Missing The Salafi Forest & The War Of Ideas Through Pam Geller's Trees

Seth Leibsohn: I want to get to . . . the appropriateness . . . of [Pam Geller's "Draw Mohammed" contest] on Sunday even before the shooting began. . . .

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser: Well, I do think, the analogy I like to use is a drunk who's walking through the streets and has anger and violent tendencies. Then someone decides to go up and poke him in the eye and . . . where is the problem? The problem is in the drunk. Why is he drinking, why does he have a substance problem and why is he violent. And that's what I'm dedicated to. Now, was it smart to poke him in the eye? I guess yes. He's running fifty-six countries and a quarter of the world's population, and he's distributing in an organized fashion that toxin that I call political Islam through a draconian form of Shariah [law] that needs reform, I think it's relevant . . .

Russ Douthat said it the best, in the NYT of all places, in January when he wrote a piece on the "blasphemy we need." He wrote that, if a large enough group . . . is willing to kill you for saying something, then it is something that certainly needs to be said. . . .

The greatest blasphemy in Islam is denying God, and these people aren't killing atheist conventions. . . . If you go to the Supreme Court in [Washington, D.C.], there are busts of people who have contributed to Western law. There is a bust in the Supreme Court . . . of Mohammed - at our Supreme Court. No one is having a big deal out of that. So the issue is Islamo-nationalism. The criticism of the Prophet Mohammed through a caricature is like burning the Islamist flag, and that's why they get all enraged. It's nothing about major theological offense. Yes, we can't have images of the prophet because of fear of deification of Mohammed, but it's all about theo-politics and not about, necessarily, theology. . . .

Seth Leibsohn radio interview of Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, 5 May 2015.

. . . Salafism robs young Muslims of their soul, it turns Western communities against them, and it can end in civil war as Muslims attempt to implement shari'a in their host countries. A peaceful interpretation of Islam is possible, but the Salafi establishment is currently blocking moderate theological reform. The civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology.

Tawfiq Hamid, Egyptian born physician, former terrorist and now author, 2008, Interview in the Jerusalem Post

Pam Geller's 'Draw Mohammed' contest does not raise a legitimate issue of freedom of speech. No one can contest that, under the First Amendment, she has a right to hold such a contest. That is a no brainer. The argument that has been raised by some on the left is that Geller's speech is likely to cause violence by those who are perpetually outraged. Anyone who knows the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence knows that such is not a legitimate ground to stop Ms. Geller's speech. What is really going on here is that our neo-Stalinist left would like to shut down any speech that they don't agree with or that in any way criticizes one of their victim's groups. Give them the finger and move on; their arguments are not worthy of anything more than ridicule.

Update: Megyn Kelly, Alan Dershowitz and others agree with my assessment of Constitutional law on this issue:



Everyone seems to be missing the far more important issue - that what is going on here is a "war of ideas" in Islam and our government has ceded that war to the enemy. Pam Geller's contest demonstrated it. Dr. Jasser explains what is actually happening -- that the Salafists' who demonstrate murderous outrage over the Draw Mohammed contest have no moral standing and their outrage is not theological in its nature, it is political. It is the murderous outrage that comes from Salafist Muslims bent on stopping any criticism of their toxic, triumphalist, and politicized interpretation of Islam and bent on preventing any reform, even as they spill blood by the tons around the world in an effort to impose a caliphate. Countering that requires engaging in the war of ideas.

There is little doubt that Obama has - and continues to - completely mishandle of our engagement in the Middle East. But even more harmful has been his utter retreat from any engagement in the war of ideas, to the point, one, of refusing to call Islamic terrorism by its name, and two, by excusing Islamic terrorism on the grounds of moral equivalence with the Crusades of near a millennium ago.

As I wrote in 2009 and as still very much applicable today:

The physical war on terror is necessary to stop the [threat] of immediate [attacks to our nation]. But it is in the war of ideas that the true battle lies, for if we do not stop the radicalization of Muslims, then the war on terror will never end. Ultimately, as Tom Friedman recently opined, this is a battle that must be fought within the four corners of Islam itself. But that said, we have an existential motivation to insure that the "good side" wins. This is made all the more critical because the good side, if you will, is not winning. The ideology at the heart of [ISIS,] al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups is very much still on the advance.

The threshold issue in the war of ideas is to identify who, as a group, constitutes “radicalized Muslims.” Islam, like Christianity, is subdivided into numerous different sects, many of which, such as Sufi for example, are peaceful and counsel coexistence. Individually, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world, most of whom would make good citizens, good friends, good neighbors and good family members in the West. Only a portion of them become “radicalized” whether as members of al Qaeda, [ISIS,] or some of the other radical Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and Jamat-I-Islami to name but a few. Those who belong to these groups do in fact share a common thread – virtually all are adherents to the Salafi/Wahhabi school of Islam or a school, such as Deobandi, that has been heavily influenced in all relevant respects by Salafism.

There was a time when Salafism was confined to the back waters of Arabia. That changed when the tribe of Saud, in partnership with the tribe of Waahab, conquered Arabia in the 1930's. Within decades, the Sauds became incredibly wealthy on oil. Now, they spend billions annually exporting Salafi clerics, schools and textbooks to the four corners of the world. Consequently, Salafism is becoming the dominant form of Islam and is effecting every major school of Islam. As I wrote in a prior post:

According to official Saudi information, Saudi funds have been used to build and maintain over 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges, 210 Islamic Centers wholly or partly financed by Saudi Arabia, and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children in non-Islamic countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia. The North American Islamic Trust - a Wahhabi Salafi organization, owns between 50% and 80% of all mosques in North America. And Salafists are, in many cases, taking over existing Mosques throughout the world. Some very informative expamples include Belgium, Somalia, and Indonesia. And indeed, the Saudi Salafi Islam now exerts significant influence on our educational system, all the way from grade school to university. . . .

The West's premier orientalist, Professor Bernard Lewis - the man who coined the term "clash of civilizations" half a century ago and who predicted the rise of Islamic terrorism years prior to 9-11 - writes in his book "The Crisis of Islam" that the ideology of [Saudi Arabia's] Wahhabi / Salafi Islam is many times worse than that of the“KKK” in terms of bigotry and violence (p. 129). . . . The NYPD, in a 2007 report, “Radicalization In The West” documented Salafism as the common thread and motivating force behind terrorist attacks in the West. Zhudi Jasser, a Muslim reformist, writes on the dangers of Salafism and the efforts to engage it in the war of ideas here. The Center For Islamic Pluralism, a "a think tank that challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups," maintains a section on their website called "Wahhabi Watch." Perhaps the most cogent description of Salfism goes back a century, to the observations of Winston Churchill:

A large number of Bin Saud's followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of [Europe's] religious wars.

The Wahhabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.

It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own regions the Wahhabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Salafism has remained virtually unchanged since Churchill's observations. It was only a few years ago that the Saudi courts, applying Salafi Sharia law, ordered the victim of a brutal gang rape to suffer 200 lashes and six months in jail for being outside of her home without the escort of a male family member. To this day, hunting witches and breaking spells are the top duties of the Salafi religious police and, when witches are "caught," they are ritually slaughtered. In the Salafi culture of Saudi Arabia, it has been less than 20 years since the kingdom's senior cleric, the Grand Mufti issued a fatwah declaring "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment." And then there is the well known Salafi edict that anyone who converts from Islam is to be slaughtered.

As I pointed out in a post here, Islam, unlike Christianity, is a religion that has never gone through a Rennisance, a Reformation or a Period of Enlightenment. And while the mechanism - itjihad - exists that could lead to such an event, the reality is that Salafists are fighting any change to their interpretations of the Koran and Sunnah with every tool at their disposal, up to and including "slaughtering the takfirs." Moreover, they are using the UN to push for blasphemy laws that would shut down all criticism of Salafism in the Western world.

The vitriol, bigotry, and triumphalism of Salafism are taught to students in schools and madrassas across the world – including in American Islamic schools and Salafi prison ministries. Salafi Islam teaches that its adherents can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. Moreover, Salafists hold that challenging their existing Salafi Koranic interpretations are "redda (apostasy) punishable by death . . ." And indeed, for specific references to these doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.

Salafism is the religion of [ISIS], the religion of [al Qaeda], the religion of all the 9-11 hijackers. That said, nothing that I write here is to suggest that all or a majority of Salafists should be stigmatized as radical. But the simple reality we ignore at our peril is that it is from the wellspring of Salafism that virtually all the radicalism of the Muslim world arises.

In the war of ideas, one of the most important steps that Obama could take would be to publicly shine a light on Salafism, both as the feeder for radical Islam and for the barbarity of some of its dogma. That would go very far to starting the type of discussion that could actually bring some semblance of evolution and peaceful change to Salafism. Ignoring Salafism - which, according to ex-CIA agent Bob Baer we have done ever since the 1970's when the Saudi's first began to buy influence in the American body politic - allows it to metastasize in the dark. And it is metastasizing at rapid speed today on the back of Saudi petrodollars. That is a recipe for disaster.

No one should be asking, as a result of Pam Geller's "Draw Mohammed" contest, whether anyone has a First Amendment right to criticize, in any way, shape or form, Saudi Arabia's Salafi Islam. They should be asking why our President is not engaging Islamists in the war of ideas and why he is ceding that ground to the Salafists. It is a mistake that our children and their progeny will be paying dearly for in the decades to come.

Update: Pat Condell discusses a related Mo-toon incident in the UK. It is an exceptional rant.

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The Al-Sisi Interview

Bret Baer: How do you, and how do America's other Arab allies view U.S. leadership in the region now?

Egyptian President al-Sisi: [Pause] . . . Difficult questions . . . .

Fox News Special Report, Interview of Egypt's President al-Sisi, 9 March 2015

The exchange above tells you everything you need to know about Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East. In the language of diplomacy, that is the equivalent of saying "it is completely screwed." And it is.

The Arab nations are under attack from the Wahhabi purists who dream of a caliphate as well as Iran's mad mullahs who dream of exporting the Khomeinist revolution throughout the Middle East and the world. Everything the Obama administration has done has, on one hand, allowed the growth of the Wahhabist Sunni threat, and on the hand, strengthened the hand of the mad mullahs. Morevover, as to Egypt, Obama has suspended most, if not all, military support, including equipment transfers, since the radical Muslim Brotherhood regime of Morsi was overthrown in 2013.

According to Fox News, in another portion of the interview, not shown in the portion posted below, President Sisi "addressed the need for what he called a religious "revolution," urging moderate Muslims around the world to "stand up" against terrorists twisting their religion." It bears repeating that President al-Sisi is the only national leader to call for Islam to reform itself, to do away with the doctrines that are today inspiring Islamic terrorism. (You can see his speech to the clerics at al Azhar University here.) President al-Sisi deserves our full support, not the back of Obama's hand.

Here is the portion of the interview already posted to the net:



Update: Much more on President Sisi's attempts to change how Islam is taught in Egypt at American Thinker.

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Understanding The Dangers Of And To The House Of Saud

We have Islamic terrorism in the world today largely because of Wahhabi Islam out of Saudi Arabia and those other sects of Islam infected by Wahhabi Islam, including Khomeini's bastardized variant of Shia twelver Islam. But Wahhabi Islam, and now its variants, are as much a threat to the Saudi regime as they are to the rest of the world.

The Sauds were a warrior clan in 18th century Arabia. They made common cause with the Islamic spiritual leader Wahhab, that the Sauds would conquer under the moral authority of Wahhabism in return for Wahhabist support for their regime. The entire legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy rests on their appeasing and promoting of Wahhabism.

The Saudi wars of conquest were to go on for the next two centuries until, in 1932, Ibn Saud was able to claim much of the Arabian Peninsula as his own. Having finally achieved total control of an area with vast oil wealth, money and power soon corrupted much of the Saudi Royal family. The most notorious example of this corruption involved Crown Prince, later King, Fahd. As described by a BBC article in 2005:

For some, the most memorable image of Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is as a young prince, emerging from a casino on the French Riviera in the early hours of the morning, an actress on each arm.

People remember him wearing an expensively cut Western suit and gazing out confidently, not in the least troubled by the wholly un-Islamic combination of drink, women and gambling.

This was not, of course, an aspect of the King's past which could be openly discussed in the Saudi media. But everyone knew the rumours.

There were stories of all night sessions at seedy clubs in Beirut, of affairs with belly dancers, and of the wife of a Lebanese businessman paid $100,000 a year to make herself available.

Then in 1969, Fahd was said to have lost $1,000,000 in a single dusk-to-dawn marathon of Scotch-fuelled gambling at the tables of a Monte Carlo nightclub.

Needless to say, many of the true believers in Wahhabism came to see the Saud clan, quite rightfully, as deeply corrupt. As to damage control in the wake of Crown Prince Fahd's actions, the Sauds didn't change their ways so much as become obsessive in controlling public exposure and scrutiny. Second, the Sauds attempted to reclaim their religious legitimacy by significantly enhancing support for the Wahhabi religion. This was when the Sauds started exporting Wahhabism around the world on an industrial scale and which continues to this day.

Unfortunately for the very wealthy Saud clan members, the vast majority of whom would much prefer reclining in the arms of a Western consort with a fine scotch to sitting in a Mosque, their lifestyle -- as well as their very pragmatic ties to the U.S. for self defense -- have made the Saudi clan the target for many of the Wahhabists outside of their control. As the David Ignatius wrote not long ago in the Washington Post, "Sunni and Shiite extremists, otherwise deadly adversaries, share a common dream of toppling the House of Saud."

So there you have it. The world's most vicious cycle, for the Sauds and the world. The Saudi clan must fully fund and support the Wahhabists to maintain their legitimacy. The Wahhabists they create want to destroy the Saudi clan because it is corrupt. The Saud's have every reason to help us, but they can't turn off the spigot that is the well spring of all Islamic terrorism today without destroying their regime. And if they do that, no Scotch, no prostitutes, only mosques. No, they'll ride this camel until it dies -- hoping against hope that we in the West can save them from their own Wahhabist terrorists. And the utter insanity of it all is that, even with all of that, it really is in our interests to cooperate with the Saudis.

Special thanks to the ever brilliant Andrea of Bookworm Room for inspiring and contributing to this post.

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The Wahhabi / Khomeinist Islamic Threat and Meaningless Words

It is axiomatic that if you can't diagnose a problem or an illness, than you can't cure it. Thus, when you here Obama call the threat the West faces "violent extremimism," you can rest assured, the threat we face will never die. But the vast majority of those who criticize Obama are little better. Typical is the column in The Atlantic today by Peter Beinart calling for the threat to be labeled "violent Islamic extremists." That is a better, but still nowhere near specific enough to allow for the problem to be dealt with at its core. Like sharks, there are many different schools of Islam, only a few of which pose an aggressive danger to civilization, at least at the moment. Why is that? When our government answers that question, when they put the threat of "violent extremism" in that context, then and only then it can be dealt with effectively by encouraging, through opinion and, if necessary, physical means, the Muslim world to deal with the specifics of their faith that are at odds with civilization.

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Wahhabi Islam & A Muslim's Plan For The War Of Ideas

The war of ideas is the war that matters in regards to Islam. That is the one we need to win or our children's children will still be fighting the radical Islamicists long after we are gone. As I have pointed out for at least a decade, and contrary to what Obama has continuously claimed, the Muslims we are fighting are not motivated by some anamolous interpretation of their religion. They are the true believers in Wahhabi Islam and the schools of Islam Wahhabism has infected. And if that is to end, then we must support reformers who would bring their religion from the 7th century into the 21st.

This today from Zaid Nabulsi, a lawyer writing in the Jordan Times [reprinted in full]:

Enough is enough. It is time to speak out.

“Islam is innocent” is an incomplete sentence. Introspection is needed, for, if we shy away from reality, the alternative will be more images like those we witnessed last Tuesday night, when brave Lt. Muath Al Kasasbeh was burnt to death in a cage.

The inconvenient truth that is overlooked or willfully ignored by apologists for the indefensible is the fact that Wahabism, the cult of mediaeval austerity founded by Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), has over the last half century been exported to every mosque and school throughout the Muslim world until it completely enveloped mainstream Sunni Islamic teachings.

Wahabism has entirely replaced, and become, Sunni Islam; the two cannot be told apart anymore.

Some Wahabist teachings, which have permeated the air we breathe in the Muslim world, are simply irreconcilable with decent human values, especially the ones that declare that every non-Wahabist is a disposable body whose bloodletting is unproblematic.

So enough of this burial of our heads in the sand. It has become tiresome to keep hearing the unproductive cliché that Islam is innocent after each atrocity committed by devout fanatics who did nothing except execute the exact letter of their textbooks, which order them to slaughter the infidels.

The escapism that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with those atrocities does not hold water anymore because Wahabism and Islam have become indistinguishable.

To understand the crisis of Muslims today, one has to remember that Wahabism exists in several textbooks containing the alleged sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, or books of “Hadith”, revered by so many.

What we must confront is the undeniable fact that it is from many stories found in these books that the unprecedented cruelty of groups such as the so-called Islamic State and Jabhat Al Nusra emanates.

The problem today has nothing to do with the original spirit of Prophet Mohammad’s message. Nor has it anything to do with the tumultuous history of Muslims over 14 centuries, parts of which were no doubt glorious and enlightened.

The catastrophe today is with the visible manifestation of Islam in the modern world, as demonstrated by the prevalent beliefs and practices of many people who call themselves Muslims.

This negative image of Muslims is not all just smoke and no fire. This is what those 120 Islamic scholars who sent a letter to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi last year could not fathom.

IS did not invent a new Islam. On the contrary, its followers are strict adherents of the same textbooks quoted in that long letter (bizarrely addressed to “Dr Ibrahim Awwad Al Badri”, Baghdadi’s real name, bestowing intellectual respectability upon this mass murderer, as if one were writing a letter to the mayor of Copenhagen).

In fact, the scholars’ letter was a misguided attempt to disinfect Wahabism, to cleanse it from itself, by claiming that IS simply misinterpreted texts that are otherwise compatible with human decency.

In that sense, the letter squabbled over the semantics of the alleged instructions by the Prophet to spread Islam by the sword, but it did not dare renounce the authenticity of those same sayings.

Instead, the scholars argued that IS has simply taken those instructions out of context, and so they addressed the devotees of Ibn Taymiyah (the mentor of Wahabism, 1263-1328) with counterarguments based on those same problematic Ibn Taymiyah texts that IS employed to justify its barbarity.

The truth of the matter is that, faced with the IS and Nusra atrocities, Muslims cannot afford to give Wahabism a facelift.

If we truly want to defend Islam, we need to perform a much more invasive surgery.

Take the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of the prevalence of the Wahabist teachings among Muslims today.

The Brotherhood is the virtual womb that incubated all the current jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda itself (Al Zawahiri hailed from the Egyptian MB offshoot that murdered president Anwar Sadat).

Yet, when Abu Musab Al Zarqawi was killed in 2006, the three most senior leaders of the MB in Jordan brazenly visited the condolence house in Zarqa and announced to the media that Zarqawi was a martyr in the eyes of God, despite Zarqawi having blown up three hotels in Amman the previous year, killing scores of Jordanians going about their lives or celebrating a peaceful wedding.

We need not go too far back.

More recently, former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, of the MB, committed much worse deeds than his Jordanian counterparts while he was briefly in office, using his pardon prerogatives to release the murderers who carried out the 1997 Luxor massacre of 62 elderly European tourists.

Not only that, Morsi even appointed the leader of that group as a governor of Luxor itself.

The MB in Jordan, despite their token condemnation of the immolation of Kasasbeh, still refuse to describe him as a martyr.

Some may counter that it is poverty and economics, not Wahabist doctrine, that explain why so many Muslims are supportive of such murderous trends. This simply defies the facts.

The orgy of decapitations in Syria over the last four years was promoted by very rich Sunni clerics such as Yusuf Al Qaradawi and Mohammad Al Uraifi, aided by the countless satellite stations openly calling for the murder of Alawites and Shiites, and financed by billions from extremely wealthy but hateful Muslims.

So, enough with the denials. It is time to raise the alarm. We have a problem!

It is not a coincidence that for over a decade we, Muslims, dominated the world record in mindless televised massacres.

There is obviously a propensity towards eliminating “the other”, imbedded deep within Wahabist ideology.

It is not only foolish to deny this fact, it is also dangerous, for we would be covering the cancerous tumour with a bandage.

What we cannot deny is that many of the Wahabist textbooks are the same operating manuals that Islamist butchers use to justify their savagery.

For example, very few people know that while Muath was being set on fire in that macabre video, the voiceover was a recitation of an Ibn Taymiyah fatwa deeming the incineration of unbelievers a legitimate act of jihad.

Ibn Taymiyah is not some obscure scholar on the fringe of Sunni Islam. In the Sunni world, he is universally venerated with the title “Sheikh of Islam”, elevating him to an almost infallible clerical status.

If we really want to defend Islam as a religion of mercy, if we really want to be believed when we proclaim the innocence of this religion, we need to do more than just repeat this meaningless mantra about us having nothing to do with IS.

We have to muster the courage to identify the specific texts that actually defame Islam, denounce them and permanently cleanse Islamic tradition of them.

Amen. This is what our nation's government should be giving its full throated support. Obama's claim that Islamic terrorism is separate and apart from Islam is not merely wholly at odds with reality, it works against people such as Mr. Nabulsi who would reform their religion in a war of ideas.

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Islam & The Battlefield Of Ideas

"[Obama] is insulting, I think, to many millions of reform-minded Muslims who are trying to reject and push back theocracy," he told Fox News on Wednesday. "And the leader of the free world in the meantime is saying, 'Well, these terror groups are sort of coming out of thin air and it's just sort of a crime, education and a job problem' -- which is absurd and oversimplifying."

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, quoted in Obama accused of skirting Islamic extremist threat, at ‘summit without substance’, Fox News, 19 Feb. 2015

In what has to qualify as the understatement of the year, George Condon at the National Journal writes that Obama and his administration are "struggl[ing] with the language of terrorism." Actually, they're not struggling. They are, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, in "pathalogical denial" of the fact that mainstream Islam is motivating terrorism.



To put this in perspective, the U.S. had decimated al Qaeda by 2008. But in the aftermath, ISIS popped up. And assuming we deal with ISIS, you can rest assured that another alphabet Wahhabi or Twelver Islam organization will rise to take their place. (And do note, while ISIS is a threat, it pales in comparison with the threat posed by a nuclear armed Iran.) We will forever face an increasingly existential threat from Muslims unless and until the Islamic religion is torn out of its 7th century roots. That requires engaging in a war of ideas. But, as the WSJ Editorial Board points out, the "war of ideas" is one "the West refuses to fight."

Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and other jihadist groups are waging more than a military conflict. They are also waging an increasingly successful ideological war for the soul of Islam and its 1.6 billion followers.

Their version of jihad is gaining adherents precisely because it is motivated by an idea that challenges the values and beliefs of moderate Islam, the West and modernity. The free and non-fanatic world won’t win this deeper struggle if the Obama Administration refuses even to acknowledge its nature.

The 9/11 Commission Report put this front and center. Its second chapter, “The Foundation of the New Terrorism,” traces what it calls “ Bin Ladin ’s Appeal in the Islamic World.” It discusses the late al Qaeda leader’s faith in “a return to observance of the literal teachings of the Qur’an and the Hadith.” It underscores bin Laden’s reliance on Muslim theologians, from Ibn Taimiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th. And it explains how bin Laden turned Islam into a licence for murder. . . .

None of this is denied in the Muslim world, which is well aware of the increasingly radical bent of mainstream Islamist theology. Not for nothing did Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi recently visit Cairo’s al-Azhar university, Sunni Islam’s premier center of religious learning, to warn leading clerics of where Islam is heading: “Let me say it again, we need to revolutionize our religion.”

That’s exactly right, but it’s hard to see how such a revolution might take place—much less who might carry it out—if Islam can barely be mentioned in the context of a conference on “violent extremism.” In his speech Wednesday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that “al Qaeda and ISIL do draw selectively from the Islamic texts,” and he called on Muslim leaders to reject grievance narratives against the West.

But the President also insisted that the West must never grant al Qaeda and Islamic State “the religious legitimacy they seek” by suggesting they are Muslim religious leaders rather than mere terrorists. That’s a fine sentiment, but it elides the fact that the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive. The Islamic State may speak for only a minority of Muslims, but it is nothing if not Islamic in its beliefs, methods and aims. Ignoring that reality for the sake of avoiding injured feelings helps nobody, least of all Islamic State’s many Muslim victims or Islam’s would-be reformers. . . .

To this, add the sentiments of UAE's Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba:

[W]hile ISIL may be the most visible menace, it is not the only threat. Across the region, violent extremists of all stripes have demonstrated their intent to roll back modernity and impose a reign of terror. . . . While military force is necessary, the key to success over the long term will be what happens off the battlefield. . . . . . [M]ilitary might and obstructing funders and fighters will not be enough. ISIL, al Qaeda and other groups are sophisticated modern organizations that use media and social networks to disseminate their ideology of hate and fear. More than provocative propaganda, these messages are nothing other than assassin recruitment ads and digital death threats that must be disrupted. In one of the most effective approaches in this battle of ideas, Muslim leaders are directly confronting and discrediting the extremists who cloak their radical ideas and violent actions in the language of Islam. While often drowned out in US and European media, influential clerics are forcefully speaking out in the region for moderation and tolerance, developing new religious texts and helping to train a new generation of imams. . . ."

And on a final note, there is Bahrain's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who would define the threat we face not as terrorism, but as "theocrats," getting far closer to reality than the Obama administration:

Terrorism is not an ideology; we are not merely fighting terrorists, we are fighting theocrats.

…If we start to define ourselves as in a war with theocrats, however, then I believe we can begin the process of delivering the military, political, economic – and maybe even the social – policies to counter this threat together, as we have in the past. In the last century, the world faced a series of overwhelming threats: fascism, totalitarianism, cold-war communism. They were studied, however, as concepts, understood and clearly defined. We addressed them, clinically, as ideologies.

So what do we call this new form of ideology, how do we identify it and how do we define it? We must agree the specific terminology and identified characteristics to take us to the very root of the problem we face. For one group alone, we already struggle with an absurdity of titles including Isis, Isil, IS and Da’ish. We see the likes of al-Qaeda and its various offshoots. We have al-Shabab and Boko Haram and that’s before contemplating yet unformed groups of their type that may develop in the future. In each case, however, we continue to hop blindly and haphazardly from one tactical threat to the other, without strategically understanding or categorising our foe. . . .

The Prince's choice of "theorcrats" as the identifying characteristic of the evil we face is subtle indeed. While the various organizations the Prince identifies above are aspirational theocrats, there is only one theocracy extant today, and it happens to be one that has spent the better part of the last thirty years attempting to destabilize Bahrain. That would of course be Iran.

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Clinton Takes Responsibility For Benghazi, But Leaves All Critical Questions Unanswered

Sec. of State Clinton said this last night about the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi:



What she said is insufficient. If she was truly taking responsibility, she would have accompanied her mea culpa with a letter of resignation, or the heads of the "security professionals" who, she would tell us, made criminally reckless decisions. Instead, what Clinton gave us yesterday was a whimsical "my bad, sorry." Or to use the vernacular of Whoopi Goldberg, it wasn't 'taking responsibility taking responsibility.' It states the obvious, leaving all of the important questions regarding security, intelligence and foreign policy unanswered, and holding no one accountable.

Yes, as Clinton stated, the specific manning decisions for security in Benghazi would be made at the State Dept. and would never reach the White House. That said, if the decision to underman security in Benghazi irrespective of the actual threat was made in consideration of a policy, then we need to know where that policy originated. who approved it and why. That is either Clinton and or Obama. Bob Woodward highlighted this exact point several days ago on Fox News:



And then, of course, there is the now the well publicized testimony of LTC Wood, commander of a security detachment in Benghazi who begged the State Dept. for more security months in advance of the attack - "[f]or me, the Taliban was on the inside of the building. . ."



Moreover, there is the claim that "fog of war" lasted for near two weeks, during which time Susan Rice, Obama, Clinton and others in the administration claimed that this was a 'spontaneous' protest over a video that got out of hand. State Dept. officials who were in Benghazi on 9-11-12 have given a first hand account of what occurred on that day. To say that our intelligence agencies were mystified for weeks, let alone 24 hours, by the "fog of war" is utterly beyond belief. Charles Krauthammer highlighted that on a Fox News panel:



So that raises the next series of questions, regarding our intelligence capabilities. Who in our intelligence community briefed the White House and what was the sum of that briefing? Either our intelligence community has degraded to the level of the keystone kops or someone is lying to America. And further, we have been told again and again that our nation had no "actionable intelligence" regarding the Benghazi attack. Why not? Are we seeing degraded intelligence capabilities because of the President's decision to deal with al Qaeda almost solely through drone strikes and not through capture and interrogation?

Then there is the elephant in the room. If Obama was trying to deceive America about the nature of the Benghazi attack, why was he doing it? Others have answered that. Charles Krauthammer, in his column The Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, points out that Salafism is resurgent in the Middle East, that Obama's "doctrinal premises were supremely naive" and that his policies have been "deeply corrosive to American influence." Laura Logan noted that Obama's deception runs deeper than just al Qaeda and the Benghazi attacks:

[O]ur government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

And indeed, twelve hours before the attacks on 9-11-12, I penned the following:

{The US. is experiencing] a false sense of security for no, we are not safer today. For the past eleven years, our soldiers and intelligence services have performed brilliantly. They have done all that we have asked of them. And yet, the future in the Middle East and, more particularly, as regards the radical Islamists, looks far more threatening today than it did on September 10, 2001.

I followed that prescient observation by noting that we have failed to engage in the war of ideas, and thus al Qaeda will be constantly regenerating in some form or another. This is not a 'war' that will end in 2014 as we turn off the lights in Afghanistan. Because we are not engaging in the war of ideas, this will be a conflict that will last for decades.

At any rate, the answers to all of the questions raised above were not answered by Hillary Clinton's whimsical acceptance of responsibility with no consequences. This is not a "political" diversion; it goes to the heart of our national security and the wages of four years of policy decisions by the Obama administration. It so happens that they are all encapsulated in the answers to why the Benghazi attack happened, why it succeeded, and why the Obama administration lied about it to America. Those are questions the Obama administration wants to avoid like the plague until after the first Tuesday in November. Those are questions America deserves answers to today.

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A Mo' Cartoon A Day

How to solve the problem of pretextual Islamic hyper-rage? A brilliant suggestion from Daniel Pipes in an op-ed at Fox News - use fire to put out the fire:

. . . What would happen if publishers and managers of major media outlets reached a consensus -- “Enough of this intimidation, we will publish the most famous Danish Muhammad cartoon every day, until the Islamists tire out and no longer riot”? What would happen if Korans were recurrently burned?

Would repetition inspire institutionalization, generate ever-more outraged responses, and offer a vehicle for Islamists to ride to greater power? Or would it lead to routinization, to a wearing out of Islamists, and a realization that violence is counter-productive to their cause?

I predict the latter. A Muhammad cartoon published each day, or Koranic desecrations on a quasi-regular basis, would make it harder for Islamists to mobilize Muslim mobs. Westerners could then once again treat Islam as they do other religions – freely, to criticize without fear. That would demonstrate to Islamists that Westerners will not capitulate, that they reject Islamic law, that they are ready to stand up for their values.

So, this is my plea to all Western editors and producers: Display the Muhammad cartoon daily, until the Islamists become accustomed to the fact that we turn sacred cows into hamburger.

Actually, it sounds a lot more likely to work than the Obama / Clinton apology for U.S. freedom of speech ad now playing in Pakistan. Here is my part, reprinting from Charlie Hebdo's edition this week:

(H/T Crusader Rabbit)

Yes, I know, they are over the top. Here is hoping U.S. cartoonists grow some testicles and come up with something more tasteful and critical. I still like Mo' with the bomb for a turban. It is certainly apropos.

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What Does It Say When The French More Avidly Defend Free Speech Against The Islamists Than Does The U.S.?

Until today, I thought the last people of French origin worthy of any respect were Charles Martel and his army of Franks - the men who heroically beat back the advance of Islamic armies into Europe. That was in 732 A.D. - a turning point in history.

It has been a long dry spell, but today, I can stand and salute France's stand on free speech, and in particular, the publishers of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, a magazine that has had its headquarters firebombed previously for "blasphemy" against the Prophet of the religion of peace. The magazine is in the midst of publishing more caricatures of Mohammed and the radical Islamists, this time based on the movie "Innocence of Muslims." This from the USA Today:

France stepped up security at some of its embassies on Wednesday after a satirical Parisian weekly published crude caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. The prime minister said he would block a demonstration by people angry over a movie insulting to Islam as the country plunged into a fierce debate about free speech.

The government defended the right of magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish the cartoons, which played off of the U.S.-produced film The Innocence of Muslims, and riot police took up positions outside the offices of the magazine, which was firebombed last year after it released an edition that mocked radical Islam.

What, no phone calls to the publisher from the Chief of Staff? No statements of disgust at the content from the President or the Sec. of State? No calls from the left to have the publisher jailed for blasphemy against Islam? Government protection of the publisher instead of sending brown-shirts to drag him from his home after midnight for questioning - or fingering him for the Islamists?

Hey, this is France, people, the place that quite literally introduced the word "surrender" into Anglo-Saxon English. This is the place that probably has more white flag factories than any other place on this earth. This is the place that gave birth to socialism and the war on Christianity. And their government - albeit with some wavering - and at least a part of their media are showing more backbone than our current administration and media?

The small-circulation weekly Charlie Hebdo often draws attention for ridiculing sensitivity around the Prophet Mohammed, and an investigation into the firebombing of its offices last year is still open. The magazine's website was down Wednesday for reasons that were unclear.

One of the cartoonists, who goes by the name of Tignous, defended the drawings in an interview Wednesday with the AP at the weekly's offices, on the northeast edge of Paris amid a cluster of housing projects.

"It's just a drawing," he said. "It's not a provocation." . . .

On the streets of Paris, public reaction was mixed.

"I'm not shocked at all. If this shocks people, well too bad for them," said Sylvain Marseguerra, a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne. "We are free to say what we want. We are a country in which freedom prevails and ... if this doesn't enchant some people, well too bad for them."

Khairreddene Chabbara disagreed. "We are for freedom of expression, but when it comes to religion it shouldn't hurt the feelings of believers."

Charlie Hebdo has courted potentially dangerous controversy in the past. Last November the magazine's front-page, was subtitled "Sharia Hebdo," a reference to Islamic law, and showed caricatures of radical Muslims. The newspaper's offices were destroyed in a firebomb attack just hours before the edition hit newsstands.

In 2006, Charlie Hebdo printed reprints of caricatures carried by a Danish newspaper in 2005 that stoked anger across the Islamic world. Many European papers reprinted the drawings in the name of media freedom.

Charlie Hebdo has also faced legal challenges. The weekly was acquitted in 2008 by a Paris appeals court of "publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion" following a complaint by Muslim associations. . . .

For refusing to back down and silence themselves in response to the violent animals of the Middle East - and those in their own midst - I can honestly say that I now have respect for a second group of French people very much in the mold of their great predecessor, Charles Martel. Let me utter words that I honestly thought would never pass my lips: Viva La' France.

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How Should We Respond To Charges Of Blasphemy Against Islam

Six months after declaring that all churches in the Arabian peninsula should be destroyed, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called at the weekend for a global ban on insults targeting all religious “prophets and messengers,” a category that, from a Muslim perspective, includes Jesus Christ.

Leading Sunni Clerics Demand Global Ban on Insults to Islam, CNS News, 17 Sep. 2012

“We never insult any prophet — not Moses, not Jesus — so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” Mr. Ali, a 39-year-old textile worker said, holding up a handwritten sign in English that read “Shut Up America.”

Cultural Clash Fuels Muslims Angry at Online Video, NYT, 16 Sep. 2012

Allow me to respond to your contentions, Grand Mufti and Mr. Ali.

Your religion is unique in many ways - one of which is that adopts a false Christianity as part of its founding narrative. Islam claims that Jesus is a "prophet" of its religion while ignoring his teachings and denying his divinity. In the Dome of the Rock Mosque, built atop the most holy site in the Jewish faith, there is an inscription now 1,300 years old:

The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed unto Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not Three. It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from his glory that he should have a son.

Now, that is blasphemy in its purest sense. It irks me, but I ignore it, thinking only that you are misguided. But if you and your fellow Muslims in the Middle East, on the other hand, are prepared to do violence because someone in the U.S. said something not nice about Mohammed - well, you can pack it where the sun doesn't shine. And if you act violently, expect an appropriate response in return, bearing in mind that our tolerance level for your infantile, hypocritical and outrageous acts is not infinite. At some point, your violence will beget a response of overwhelming force.

As to Jesus, while the Koran claims to adopt him as part of Islamic faith, yet the Koran adopts none of his teachings. Perhaps most importantly, Jesus commanded us to follow the Golden Rule. Mohammed acknowledged no Golden Rule. To the contrary:

Islam does not enjoin believers to do unto infidels as you would have infidels do unto you. On the contrary! Islam tells its followers to subdue infidels; to kill them; to, at best, reduce them to dhimmitude.

And as to the Dome of the Rock, let's talk about the detestable Muslim habit of attempting to wipe out symbols and buildings of other faiths - an act directed by the Koran, verse 018:021. The Dome of the Rock was built on the holiest Jewish site, the Temple Mount, 1,300 years ago. It wasn't until 800 years ago that Muslims justified this on the claim, apparently made out of thin air, that this was a site also intrinsically holy to Muslims because of Mohammed's night ride. Everywhere Islam conquered, they built mosques on top of the holy sites of Christianity, with Constantinople and Cordoba being the two most famous of thousands of examples. Unfortunately, this is not merely historical - it continues to this day, from destroying ancient historic Buhddist statues in Afghanistan to the destruction of Churches in Nigeria, Egypt the West Bank - and let's not forget Jordan's industrial scale destruction of Jewish holy sites after they captured the Jewish Quarter in Jerulsalem.

I could raise an entire litany of other examples. There is the Muslim world's glorification of the most animalistic, subhuman acts of terror directed against Jews and Christians. There is the Koran's direction that it is acceptable to rape and enslave non-Muslims. There is the officially sanctioned discrimination against Christians and the few Jews left in every country with an Islamic government. There is the murder of homosexuals and people accused of witchcraft, not to mention the grossly unequal, violent treatment of women.

I consider the vast majority of these things to be a blasphemy against my religion - and indeed, all of these things to be a blasphemy against humanity. Here is reality. Your nations have produced nothing to advance civilization in the past near millenium. Today, the Arab Middle East is a cesspool of poverty, corruption and dysfunction - and that is not the fault of the West, not the fault of the Crusades, not the fault of 'Western imperialism,' and not the fault of America, where if you want to practice your religion in peace, you are perfectly welcome to do so. It is the fault of Islam and an Islamic culture that is, in the words of Churchill, the most "retrograde force" on this earth.

The best thing that I and the world can do for you is to criticize your religion and demand that you reform it to the point that its believers comport with civilized behavior. The best thing that you can do is evolve your culture and religion.

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Spinning The Middle East & The Murder Of An Ambassador

In 2007, Obama claimed that, if he was elected, Muslim hostility would ease. As the events of the past week have brought home, we are, today, in worse shape in the Middle East than we were four years ago - and indeed, than we were on 9-11-01 - with radical Salafists now in or near control in most Arab countries.

That is a reality that puts a stake in the heart of Obama's narrative that he has been a foreign policy success. To obfuscate, the administration on Sunday trotted out UN Ambassador Susan Rice to make the case that the 9-11-12 violence in Cairo and the murder of our Ambassador in Benghazi were nothing more than a spontaneous response - on 9-11 no less - to an anti Muslim film trailer that, incidentally, had been on the internet for months. As Conn Carol writes {h/t Instapundit):

[N]o one outside the White House believes a single video caused the violence. Liberal commentator and Tufts University international politics professor Dan Drezner has called Obama’s decision to blame the YouTube clip a “radically incomplete and dishonest answer.” As The New York Times Ross Douthat points out, the riots have far more to do with internal power politics.

And Rep. Alen West minced no words in responding to Rice's contentions:



(H/T Bluegrass Pundit)

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out a few days ago, what is happening is that the Obama administration is agreeing with the rioters, throwing our First Amendment under the bus rather than admit that the administration's Middle East policies of apology by the U.S., justification of Arab victimhood, and disengagement have borne a poisonous fruit.



Other pundits have reached similar conclusions, each worth a read. The best analysis comes from Victor Davis Hanson at PJM

:

The worst response to radical Islam has unfortunately become the present administration’s postmodern, so-cool policy. The Cairo fable, the al Arabiya “Bush did it” interview, the euphemisms (e.g., “man-caused disasters”), the insanity that Maj. Hasan’s murdering threatens our diversity programs, trying KSM in New York, reading Mutallab his Miranda rights, serial trashing of Guantanamo, James Clapper’s laughable assurance that the Muslim Brotherhood is “secular,” NASA’s all-important Muslim outreach, etc., at best remind the Islamists that Westerners would hardly be so self-abasing if there were not something to be ashamed about.

Barry Rubin, also writing at PJM, notes that the "causes of these demonstrations are not some act of Islamophobia, but the agitation of revolutionary Islamist groups that work systematically every day to build anti-Americanism, hatred of the West, and the loathing of Jews and Christians." That is also the conclusion Fouad Ajami, writing at the Washington Post.

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Update: Prof. Niall Ferguson also has an excellent article on the situation in the Middle East today, opining that "what is unfolding in the Middle East has the makings of the most perfect storm in American foreign policy since 1979."

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But deflecting attention from reality of the Middle East exposed by the 9-11-12 violence has not been the only rear guard action the Obama administration has been engaging in this past week. There is also the attempt to wholly gloss over the scandalous lack of security in Benghazi on 9-11-12 that led directly to the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

To this end, the State Dept. is stonewalling, outrageously refusing to answer any more questions on the murders in Benghazi. Further the administration used Ambassador Susan Rice's appearance on on all of the Sunday talk shows to provide a complete defense of the administration. Rice insisted that security in Benghazi, which, on 9-11-12 consisted of a locked door and two American and four Libyan security personnel, was "strong" and "significant." This despite the fact that "terror cells in Benghazi had carried out five attacks since April, including one at the same consulate, a bombing at the same consulate in June." And despite the fact there was forewarning of the attack. And despite the fact that 9-11 is a date even an idiot knows is a very likely to be a day of violence directed at U.S. targets by Osama-loving Salafis.

Rice is lying shamelessly. The security plan in Benghazi was not "significant" or "strong," it was criminally reckless. Now, hold your breath until the MSM holds the Obama administration to account for this any time before Nov. 7.

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Outrageous: Justice Dept. Publicly Fingers Key Figure Behind Anti-Muslim Film (Updated)

This is perhaps the single most outrageous act of the Obama administration and Eric Holder's Justice Dept. to date - and that is saying a lot.

Federal authorities have identified a southern California man once convicted of financial crimes as the key figure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforcement official said Thursday.

Attorney General Eric Holder said that Justice Department officials had opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other diplomats killed during an attack on the American mission in Benghazi. It was not immediately clear whether authorities were focusing on the California filmmaker as part of that probe.

The "key figure" had used an alias in making the film for his own personal security. The AP article quoted above goes on to provide the actual name of "key figure." I will not repeat it here.

To be clear, it doesn't matter WHO produced this film. It is not a crime. So what possible justification is there for the FBI to publicly identify the "key figure" behind this film? There is none. Our 1st Amendment absolutely forbids any legal action against this man. This is thuggery in its purest form - endangering the life of the person fingered and sending a message to anyone else in the U.S. who might want to make their feelings on Islam known but are too afraid to exercise their rights without anonymity because some Salafi nut job might behead them.

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Update: Instapundit has gone nuclear over this in a series of long posts and round-ups, opining that "Barack Obama should resign." See here, here, here and here. -------------

You want to know the true canard of the Obama administration. Its that this film trailer, available world wide on Youtube for two months, was anything other than a pretext for the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood to organize violence against the U.S. on 9-11. What our government should be doing is naming those bastards, either as part of an arrest or as notification of their next of kin. Instead, we apologize to them for our freedom of speech and now publicly finger the "key figure" behind the movie.

The modern left has nothing but contempt for "free speech" - at least to the extent that it is speech with which they personally disagree. The left's support of Islam does not arise out of respect for religion, but out of a common cause to undermine the Christian foundations of our society. Does Holder and the left really want to play this game of making "blasphemy" a crime in the U.S.? The same people who denigrate Christianity at seemingly every available opportunity want to make "blasphemy" a crime? Does this mean we can prosecute the "key figure" behind "Religuous?"

Salafi Islam and Iran's own version of it, the veleyat-e-faqi, are not religions, they are cults. The "Allah" they worship is immoral and bloodthirsty, barbaric and pitiless, irrational and intent on the destruction of all things not Islamic. Unless Salafi Islam, and indeed, all of Arab culture goes through a "rennasaince" and "reformation," we are ultimately headed towards a genocidal conflict not of our choosing. The only other alternative is to mobilize public opinion on a massive scale by unapologetically shining a blinding spotlight on these cults - the ones' that believe it is fine to assassinate anyone who leaves their religion, or who disagrees with their interpretation of the Koran, or that murdering 3,000 innocent people on a single day eleven years ago was a good thing, and that the perpetrators are in heaven enjoying non-stop sex and wine. We can fight this with guns or the pressure of public opinion on a world wide scale. But we are going to fight it one way or the other. Eric Holder and Obama would have it be with guns.

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Update: ABC News is now reporting that the film maker might face jail time for his movie. The only "crime" here is that the Obama administration wants to deflect the reality of today's radicalized Middle East onto the film maker. This is the most blatant and grotesque violation of the First Amendment I can ever recall. It is Orwellian in its purest sense. And it really is a red line. If he spends a day in jail over this, this country needs not an election, but a revolution. -------------

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Libya - the Aftermath

Our Ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was murdered by Salafists in Libya, at some point during what amounted to a full scale military style raid. Ambassador Stevens apparently had no U.S. security assigned to him personally, and he was visiting a consulate in Behngazi with either a minimal or no U.S. security detail. Obama and Clinton need to explain how this could be allowed to happen, in particular on 9-11, in an area without a functioning government and known to be infested with Salafists. This is inexcusable.

Actually, the Ambassador's murder appears even more mysterious as more facts are learned. Fox has a timeline of the Salafist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. It is not clear when or how the Ambassador was murdered, only that he was.

Libya has an interim government at the moment, and I don't even know if they have anything approaching a functioning military or security system. The Libyan interim government has issued statements of apology and sorrow over these events and seem to be cooperating with U.S. authorities. Apparently, they have already made four arrests of suspects involved in the attack. The Atlantic is carrying a photo essay of pro-American rallies in Libya.

There are some calls in Congress today to strip aid from Libya. Rep. Peter King pushed back against that suggestion, stating that "that the government is fragile there -- and still forming after the downfall of Qaddafi -- and that Libyan security personnel did try to protect Americans during the Benghazi attack Tuesday night." I agree with Rep. King on this one. The actions of the Libyan government stand in stark contrast to the acts of the Egyptian government as regards the 9-11 attack on our embassy in Cairo and the two should not be similarly punished.

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So How Do Islamic Radicals Celebrate 9-11?

They attack a few U.S. embassies, of course.

As I set forth below, Islamic radicals are today ascendant in the Middle East. The Arab Spring has been the victory of Salafists. And as I pointed out, Egypt has already taken the first big steps down the path followed by Iran in 1979 as it became a radical Islamic theocracy. So, shades of 1979, it is no surprise that our diplomatic posts in both Cairo and Libya were attacked on this 9-11. The ostensible reason for the attacks was that some private U.S. citizens, Egyptian ex-pats, made a video criticizing Islam. The film has been available to audiences in the Middle East since 1 July.

In Cairo:

Mainly ultraconservative protesters [read Salafi / Wahhabi Islamists and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood] climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Egypt's capital Tuesday and brought down the American flag, replacing it with a black Islamist flag to protest a U.S.-produced film attacking the Prophet Muhammad. . . .

The unrest in Cairo began when hundreds of protesters marched to the downtown embassy, gathering outside its walls and chanting against the movie and the U.S. "Say it, don't fear: Their ambassador must leave," the crowd chanted. Dozens of protesters then scaled the embassy walls, and several went into the courtyard and took down the flag from a pole. They brought it back to the crowd outside, which tried to burn it, but failing that tore it apart. The protesters on the wall then raised on the flagpole a black flag with a Muslim declaration of faith, "There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet." The flag, similar to the banner used by Al Qaeda, is commonly used by ultraconservatives around the region. The crowd grew throughout the evening with thousands standing outside the embassy, chanting "Islamic, Islamic. The right of our prophet will not die." A group of women in black veils and robes that left only their eyes exposed chanted, "Worshippers of the Cross, leave the Prophet Muhammad alone." Dozens of riot police lined up along the embassy walls but did not stop protesters from climbing the wall. . . .

Instead of responding with outrage, not merely at the protests, but the failure of the new Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo to protect our embassy, the response from the Obama administration's State Department essentially 'apologized for blasphemy' by a person who has every right to free speech in the U.S.:

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,. . . Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others

That is utterly disgusting in its apologetic tone and counterproductive for its failure to defend Americans' freedoms. Moreover, it completely fails to hold the Egyptian government to account for their failure to defend the Embassy.

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Update: I couldn't agree more with this response from Charles Krauthammer:



And then there is this from Instapundit: "Advice to Obama: To stiffen your spine, imagine these were Tea Partiers instead of Islamic fundamentalists who hate America and all it stands for." Funny, but based all too much on reality.

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The attack on our diplomatic in Libya was more severe, involving what amounted to a full scale attack:

Libya's deputy interior minister Wanis al-Sharef told AFP: "One American official was killed and another injured in the hand. The other staff members were evacuated and are safe and sound."

He could not say if the dead man was a diplomat.

Abdelmonoem al-Horr, spokesman for the Libyan interior ministry's security commission, said rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the consulate from a nearby farm. Security forces and the interior ministry were trying to contain the situation, he added. . . .

"Demonstrators attacked the US consulate in Benghazi. They fired shots in the air before entering the building," Libya's deputy interior minister, Wanis al-Sharif Sharif, who is in charge of the country's eastern region, told AFP.

"Dozens of demonstrators attacked the consulate and set fire to it," said a Benghazi resident, who only gave his name as Omar, adding that he had seen the flames and heard shots in the vicinity.

Another Libyan witness said armed men had closed the streets leading up to the consulate, among them ultra-conservative Salafists. . . .

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UPDATE: The attack by Salafists on our Consulate in Benghazi, Libya is now confirmed to have taken the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Embassy staff members.

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Consider these attacks the canary in the coal mine. We are, in many ways, in a much more precarious position vis-a-vis the Middle East than we were eleven years ago. The Salafists - those people whose ideology was shared by Osama bin Laden - now are in or close to control of most of the Arab nations of the Middle East. There will be blood.

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9-11 Its Aftermath, Eleven Years On

On September 11, 2001 al Qaeda, a group of Wahhabi Islamists led by Osama bin Laden, managed the worst foreign attack ever on American soil ever. Using passenger jets as weapons of mass slaughter, they killied nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children. The attack was a surprise to most Americans. Few realized, just the day before, on September 10, 2001, the nature of the threat against us rising in the Middle East, nor, for that matter, that such a threat existed.

Since 9-11, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and lost the lives of thousands of American fighting men and women in what was once known as the "war on terror," a term Obama later sanitized to "overseas contingency operations." Between September 11, 2001 and today, we drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, though they have since mounted a partial comeback. We drove the Ba'athits from power in Iraq as part of a war of choice to try to bring democracy and moderation to the Middle East. We rid the world of many an evil man, either by capture of death, such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Musab al Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein. We have kept America safe from any large scale terror attacks. And, in an act of great symbolic importance, we brought justice to Osama bin Laden. He sleeps with the fishes.

So are we safer today, eleven years on from 9-11? We as a nation certainly seem to feel so. Washington today will be "business as usual," according to Dana Milbank. There will be a smattering of memorial services in Washington, but, Milbank tells us, that "the day that changed the nation is becoming more and more ordinary . . . Sept. 11, 2001 is on its way to joining Dec. 7, 1941 — more historical, less raw." But it is very much a false sense of security for no, we are not safer today. For the past eleven years, our soldiers and intelligence services have performed brilliantly. They have done all that we have asked of them. And yet, the future in the Middle East and, more particularly, as regards the radical Islamists, looks far more threatening today than it did on September 10, 2001.

On September 10, 2001, no Islamic radicals had access to nuclear weapons. Today, Iran, the world's most ardent supporter of terrorism, a regime every bit as bloody minded, radical, expansionist and Jew-hating as was Nazi Germany, is on the brink of creating nuclear weapons.

On September 10, 2001, Pakistan, the only Islamic nuclear nation, was under the control of a nominally secular military dictator. Today, Pakistan is a hot bed of radical Islam, a failed state, and evermore our enemy.

On September 10, 2001, Turkey was a secular nation, an ally of the U.S. and a friend to Israel. Today, Turkey is well down the path to being Islamicized by PM Erdogan, who, not long ago, conducted a coup against secularists in control of the Turkish military. Erdogan dreams of reestablishing Turkey as the head of a new Caliphate and has warmed to Iran.

On September 10, 2001, Egypt was a dictatorship friendly to the U.S. and cooperative with Israel. Today, after the "Arab Spring," Egypt is under the control of the radical Muslim Brotherhood - the organization that spawned al Qaeda and shares every one of al-Qaeda's goals. The secularists who led the revolution that deposed the Mubarak dictatorship are already under brutal assault from their new regime and its Islamist supporters. The Muslim Brotherhood government has already led a coup against the military, which many in the West hoped to be a restraining influence in Egypt. Indeed, Egypt seems to be following the same pattern that took Iran from revolution in 1979 to a radical theocracy but two years later.

On September 10, 2001, the PLO nominally controlled the Gaza strip, subject to Israeli oversight. Today, Hamas, a bloody terrorist organization, fully controls the Gaza strip, the PLO has joined with them, and the Obama regime is funding them, at least indirectly, to the tune of almost a billion dollars..

On September 10, 2001, Lebanon was divided between Syrian occupation in the north and Israeli occupation to the south. Today, Lebanon is virtually a puppet regime of Iran, ruled only with the continuing approval of Hezbollah. It is armed to the teeth with Iranian supplied rockets pointed at Israel.

On September 10, 2001, Syria was a secular dictatorship under the Assad / Alawite clan and an ally of Iran. Today, Syria is involved in a brutal "civil war;" but . . . a large number, perhaps a majority, of the people fighting Assad for control are not beleagured Syrian citizens, but foreign Islamists bent on deposing Assad in order to put in place their own Sunni theocracy. Indeed, as one Syrian General recently opined,

"Of Western, and particularly European, attitudes to the battles, he voiced disbelief. "Don't they understand that we are the last dam that is holding back the flood of Islamists in Europe," he asked. "What blindness."

Just as Egypt's former dictator Mubarak rightly warned us that he was the bulwark against the Islamists in Egypt, I think that the Syrian general might well be right as regards Syria, not to mention what it will mean for Europe if Assad falls to the Islamists. And we seem to be doing nothing to influence the situation.

On September 10, 2001, Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein. We got rid of him and installed what was to be a democracy. But desperate to mark Iraq as a failure, our perfidious left demanded that all U.S. troops be pulled from Iraq, Bush blinked, and Obama made sure all U.S. troops were removed. Moreover, when Iraq held its free election in 2010, Obama acquiesced to what amounted to a coup by Maliki. Today, we have little influence over Iraq and its illegitimate government is moving ever closer to the Iranian sphere. Unique in today's Middle East, Iraq today is better off than it was ten years ago and it is, at least not a direct enemy of the U.S. That said, Iraq's trajectory looks poor indeed.

On September 10, 2001, Saudi Arabia was nominally a close ally of the U.S. They still are a close ally of our government types, even as they spend billions of dollars annually pushing their bloody, toxic brand of Wahhabi Islam throughout the world. And it is that - Wahhabi Islam and its influences - that caused 9-11, and that undergird the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, among many others. Iran's own highly radicalized version of Shia Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini's veleyat-e-faqi, is virtually a clone of Wahhabi Islam in terms of its triumphalism, expansionism and bloodiness.

So what has gone wrong over the past eleven years? Short answer - Bush's failure to identify our enemy as Wahhabi Islam, a mistake exponentially compounded by Obama's policies towards Wahhabi Islam and the Middle East.

Obama has pointed to the execution of bin Laden as well as his, Obama's, increased use of drone strikes as the ipso facto proof of his foreign policy bona fides. But especially as regards the Middle East and radical Islam, his policies have been an utter catastrophe: from the failure to fan the Green Revolution in Iran to fanning the flames of revolution in Egypt; from pressuring Israel to make unreasonable concessions to the Palestinians to excusing the radicalism and terrorism of the Palestinians; from failing to halt Iran's march towards a nuclear arsenal to allowing Pakistan to play a double game against the U.S. Obama has allowed a bad situation to become exponentially worse.

I have been saying for years now on this blog that our policy towards the Islamists - those who would happily slaughter us in a heart beat and impose Sharia law on the world - has no chance of working unless and until we finally identify the enemy. The enemy is not "terrorism." Terrorism is a tactic. The enemy is the toxic ideology of Wahhabi Islam and the Veleyat-e-Faqi of Iran.

Columnist Caroline Glick, several months ago, hit on much this same point, as well as pointing out how Obama has made the situation much worse. Her assessment is well worth a read:

How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."

Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.

The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.

For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.

And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic.

And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.

The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.

We have already spent tremendous amounts of treasure and blood in response to the 9-11 attacks. But the failure to identify and fight the real enemy, not merely on the battlefield, but in the war of ideas, has been an existential error.

One of the lessons of WWII, according to Nazi generals, was that Hitler could have been stopped with minimal cost in blood and treasure in 1937 had France and England stood up to him. Waiting just two years turned the costs from nominal into the most costly and deadly conflict in our world's history.

We are now repeating that mistake in regards to radical Islam. Bush is at fault; Obama has allowed the situation to become exponentially worse. Given that 9-11 has given us much more warning of the "enemy's" bloodiness, violence and existential motivations than either the British or French had as regards the Nazi's in 1937, our failure to address this is unforgivable. And no, killing bin Laden does not change the fact that, on this most important of issues, Obama's foreign policy is ineffective at best, incompetent and dangerous at worst.

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Glancing about the web, I see that Bookworm Room has a post on 9-11 that you would likely find of interest: September 11, 2001: In Memoriam.

Powerline has a good post on how aggressive CIA policies, now condemned by Obama, are what led to finding and executing Osama bin Laden.

Update: This from Muslim reformer Dr. Zhudi Jasser of AIFD today hits the nail on the head:

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is calling on President Obama and presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney to use the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to reengage the national discussion into the root causes of this horrible attack that claimed nearly 3,000 American lives.

With the understandable concerns over the U.S. economy driving the 2012 president race, both the Administration and the Romney campaign seem to be content to not engage on important issues in the global arena. But eleven years since the attacks on our country the U.S. still has done little to address the ideology of political Islam which is the root cause that led Al Qaeda and 19 hijackers to attack our country. In fact with the Islamist political victories in the Middle-East since the “Arab Spring” it is clear that the ideology of political Islam, and the radicalism that is borne within the ideology, are growing in a post 9-11 world. . . .

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