NATO sorties engaged in hostile bombing attacks in Libya does not inject our own armed forces into those hostilities. There is nothing in the War Powers Resolution that limits congressional authorization to situations where we are the singular leader of an ongoing military mission. When we deploy American armed forces to help one side engaged in hostilities in a foreign country, we too are necessarily engaged in those hostilities alongside our allies, albeit in a supporting role. The most insulting argument that the Obama administration has made to justify its thumbing its nose at Congress is that President Obama is acting within the constraints set by the United Nations Security Council resolution, which authorized limited military force to protect Libyan civilians. On March 17, 2011, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, which authorized UN member states and regional organizations “to take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi.” The UN resolution mandated that such measures should not include “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” First of all, the UN Security Council is not a substitute for the U.S. Congress under the United States Constitution. The notion that since the Obama administration is operating within the constraints of the UN Security Council resolution, and therefore congressional authorization in this instance is unnecessary, represents a fundamental attack on U.S. national sovereignty and on the checks and balances that our Founding Fathers built into our Constitution. Secondly, the mission in Libya has gone way past its limited objective of saving civilians, particularly in Benghazi, from the threat of imminent massacre and of establishing a no-fly zone to protect civilians from any further Libyan government air attacks. That objective was accomplished within the first few days. Despite the protestations to the contrary, it is clear from the pattern of NATO's sustained bombing campaign in the capital of Tripoli that the military attacks are designed to get rid of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. We are now involved in a civil war, aiding rebel forces whom we know little about, including some who may have actually participated in the insurgency in Iraq against our own troops. Finally, international consensus on the course of the war in Libya, if there ever truly was one, is in tatters. The UN Security Council is being pushed in different directions as France and the United Kingdom want more latitude in what they can do militarily and the African Union is questioning whether NATO forces have already abused the limited authority granted for military action under Security Council Resolution 1973. Three African members of the Security Council -- South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon - have asked that the Security Council issue an official statement clarifying the limitations on the use of military force in Libya. According to a draft of the statement obtained by Inner City Press, its sponsors included the following language in an attempt to unambiguously re-affirm the limits of Security Council Resolution 1973: "The Security Council expresses its deep concern over the continuation of violence in Libya, and reaffirms its commitment to the full implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions 1970 (2011) and 1973 (2011) in letter and spirit to ensure protection of civilians in Libya. The Security Council reaffirms that resolution 1973 (2011) explicitly excludes a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory... The Security Council reaffirms its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya." Although the Obama administration told Congress not to worry about the Libyan war because the military mission was constrained by the UN Security Council resolution, the United States has reportedly opposed the African countries' request to simply confirm those constraints. The Obama administration is clearly hoping that the problem will soon go away with Qaddafi's death or departure from Libya. An anti-Qaddafi member of Libya's Mission to the UN expressed optimism that the tide is turning decisively against Qaddafi, telling Inner City Press that “the freedom fighters are now within 40 kilometers of Tripoli.” In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama stated that “[t]he president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Barack Obama was right then, and is wrong now with regards to Libya. He may be playing for time in the hope that Qaddafi is soon history, but President Obama's contempt for the U.S. Constitution will leave a lasting stain that will further mar his own legacy in history.
To date, the Department of Defense has identified 1582 American service members who have died as part of the Afghanistan war and related operations, the majority of whom were killed since President Obama took office. During the Obama administration, more American service members have died in Afghanistan than during all the prior years since the Afghanistan war began in 2001. For the U.S. military, 2010 was the deadliest year of the Afghanistan war so far. 499 service members died. Additionally, there were 5,182 US forces wounded in 2010. This represents more than half of all U.S. forces wounded in the entire Afghanistan war, which totaled 9,957 at the end of 2010. The total U.S. military deaths compiled by the Defense Department for Operation Enduring Freedom for the years 2001 through 2010 are as follows: Total Number of Military Deaths by Year 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 11 49 45 52 98 83 106 155 311 499 Two factors have contributed to the increase in American fatalities during the Obama administration. The first reason is President Obama’s decision in December 2009 to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. This Obama “surge” represented a major escalation of America’s military presence there, putting more of our soldiers in harm’s way. The second factor contributing to the increase in American fatalities since President Obama took office has been the more restrictive rules of engagement that the Obama administration has put in place to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties. These rules, although loosened somewhat under General Petraeus, have restricted the use of air power and heavy weaponry in populated areas and prohibited our troops from shooting at the enemy unless fired upon first. This has the effect of shifting more of the risk of engagement from the Taliban and its allies to our own troops...
Afghan Death Toll Rises; Media Interest Declines
The war in Afghanistan gets little attention by the mainstream media these days. But the loss of American lives continues to mount. Just last week, seven U.S. troops were killed by a powerful bomb which had exploded in a field where they were patrolling on foot. At least twenty-eight Americans have been killed in May, 2011 alone, according to the Associated Press.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/06/01/afghan-death-toll-rises-media-interest-declines/
President Obama’s Message To Israel: Go To Hell
President Barack Obama wants Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, with a few minor agreed upon swaps. He might as well have told the Jews living in Israel to pack up their belongings and leave or take their chances in the Hell that Hamas has waiting for them.
In his stab-Israel-in-the-back speech delivered on Thursday at the State Department, Obama declared:
"The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."
Obama waited towards the end of his speech on the Middle East and North Africa to throw our most reliable Mideast ally, and the region’s only true democracy, under the bus. His timing, on the eve of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House on Friday, could not have been more provocative.
Prime Minister Netanyahu did not waste any time in reacting to Obama’s gambit. He said that Israel would object to any withdrawal to “indefensible” borders, which the pre-1967 borders would most certainly be.
A future attack launched from the pre-1967 lines against Israel’s nine-mile-wide waist at its narrowest point could easily split the country in two. Most of its national infrastructure (airports, industries, and inter-city highways) and population centers would be fully exposed to hostile fire from military forces deployed along the adjacent West Bank hill terrain, which would serve as an ideal platform of attack for Arab military forces. The Golan Heights would provide the Syrians with the same strategic military position to threaten Israeli civilians living below. Protecting against infiltration by Palestinian terrorists would be virtually impossible.
Obama’s inclusion of a demand for a “contiguous” Palestinian state encompassing Gaza and the West Bank would also have the effect of splitting Israel in two.
In short, the pre-1967 borders are not defensible because they do not provide Israel with sufficient buffer depth to enable Israel to protect itself against terrorist incursions, as well as to ensure a defeat of conventional military assaults if Israel is once again attacked.
Israel has returned Sinai to Egypt. Under the terms of the peace treaty Israel signed with Egypt, there has been more than thirty years of relative peace between the two countries. However, that peace is now threatened as a result of the so-called Arab Spring Obama is so proud of, which swept Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from power and left a vacuum that is likely to be filled by the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And what does the Muslim Brotherhood have in mind for Israel? A leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muhammad Ghannem, provided the answer to the Arabic-language Iranian news network Al-Alam:
"the people should be prepared for war against Israel"
Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally in 2005, after entering into detailed security arrangements with the Palestinian Authority. When Hamas took over Gaza completely in 2007, the agreed upon security arrangements fell by the wayside as the terrorist organization launched thousands of rockets into populated areas of Israel, targeting and killing civilians including children.
At least President Obama recognized in his State Department speech that Hamas is not to be trusted. He criticized the ongoing rocket attacks and other terrorist acts by Hamas and its allies and the long-standing Palestinian culture of hate.
Obama even acknowledged that Hamas’s participation in the new Palestinian government
raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel
And he asked rhetorically
how can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist
Yet, rather than first insist on the logical condition that such a terrorist party – namely, Hamas – be excluded from the Palestinian government and repudiated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama told the Israelis to never mind and just turn the clock back to pre-1967.
Obama seeks to define in advance the Palestinian-Israeli borders, after which the “emotional issues” of Jerusalem and return of the Palestinian refugees would be negotiated. What kind of leverage would Israel have then, especially when the Obama administration has declared previously that East Jerusalem belongs to the Palestinians?
Obama is essentially telling Israel: Give up all defensible borders first — then take your chances on Jerusalem and the Palestinians’ claim to a “right of return.”
All of these issues are inextricably linked. Why didn’t Obama insist, in his same speech telling the Israelis what they must do for “peace,” that the Palestinians must renounce once and for all their bogus claim for the right of millions of descendents of the original refugees to return to their so-called “homes” within Israel’s pre-1967 borders?
Whatever intentions Obama may have had in making his reckless proposal, his meddling where he does not belong will likely make the Jews’ historic and legitimate homeland a living Hell.
President Obama’s Message To Israel: Go To Hell
"The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."
"the people should be prepared for war against Israel"
raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel
how can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist
The Future of Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law
The United States Supreme Court has just struck an important blow against illegal immigration. In the case of Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v. Whiting, the Court upheld by a 5-3 vote the constitutionality of an Arizona licensing law which suspends or revokes the licenses of businesses that knowingly or intentionally hire illegal immigrants.
Unlike the stance that Justice Kagan appears to be taking with regard to challenges to Obamacare, Justice Kagan did the right thing here and recused herself in this particular case.
Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion for the majority provides a window into the Court's analysis of states' powers to reverse the flow of illegal aliens into their states. The opinion has huge implications in undermining the federal pre-emption arguments that have been successfully raised to date in challenges to Arizona's other major anti-illegal immigration law (SB 1070), which mandates that law enforcement personnel ask about the immigration status of those they detain for separate and unrelated reasons but have reason to suspect may not be in the country legally.
The Chamber of Commerce, various businesses and civil rights groups opposing Arizona's licensing law argued that the state law’s license suspension and revocation provisions were pre-empted by federal immigration law. They pointed to the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) as blocking the states from interfering with federal enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. This should sound very familiar to those who have been following the challenges to Arizona's SB 1070.
The federal Immigration Reform and Control Act makes it “unlawful for a person or other entity . . . to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien.” (8 U. S. C. §1324a(a)(1)(A))
Employers who violate this prohibition may be subjected to federal civil and criminal sanctions. At the same time, IRCA also restricts the ability of states themselves to combat employment of illegal immigrant workers. It expressly pre-empts “any State or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ, or recruit or refer for a fee for employment, unauthorized aliens.”
The Supreme Court reasoned that the parenthetical exception to the pre-emption provision, carving out states' "licensing and similar laws," meant that Arizona had the power to use such laws for the purpose of penalizing businesses that hired illegal immigrants. The Court interpreted this exception very broadly. Chief Justice Roberts relied on what he called "common sense" in interpreting the scope of the pre-emption carve-out for "licensing" laws. He also rejected the argument that Congress intended the federal immigration system to be so exclusive that the states have no role at all. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Arizona was simply implementing the sanctions that Congress expressly allowed the states to pursue through licensing laws. He also emphasized that Arizona’s law closely tracks the federal immigration law's provisions in all material respects. For example, Chief Justice Roberts observed that Arizona's law adopts the federal definition of who qualifies as an “unauthorized alien.” And it requires Arizona employers to use the federal government’s own system for checking employee status. This same reasoning should apply to the core provisions of SB 1070 that have been struck down by lower courts. For example, when state law enforcement officers have reasonable suspicion that an individual is in the country illegally after they have detained the individual for entirely unrelated reasons such as going through a stop sign, it seems illogical that the verification and relay of that information to the federal government would be against Congress's intent. The federal government at all times maintains its authority to determine how to proceed once an illegal alien is brought to its attention by Arizona law enforcement officials. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion dismissed other contentions offered by the challengers to Arizona's licensing law, which the challengers to SB 1070 no doubt had hoped would have been more successful. He rejected the argument that Arizona's licensing law is pre-empted because it upsets the balance that Congress sought to strike: "The balancing process that culminated in IRCA resulted in a ban on hiring unauthorized aliens, and the state law here simply seeks to enforce that ban." And the Chief Justice dismissed out of hand the presumption that employers would err on the side of discrimination and turn away prospective employees who look or sound foreign, in order to be sure that they comply with the Arizona law and maintain their licenses. Finally, the Supreme Court opinion upholding the constitutionality of Arizona's licensing law invoked the allocation of federal and state responsibilities under our system of federalism. Congress, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, did not intend "that the Federal Government can impose large sanctions, and the States only small ones." The pro-amnesty, open border groups who oppose all efforts to reverse the tide of illegal immigrants into our country may try to argue that the Supreme Court's decision was narrowly focused, confined only to Arizona's business license law. However, if Chief Justice Roberts wanted to write such an opinion, he could have limited himself to deciding the case based solely on the unique express pre-emption carve-out language applicable to state licensing laws. But instead he went on to deal with more fundamental pre-emption and discrimination arguments that challengers of Arizona's anti-illegal immigration laws, including SB 1070, have raised.
In sum, the Court's reasoning in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v. Whiting bodes well for those of us who believe that SB 1070 is constitutional and an appropriate response to the illegal immigration problem besetting the border states.
The Palestinians Manufacture Their Own “Catastrophe”
Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of Hamas in Gaza, told thousands of worshippers on Sunday May 15th to pray for the end of Israel, adding:
“Palestinians mark the Naqba with great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine.”
In a coordinated multi-front assault from Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, tens of thousands of Arab protesters heeded the Hamas terrorist’s call. Marking Palestinian Nakba Day (the day of the “catastrophe,” as they like to refer to the day of Israel’s creation), they streamed en masse to Israel’s various borders, intending to infiltrate the Jewish State and wreak havoc.
As many as 1,000 busloads of Lebanese and Palestinians living in Lebanon descended on the Israeli frontier where mobs began hurling rocks over the border. Carrying Palestinian flags and chanting “we want our land back,” many protesters approached the electric fence that separates Lebanon from Israel.
Lebanese army troops tried but failed to quell the violence, shooting in the air and ordering the protesters away from the fence. The protesters pelted the Lebanese troops with stones and then turned their fury on Israeli soldiers who were maintaining defensive positions on the Israeli side of the fence.
Some protesters succeeded in breaching Israel’s border and entered Israel illegally despite attempts by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at first to use non-lethal force to stop them and contain the mob violence. However, IDF Spokesman Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai confirmed that IDF troops did ultimately open fire at the large crowd of protesters who approached the border with Israel, resulting in at least four protesters’ deaths.
Some 20,000 Syrians also tried to enter Israeli territory. Presumably frustrated with their inability to bring down their own despot whose regime has killed hundreds of unarmed Syrian dissidents, they decided to turn their anger on Israel.
At least four people were reportedly shot dead by Israel Defense Forces troops trying to defend the Israeli side of Syria’s southern border with Israel.
“IDF forces opened fire in order to prevent the violent rioters from illegally infiltrating Israeli territory. A number of rioters have infiltrated and are violently rioting in the village. From initial reports there are dozens of injured that are receiving medical care in a nearby hospital,” according to an IDF statement.
In Qalandia, a main Israel-West Bank crossing near Ramallah, some 600 Palestinians were violently rioting, hurling rocks and setting fires, Israel Radio reported. This follows riots in East Jerusalem over the weekend.
Thirteen IDF soldiers were wounded during the course of the Palestinian Nakba Day riots and encroachments across Israel’s borders.
Considering the violent provocations and illegal incursions into Israel on multiple fronts that heightened terrorist threats inside Israel, the IDF forces showed remarkable restraint – opening fire only as a last resort in self-defense. The deaths are tragic, but the Palestinians’ violence set the chain of events in motion that led to those deaths and many injuries.
Not surprisingly, the United Nations continues to blame Israel for whatever harm befalls the Palestinians.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on all parties to show restraint, but then linked the violence to the “the unsustainable status quo in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He stressed in his statement concerning the Palestinian riots that there must be “an end to occupation, an end to conflict, and a just and agreed solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees.”
What about an end to the rockets launched against Israeli school children? The Palestinian rioters’ solution is Hamas’s solution – the full return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to the land of Israel and the end of the Jewish State.
In a press release marking Palestinian Nakba Day issued by Richard Falk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, and released under the auspices of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, Falk accused Israel of a “legacy of ethnic cleansing” going back to “the Nakba on 15 May 1948.” He charged that Israel has employed “sinister schemes…over the years to rid historic Palestine of its original inhabitants, in order to make space for Israeli citizens.”
Not a single word about the Palestinians’ and their Arab neighbors’ rejection of the UN’s original two-state solution under the partition plan and their use of violence to try and kill Israel at its infancy. Instead, the Palestinians could have turned “Nakba” into a day of celebration for the Palestinians’ own 63rd year of independence...
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/05/16/the-palestinians-manufacture-their-own-catastrophe/
An Open Letter To Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas You write in your New York Times op-ed column today that the Palestinians are ready for international recognition of a “long overdue Palestinian state.” You’re wrong. You may well succeed in persuading the pro-Palestinian UN General Assembly to give you the vote of confidence you will be requesting this September, but you blew any chance to make a legitimate claim for international recognition of a Palestinian state by deciding to lie down with the Hamas terrorists. The General Assembly can only act on your application for UN membership “upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” (Article 4). There are basic obligations that UN member states are expected to follow. The United Nations Charter specifically requires in Article 2 that All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. Your government partner, Hamas, vows to destroy the member state of Israel. At minimum, you must publicly repudiate Hamas and end its participation in your government in order to begin to meet the UN Charter’s qualifications for membership. If not, even the Obama administration will be likely to veto any Security Council recommendation for Palestinian membership in the United Nations. If the General Assembly proceeds to vote anyway in support of your application for membership, it will be an empty symbolic act having no legal effect. Choosing to stand with Hamas instead of against Hamas dooms any legitimate claim you might have for international recognition of a Palestinian state. But you won’t stand up to Hamas because you are afraid of its power. You also agree with Hamas’s underlying premise that Israel has no right to continue to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed, in your op-ed article, you gave away the fact that you agree with Hamas’s claim to the entirety of Israel – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – as the Palestinians’ “historic homeland.” While you say that you are now looking only for recognition of a Palestinian state “on the 1967 border,” you wrongly insist that this represents only “22 percent of our historic homeland.” You write that once admitted to the United Nations as a member state, you will be in a stronger position to press your “core” issue of the return of Palestinian refugees to “their home and homeland” – now in the millions, counting all the descendants of the original refugees. In other words, “22 percent” now as Step 1. Elimination of the Jewish state of Israel later as Step 2. Sixty-three years after the Palestinians could have had their own independent state if they had accepted the United Nations’ original two-state solution, you are coming back to the UN demanding that it bail the Palestinians out of their own colossal blunder. But instead of coming in the spirit of contrition for all of the deaths and human suffering the Palestinians caused by rejecting the UN’s original plan and rejecting several peace proposals since that would have given the Palestinians most of the West Bank as well as Gaza, you still maintain that the Palestinians were the victims of some sort of international injustice: It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families’ homes. Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled. You are wrong about the history. There was no internationally recognized Arab Palestinian homeland to start with. There was a mostly barren land, owned by the non-Arab Turks for centuries before the British took possession after World War I. Arabs who had migrated from surrounding Arab countries, and Jews who had migrated from surrounding countries and from Europe, settled in this territory. The Jews, who had been promised a home of their own on their historic land under international law, agreed to the UN’s compromise partition solution. The Palestinians did not. Some Palestinians were expelled from their homes, but many more left voluntarily because they believed their Arab neighbors’ promise that the Jews would soon be driven into the sea. They gambled their families’ future and they lost. Yet you continue the fiction that all of Israel belongs to the Palestinians and you justify the violence perpetrated over the weekend by mobs of Palestinians and their other Arab supporters whom you claim were just trying to “return to their families’ homes.” Mr. Abbas, if you want international recognition for the Palestinian state you could have had sixty-three years ago, then publicly renounce Hamas and its friends. Give up your spurious “homeland” claims (including claims to any part of Jerusalem, which was forcibly taken by Jordan in violation of the UN partition plan and liberated by Israel to allow access by followers of all faiths). In other words, demonstrate some responsible statesmanship and a true commitment to the peaceful co-existence of a Palestinian state and a Jewish state living side by side.
Dear President Abbas:
Michael Moore And His Like-Minded Looney Tunes Complain Of The “Execution” Of “Unarmed” Osama Bin Laden Moore and his co-loonies have reinforced their well-deserved reputations for left-wing looniness by questioning the “legality” of Osama Bin Laden’s descent to Hell, courtesy of our Navy Seals. These bubbleheads, along with other hair-splitting Monday morning quarterbacks complaining that the killing of bin Laden may have violated international law, are completely unhinged from the real world. Let’s start with Michael Moore, the multi-millionaire film writer and conspiracy theorist who thinks that “capitalism is a sin” while rolling in big bucks from his lie-filled film Fahrenheit 9/11. With confidence that, in his words uttered thirteen months after al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on our homeland, “there is no terrorist threat in this country,” Moore now feels sorry for what happened to Bin Laden. He told CNN: "They killed him not because there was a fire fight or something going on. They went there with the intention to kill him. That’s an execution or an assassination, whatever you want to call it." Moore lamented that, in killing Bin Laden, America "lost something of [its] soul." The only thing we lost is an evil, soulless killer. We don’t need the kind of “soul” that Michael Moore is pitching, especially when Moore compared the insurgents in Iraq, who included al Qaeda terrorists aiming to kill our soldiers, to the Minutemen of the American Revolution. I suppose that if Moore had his way, and could have fit into one of the Navy Seals’ helicopters without bringing it down, he would have enjoyed personally meeting Bin Laden and perhaps would have offered him a leading role as the hero in a Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel. Meanwhile, across the pond in Merry England, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rev. Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Church of England and of the 80-million strong worldwide Anglican Communion, has criticized the United States for shooting dead the reportedly unarmed Osama bin Laden: The killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done The circumstances of Bin Laden’s demise left the Archbishop of Canterbury ”uncomfortable.” Poor thing. But before you feel too sorry for the Archbishop’s discomfort, don’t forget that this is the same Archbishop who, back in 2008, said that the United Kingdom will eventually have to get comfortable incorporating Islamic sharia law into the English legal system in order to help facilitate social cohesion. At least the Archbishop of Canterbury should be comfortable with the fact that the Obama administration tried to follow sharia law by conducting a Muslim religious ceremony within 24 hours of Bin Laden’s death, before disposing of his cleansed body. Finally, there are the transnationalists at the United Nations who want to usurp U.S. sovereignty by trying to get the final say over whether member states of the UN, including the United States, are conforming with international law. In a statement released in Geneva, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, and the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin, said the U.S. "should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards…the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially-decided punishment." It’s none of the UN’s business how the United States chooses to defend itself against an organization and its leader who declared war on the United States, have continued to plot acts of terrorism against American civilians and have not followed the most elementary rules of law. The Navy Seal commandos who located Bin Laden had only seconds during their time sensitive mission to make a judgment on whether bin Laden posed any possible danger. They had just encountered some gunfire from Bin Laden’s courier. The commandos reportedly also spotted two guns, one of which was an AK-47 assault rifle, in the room where they encountered Bin Laden. Obviously, they couldn’t pat him down without running a risk of harm and lost time. With their own lives and the success of the mission on the line, the commandos made the only logical call under the circumstances. Besides, the only valid reason to try and take Bin Laden alive in the face of such risks would have been to extract more information from him via the same enhanced interrogation techniques that helped provide the clues leading to Bin Laden’s door in the first place. But since the Obama administration doesn’t believe in enhanced interrogations and has ended them, Bin Laden served no useful purpose remaining on this earth.
What do Michael Moore, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and United Nations human rights officials have in common? They are upset over the latest reports that the United States shot Osama Bin Laden to death because the mass murderer, though stained with the blood of thousands of slain innocent Americans, was reportedly unarmed when justice was finally served.
How’s That “Arab Spring” In Egypt Going These Days? With the world’s attention riveted on the welcome demise of Osama Bin Laden, Egypt has slipped off the mainstream news media’s radar. But all is not well in the land of the “Arab Spring.” Ultra-conservative Muslims known as Salafis are flexing their muscles in Egypt. Just yesterday, for example, Salafi-led Muslim mobs set fire to a church and a Christian-owned apartment building. The Islamists’ continued persecution of the Christian minority set off a wave of violence, killing 12 people and injuring more than 200. So much for peace and harmony among all religions in the new Egypt. The Obama administration is counting on the more “moderate” Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to keep the extremists in check. According to President Obama’s “faith” advisor Dalia Mogahed, the Obama administration “respects” the Muslim Brotherhood, which it expects will take a majority in the upcoming Egyptian parliamentary elections. There’s just one small problem. Al Qaeda, the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood are all devoted to the success of radical Islam – the militant, politically activist ideology whose ultimate goal is to create a worldwide community, or caliphate, of Muslim believers governing under sharia law. Their means may differ, but the the end objective is the same... http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/05/09/hows-that-arab-spring-in-egypt-going-these-days/
5 Questions our Beaming President Needs to Answer on the Death of Osama bin Laden President Obama is basking in the after-glow of the successful operation that led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. As I have said previously, he deserves credit for making the gutsy decision to use a Navy SEAL team to take Bin Laden down. Of course, the lion’s share of the credit belongs to the special operations forces themselves, who overcame immense odds to mount the incredibly risky attack ordered by their commander-in-chief. However, as President Obama savors the high point of his time in office to date, there are some questions that he needs to answer to the American people. Here are just a few of them. 1. Does the president have any change of heart about the harsh criticisms he leveled at his predecessor for using renditions of suspected terrorist detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques in light of the crucial information they yielded on the identity of bin Laden’s trusted courier, which in turn led us to locate Bin Laden himself? Since taking office, President Obama has largely followed the counter-terrorism policies of President George W. Bush, despite criticizing them while campaigning to succeed Bush. Guantanamo remains open. Military commissions are still being used by the Obama administration to try some detained terrorist suspects. Renditions and indefinite detentions of high risk suspects without trial have continued. It’s time for President Obama to admit that he was wrong in castigating the Bush administration during the campaign and acknowledge the continuity of Bush’s policies that are necessary to fight an evil foe determined to kill as many Americans as possible. 2. Why have there been so many conflicting reports on what happened during the mission? First we were told by the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who reportedly observed the mission in real time from a live feed transmitted by the Navy Seals as it went down, that Bin Laden had a firearm which he was using when confronted and shot. We were also told that he used one of his wives as a human shield. The next day we learned that Bin Laden was not carrying a weapon when he was killed by our forces, but was somehow resisting arrest. We also learned that Bin Laden had not used any human shield. Given the fog of war in a fast-moving operation, why did Brennan speak with such certainty in the first place on what happened when apparently he did not know the whole story? Was there an attempt to justify killing Bin Laden, rather than taking him into custody, in order to satisfy international law sticklers including President Obama himself? Will the Obama administration, in its usual deference to the United Nations, comply with the request from the UN’s senior human rights official, Navi Pillay, for detailed information on the operation to confirm its ‘legality?’ President Obama said in his speech to the nation on Sunday night that “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. If Bin Laden represented a perversion of Islam, why obsess that he be buried within 24 hours and cleansed in accordance with Islamic law? Why not bury him in an unmarked grave or drop him into the sea to live with the fishes after making absolutely sure that we have confirmed his identity? 4. What are we going to do about double-dealing Pakistan where al Qaeda terrorists are finding sanctuary? Shouldn’t we re-focus our efforts in the region from counter-insurgency, nation-building in Afghanistan to more limited counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan and Yemen where our enemy is now concentrated? The Obama administration wisely left Pakistan in the dark about the Bin Laden mission until it was completed. Elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have a record of working with the Taliban and al Qaeda. There is no way that bin Laden could have been hiding in a town filled with Pakistani military facilities and within yards of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point without the knowledge and support of members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence service. Advance information about the operation in the wrong hands would have ensured the failure of the mission and could well have brought about significant casualties to our forces. After initially praising the killing of Bin Laden as a “major setback to terrorist organizations around the world,” the Pakistan government issued a statement yesterday complaining that the United States had undertaken an “unauthorized unilateral action.” It’s time for a major push back against this fair weather, duplicitous ‘ally.’ Is the Obama administration planning to revisit the billions of dollars Pakistan receives each year from our country? Will we continue, and even expand our counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan, including continued drone attacks and commando raids, without seeking Pakistan’s permission as their treacherous government demands? And aren’t we wasting billions of dollars and sacrificing the lives of our soldiers trying to re-build Afghanistan when the global terrorist networks threatening America are now operating out of Pakistan and Yemen, not Afghanistan? 5. Finally, will the Obama administration continue to mistakenly look at radical Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and their U.S. affiliates such as the Council of American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America benignly, distinguishing them from al Qaeda, even though they are using more stealth means towards the same Islamic supremist agenda to impose sharia law as broadly as possible? President Obama can take pride in his accomplishment of ridding the world of Osama bin Laden. But the American people deserve answers to these and other difficult questions in the days, weeks and months to come.
Osama Bin Laden turned out in the end to be the Islamic perversion of the Wizard of Oz – a pathetic old man hiding behind a ‘curtain’ of deception – although the evil he perpetrated was no fantasy. Bin Laden was a larger than life hero to Islamists, whom he led and inspired with messages of hate against the infidel West to carry out the 9/11 attacks on the United States and countless other mass-casualty attacks killing innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah.
However, Bin Laden’s self-created image of invincibility, courage and self-sacrifice were all lies. He had various aliases, including “Lion Sheik.” But, at the end of the day, the “Cowardly Lion” character in the Wizard of Oz had far more courage.
Osama Bin Laden was a charlatan. He did not live the spartan life of danger in a mountainous cave that his videos and handlers had suggested. He lived a life of relative luxury in a highly secured $1 million mansion located in an affluent Pakistan town two hours outside the Pakistan capital of Islamabad, most likely under Pakistani military or intelligence protection. After the curtain was pulled back on Bin Laden’s hideout and his protectors scurried to defend him and themselves (with conflicting reports as to whether a woman was used at some point as a human shield), our Navy Seals sent the “Emir/Director” (Bin Laden’s other flattering nicknames) to the section of Hell reserved just for him. If 72 virgins are awaiting him, it will be a fitting punishment if they all turn out to be clones of Medusa, the terrifying female creature of Greek mythology, or perhaps clones of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West.
It took years of patient intelligence-gathering and the incredible courage of our special forces to finally enter the lair of the “Lion Sheik” and bring him to justice. Some of that intelligence gathering reportedly included the harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons authorized by President George W. Bush, which candidate Obama and the Left had so vehemently criticized. While President Obama certainly deserves credit for deciding on the risky Navy Seal operation that finished Bin Laden off and seeing it through, he has Bush to thank for setting the intelligence wheels in motion, irrespective of the anti-Bush lies the editors of the New York Times and Democratic Party partisans continue to dispense. The full story leading to the tracking and demise of Osama Bin Laden will come out in due time. But for now, all Americans of whatever political persuasion should celebrate this victory, while recognizing that much more work to defeat global Islamist jihad remains to be done.
USA! USA! American Forces Bring Osama Bin Laden To Justice
Hallelujah! Americans gathering outside of the White House last night, shouting “USA! USA!,” were celebrating the news that Osama Bin Laden is dead – brought to justice early Sunday morning for his crimes against humanity by the bullets of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command forces in a mission ordered by President Obama. Upon taking office, President Obama had made the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda. Now we have killed the monster and captured his body.
The al Qaeda leader responsible for the loss of nearly 3000 innocent lives on 9/11, and the deaths of thousands of other victims all over the world, was cowering to his last day in a $1 million compound in Pakistan, with elaborate security and 12 to 18 foot walls topped with barbed wire. A woman used as a human shield met the same fate as Bin Laden, along with two al Qaeda couriers and one of Bin Laden’s adult sons.
Congratulations to our brave special forces countrymen who carried out this successful mission. And President Obama deserves credit for never letting up on pursuing Bin Laden in Pakistan, as well as launching multiple drone attacks on Pakistan soil that have killed other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and have disrupted their operations. Unfortunately, President Obama continues to focus on the symptoms rather than the root cause of the existential problem we are facing. Our enemy is not just al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations. It is the ideology of radical Islam, which animates the terrorists and inspires many more millions of Islamists who aim to conquer our institutions and subvert our freedoms by stealth. In his speech to the nation announcing the killing of bin Laden, President Obama emphasized, as he has done in the past, that "the United States is not –- and never will be -– at war with Islam." We may not be at war with Islam per se, but the Islamists who feed on Islamist supremist ideology are at war with the United States and the free world. And they hate us because of who we are, not for any alleged harm that we’ve ever caused them...
Obama did not bow to pressure from the Pakistani government to stop the drone attacks. And given the fact that the compound in which Osama bin Laden was hiding was only about 1000 feet from Pakistan’s premier military academy and not very far from the Pakistani capital of Islamibad, it is suspected that members of the Pakistani military and intelligence services were aware that Bin Laden was hiding in their midst and did nothing about it. We did.
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/05/02/usa-usa-american-forces-bring-osama-bin-laden-to-justice/
Spread-The-Wealth Obama: Take More From The Job
Producers And Give More To The Free-Riders
Kicking off his 2012 re-election campaign, President
Obama has been going around the country in the last few days spewing class
warfare vitriol. He believes that it is the duty of the dwindling base of
income tax payers to provide even more support for the ballooning base of
non-income tax payers.
It's not enough for this spread-the-wealth demagogue-in-chief that the top 10 percent of earners in this country pay nearly 3/4 of the income taxes collected by the federal government while the bottom 40 percent of American households, on average, get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in income taxes.
Obama wants even more pounds of flesh from the so-called “wealthy” Americans to spend on his pet projects like high-speed rail:
"We can’t just tell the wealthiest among us, you don’t have to do a thing. You just
sit there and relax, and everybody else, we’re going to solve this
problem… We’ve got to have the quickest trains."
In
reality, Obama is castigating the job producers in the private sector, most
notably small businesses earning more than $200,000 a year whom he thinks are
not paying their fair share. In reality, it is these job producers who are the
locomotive for the increasing number of Americans who are getting a free ride.
For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930′s, U.S. households
are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying
in taxes...
The “Reformer” Syrian President’s Answer to
Obama’s Engagement Policy
Less than one month ago - after Syrian President Bashar al-Assed began launching his brutal attacks against his own people - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to him as a "reformer". She was contunuing President Obama's fruitless exercise of "engagement" with Iran's best friend in the Middle East.
As one resident of the besieged city of Dara’a (the center of the Syrian opposition movement) said, while filming tanks entering the city:
"These
are the reforms of Bashar al-Assad. He is reforming Dara’a with the tanks of
Bashar al-Assad."
The
Syrian government’s brutal crackdown against protesters has already killed
nearly 400 people to date...
Sweeping The Truth About China’s Dictatorship Under The Red Carpet
Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama swept the ‘minor’ embarrassment of the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner’s incarceration under the red carpet rolled out for the Red Chinese dictatorship. After all, when your banker is in town, you have to show him a good time. And you even let his favorite performer get a dig in at the host country.
On this occasion, the state dinner program included a performance by Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang, who performs regularly in the United States and has entertained Obama on two prior occasions.
Lang Lang decided to play an anti-American propaganda tune entitled “My Motherland,” which is the theme song from the Chinese-made Korean War movie “Battle on Shangangling Mountain.” This movie celebrated an attack by Chinese reinforcements on U.S. soldiers, whom had pinned down some Chinese troops on the mountain that gave the movie its name.
While a brave Chinese dissident languishes in jail for speaking truth to power, his fellow Nobel Peace prize winner Barack Obama is serenaded by a spoiled brat who chose an anti-American song to please his patron President Hu. One blogger proudly gloated on a Chinese blog:
Those American folks very much enjoyed it and were totally infatuated with the melody!!! The US is truly stupid!!
Michelle Obama was so infatuated that she thanked Lang Lang for inspiring her daughters to learn piano. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lang Lang has taught the Obamas’ daughters how to play “My Motherland.”
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/24/sweeping-truth-china-dictatorship-under-red-carpet/2/
The New Ground Zero Mosque Imam Selection Rubs More Salt Into The Wound – Past Connections To Terrorist Supporters Exposed
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is out as the religious face of the Park 51/Cordoba House mega mosque community center complex proposed to be built near Ground Zero. Rauf became too radioactive for the project’s developers, so he was pushed aside. Despite efforts by some apologists to defend this faux ‘moderate, the evidence of his true stealth jihad agenda was overwhelming.
Therefore, to keep moving ahead with their Ground Zero mosque project, the developers turned to Shaykh Abdallah Adhami as Rauf’s replacement. This is just like rubbing more salt into the wound. All that the new imam represents is a different mask hiding the same radical Islamist agenda.
It turns out that Shaykh Abdallah Adhami showed up as a guest speaker at the annual convention of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) back around Thanksgiving 2000. The theme of the convention was “All Palestine is Sacred!” Adhami was joined at the speakers’ rostrum by Dr. Sami Al-Arian who pled guilty in 2006 to conspiracy to contribute services to or for the benefit of the Palestine Islamic Jihad.
Defunct since 2005, the Islamic Association for Palestine was established in 1981 by Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook. Indeed, it functioned as a front for the terrorist organization Hamas.
IAP was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document — titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” – as one of the Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded “organizations of our friends.”
Given the clear terrorist -supporting agenda of the Islamic Association for Palestine, why did the new Ground Zero Mosque imam Shaykh Abdallah Adhami agree to participate in this pro-Hamas group’s annual convention and address the gathering? If Adhami wants to convince us that he has no hidden stealth jihad agenda, then he should release the transcript of his speech if it is still available.
Soros and WikiLeaks: Time To Investigate Their Connection