It Doesn’t Matter One Bit What Obama Thinks ‘True Islam’ Is

It Doesn’t Matter One Bit What Obama Thinks ‘True Islam’ Is

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY , National Review Online

There may well be a civil war going on within Islam, but it will be Muslims, not American politicians, who settle it.

In Egypt, the president is Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a pious Muslim. Having grown up in the world’s center of sharia scholarship and closely studied the subject, he has courageously proclaimed that Islam desperately needs a “religious revolution.”

In the United States, the president is Barack Obama, a non-Muslim. His childhood experience of Islam, which ended when he was just ten, occurred in Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim country, but a non-Arabic one where the teaching and practice of Islam is very different from what it is in the Middle East.

While Sisi sees a dangerous flaw in Islam, Obama believes America needs to be “fundamentally transformed” but Islam is fine as is. You see the problem, no?

Said problem was very much on display this week at the president’s “summit” on “countering violent extremism,” the administration’s euphemism for confronting violent jihad. The latter phrase is verboten because Obama will not concede the close nexus between Islam and modern terrorism.

In reality, the summit had so little to do with confronting terrorism that the president did not invite the FBI director — you know, the head of the agency to which federal law assigns primary responsibility for terrorism investigations.

The summit was really about advancing the “social justice” agenda of “progressive” politics. The president and his underlings somehow reason that the answer to the barbarity of ISIS and al-Qaeda is to “empower local communities” here and abroad. Apparently, if the community organizers rouse the rabble to demand that government address “injustice” and Muslim “grievances,” the alienation that purportedly drives young Muslims into the jihadists’ arms will abate. This is the strategic political aspect of the Left’s denial of terrorism’s ideological roots: If terrorism is not caused by Islamic supremacism, then it must be caused by something else . . . and that something somehow always manages to be a government policy opposed by the Left: insufficient income redistribution, running Gitmo, our alliance with Israel, surveillance of radical mosques, etc. Smearing your political opponents as the root cause of mass-murder attacks — it’s a very nice weapon to have in one’s demagogic arsenal.

To the extent the summit dealt with Islam, it was to play the counterproductive game of defining the “true” Islam in order to discredit the Islamic State and al-Qaeda as purveyors of a “false” or “perverted” Islam. To try to pull this off, Obama relied on the bag of tricks toted by his “moderate Islamist” allies (who also turn out to be reliable progressives).

In his summit speech, Obama made the concession — which was almost shocking coming from him — that ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists “do draw” from “Islamic texts.” He mocked them, however, for doing so “selectively.” The clear suggestion was that the terrorists deceive when they assert that Islamic scripture commands Muslims to, for example, “strike terror into the hearts” of non-believers, decapitate them (“smite their necks”), or enslave them. He intimated that there must be some balancing scriptures, some other side of the story nullifying these belligerent commands.

But then, almost in the next breath, the president engaged in the same bowdlerizing of Islamic teaching of which he had just accused our enemies. We should, he said, be listening to, instead of the terrorists, “Muslim clerics and scholars” who “push back on this twisted interpretation” and assure us “that the Koran says, ‘Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind.’”

The Koran does indeed say that, in Sura 5:32. Yet, in the very next verse, conveniently omitted by Obama (5:33), it goes on to say: The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter.

That puts a somewhat different cast on the whole “whoever kills an innocent” theme, wouldn’t you say?

Which leads us to Obama’s other rhetorical chicanery. When he speaks of Islam, Obama not only takes scripture out of context; he also renders it as if there were a universal understanding of words like “innocent.” Yet when we read the above two verses together, and put them in the broader context of Islamic doctrine, we see that Islam can convey a notion of who is an “innocent” that is very different from the one we Westerners are likely to have. To be “innocent,” in this context, one must accept Islam and submit to its law.

The same is true of “injustice,” another word the president often invokes when discussing Islam. The true Islam, we are to believe, is just like progressivism: a tireless quest for “justice.” But just as the Left’s idea of justice differs from the average person’s, so does Islam’s. For the Islamist, justice equals sharia, and injustice is the absence or transgression of sharia. So, while this could well have been inadvertent, Obama’s claim that injustice drives young Muslims to join terrorist groups is exactly what the terrorists themselves would say — for the imperative to impose sharia is their rationale for committing terrorism.

Obama’s seeming inability to grapple with the Islamic roots of terrorism may not be fully explained by his coziness with Islamists. In a 2005 essay, Cardinal George Pell, the former Australian archbishop (he now runs the Vatican’s secretariat for the economy), observed that in Indonesia, Islam has been has been tempered by indigenous animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a pacific strain of Islamic Sufism. Cardinal Pell described the resulting brand as “syncretistic, moderate and with a strong mystical leaning.”

As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, that cannot be said for all of Indonesian Islam: There is also plenty of fundamentalism, sharia supremacism, and persecution of religious minorities, particularly of Ahmadi Muslims who reject violent jihad. Still, the practice of Islam in much of the country where the president spent some of his formative years is relatively moderate.

Things are different in the cradle of Islam, the Arab Middle East. That was the upshot of President Sisi’s impassioned speech in January. In calling for a religious revolution, he admonished the scholars of al-Azhar — who seemed cool to the warning — that terrorists in the Middle East were relying on a “corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible” even though it “is antagonizing the entire world.”

Sisi is right, of course. How refreshing, how urgently necessary, for him to face the problem honestly. Nevertheless, our challenge is a different one from Sisi’s and Islam’s. It is preserving our own national security, not avoiding antagonism.

It is thus foolish for the Obama administration — as it was for the Bush and Clinton administrations, and as it is for Republican as well as Democratic leaders in Washington — to become enmeshed in the futile effort to define the “true” Islam. There probably is not one. Even though the scriptures are troublesome and unvarying, the practice of Islam — the interpretation of and degree of adherence to those scriptures — varies widely around the world.

There is also likely to be continuing upheaval as reformers square off with fundamentalists, so the “true” Islam could change. Moreover, our politicians are elected by an overwhelmingly (probably over 97 percent) non-Muslim country. Muslims by and large do not care what nonbelievers think the essence of Islam is. And if it were not for terrorism, most of us would neither give Islam a second thought nor care what Muslims thought about America and its Judeo-Christian roots. (How much time do you spend wondering what Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei believes is the “true” Christianity?)

We can sincerely hope that President Sisi and other reformers bring about a long-overdue Islamic Reformation. We can sincerely hope that they discredit and marginalize the sharia supremacism of ISIS and al-Qaeda.

But whether the Islam of the jihadists is “true” or “false” is irrelevant to us. What matters about sharia supremacism is that many millions of Muslims believe in it. It is a mainstream interpretation of Islam that has undeniable scriptural roots and inevitably breeds violent jihadists.

We must protect the United States regardless of whether they are right and regardless of how Islam’s internal strife is resolved – if it ever is.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute.

Islam or Islamic Extremists?

Islam or Islamic Extremists?

Col Mike Walker

Harry,

Here is my response.

It is true that Islam has had a tradition of military conquest to expand its faith from the days Muhammad walked the earth.

But only a complete idiot would either believe in or want to go to war with a billion people.

Further, of the alleged 25,000 attacks since 9/11, the overwhelming majority have been carried out by Islamic extremists against other Muslims they find lacking.

To blame the millions of Muslim victims for the terrorist acts of thousands of extremist is an obvious contradiction.

However, the Islamic extremists wish and pray everyday that non-Mulsims DO blame all Muslims. Only by creating an "Us versus Them" mentality do they have any chance of winning.

Idiots believe we are at war with Islam and ISIL/al Qaeda loves those idiots with all their hearts.

Mike

Snarker-in-Chief

Someone to look up to....?

Snarker-in-Chief 

No one — least of all the American people — is exempt from our president’s snark.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.

President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.

Vladimir Putin is the dangerous autocrat of a nuclear-armed superstate. He has trampled on the rights of his own people while trying to bully the former Soviet republics back into a czarist Orthodox version of the Soviet Empire. So Putin is many disturbing things, but for Obama he is reduced to some archetypal high-schooler to be snarked at: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” Putin, in Obama’s putdown, has “got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.” Gratuitously reducing Putin’s aggression to the work of an adolescent rival show-off may be dangerous when combined with the past six years of Obama’s mostly seeming indifferent to that aggression. Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise.

Mitt Romney was not just wrong in his views, but, to Obama in his snark mode as psychoanalyst, apparently ill: “[Romney is] changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping we’ve got to name this condition he’s going through. I think it’s called . . . Romnesia. I’m not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.” Note the “I want to go over some of the symptoms.”

The reason Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary of 2008 was not just that the state’s Democratic voters preferred Hillary Clinton; he was sabotaged by an ignorant subset of the working-class population that lacked his own perspective, good taste, and calm analytical mind. Not appreciating Obama’s talents was analyzed as the equivalent of Neanderthalism: “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Note the “It’s not surprising . . .”

Obama would follow that pop psychology by analyzing the police as acting “stupidly” and stereotyping by race. In his unfortunate National Prayer Breakfast riff, he snarked at American Christians, advising them not to get on their “high horse,” given the moral equivalence between the millennium-old Crusades and the present epidemic of radical Islamic terrorism. Snarkers usually project, masking their own high-horse moralizing by alleging bastard forms of it in others.

Snarkers also don’t discriminate in their targets. Sometimes Obama’s snark has been directed at his own Democratic rivals. Hillary Clinton was not just someone Obama ran against and beat in the primaries, but comes off as a frumpy nice girl in his famous quip, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” Note the “enough.”

By all accounts Obama has had a loyal and competent staff; in any event, it ran two winning campaigns. But Obama snarked at them too: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Note the “I’ll tell you right now.” As far as Washington culture goes, Obama is the parent, it the child: “What Washington needs is adult supervision.”

Obama is supposedly friends with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the latter made a terrible mistake when he chided the golf-obsessive Obama as in fact a “hack” and a “sh***y” golfer. Obama quickly fired back that Jordan “was not well informed.” He then went after Jordan himself as the less than successful basketball-team owner: “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.” Snark is now exemplified by the president of the United States stooping to engage in a kindergarten tit-for-tat over relative golf skills with an ex-NBA player: “But there is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.” Note the “He might want” and “If I was playing twice a day . . .”

Sometimes presidential snark is just mean-spiritedness displayed through gratuitous smart-aleckiness. So when Obama once was asked about consulting past presidents, he replied of Ronald Reagan, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances” — a reference to decades-old rumors that Mrs. Reagan, octogenarian and widowed by the time Obama snarked at her, had supposedly consulted an astrologer. Note “a Nancy Reagan thing.”

When Obama talks of his bowling skills, it is by way of deprecating the handicapped: “No, no. I have been practicing. . . . I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something.” Note the “or something.”
The grandmother who worked overtime to raise him when his mother would not, and who saved to put him through a tony prep school, is psychoanalyzed away as little more than an ignorant racist stereotyper — a useful foil to contextualize and excuse the demonstrable abject racism of his own pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away.” Note the “typical.”


Snark can also be a sort of smart-ass caricature in which the statesman devolves into the silliness of popular culture: “I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.” Note “mind-meld.” To dismiss his opponents in his reelection campaign, Obama returned to popular-culture snark, “And you can pretty much put their campaign on . . . a tweet and have some characters to spare.”

When Mitt Romney criticized Obama for deep defense cuts and reducing the navy to its smallest fleet size since World War II, Obama offered snark instead of a counter-argument: “Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. . . . We also have things called aircraft carriers that planes land on and submarines that go under water.” Note the snark “that planes land on” and “that go under water.”

In the months before the Crimea and Ukraine crises, Romney presciently reminded Obama that Putin’s Russia in 2012 was America’s chief worry. Obama snarked back, “The 1980s — they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

When some Republicans at Obama’s recent State of the Union address clapped when he noted he had no more campaigns to run, Obama left his teleprompter to interject the schoolyard tit-for-tat, “I know. Because I won both.” Touché!

To Senator Jon Kyl, who once questioned the newly inaugurated Obama about the proper mix between tax hikes and budget cuts, Obama offered the gloat, “I won.” To his Republican House opponents of his agenda, Obama snarked, “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.”

Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers. As for those who wanted the Keystone Pipeline built to enhance North American energy independence, jobs, and prosperity, Obama reduced them to obsessed one-issue zealots: “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.” Note of the vast Keystone project the adjective “single” — perhaps as in a single Hoover Dam or a single Golden Gate Bridge.

Critics used to say they opposed Obama’s redistributionist programs, but conceded that he must be a pleasant guy. Supporters lamented Obama’s frequent inattention to detail but reminded everyone how charismatic the president was. Both diagnoses are probably mistaken. Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

A Primer In Strategy

Take notes...

A Primer In Strategy

Col Mike Walker

There has been a lot of talk about military strategy lately and much of that focused on ISIL – too much in my opinion – but that is not the issue at hand.

The problem is that the discussions are just plain goofy.

Tactics, opinions, management techniques, what have you, are debated as strategy. They are NOT and selling them as such is a sign of failure. So here are some basics for all the “armchair quarterbacks.”

Military strategy begins with an “endstate,” or where you want to be when the fighting ends. That must come from the big boss.

Once that is grasped, the next job is to understand the enemy, in this case, ISIL. In its simplest form, ask: What is its aim, its resources and over what battlespace is it fighting?

While identifying ISIL’s strengths and weaknesses are important, understanding its motivations and endstate are more so and that demands hearing things you may not want to hear. In other words, go in with your eyes wide open.

Cold calculating objectivity is the ideal. Any other approach is both dishonest and dishonorable to the American men and women who execute the missions.

Next come the stepping-stones to get from where you are to where you want to be: the endstate. These are called “strategic objectives.”

The final step in developing a strategy is to identify the lines of operations needed to obtain the strategic objectives and endstate. Unfortunately, lines of operation do not combine to follow a linear course but form a complex multi-dimensional network of nodes and pathways.

As a rough rule, a comprehensive strategy against ISIL would include a number of lines of operations aimed at security, governance and economics.

In competent militaries, it is understood that nothing goes exactly to plan unless you are walking into a trap. The adage is “expect the unexpected.”

To cope with uncertainty, sub-plans, called “branches” and sequels” are developed, refined and added to as needed.

Dealing with uncertain complexity requires a unified political-military vision both within our ranks (civil and military) and with our allies. It is a demanding task as executing each line of operation requires detailed planning and that is where tactics comes in.

Tactics realize strategic objectives and make the endstate possible. Unlike strategy that is driven by the endstate, “mission statements” drive military tactics.

Tactical plans deal with things like the use of naval, air and ground forces, the conduct of cyber-warfare and unconventional operations like psychological warfare or special operations. They also include less conventional plans like training allied security forces or carrying out humanitarian operations.

The job of the big boss and his staff is never tactical.

Their job is to design and assess metrics that measure the effectiveness of the boss’s strategy, i.e. are we nearing the endstate or was the identified strategic objective attained as planned?

If yes, carry on. If no, where are we lagging? Along which line or lines of operation? Then comes the “why?” with the really big job for the boss and his staff: What needs to be done to get on back on the road to our endstate?

Five signs of trouble for the big boss:

Are the metrics working? Do they tell us where we are and where we are going? If not then the staff is failing.

If there are no “branches and sequels” to deal with the unexpected or they prove inadequate then the staff is not doing its job.

As a corollary, good bosses can deal with bad news, what they hate are surprises. If the boss is surprised then his subordinates failed.

If the staff is getting into tactics then you have a malfunctioning staff. If the boss ever needs to “go tactical,” fire the subordinate commander and get back to being a strategist immediately. If members of the boss’s staff “go tactical,” fire them and get strategists (by the way, strategists are a lot harder to come by than tacticians).

If the endstate is not clearly understood by all participants – from top to bottom – then the strategy will fail…at that point hope for blind luck.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Looking At The Wrong Threat: Iran v. ISIL

Looking At The Wrong Threat: Iran v. ISIL

Col Mike Walker

All,

Below is a response to a question posed by a knowledgeable colleague: Which is more dangerous, Iran or ISIL?

The simple answer is that Iran is the greatest threat to the United States in the region.

Iran is an aggressive and revolutionary regime with a global vision: It wants to destroy and replace the current "unjust" world order.

 

To the Ayatollahs, the heart and soul of the unjust world order is the United States (hence the "satan, " evil" etc rhetoric). 

 

We are the number one enemy and will remain so as long as the Islamic theocracy remains in place.

 

Kind-hearted people want to believe that Iran only wants its rightful place under the sun. That is why our attempts to reach detente with Iran fail over and over again and will continue to fail.

 

In addition to having us in their crosshairs, Iran is the greater threat not because they are more “evil” but because they are more competent. Iran grows in strength and influence and capabilities. The Sunni extremist factions (al Qaeda, ISIL, etc) are to be feared as efficiently savage murders but for little else.   

 

Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon, making that poor country a potential Iranian vassal state. As if to make their point, Mohamad Chatah was assassinated by pro-Iranian terrorists on 27 December 2013, a few days after his open letter to Iran was published. The letter can be found at: 

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304483804579286723620835720

Teheran declared Bahrain the 14^th province of Iran. They have strong influence in Iraq. The most lethal IEDs used against Americans by Sadr's forces (Mahdi Army) were designed and often manufactured in Iran.

 

Assad in Syria now owes his rule to the Ayatollahs -- that is why Turkey and the Sunni Arab states won't fully support U.S. policy in Syria. We have backed off our demand for Assad's removal and that foolish policy strengthens Iran and weakens our regional allies.

 

Iran backs the Houthi in Yemen, further destabilizing the region. Iran hates the Saudi form of Islam so the Saudis may go into Yemen if they see it becoming an Iranian satellite.

 

Now lets move on to Iran's international maneuvers.

 

Morocco broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2008 because MOIS/VEVAK was using fake NGO and cultural organizations to destabilize the regime there. 

Iran continues to build its intelligence and covert operations capability in the Western Hemisphere as an attempt to bring the struggle closer to America.

 

Iran aided and abetted our enemies in Afghanistan and was barely foiled in a plot to place a bomb at the JFK Airport in 2007 that resulted in a life sentence for Abdul Kadir, the former-head of clandestine Iranian intelligence operations in Guyana. Kadir received direction from the Iranian embassy in Caracas, Venezuela. 

In April 2009, a Canadian of Iranian ancestry was arrested for trying to illegally ship a number of pressure transducers to Iran, which he had originally purchased in the US. The transducers are needed in making nuclear weapons.

 

More recently, on 25 May 2013, Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman released a study detailing the Iranian regional terrorism network in Latin America built on his previous 2006 investigation that indicted seven Iranians and one member of Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community Center in Buenos Aires that killed eighty-five people. 

Nisman was apparently murdered last week just as he was issuing a report on illegal Iranian attempts to escape justice.

 

On 30 May 2013, Manssor Arbabsiar was sentenced to a 25-year prison term in Federal Court for his role in the foiled Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and detonate bombs at the Saudi Arabian and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. 

 

The Ayatollahs have both the will and ever-growing means to attack the United States. That makes them the dominant threat in the region.

 

Having written that, I do not propose an aggressive military policy against Iran, only a containment policy against a real and active threat.

 

Semper Fi,

Mike

Why Obama Needs to Pretend the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists

Why Obama Needs to Pretend the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists 
The administration makes a desperate and indefensible claim. 
By Andrew C. McCarthy

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night.
In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend:

1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to intimidate people and change policy), and (c) a national-security threat to the United States. The law that covers this is Sec. 1189(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, from the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s here, and it’s just the first few lines — even a president who routinely ignores the laws he is sworn to execute faithfully should be able to make some time for it, maybe on the plane ride between the golf course and the Saudi palace.

2. Obviously, even if it were true, as posited by Messrs. Schultz and Earnest (speaking for President Obama), that the Taliban is concerned only with Afghanistan, not with the global jihad, that would be irrelevant. They easily fit the definition of a foreign terrorist organization. 

3. Of course, it is not true that the Taliban is concerned only with Afghanistan. The administration’s risible claim to the contrary is part of its campaign to bleach the Islam out of radical Islam. Islamic supremacism, the ideology that fuels jihadist terror, is a global conquest ideology. Obama wants you to believe that there is just a dizzying array of small, disconnected, strange-sounding, indigenous “insurgent” groups that are not joined by any unifying ideology — the Afghan Taliban (not to be confused with the Pakistani Taliban), Hamas, Hezbollah, the Haqqani Network, Boko Haram, al-Nusra, Ansar al-Sharia, the sundry jihadist franchises that invoke al-Qaeda’s name (in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Islamic Maghreb, in the Indian subcontinent . . . ), and so on. You are not to see them as a united front against the West, but instead as animated by strictly parochial political and territorial disputes. The strategy, a disingenuous elevation of semantics over substance, is designed to minimize the global jihadist threat to the West that has intensified on Obama’s watch and has undeniable roots in a supremacist interpretation of Islam.

4. You need not take my word for it when it comes to the Taliban’s ideological connection to the global jihad. Instead, just look at what they do. What did the Taliban do when they ruled Afghanistan? They willfully allowed their territory to be used as a launch pad for attacks against the United States (the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa, the 2000 bombing of the Cole, and the 9/11 atrocities). And after 9/11, when, by simply handing bin Laden & Co. over to the United States, they could have stayed in power and avoided an invasion of the Afghanistan they are said to be preoccupied with, what did they do? At enormous cost to themselves, they tried to shelter al-Qaeda. In the 14 years since, they have continued to abet the global jihadist campaign, and have reveled in making war against the United States — a war they now understandably think they will win.

5. The Taliban’s continued alliance with al-Qaeda’s global jihad is of a piece with Hamas’s self-proclaimed incorporation in the Muslim Brotherhood’s global ambitions, and with the forward-militia role Hezbollah plays for Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary state that exports its Shiite version of jihad. All of these actors perceive themselves as enmeshed in a civilizational struggle against the West. We can’t erase that by pretending there is no animating ideology, pretending that they can be pacified if we satisfy their local grievances.

6. This business of distinguishing “insurgents” from “terrorists” is nonsense. An insurgency is just a domestic uprising (in the sense that the insurgent is from the country in which he is rebelling). When insurgents use terrorist tactics they are domestic terrorists. It may make Obama feel better to say that his pal Bill Ayers was an “insurgent,” but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a terrorist.

7. The most disturbing facet of the “insurgent” canard is that Obama is buying the logic of such Islamic supremacists as the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They claim that Hamas and Hezbollah are not terrorist organizations (as American law designates them to be) but domestic political organizations that engage not in terrorism but in “resistance” — a righteous fight against “injustice” and “occupation” in their homelands.

8. Obama, of course, is not approving of the Taliban’s tactics and goals. But he wants you to see them as domestic insurgents because progressives believe insurgents should be negotiated with and brought into a political settlement — and to the extent insurgents go overboard in their aggression, progressives believe they should be prosecuted in the civilian justice system, not fought militarily like wartime enemies.

9. In the United States, Obama is operating in a political environment where the public — based on longstanding prudential American policy — believes we should not negotiate with terrorists because that encourages and legitimizes their savage methods. Similarly, the public strongly believes international terrorists are enemies who must be defeated, not defendants who must be indicted. Obama knows he is negotiating with, intends to settle with, and eventually will leave Afghanistan to the tender mercies of, the Taliban. Therefore, the administration is desperate that you not look at the Taliban as terrorists.

10. But they are terrorists.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Expanded International Economics Riddles

From the riddler, Col Walker...

Q: How do Venezuela and Cuba increase their national wealth?

A: They don’t.

Q: How do liberal democrats in the United States increase revenues?

A: Find people who know how to grow the American economy and tax them to death.

Q. How do you deal with a stagnant or falling standard of living in Russia?

A. Invade a neighbor.

Q: How do you increase national wealth in Greece?

A: Demand that the Germans and French work harder.

O Cruel Fate

Wanna dance?

O Cruel Fate

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Well, my how the mighty have fallen. I have long witnessed the emasculation of the American male and sometimes for the better, but this week proved we have gone off the deep end.

The French undergo a terrible attack and find their spine. Our response?

The senior American leadership passed on attending an international display of strength and solidarity because of …well…security concerns.

Our guys were a bit more afraid than, say, fifty other world leaders and a million unarmed civilians. 

Gee.

And then to add injury to insult, our Secretary of State goes hat-in-hand and with hugs and kisses (literally) to apologize. To make amends, he brings a symbol of American resolve.

A new weapons system to kill terrorists? No. A military leader to coordinate efforts against violent Islamic extremists? Not quite. A proposed military pact of mutual support? Sorry!

He brought James Taylor to sing, "You've Got A Friend."

It is pretty had to look like total wimps (and in France of all places) but we accomplished the near impossible.

Profiles in Courage? I think not.  Jack Kennedy, we really miss you. 

Ich bin ein "stay at home man."

Semper Fi,

Mike