Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Losing the Jihadists’ War on America

Have you ever asked yourself why, despite more than ten years of efforts –involving, among other things, the loss of thousands of lives in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well-over a trillion dollars spent, countless man-years wasted waiting in airport security lines and endless efforts to ensure that no offense is given to seemingly permanently aggrieved Muslim activists – are we no closer to victory in the so-called “war on terror” than we were on 9/11?

Thankfully, we have been able to kill some dangerous bad guys.  The sad truth of the matter is that, by almost any other measure, the prospect of victory is becoming more remote by the day.  And no one seems able to explain the reason.

In an effort to provide the missing answer, on April 24th, the Center for Security Policy is making available via the Internet a new, free ten-part video course called “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within.”  (www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com).  This course connects the proverbial dots, drawing on a wealth of publicly available data and first-hand accounts to present a picture that has, for over a decade, been obscured, denied and suppressed:

America faces in addition to the threat of violent jihad another, even more toxic danger – a stealthy and pre-violent form of warfare aimed at destroying our constitutional form of democratic government and free society.  The Muslim Brotherhood is the prime-mover behind this seditious campaign, which it calls “civilization jihad.”

The Muslim Brotherhood?  Yes, that would be the same organization to which President Obama recently transferred $1.5 billion of our tax dollars in a lump sum payment.  To do so, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to waive congressionally imposed restrictions born of fully justified concerns about the nature and direction of the shariah-adherent government the Brotherhood is birthing in Egypt.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidentially-directed waiver came despite: the Brotherhood-dominated government’s hostage-taking of American democracy activists; murderous Islamist rampages against Coptic Christians and other religious minorities; the toleration and abetting of escalating violence against Israel in and from the Sinai; and official threats to jettison the 1979 peace treaty with the Jewish State.  And matters have only gotten worse since the President’s largesse was made available in an unusual up-front, lump-sum payment.

Unfortunately, as the Center’s course makes clear, this episode is just the latest of many that flow from the subversion by Muslim Brotherhood operatives that has been happening within our civil society and governing institutions in every administration since Bill Clinton was in office.  [During his presidency, a top Muslim Brother, Abdurahman Alamoudi, was actually put in charge of recruiting, training and credentialing Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military and prison system.  Incredibly, some of them are believed to still be in place today, even though Alamoudi turns out to have been a top al Qaeda financier and is himself doing hard time at Supermax on terrorism charges.]

The George W. Bush administration was similarly subjected to Muslim Brotherhood penetration and influence operations.  As the course documents, the Brothers’ access to and influence with senior officials in the years after 9/11 helped shape policies that, among other things, induced the federal government to: use euphemisms like “terror” to describe our jihadist enemy; reach out to the Muslim community in this country using virtually exclusively Brotherhood front organizations as liaisons; and provide support to and participation in shariah-compliant finance – an industry engaged in what one of its leaders, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calls “jihad with money.”

Unfortunately, those look like the good old days compared to what is happening under the Obama administration.  Not only has Mr. Obama facilitated, and now underwritten, the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover in Egypt and an increasing number of states elsewhere in the Middle East.  At his direction, explicit or implicit, the U.S. government is systematically purging its training materials of any information that Islamists might find offensive – including, factual information about shariah, its impelling of jihad (preferably violent and, where necessary, pre-violent), the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission of destroying us from within, etc.

Worse yet, under Team Obama, Brotherhood operatives doing business as Muslim “community leaders” are being allowed to have a say in what sort of training and outreach is done from here on, and by whom.  Could we have won the Cold War if we gave a similar role to the KGB or the American Communist Party it ran?  Or World War II if that role had been assigned to the German-American Bund?

In short, we are losing what is more accurately described as the “Jihadist’s War on America” because we are being subjected to a systematic, disciplined and highly successful campaign of what the military would call “information dominance.”  It leaves us, as a nation, witless about the true nature of the enemy and his motivations and therefore incapable of countering them effectively.

On April 25, Glenn Beck will release an important new hour-long documentary that addresses many of these same points entitled “Rumors of War III.”  It concludes, as does our course, with a powerful reminder of what is stake if we persist in such behavior and continue to lose the Jihadists’ War on America – a quote from a speech Ronald Reagan gave 50 years ago that rings as true today as ever:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Obama’s all-hat-no-cattle diplomacy

The multinational negotiations held over the weekend in Turkey with the ostensible purpose of halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be followed by – drum roll – yet another round of talks in late May.  Not surprisingly, the Iranian regime is calling this diplomatic exercise "a success."
 
Indeed, it is from their perspective.  The Persians are, after all, the people who invented chess.  They have millennia-old experience haggling about carpets and other merchandise in the bazaar.  And they have the Obama administration and the rest of the so-called "international community" right where such strategically minded folks with a gift for besting their interlocutors want them:  Talking, seemingly endlessly.
 
The Iranians know that as long as the United States and the other members of the Perm 5-plus-1 – diplo-speak for the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council (the U.S., Britain, France and the mullahs’ patron/protectors, Russia and China) and Germany – are engaged in a diplomatic dance, they will insist that Israel not take matters into its own hands and strike Iran.
 
The predictable effect will be to give Tehran the time it needs to complete its longstanding bid to get the Bomb, even as President Obama’s campaign flaks and foreign policy acolytes congratulate him on skillfully managing the vexing Iran portfolio.
 
Such a posture reminds me of the old cowboy put-down of someone who is "all hat and no cattle."  If ever there were a case of someone who is good at the hat bit – talking big, gesticulating forcefully – but abysmal at the business of delivering, it is Barack Obama.
 
Sadly, the Iranian debacle is not the only example of Team Obama’s all-hat-no-cattle foreign policy.  A small sample of the most important of such behavior would include:

 

  • A reset with Russia that has amounted to nothing more than a serial give-away to the Kremlin on missile defense, on nuclear deterrence and the political cover the Russians’ persist in providing rogue states like North Korea, Iran and Syria.  One can only imagine how much worse this will get if the President gets reelected and can be even more "flexible" on such matters than he has been to date.
  • Coddling of China, even as it arms to the teeth with weapons designed to attack American forces and infrastructure – a number of which have emerged to the complete surprise of U.S. intelligence.  In the face of such developments, to say nothing of what amount to acts of war as sustained PRC government-linked hacker attacks on public and private sector computer networks, the Obama administration has maintained what can only be described as a cordially accommodating, business-as-usual approach to Beijing.
  • Ignoring the strategic implications of the impending demise of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  The President’s participation at the Summit of the Americas over the weekend could have been an opportunity to forge a hemispheric commitment to democracy in Venezuela.  At the very least, the United States could have put a strong marker down in opposition to the prospective hijacking of thatlong-suffering country by the narco-generals Chavez has put into power as his cancer metastasizes.  In this case, even the President’s big hat was obscured by the scandal involving his womanizing Secret Service detail.
  • Perhaps most worrying of all is Team Obama’s recent and intensifying engagement with the virulently anti-American and anti-infidel Muslim Brotherhood.  Far from contributing to democracy in Egypt and regional peace with Israel, the prospect for either, let alone both, have become substantially worse, thanks to the administration’s appalling conduct.  The latter includes: opening formal relations with a group whose declared purpose is "destroying Western civilization from within"; feting a Brotherhood delegation in Washington; turning over to the Brotherhood-led Egyptian government in one lump-sum payment $1.5 billion in military assistance; and doling out a further $180-plus million to the Brothers’ franchise in "Palestine," Hamas, which is now partnered with the Palestinian Authority in a unity government there.

 
The all-hat-no-cattle policy is advancing the three practical effects of the Obama Doctrine: emboldening our enemies, undermining our friends and diminishing our country.
 
Speaking of friends, press reports are circulating in the wake of the weekend’s negotiations with Iran, that Israel is reportedly about to strike that Islamic republic. If true, it’s deeply regrettable that such early warning is being given to the Iranians.  
 
But the prospect that the Obama administration has every intention of allowing the Iranians to run the clock out leaves the Israelis with no choice but to attack if they are to stave off an existential threat to their people. We should be helping them do that, not helping the mullahs – and not encouraging still other enemies of this country, actual and prospective, to believe that the costs of taking us on are minimal thanks to our all-hat-no-cattle administration.
 
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Political Compromise of Our Security

                   A troubling pattern of putting U.S. and allied security interests second to the Obama administration’s political priorities is now well-established.  If allowed to continue, it will not only make the world more dangerous.  It is going to get people killed – probably in large numbers and some of them may be Americans.

A prime example of the phenomenon was the disclosure of minute details of the 2011 raid by SEAL Team 6 withinhours of its successful liquidation of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  The revelation of special operations tradecraft horrified those in and out of the U.S. military who appreciate that safeguarding the secrecy of such techniques is essential toensuring their future utility, and the safety of those who employ them.

The really galling thing, though, was that such secrets were compromised for the transparent purpose of touting Mr. Obama’s decisiveness and competency as Commander-in-Chief.  Regrettably, such qualities have not been much in evidence, either prior to or after that raid.  For that matter, notwithstanding Vice President Joe Biden’s characteristically preposterous description of the operation as “the most audacious plan in 500 years,” it is not entirely clear what his boss’ role was in the execution, let alone the conception.

Still, given the importance now being attached to this narrative of vision and courage in the Obama reelection campaign, it is clear that the serial disclosure ofstate secrets by, most notably, the President’s counter-terrorism guru, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, was in the service of a political cause.  Call it the ends justifying the means.

More recently, “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers” reportedly fed Foreign Policy Magazine contributor Mark Perry a salacious story about Israel enlisting Azerbaijan in its plans for staging aircraft in an attack on Iran.  Perry claims that “a senior administration official told [him] in early February that ‘The Israelis have bought an airfield, and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.’”

If true, such a disclosure would fit the pattern of deliberate, concerted and damaging leaks of exceedingly sensitive information in order to advance Team Obama’s political agenda.  In this instance, that agenda would be to prevent any strike on Iranian nuclear and perhaps other targets by the Jewish State before the November elections. 

True or not, the revelation has had the desired effect:  It put the Azeri government of President Ilham Aliyev on the spot and forced it to disavow any such collaboration with Israel.  While some have questioned the integrity of the author and the logic of his thesis, the trouble is, it certainly sounds like the Obama administration to see such a stunt as a highly desirable two-fer: an opportunity to undermine Israel’s security, while effectively protecting Iran.

It seems that a similar calculation moved the Obama administration to divulge what appeared on the front page of theWashington Post’s Sunday editions:  An article citing unnamed White House and intelligence sources – including “a senior U.S. official involved in high-level discussions about Iran policy” – that revealed details about the intelligence operations and capabilities the United States is said to have brought to bear lately against Iran.  

The ostensible purpose of these initiatives has been the monitoring and disabling of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.  Among the insights: the CIA has stood up and greatly expanded a unitdubbed “Persia House” for the purpose of monitoring and running covert actions against Iran.  

In the article, much was made of the growth of this organization, its use of stealthy unmanned drones to collect signals and other intelligence deep in Iran and U.S. involvement in computer worms, assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and explosions in certain sensitive facilities involved in Iran’s weapons program.

The point of these leaks of exceedingly sensitive activities – at least some of which could constitute acts of war, however, seemed once again to be cynically manipulative:  It appears designed to show the American people that everything is under control.  Team Obama is working the problem, skillfully employing intelligence assets to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions from being realized without using military force.

The Post story also served as a vehicle for reiterating the administration’s party line:  The mullahs have not decided to acquire an actual weapon and are at least a year away from getting one.  And, what’s more, we will know should that decision be taken in plenty of time to do something about it.

We would all wish these assurances to be accurate.  Unfortunately, the problem with the Obama administration’s practice of playing fast-and-loose with information that is secret for a reason – it might be called “political compromise,” but that would be the only sense of the term this president seems to favor – is that it almost certainly will jeopardize our security, and that of other freedom-loving people.

Political Compromise… of Our Security

A troubling pattern of putting U.S. and allied security interests second to the Obama administration’s political priorities is now well-established.  If allowed to continue, it will not only make the world more dangerous.  It is going to get people killed – probably in large numbers and some of them may be Americans.

A prime example of the phenomenon was the disclosure of minute details of the 2011 raid by SEAL Team 6 within hours of its successful liquidation of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  The revelation of special operations tradecraft horrified those in and out of the U.S. military who appreciate that safeguarding the secrecy of such techniques is essential to ensuring their future utility, and the safety of those who employ them.

The really galling thing, though, was that such secrets were compromised for the transparent purpose of touting Mr. Obama’s decisiveness and competency as Commander-in-Chief.  Regrettably, such qualities have not been much in evidence, either prior to or after that raid.  For that matter, notwithstanding Vice President Joe Biden’s characteristically preposterous description of the operation as “the most audacious plan in 500 years,” it is not entirely clear what his boss’ role was in the execution, let alone the conception.

Still, given the importance now being attached to this narrative of vision and courage in the Obama reelection campaign, it is clear that the serial disclosure ofstate secrets by, most notably, the President’s counter-terrorism guru, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, was in the service of a political cause.  Call it the ends justifying the means.

More recently, “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers” reportedly fed Foreign Policy Magazine contributor Mark Perry a salacious story about Israel enlisting Azerbaijan in its plans for staging aircraft in an attack on Iran.  Perry claims that “a senior administration official told [him] in early February that ‘The Israelis have bought an airfield, and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.’”

If true, such a disclosure would fit the pattern of deliberate, concerted and damaging leaks of exceedingly sensitive information in order to advance Team Obama’s political agenda.  In this instance, that agenda would be to prevent any strike on Iranian nuclear and perhaps other targets by the Jewish State before the November elections.

True or not, the revelation has had the desired effect:  It put the Azeri government of President Ilham Aliyev on the spot and forced it to disavow any such collaboration with Israel.  While some have questioned the integrity of the author and the logic of his thesis, the trouble is, it certainly sounds like the Obama administration to see such a stunt as a highly desirable two-fer: an opportunity to undermine Israel’s security, while effectively protecting Iran.

It seems that a similar calculation moved the Obama administration to divulge what appeared on the front page of the Washington Post’s Sunday editions:  An article citing unnamed White House and intelligence sources – including “a senior U.S. official involved in high-level discussions about Iran policy” – that revealed details about the intelligence operations and capabilities the United States is said to have brought to bear lately against Iran.

The ostensible purpose of these initiatives has been the monitoring and disabling of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.  Among the insights: the CIA has stood up and greatly expanded a unit dubbed “Persia House” for the purpose of monitoring and running covert actions against Iran.

In the article, much was made of the growth of this organization, its use of stealthy unmanned drones to collect signals and other intelligence deep in Iran and U.S. involvement in computer worms, assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and explosions in certain sensitive facilities involved in Iran’s weapons program.

The point of these leaks of exceedingly sensitive activities – at least some of which could constitute acts of war, however, seemed once again to be cynically manipulative:  It appears designed to show the American people that everything is under control.  Team Obama is working the problem, skillfully employing intelligence assets to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions from being realized without using military force.

The Post story also served as a vehicle for reiterating the administration’s party line:  The mullahs have not decided to acquire an actual weapon and are at least a year away from getting one.  And, what’s more, we will know should that decision be taken in plenty of time to do something about it.

We would all wish these assurances to be accurate.  Unfortunately, the problem with the Obama administration’s practice of playing fast-and-loose with information that is secret for a reason – it might be called “political compromise,” but that would be the only sense of the term this president seems to favor – is that it almost certainly will jeopardize our security, and that of other freedom-loving people.

Leading With No One Behind

In Seoul, South Korea on Monday, President Obama enthused once again about his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.  It’s a dream he has had since he was a radical leftist studying at Columbia University in the early 1980s.  And, in the hope of advancing it now as Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America, he declared that – since he was convinced we had more of these weapons than we need – he is going to reduce our arsenal.  According to some accounts, he has in mind cutting it to one roughly the size of Pakistan’s.

In his address at Hankuk University, Mr. Obama suggested that he would get the Russians to do the same.  That surely will come as a surprise to their once-and-future president, Vladimir Putin, since he has been quite aggressively beefing up the Kremlin’s nuclear forces.  In fact, Putin recently unveiled a $770 billion defense modernization plan which would, among otherthings, buy 400 new long-range ballistic missiles.  It is a safe bet that they will be outfitted with modern nuclear weapons, probably multiple, independently targetable ones at that.

It seems no more likely that the Russians will agree to reduce their vast monopoly on tactical nuclear weapons or their undisclosed and “non-deployed” stocks of strategic nuclear weapons – two other initiatives Mr. Obama declared he wanted to take.  Even if they would, any such agreement would be wholly unverifiable.

If the Russians won’t play ball, it’s a safe bet no one else will either.  Mr. Obama’s subordinates are signaling, however, that he is prepared to disarm us unilaterally through what one of them, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller recently called “executive action.” 

In short, the President seems to be replacing his notorious “lead from behind” strategy in Libya with a “lead with no one behind” approach.

Mr. Obama has sparked disbelief and outrage on Capitol Hill with the revelation that he has tasked the Pentagon with developing options that would eliminate as much as 80 percent of the deployed weapon levels set just two years ago by his seriously defective “New START” Treaty.  On March 7, 2012, Rep. Mike Turner who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee wrote in Politico: “Traditionally, a president has directed his military advisers to determine, chiefly, what level of our nuclear force is needed to deter a potential adversary from attacking us or our allies. The answer to that question should be what drives the strategy — not a president’s political ideology.”

In addition, on February 17, 2012, Chairman Turner and 33 other Members of Congress threw down the gauntlet in a letter to Mr. Obama.  It said, in part: “We seek your assurance that in view of the ambitious nuclear weapons modernization programs of Russia, communist China, Pakistan and others, the deep cuts to U.S. conventional capabilities per the Budget Control Act, and your failure to follow through on your pledged [modernization of the deterrent], that you will cease to pursue such unprecedented reductions in the U.S. deterrent and extended deterrent.”

The legislators’ point about the President’s failure to honor the commitment made to secure Senate approval of New START in a cynical and heavy-handed power play during the 2010 lame-duck session is particularly apt.  Even if Mr. Obama can’t get away with the sweeping reductions he has in mind, all he has to do to accomplishAmerica’s unilateral disarmament is perpetuate the atrophying of our increasingly obsolescent nuclear forces – most of which are over twenty-five years old and have not been realistically tested through underground detonations for two decades.

Later this week, a new push will be made for a treaty that would lock our deterrent permanently into just such a death-spiral.  The National Academy of Sciences will release a study that is expected to deem the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) verifiable and further underground testing unnecessary.  Much evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, proponents of the CTBT and advocates of “Global Zero” – the multimillion campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons that can, at most, rid the world of ours (and perhaps those of other, Free World nations that honor their international commitments) – hope to use the Academy’s analysis to prevail upon the U.S. Senate to reverse its previous rejection of this accord.

At the same time as the Obama administration is wreaking havoc on our nuclear deterrent, it is undermining the other insurance policy we need against catastrophic, potentially country-cratering attacks like thoseinvolving ballistic missile-delivered electromagnetic pulse strikes: effective national, or better yet global, missile defenses.  Policy decisions and budget cuts are taking their toll on our anti-missile programs.  So is the President’s willingness to cede technology or vetoes to the Russians. 

In the latter connection, Mr. Obama was overheard telling outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Seoul on Monday: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for [Putin] to give me space…. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Translation: If President Obama is reelected, we should expect even more U.S. disarmament – whether or not anybody is following our lead. Shouldn’t that grim prospect be a centerpiece of the campaign this year, and the American people offered a robust alternative come November?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

 

Mohamed Merah – Man of the West

The massacre of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times – although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.
On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher.
Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed.
But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served.
Indeed, it hasn’t even begun to be addressed. The killer, Mohamed Merah, was not a lone gunman. He wasn’t even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about.
He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.
An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime? 
Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh? 
The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.
And he was surely correct.
Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations. 
Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl’s killers took of him before they chopped his head off.
The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.
Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators."
The exhibitionism common to all the men’s behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.
THIS SITUATION is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West’s responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah’s death can bring no closure to this story.
There are five interrelated aspects to the West’s response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West’s response is denial.
Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.
In the case of Halimi’s murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi’s family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.
Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.
On a lesser note, everyone from the media to Jewish communal leaders in the US abjectly refuse to recognize that mainstream Muslim groups like the Muslim Students Association are sympathetically inclined towards Hamas. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that sympathy for Hamas necessarily entails sympathy for Hamas’s genocidal platform of annihilating the Jewish people in the name of jihad.
As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.
Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West’s effective collusion with these killers is Western elites’ justification of their crimes.
After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah’s jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah’s name and his excuse at the same time. 
Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel’s "murder" of Palestinian children.
It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn’t murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.
But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn’t know that.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.
And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.
French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century’s first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura’s alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.
The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court’s libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.
The appellate court viewed France 2’s unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.
Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France’s Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France’s Supreme Court overturned the appellate court’s ruling and ordered it to retry the case. 
As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.
IN ADDITION to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.
Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.
Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.
As the mother of the teenager said, "All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times."
In the US, Hasan’s colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.
The West’s complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn’t end with their perpetration.
After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers’ trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi’s killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.
In Seattle, Haq’s first trial for his attack on Seattle’s Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle’s mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn’t bother to present the records of Haq’s phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.
Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah’s death is not a victory of justice.
Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Fund But Verify the Export-Import Bank

Ordinarily, a question of whether to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and to increase its loan limit would be about asuncontroversial a proposition as one could find on Capitol Hill.  Ex-Im provides an important counterpart tothe government-guaranteed loans our international competitors use to encourage their industries’ exports.  And it actually makes money for the Treasury. 

This year, though, some of my friends among the fiscal conservative and strict constitutionalist communities are urging that the Bank’s authorization be allowed to expire or, at least, that Ex-Im not be allowed to increase the amount of loans it can make with government guarantees.  They argue that we should not be extending credit at a time when we are broke, we should not be picking winners and losers, and that these sorts of transactions amount to crony capitalism and favor big businesses. 

Despite such concerns, the outcome is not really in doubt.  The U.S. Senate will surely vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, as has the House of Representatives, and raise its loan limit from $100 billion to perhaps as much as $140 billion.  The reason is clear:  The current authorization will expire on May 31st, and the Bank’s existingloan limit will be reached this month.  Most Senators and their House counterparts recognize that renewing the Ex-Im’s authority and expanding its lending capacity is crucial to maintaining the industrial base and military readiness, to rebuilding American manufacturing and job growth, to improving our trade balance with other nations – and to reducing the deficit.

But let’s examine the critics’ complaints in turn. 

First, the Export-Import Bank is a money-making activity for the U.S. government.  According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, since 2005, Ex-Im loans, guarantees and insuranceprograms have returned $3.4 billion over and above its costs and loss reserves, with a default rate of less than 2%.  That includes $400 million in 2011 alone.  Even if we have to borrow money from the Chinese to make such loans, the net return on investment is positive.  That is money that reduces the deficit, not adds to it. 

Second, far from picking winners and losers, Ex-Im loan guarantees simply ensure that the United States has a chance to have winners in the international market place.  By leveling the playing field with foreign competitors whose governments are only too happy to provide credit – indeed, the Communist Chinese have a facility eleven times the size of the U.S. Export-Import Bank for precisely that purpose – the excellence of our products can be the determinant, not our rivals’ sweetheart financial arrangements.

Third, thanks to an existing congressional mandate to focus Ex-Im’s lending on small businesses, eighty-seven percent of the Bank’s transactions have gone to such enterprises – the ones that have been hit hardest by the credit crunch of the last four years.  This fact should allay concerns about “crony capitalism” as the competition for such loans is fierce and merit-based.

Of particular concern to those of us in the national security community, moreover, is the fact that over half of the dollar amount of the Export-Import Bank’s loans support manufacturing.  That is of tremendous importance with respect to the foreign sales of big-ticket U.S. items, like commercial aircraft.  Such support translates into a cost-effective way to help preserve an aerospace industrial base at a time when it is reeling, and contracting, due to dangerously reduced defense budgets.

Alternatively, if the Ex-Im Bank is not reauthorized with a higher loan level, U.S. manufacturing will soon be damaged by attacks from two sides.  For one, in a predatory global market, we would be eliminating a facility that constitutes a vital source of financing for the commercial industrial base for foreign sales.  The commercial lending institutions either cannot or will not fill this void. 

For another, thanks to the roughly twenty percent cuts in our national security-related spending that the Obama administration has now translated, with congressional acquiescence, into binding statutory direction, we risk devastating – possibly irrecoverably – the manufacturing base of our defense sector.

Matters will be made still worse for the international competitiveness of American corporations as they are now being burdened with the highest corporate tax rate in the world at 39.2%.  All of this country’s seven major trading partners – Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany – have lower rates.

Making the case for the U.S. Export-Import Bank does not mean we should be indifferent to the need to improve its oversight.  Notably, we should not be providing U.S. taxpayer financing to actual or prospective antagonists like China’s National Nuclear Power Corporation (which, in 1996, received $120 million in low-interest loans to purchase U.S. nuclear power technology).  Also, it was not until 2009 that Ex-Im put in place a rule requiring borrowers to certify they have no operations in Iran’s energy sector.

Growing exports to friendly nations through loans that are repaid is an eminently sensible public policy, one we should continue through a reauthorized Export-Import Bank with a larger line of credit.  At the same time that a redoubled effort is needed to ensure that the Bank’s operations and loans are sound and well-managed, we need to resist the temptation – and Obama administration policy – that seeks to grow exports through encouraging the unlicensed export of militarily relevant (“dual-use”) technologies such as “toxins for vaccine research.”  That will be the subject of a forthcoming column.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.  

Channeling Scoop Jackson

When Barack Obama became President of the United States, he swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend our Constitution.”  Unfortunately, evidence has accumulated ever since that he feels no obligation to honor his commitment.

In fact, Mr. Obama has been violating that oath, left and, well, left.  Here are a few of the most egregious examples:

Under the President’s health care legislation, now universally known as Obamacare, Americans are compelled to purchase health care.  The constitutionality of this measure is being tested in court at this writing.  But such a mandate smacks of big government overreach that must be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Then, late last year, there were Mr. Obama’s “recess” appointments of several controversial nominees to positions requiring Senate confirmation.  For the first time in the country’s history, a president made such appointments when the Senate was not actually in recess.  

On the basis of this precedent, Mr. Obama (or his successors) may choose to flout Senators’ constitutional prerogative even further – say by making recess appointments when the Senate breaks for lunch.  And, given the lack of outcry or meaningful push-back from Senators to date, whynot?

The latest, and one of the most ominous examples of President Obama’s low regard for the Constitution, came to light in congressional testimony last week by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.  He told incredulous Senators that the United States would only go to war in Syria if it gets international permission.  Wherever you come down on the advisability of America engaging militarily in yet-another Middle Eastern nation, if we decide it is in our national interest to do so, it should be up to our elected representatives, not the United Nations, the Arab League or some other multilateral entity.

Mr. Panetta added true insult to constitutional injury.  He declared that the administration might or might not inform Congress should it decide to use force.  Presumably, any such decision would, like the U.S. intervention in Libya, be dressed up as a humanitarian operation.  Its true purpose, however, would surely be to topple the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad – a government that, like Muammar Qaddafi’s, it was, until recently, assiduously romancing.

These were not misstatements or Freudian slips on the part of the Defense Secretary.  In his hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Panetta declined several opportunities to clarify or revise his position.  Consequently, one can only conclude that Team Obama has embraced the sort of diminution of U.S. sovereignty that helped scupper John Kerry’s presidential bid in 2004, when he pledged to seek UN permission before engaging in military action.

Many years ago, I had the privilege of working for the late, truly great Democratic Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson.  It is simply inconceivable to me that such anti-constitutional misconduct – by a president of either party – would be tolerated were he still in the U.S. Senate.

Scoop Jackson would have been affronted by the dire implications of such behavior for the system of checks-and-balances that are enshrined in the Constitution and that are supposed to limit the scope and potential for abuse of the government it charters.  He would never have stood for relegating our national security decisions to the say-so of others, or having our military be, as President Obama once put it, “volunteered” by them.

Ever the level-headed politician, Senator Jackson would also have recognized the validity in such cases of the old adage, “what goes around comes around.”  President Obama is creating precedents today that a future Republican president could exploit to the detriment of his partisan rivals.  Some of them may turn out to be the very legislators who are today largely turning a blind eye to what this chief executive is doing, evidently on the grounds that the ends justify the means.  

It is striking that few, if any, Democrats in Congress appear to recognize the peril to our country posed by President Obama’s anti-constitutional behavior.  Even more amazing is the fact that none of them seem to appreciate that they have a vested interest in shoring up the Constitution, not allowing it to be eviscerated, piece by piece.  If they allow this to continue, they will surely rue the day at some point in the future when another Commander-in-Chief is running roughshod over their institutional duties, prerogatives and policy preferences.

Naturally, in the course of a national election, Democratic politicians are reluctant to part company from the man at the top of their ticket, especially in ways that might be seen to align them with his critics.  Still, violating the Constitution is the sort of thing that should compel them to do so.  After all, they also took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.”  I feel sure Scoop Jackson would do so, were he alive today.  The country urgently needs his successors on Capitol Hill – on both sides of the aisle – to channel his character and fidelity to the oath of office that they have all sworn.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Andrew Breitbart, Our Samuel Adams

The untimely death of my friend Andrew Breitbart last week got me thinking about what an extraordinary contribution he had made to our country and to the cause of freedom in his forty-three years.

Reflecting on Andrew’s visionary, colorful and usually combative leadership conjured up a favorable comparison to another patriot from an no-less-critical time in our nation’s history: Samuel Adams.

I sought the counsel of J. Michael Waller, a scholar and professor on the art of political influence who prominently features Sam Adams in his courses at the Institute of World Politics as one of the earliest and most effective of American practitioners of that art.

Dr. Waller confirmed my sense that there were extraordinary similarities between these two towering figures.

For one thing, neither the original Samuel Adams nor our time’s version were troubled by the prospect that their stances were seen as extreme by some. What mattered to both Adams and Breitbart was being right, particularly if it entailed challenging those in government who abused their power and standing up for the common man.

Both men relished a good fight. Samuel Adams and Andrew Breitbart were instigators who could appeal to and mobilize the masses with effective and often-pathbreaking use of the communications instruments of the day.

Interestingly, as Dr. Waller observes, “It was Samuel Adams who organized the Sons of Liberty and the rough men of the waterfront to dump the tea into Boston harbor that night in December 1773, fueling a tea party movement across the colonies, as far south as Charleston, South Carolina.”

Andrew Breitbart played a similarly catalytic role in encouraging and amplifying that movement’s counterpart in our era.

Michael Waller admiringly makes another parallel between these two, larger-than-life figures. Like Samuel Adams, Andrew Breitbart used his role as a purveyor of information — initially as an editor for the Drudge Report and later as the driving force behind his own online media empire — to infuriate his audience and move them to action.

Like Adams, too, Andrew would seek to goad his adversaries to act, or overreact, creating new opportunities to defeat them.

For example, in 1770, Sam Adams was the first to publish the story of an incident he arguably encouraged when a Massachusetts crowd taunted British Redcoats into firing the shots he portrayed as the Boston Massacre.

Andrew Brietbart similarly inspired or stage-managed exposés of outrageous misconduct by President Obama’s favorite community organizers at ACORN, the Agriculture Department’s Pigford scandal, NPR’s willingness to take money from the Muslim Brotherhood and Anthony Weiner’s moral turpitude. All were designed to put a withering spotlight on and upend the established order – and compel action to correct its corruption and venality.

Andrew’s network of websites — Big Hollywood, Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Peace — served as a latter day, electronic equivalent to Samuel Adams’ famous Committees of Correspondence.

As Dr. Waller put it, “Those were local groups of patriots who networked among themselves across Massachusetts and most of the rest of the colonies to spread news, discuss issues, plan action, coordinate their political action, and serve as an underground information dissemination network to circumvent the establishment.”

I was privileged to work with Andrew in launching his most recent “Big,” Big Peace.com. It rapidly became a vehicle for just such collaborations by those committed to a strong America and appalled by policies espoused by Barack Obama – and, regrettably, to varying degrees, by some Republicans – that are having the effect of devastating our country’s ability to project power and deter aggression.

Sadly, unlike Sam Adams who lived to see the fruits of his efforts give birth to a new nation, Andrew Brietbart has passed on while there is still much work to be done.

While he has left behind a terrible void at a moment when a skilled, brilliant and effective political warrior is more needed than ever, Andrew’s abiding legacy will be that he helped create movements and networks that are sure to shape our future.

It falls to us to realize his vision of an America rooted in freedom, limited government and patriotic common sense — a vision he certainly shared with Samuel Adams.

LOST Trade Routes

There is never a good time to deny the United States Navy maximum capability to defend American interests, but now is a particularly bad time. Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons and China’s continuing escalation of its military buildup will have significant implications for key trade routes like the Strait of Hormuz (through which 20% of all globally traded oil passes) and the South China Sea (through which 50% of goods transported between continents by ship passes). We will need our Navy to deter or challenge Iran and China if necessary, to keep those waterways stable and thereby fend off further damage to the global economy. With the Navy already taking a serious hit to its abilities thanks to the Obama administration’s FY 2013 defense budget proposal, the last thing we need is a mechanism that compounds the damage to that force’s effectiveness. But that is what we would be getting with ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (aka Law of the Sea Treaty, or LOST), a topic that 66 Members of the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Jeff Flake (Arizona-6th District) and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio-4th District), recently sought to address.