1.5 Billion Bin Ladens

by Alan Caruba

Amidst the graffiti on the wall outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, one of the rioters scrawled “1.5 Billion Bin Ladens.” Last time I heard, the last thing bin Laden saw was a member of Seal Team Six just before he took a bullet to the head. That is the way a nation that has been attacked responds to the murder of nearly three thousand of its citizens.

To suggest, as the White House keeps saying, that rioting in more than twenty-five mostly Muslim nations is the result of some amateur film that no one has seen reveals an administration that thinks Americans are stupid and unaware that President Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East is responsible for the crisis that has killed our ambassador to Libya and others. A compliant mainstream news media continues to report this fiction.

At the heart of events is the intention to create a Muslim caliphate stretching across the Middle East, Northern Africa, and into Southeast Asia. One that will stretch into Europe and, presumably, America. The aim is to establish governments in which Sharia law will replace any remnants of democracy and freedom. It is being aided and abetted by Barack Hussein Obama.

I don’t want 1.5 billion Muslims to die. I just want them to stop attacking America, the West, and each other. The likelihood is that many, if not most, Muslims find the rioters an offense to Islam, but if they said so out loud, they are just as likely to become a dead Muslim. No other faith of the many on planet Earth requires its faithful to make war on everyone that is not a Muslim.

There is no making peace with the more radical elements of Islam for whom dying as a martyr is so appealing they believe that killing other people is worth strapping on a bomb.

Jews don’t believe this. Christians don’t believe this. Hindus don’t believe this. And Buddhists don’t believe this.

The history of Islam reveals a pattern of conquest by a cult that venerates a self-proclaimed prophet.

In 612 AD, Mohammed began to preach his new “religion.” It was a patchwork of what he knew of Judaism and Christianity with a mix of local pagan faiths. Its greatest appeal was that it endorsed the pillage of caravans and then of tribes as a means to acquire wealth. It permitted men to have several wives and reduced women to chattel. If you were a malcontent forever looking for someone to hate, you were instructed to hate—and kill—all non-believers in Allah.

In 632 AD, Mohammed died. His followers launched “holy wars” to spread Islam and, in the process, created the schism between Sunnis and Shiites concerning who was Mohammed’s rightful successor. They still disagree and, as we have seen, do not hesitate to kill one another.

By 638 AD, Muslims had conquered Jerusalem and, within a few decades, controlled an empire stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, a landmass that includes modern day Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

In 673 AD, the first Muslim attack on Christian Constantinople was repulsed. Having established Islam throughout northern Africa, Muslims invaded Spain in 711 AD where they would remain for seven centuries until driven out. When they tried to go farther north in Europe, they were stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD.

Between 1095 and 1291, led by the Catholic Church, a series of crusades ensued. The latter ones were more successful, recapturing Jerusalem in 1099. Saladin would recapture it in 1187 AD. In 1453 AD, Constantinople fell to Ottoman armies and the Church lost its base in the Middle East. Rome would become its capitol.

Thereafter the greatest threat to Europe was the Ottomans, but in 1683 their army was decisively defeated near Vienna, ending any expansion. It would not be until World War I that the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered by Britain and France.

Muslims have long memories and still resent the loss of Spain despite their spread into India and parts of Asia. When Israel declared itself an independent nation in 1948 those memories were inflamed because Islam does not cede land it once controlled.

In the modern era, the West has mostly sought to control the Middle East through the proxies of various despots, but that has not always worked out as they wished. After invading Afghanistan the Soviet Union collapsed when they were driven out. They lost control over satellite nations in Eastern Europe. The U.S. is seen as losing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Militant Islam is on the rise again, driven in large measure by Iran, but also funded and encouraged by Saudi Arabia despite its reliance on American military power to protect it. The present turmoil has nothing to do with a quest for democracy and freedom.

In Egypt the overthrow of Hosni Mubarack put the Muslim Brotherhood in charge and President Obama had signaled his support when he gave his apology speech in Cairo in 2009. He then supported the overthrow of Libya’s dictator.

In all likelihood, Israel will have to mount a military mission to damage Iran’s nuclear program. If it does not, it will be destroyed. After Israel, America will be next. So let’s root for Israel even if the present administration does not.

America’s problem is the present administration of Barack Hussein Obama who was elected in 2008 despite the fact that his father was a Muslim, his step-father was a Muslim, and his outreach to Muslims has proven to be a colossal failure.

America responded to the 2001 attack on 9/11 with military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. It did not pursue these wars as we once did against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the last century which ended with the demand for an unconditional surrender and a long occupation.

That’s going to be hard to achieve as President Obama continues to reduce our nuclear arsenal and massive budget cuts to our military power kick in. Those who think that America can withdraw from the Muslim turmoil and aggression behind two great oceans are wrong. We could not do that in the 1940s, we could not do that in 2001, and we cannot do it now.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama Admits He is a Muslim

Cartoon Round Up

Echoes of Past Failures

Rosh Hashanah 2012 - Ancient Prayers, New Dangers

By Alan Caruba

The question of the day is: When was the last time that Israelis attacked an American embassy, took hostages, or killed an American diplomat? The answer is: Never.

The answer to a similar question about Islam is a long list of such attacks going back to Iran in 1979 when American diplomats in Tehran were seized and held hostage for 444 days and most recently in Cairo, in Libya, and in Yemen, when our embassies were besieged this week. The attacks were timed to coordinate with the eleventh anniversary of the attack on America on 9/11..

Generally unknown to Americans is that, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, in the weeks leading up to the 9/11 anniversary Muslim clerics and others throughout the Arab world repeated the fiction that 9/11 was actually orchestrated by the U.S. and Jews in order to target Islam and Muslims. Steeped in centuries of anti-Semitic Islamic teachings, this conspiracy theory is widely accepted.

The House of Mirrors in the Middle East is one in which everything is a reverse of reality. It is a narrative in which it is the Muslims who are the victims and 9/11 was an American and Jewish plot against them.

In addition to the anniversary of 9/11, the current turmoil in the Middle East is occurring as Jews around the world are preparing to celebrate their High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

On October 6, 1973, following a succession of wars, Israel was once again attacked. It was Yom Kippur. This exemplifies the hatred felt throughout the Middle East towards Israel. On 9/11 Americans were reminded of their hatred for our nation. Eleven years later, nothing has changed.

One would think that Israel could count on the support of the U.S. as Iran rushes to create their own nuclear weapons for the expressed purpose of destroying Israel, but the Obama administration has broken a bond that dates back to 1948 when the U.S. was the first to recognize the establishment of Israel.

President Obama has invited Egypt’s President, Mohammed Morsi, to meet with him in New York when the UN convenes a session, but pointedly could find no time in his schedule for Israel’s Premier, Bibi Netanyahu. While embassies throughout the Middle East and worldwide are on heightened alert, Obama’s highest priority is to raise money for his reelection.

That is the current status of affairs as Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of Saturday and extends through Sunday. It occurs ten days before Yom Kippur and it is on Yom Kippur that Mamoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, will address the United Nations. He will find a friendly reception because the UN has been the locus of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic sentiments for decades.

Synagogues around the United States are likely to have a strong police presence on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Recently, in Manalapan, in my home State of New Jersey, a neighborhood was defaced by swastikas and graffiti, but while there are occasional anti-Semitic incidents the American Jewish community remains secure.

In reality, though, all Americans remain the target for Islam’s the holy war.

The coming U.S. elections are a time of choosing and it is clear that the Democratic Party has been captured by its extreme left wing. This was demonstrated when the inclusion of a platform plank mentioning God and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel required three votes for passage at the recent Democratic Party convention and was loudly booed by a significant portion of the delegates.

The convention more nearly resembled a meeting of the former Soviet Comintern and, along with his associations, statements, and actions over the years, the DNC nominee, President Obama, is hostile to Israel, having thoroughly absorbed the anti-American sermons in the Chicago church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright who, following 9/11, famously said, “the chickens have come home to roost.” He, like so many others, blames America.

So we are not just going to elect a new president in November, we are going to cast a vote for a future of much-needed economic recovery and one in which the most fundamental American values and faith are reaffirmed. We shall do so as America remains under attack by Islam.

L’Shanah Tovah, the Hebrew greeting on Rosh Hashanah translates as “May you have a good year.” For America, a good year will begin only if the nation rids itself of the worst President in its history.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Countdown to Obama's Defeat

By Alan Caruba

“I don't consult polls to tell me what my principles are or what our policies should be.” -- Paul Ryan, Republican candidate for Vice President

I have a number of political pundits whom I admire, admittedly because they agree with my analysis of what’s happening. Those with whom I disagree keep telling me that Obama is doing just fine, he’s five points ahead here or there, he’s appealing to woman, Hispanics, blacks, et cetera.

No, Obama’s political base can be summed up rather easily. They are idiots.

The same kind of idiots that loudly booed the Democratic Party plank reinstating God and Jerusalem as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa agonized through three votes until he decided “in the opinion of the chair” that the yeas were shouting just a tad louder than the nays. It would have more accurate if he had said “in the opinion of the chair, the Marxists have lost.”

Then there is the popular video going around in which DNC delegates were asked if it was a bad idea for corporations and other businesses to make a profit and most of them said—wait for it—yes. This is Obama’s base.

Over the years I have grown less confident of polls taken in the run-up to Election Day. This is especially true when they suggest that only a few points separate one candidate from another. A successful incumbent President should have a recognizable margin of approval and, if he doesn’t, that’s usually a sign he’s in trouble.

My mind keeps returning to the Carter-Reagan campaign and its outcome. Writing in Time Magazine on December 1, 1980, John F. Stacks reported:

“Reagan's landslide challenges the pulse-taker profession. For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was "too close to call." A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders. But when the votes were counted, the former California Governor had defeated Carter by a margin of 51% to 41% in the popular vote—a rout for a U.S. presidential race.”

And now it’s someone’s turn say, “Yeah, but that was 1980 and Romney is no Reagan.” Suffice to say, there can only be one Reagan and, for that matter, only one Jimmy Carter. Does anyone find any correspondence between the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, along with a terrible economy, that finished off Carter’s chances for reelection and it is not the same Iranians making all kinds of threats against Israel to provoke their military response?

In 1979, Iranians took U.S. diplomats hostage in much the same way Egyptians in Cairo—on the twelfth anniversary of 9/11—scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy, tore down the U.S. flag, while in Benghazi, Libya they were killing our ambassador and his staff. The President’s response was a disgraceful, typically apologetic, lame statement in response. All this limp-wristed diplomatic talk does is invite more attacks.

Do not deceive yourself into thinking the Iranians are not following the U.S. campaigns and not doing their own calculations regarding whether the Israelis will attack their nuclear facilities before or after November 6. And, yes, the Israelis are making the same calculations that explain why they are demanding that the U.S. and the world draw some “red lines” that might deter Iranian nuclear aggression.

All Presidents are subject to events beyond their control. How they respond is the key to understanding whether they are leaders or merely politicians. Constantly apologizing to nations in which our embassies are under attack and our diplomats are killed is the very antithesis of leadership.

After 9/11, Bush43 bombed the hell out of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. There were no complaints at home. Should that have been sufficient? Probably yes. Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die. As for Iraq, well, bombs are still going off there as the Arabs conduct business as usual. The Arab Spring has been about swapping old despots for new ones dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

I tend to look for signs of the outcome of elections in places other than polls and one of them was reported in the September 10 edition of The Wall Street Journal. It turns out that the weekend’s box office for movies people plunked down money to see included “’2016: Obama’s America,’ the low-budget documentary critical of President Barack Obama, (that) remained in the top-10 highest-grossing films, earning $3.3 million on 2,017 screens. The $2.5 million film has now grossed $26.2 million since its opening.”

On Sunday, September 9th, New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, pretty much sacked Obama for blaming the people who elected him for his failure as President. Even Jon Stewart on the Comedy Channel took a shot right after Obama’s acceptance speech. The August 27th edition of Newsweek had a cover story, “Hit the Road, Barack. Why We Need a New President” by historian Niall Ferguson who eviscerated him with fact upon fact. Newsweek was among the most worshipful magazines in 2008 of candidate Obama.

And who has a huge campaign war chest and who has not? Hint: Republicans.

When noted liberals or liberal publications start looking for the exit door before the election, you have a pretty good indicator that even liberals have tired of Obama’s unfulfilled promises, not to mention the worst economy since the Great Depression.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Apologizing to Our Enemies

By Alan Caruba

All Presidents are hostages to events. It is, however, the manner in which they respond that shapes their outcome.

By the afternoon of September 11, the Obama administration scrambled to disavow a statement to the assault on the U.S. embassy in Cairo that had been issued by the embassy.

The statement said, “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

“Misguided individuals”?

“The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect views of the United States government” an unnamed administration official told Politico.

But the statement did reflect the Obama administration’s views as expressed repeatedly over the years. Indeed, in condemning the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and his staff, issued on September 12, was repeated in President Obama’s statement. “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the senseless violence that took the lives of these public services.”

The attacks, deliberately timed to coincide with the eleventh anniversary of the worst attack on the U.S. homeland since Pearl Harbor on 9/11, the administration made no effort to connect them. It made no effort to explain to Americans that this nation is at war with Islam, a war made manifest in Afghanistan following 9/11, pursued against the dictator Saddam Hussein, and which the President himself has been personally carrying out with drone attacks on al Qaeda leaders in Yemen and in Pakistan; a war personified in the ten-year effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

It was a war declared by Iran when, in 1979, Islamist revolutionaries scaled the walls of the American embassy in Tehran and took our diplomats hostage for 444 days until releasing them the same day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office for his first term in office. He would later order an attack on Moammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya after he sponsored terrorist attacks carried out against American targets in Germany and the bombing of an airliner over Great Britain carrying Americans. Gaddafi sued for peace.

If Obama had announced that the proposed funding to Egypt would not be sent, nor similar support for the nascent Libyan government that replaced Gaddafi then, at the very least, a message would have been sent that we will not support governments that stand aside when such attacks occur.

Obama’s “diplomacy” with the Middle East has been a message of apology.

All this is reminiscent of former President Carter’s failed attempts to assert American power and outrage. For all the criticism of President Bush, after 9/11 he swiftly authorized the bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Obama has been trying to open lines of communication with the Taliban instead of steadfastly pursuing a policy of destroying them. In this regard, ignoring Pakistan’s support for them has been a failure of spectacular misjudgment.

Never forget that Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan where he had received sanctuary, living barely a mile from that nation’s equivalent of our West Point academy.

Contrast that with Republican candidate, Mitt Romney’s response to the Libyan killings. “I am outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt, and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

This goes way beyond the politics of the current campaigns. It goes to the heart of the fact that America has been under attack since the killing of marines in Beirut in 1983 and by the attacks on our embassies there and in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

Islam is at war with America and the West. Iran has covertly been waging this war. And the Obama administration’s response has been to attack our only true ally in the Middle East, Israel, openly withdrawing from support for a nation that, along with ours, is threatened by Iran.

We must stop apologizing to our enemies and begin to punish them before they once again bring their war to our shores.

© Alan Caruba, 2012