Archive for category Terrorism
NASA’s New Role: Diplomacy
Posted by Tom in Defense, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Terrorism on July 6, 2010
Stretch goals are important, they compel reaching, thinking outside the box, innovation, risk-taking; yes and ultimately excellence. Where better to expand U.S. horizons than at the space agency, NASA? Kennedy challenged a shot for a man moon landing in 1961, a dramatic stretch goal. This to answer the Russians unmanned landing in 1959. The challenged worked: on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
What’s Obama’s stretch goal for NASA? Well …, er …., it’s diplomacy. Yes, you heard right, diplomacy. Obama wants better relations. With whom you ask. The Muslims! Not the English, the Poles, the Germans, nor the Israelis; no, the Muslims.
According to this Fox News item, “NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.” Bizarre! Mars? No, the Muslim world!
And, note the contrast with Kennedy. JFK was answering the USSR. It was an “in your face” response to an enemy seeking to burry us. Obama confronts Islamists seeking to burry us. What’s he do? Well, he goes about the Middle East bowing, scraping and apologizing for the United States. Oh, and he gives NASA a charge to improve relations with Muslims.
Hussein Obama is well named!
Unprotected Against Jihad
Posted by Tom in Defense, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Individual Freedom, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, Military Policy, National Character, Terrorism on June 1, 2010
Hussein Obama’s counterterrorism tzar, John Brennan trivializes the danger of Islam according to Andy McCarthy in today’s NRO post, An Islam of Their Very Own. The article is a must read with only two conclusions possible: Obama is stupid or naive or he is converting the U.S. to sharia, that is Islamic law. In essence, become Muslim or die, so ruled Mohamed after his militant successes.
“Brennan admonished that we must not “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists.’” Why not? “Because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Right again. There is no gainsaying that jihad is deemed to be a divine injunction in Islam. If one regards all forms of Islam as “legitimate,” then jihad, too, must be legitimate. Yet “legitimate” is a slippery concept. It could mean that something is good. Or it could just mean that something is authentic — something that really exists, for good or ill.
“Islam falls into the latter category. It exists. In many of its iterations — not just al-Qaeda’s ideology but Islamist ideology, which is quite mainstream — Islam means the West existential harm. This is why we are supportive of reformist Muslims, however pessimistic some of us may be about their prospects. The point, though, is that Islam is not going away. It is part of the hand we are dealt, like it or not. We don’t need to trash-talk it gratuitously, but neither should we pretend that it is an asset on our security ledger. It’s not.
“Alas, the Hope administration doesn’t see it that way. For Brennan, as for Obama, Islam is immovably in the first category: “legitimate” as in “good” — end of discussion. To sculpt this alternative reality, two things are required. First, we must ignore Islam’s many troublesome elements — e.g., its supremacism, inequality, intolerance, denial of freedom of conscience, endorsement of violence, etc. Second, to the extent that the resulting atrocities can’t be ignored, we must pretend that what ails the Islamic world is our fault, not Islam’s.”
Andy’s point echos the points made during Herman Pirchner’s presentation and discussion at our last Reno Hayek dinner, namely that radical Islam and its Jihad is closer to the Koran than any reformist/secular branch of that “religion.” I put that in quotes to denote that it is more than just our concept of “religion;” it is government, society and religion in the sense that Mohamed imposed upon his conquests.
Here’s my empirical observation: not many, if any, Moslems have condemned the Jihads, the terror, the 911 carnage, the call to exterminate Israel.
These people are backward, immoral, intolerant, and violent. They advocate or tolerate “supremacism, inequality, intolerance, denial of freedom of conscience, endorsement of violence, etc.” For them, the end justifies the means, no matter how distorted either end or means in reality are. They blow themselves up in hopes of “virgins in heaven.” Pity those few virgins in number! But, that is the level of their intelligence.
Hussein Obama apparently ignores “man caused disasters.” Islam is good because he wishes it so. This is contrary to the reality that we witness every day. Islam is bad.
“Our political leaders can continue to trivialize jihad as if it were some benign struggle to brush after every meal. They can continue to ignore the core tenets that make sharia antithetical to a free, self-determining society. But they can’t do that and do the only job we need them to do: protect our lives and our liberties.” Andy McCarthy’s article is a must read.
Hussein Obama is hell-bent-for-leather to “hope and change” the United States into an Islamic nation under Sharia law. Be very fearful for our nation.
U.S. Foreign Policy: Provocative Weakness
Posted by Tom in Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Military Policy, National Character, Terrorism on May 19, 2010
Our kudos and thanks go out to Herman Pirchner, Jr. President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington DC for an excellent presentation and discussion last evening on America’s foreign policy. Herman took us around the world with using radical islam as the unifying link. It was truly enlightening and very sobering to hear his observations. Among them:
- Russia is extending its “sphere of influence” toward former satellites to counter radical islam and re-assert itself by keeping the U.S. off balance in the Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. In some respects our interest are aligned like controlling radical islam, and in others they are opposed like reforming the white USSR.
- China is due for a generational change that leaves a big question-mark. Unlike the current leadership which grew amid the turmoil of the cultural revolution, the next generation is being raised in relative wealth and security and being educated in the best universities around the world. It thus understands world values. China is the only major nation without a significant islamic population.
- Europe will have a majority islamic population within two generations. Already there are community pockets of society governed by Shia law. There is a distinct possibility that Europe will break apart financially.
- Israel is gravely at risk since the U.S. has permitted Iran to go nuclear. The odds are against its survival.
- Arab world nations fear Persian hegemony and will thus arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
U.S. foreign policy under Hussein Obama has been one of being nice rather than right. We have given up numerous positions without getting anything in return. We have shown ourselves to be weak, frustrating our allies and emboldening our enemies. We are inviting trouble in both aspects.
The doctrine of “provocative weakness” enunciated by Fritz Kraemer in the Nixon years is that the only effective foreign policy was one backed by the realistic threat of using military force to achieve its goals; the failure to use this realistic threat was a provocative invitation to our enemies to use aggression against us. This variation of Teddy Roosevelt’s “speak softly and carry a big stick” is antithetical to Hussein Obama’s administration. Obama is disarming and withdrawing from defensive alliances. He relies on bowing, scraping, apologizing and addressing dictators like Chavez as “mi amigo.” Here’s a picture to refresh memories:
Yes, provocative weakness is Obama’s order of the day!
One chilling observation brought up during the discussion was that the radical islamic version of Islam was more true to the Koran than the secular, passivists’ version. In either version the goal is to conquer non-believers and convert them either peacefully by out populating them or violently with the sword as Mohamed did from Medina. So we will see more September 11ths. Obama has invited them.
Again we wish to thank Herman Pirchner for the excellent presentation and discussion.
“I am Ann Frank”
Posted by Tom in Foreign Policy, Individual Freedom, National Character, Terrorism on April 27, 2010
This, one of the powerful ending lines in Jeffrey Lord’s American Spectator article, Jon Stewart Flunks His Spartacus Test, in which Stewart’s position on Comedy Central’s censorship of South Park’s episode on Islamic fanatics is slammed. Lord sets the courage test in terms of Kubrick’s Spartacus, the iconic film of the Greek gladiator at Capua and his courage to the last. With that in mind he fast forwards to United Airlines Flight 93 on 911 where ordinary Americans were confronted with their Spartacus moment and proudly passed the test earning our tribute or what the ancient Greeks would call arete, courageously living up to their full potential, excellence.
Faster forward to today and the edgy, over-the-top, iconoclastic South Park created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone who decided to take on Islamic Fascists but gently by disguising the Prophet Mohammed as a bear. A web site called “Revolution Muslim” warned the creators that they would end up like Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch film maker killed by Islamic terrorists after he made a film on the treatment of Muslim women. This fatwa put the fear of Allah into Comedy Central which promptly bleeped a 35 second speech warning of “fear and intimidation.”
Now to Jon Stewart, darling of the leftists, brave defender of Democrats, epitome of all moral good. Jon gets his chance to stand up for Free Speech. Jon get his “Spartacus test.” What say, this paragon of leftist virtue, when confronted with intimidation based censorship by Comedy Central?
“It’s their right,” he said of Comedy Central in a verbal shrug of indifference. “We all serve at their pleasure.” In other words, they sign the checks!
The problem is that these Islamic terrorists want to bury us. “American and Western culture — the good, the bad and the ugly of it over a few thousand centuries, from Plato to Parker and Shakespeare to Stone — can thrive only in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. That freedom, as has been made abundantly clear since 9/11, is under full scale assault.”
“The right answer is never to pretend that if you somehow were transported back in time, say to a house in Amsterdam in August of 1944 and the German Grüne Polizei were pounding at your door, you could get away with saying: “Hi. Fox News can %$#@@ themselves. You guys sign the checks. Seig Heil. Ann Frank is upstairs, third door to the right, the room behind the bookcase.”
“The right answer would be, the right answer is always: I am Ann Frank.”
The clever, liberal leftist, Jon Stewart gets an F on his Spartacus test. For all practical purposes, his Obama Hussein idol with his fawning Mideast diplomacy has also flunked the Spartacus test. A great article by Jeff Lord.
Obama: the “peace in our times” president
Posted by Tom in Defense, Foreign Policy, Military Policy, Terrorism on April 14, 2010
Like a broadway scripted play Obama is into his foreign policy-defense act. (This, the act that follows Obamacare!) It is, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a policy “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Act 5, Scene 5)
No, that is to naive but not too harsh. As I think Clifford May’s tax day NRO post, The Obama Doctrine, points out well, Obama has showcased his photo-op national security initiatives: the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (STARTT), new National Security Strategy (NSS) and his international Nuclear Security Summit with 40 heads of state.
- STARTT: Reduce US/Russian nukes by 30% for good example to others. “That’s a lovely vision, but which do you think is more likely: that rogue regimes will see these reductions as virtuous and emulate them? Or that they will see these reductions as an opportunity and exploit them?”
- NSS: We pledge not to use nukes against non-nuclear nations. But we fail to define our non-nation enemies. Obama strips terms like “islamic extremism” from the document for fear of offending! We’re back to “man-caused disasters” and “overseas contingency operations.” ” Imagine if President Roosevelt had decided not to speak about German Nazism, lest he offend Germans who were not Nazis, nor utter the words “Italian Fascism” since not all Italians were of the Fascist persuasion, and of course refrained from mentioning Japanese militarism . . . you get the idea.”
- Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit made little progress on cleaning up “loose nukes” and ignored Iran and North Korea.
- NPR: Obama will not modernize our nuclear weapons nor will he use nukes against enemy attacks against us with chemical or biological weapons. In other words, deterrence is a thing of the past. The policy will “actually provide our adversaries with an incentive to accelerate development of offensive capabilities. They clearly do nothing to strengthen deterrence.” Deterrence is what has kept us safe since 1945. The concept that attacks on us or our allies will not bring measured response but extreme, disproportionate devastation is what prevented such attacks. In this regard, Obama is the equivalent of the Russian in Dr. Strangelove who kept the doomsday machine secret, Obama wants to eliminate deterrence–really dumb!
Finally, our own Neville Chamberlain has decided to eliminate necessary missile-defense! “President Obama has scrapped a missile-defense system for eastern Europe, cut the number of planned deployed ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California from 44 to 30 (these provide the only protection to the U.S. homeland against long-range ballistic missiles), cut $1.5 billion from the missile-defense budget (then, curiously, restored about $600 million), and nominated a missile-defense opponent, Philip Coyle, as his top missile-defense adviser.”
In sum, the “Obama Doctrine” postures against non-existant threats, fails to treat real threats, and removes and reduces our defense capability. He’s an articulate empty-suit and a danger to our security.
Cover-Up With Diversion
Posted by Tom in Defense, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Military Policy, Terrorism on March 22, 2010
Why has Hussein Obama single handedly created a crisis with Israel? He has ordered Secretary Clinton to present Netanyahu with a detailed ultimatum! All over some trumped up building plans in East Jerusalem. In effect he’s blaming Israel for all that is wrong in the Middle East.
Caroline Glick in her RCP post, Obama’s War on Israel, speculates on some intriguing answers:
- His assault on Israel is related to the failure of his Iran policy. He has residential construction to blame for Iran’s bad behavior and nuclear nose thumbing!
- He hopes to bring down Netanyahu and replace him with the leftist Tzipi Livni as more of an Obama puppet.
- He prefers dealing with the unelected Arab dictators in Iran and Syria to the democratically elected Israeli government and downgrading relations with the latter is a condition to better dealings with the dictators who want to exterminate Israel.
Since his election Hussein Obama has been on a world-wind tour bowing, scraping and apologizing for America. He denies the country’s greatness and exceptionalism. It was telling that in doing so he equated America to Greece, that bankrupt PIIG and member of “club Med.”
It is obvious that Obama has failed in Iran and failed generally in the region. He has demonstrated his personal weakness to ally and for alike and now seems to prefer kissing up the Arab dictators. I suspect that there is a reason his middle name is Hussein.
It would be one thing if Obama were simply an embarrassment to his countrymen, but his policies in the region have truly put American security at greater risk. 2012 can’t come too soon; we need a strong president who will keep this country safe.
Ready, Aim, Shoot…….Yourself In The Foot
Posted by Tom in Defense, Foreign Policy, Military Policy, Terrorism on March 14, 2010
These guys are really stupid. This week we saw Biden, Clinton, and now Axelrod jump all over Israel for zoning additional residences in Jerusalem. Jennifer Rubin pens the latest today in her Commentary post, It Gets Worse. She quotes Likud Party’s Danny Dandon who called Clinton’s “meddling in internal Israeli decisions regarding the development” of Jerusalem “uninvited and unhelpful. In fact it is sheer chutzpah.” After all these are zoning decisions regarding Jerusalem’s primary city!
Let me recap Hussein Obama and his three stooges, Biden, Clinton, and Axelrod are dissing our only reliable ally in the Middle East, a nuclear power, the only democracy, and a staunch supporter of the United States. The illegitimate Iranian government is fomenting unrest in Palestine and at the same time developing nuclear weapons which will destabilize the region, at the very least. Open-hand Obama is kowtowing and apologizing for America in the Middle East.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? Do we really have an American president? Commander in Chief?
Ugly Fact For “People of the Book”
Posted by Tom in Defense, Foreign Policy, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, Terrorism on January 21, 2010
Mohammed started successfully consolidating Islam from Medina by raiding caravans heading to Mecca. Then, he started spreading Islam from his Medina base with conquests, eventually throughout the Mediterranean world .
For a time, he tolerated “people of the book.” This, the term given to Abrahamic religions, namely Judaism and Christianity, of which Islam claims to be one. Late antiquity through medieval times to modernity the Islamic-other, religious battles and tolerance shifted to and fro. Today, the civilized norm would seem to be benign tolerance in secular, neutral or tolerant environments, certainly to minorities within Islamic dominated societies.
Not so, as set out in Clifford May’s January 21st NRO post, The War Against the Infidels. In it he enumerates this century’s minority persecutions: dynamiting of the Bamiyan buddhas, desecration of the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel, this week’s Christian killings in Nigeria, the murder of Egyptian Coptic Christians, Pakistan church bombings, and the attacks on Malaysia Christian churches.
Very little reporting from Western journalists. Silence from academics, diplomats and politicians. We are too politically correct. We don’t want to offend. Our president goes around bowing and apologizing in the Middle East, but never condemning.
Clifford May sums it up well: “When the dots are connected, the picture that emerges is not pretty: An “Islamic world” in which terrorists are regarded often with lenience, sometimes with respect, and occasionally with reverence, while minority groups face increasing intolerance, persecution, and “cleansing,” and where even their histories are erased. And we in the West are too polite, too “politically correct,” and perhaps too cowardly to say much about it.”
Don’t look for socialist Europe, the UN or the Democratic administration to raise any objections.
Tom Motherway
Musings on Democratic Personnel
Posted by Tom in Financial Crisis, Intelligence, Terrorism on January 16, 2010
Politics is politics, so you expect political appointments, you know, to the victor goes the spoils. But there may be instances when you want competent people running the show. I would think a couple of those would be investigating the recent financial collapse and investigating our national security lapses. So what do we see in those functions?
Phil Angelides, the former California State Treasurer who oversaw California’s slippage into bankruptcy is now chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission charged with finding out causes and solutions to the market breakdowns. He starts out by failing to consider the roles of the Fed, and Barney Frank’s Fannie and Freddie; the scripted conclusions are already set. Apparently, Phil hasn’t learned any lessons while he watched California slip into bankruptcy! See: D.C. Witness Protection Program in the January 15th WSJ.
And how about national security and the intelligence necessary to make it work? The departments are run by so-called managers like John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Janet Napolitano, and Dennis Blair, not by professionals who know how to connect the dots. People like Napolitano are comically clueless. With these people in charge intelligence will continue to fail according to Herbert Meyer a former CIA official. His article Why Intelligence Keeps Failing, in the January 16th edition of Real Clear Politics presents a summary of intelligence from the OSS days to today’s CIA and NSA. His point that only the pros should run intelligence services is hard to refute.
So what do we get from our Democratic rulers in these critical areas? Laughable incompetence!
Tom Motherway
“Not all Muslims are terrorists, but pretty much all terrorists are Muslim.”
Posted by Tom in Defense, Foreign Policy, Terrorism on January 2, 2010
That truism, complements of an Israeli security officer, is something Barack Hussein Obama refuses to recognize. Can the man be so intellectually stubborn as to not see this simple truth? Is he so dense as to put his obsessive, leftist political correctness over the security of the nation?
Bloomberg reports his feeble attempt to assure US citizens he will protect them, he used the word “war” in his recent pronouncement: “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” Obama said. Yes, he swallowed hard and used the word “war” instead of “overseas contingency operation!” But against whom or what, Mr. President? Terrorists, terrorism, perhaps? No, he still can’t bring himself to use the word “terrorist;” thus he leaves the “man-caused disaster” joke hanging in the air, marking his administration’s posture on defense.
That defense posture is well illustrated by treating the act of war as a mere crime: not interrogating the enemy combatant as to future attack plans, but giving him miranda rights, a defense attorney, discovery rights, and a trial by jury. All rights, hard won rights, of a US citizen! No wonder the nation is insecure. Charles Krauthammer said is well in his post today: “From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guatanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York–a trifecta of political correctness and and image management. And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over–that is, if it ever existed.”
It’s time to drop the PC crap, start profiling and stereotyping as the Israeli security officers do and stop frisking 80 year old grandmothers. We are looking for muslim terrorists, Islamic terrorists. These people come from certain countries, certain ethnic groups, certain religions. They have typically traveled to certain places as their passports well illustrate. Barack Hussein Obama, please learn this well and see that is is implemented in our security procedures.
Tom Motherway