The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (37 page)
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Authors: David Limbaugh
BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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As his administration dutifully set about whitewashing the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama seemed unconcerned by the rising persecution of Christians in Arab Spring nations. For example, when Egyptian soldiers massacred Coptic Christians protesting the burning of a church, the White House issued a statement reeking of moral equivalence. Declining actually to condemn the massacre, which it only referred to in vague terms, it called for restraint from both the victims and the perpetrators. “The President is deeply concerned about the violence in Egypt that has led to a tragic loss of life among demonstrators and security forces,” said the statement. “Now is a time for restraint on all sides so that Egyptians can move forward together to forge a strong and united Egypt.”
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THE ARAB SPRING: “AN UNSHACKLING OF ISLAM”54
As it was warming up to the Muslim Brotherhood, the administration backed off its previous support for the Egyptian military. The problem was that after Mubarak’s overthrow, Egypt’s military rulers faced a choice of either holding quick elections, which the highly organized Brotherhood would surely dominate, or postponing elections and prolonging the transitional period, raising the likelihood that the military would seek to retain power for itself. Fearing the military could become abusive, the White House in November 2011 urged it to relinquish control “as soon as possible.” This was in stark contrast to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s praise for the military just two months before as an “institution of stability and continuity.”
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Whether you gauge Obama’s Egypt policy by the country’s progress toward a stable democratic society, its attitude toward the United States, or its intentions toward Israel, it has been a major failure. Notwithstanding his call for Egypt’s regime to step aside, Obama, in his new FY2013 budget, proposed more money for Egypt at the very time ascendant Muslim Brotherhood leaders were becoming more belligerent toward Israel and even threatening to attack the Jewish state. Hosni Mubarak may have been a repressive leader, but for three decades he was friendly to the United States, kept the peace with Israel, and helped maintain stability in the region. But by helping to empower Islamist revolutionaries under the pretense that they are democratic forces, Obama has jeopardized regional stability as well as Israel’s security.
In another indication of the failure of Obama’s diplomacy, in January 2012 the Egyptian government criminally charged forty-three NGO workers, including at least sixteen Americans, with illegally using foreign funds to stir unrest in Egypt. Some of the accused had already left the country or found shelter in the U.S. embassy, but the others were detained, including Sam LaHood, son of Obama’s transportation secretary Ray LaHood. In what seemed to be a personal insult to Obama, LaHood was arrested one day after Obama had contacted Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s regime, to urge him to permit NGOs such as LaHood to operate freely.
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Finally, after being held for more than a month, on March 1, 2012, the detained Americans were allowed to leave Egypt upon putting up bail in excess of $300,000 each.
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Finally, after being held for more than a month, on March 1, 2012, the detained Americans were allowed to leave Egypt upon putting up bail in excess of $300,000 each.
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Before their release, in response to congressional warnings that the U.S. would cut off aid to Egypt unless the detainees were let go, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood sent the United States a clear message: “What was acceptable before the revolution is no longer.” If we suspend the aid, they warned, Egypt would sever its peace treaty with Israel. “We have been told that fear of losing U.S. aid will constrain Egypt,” noted Middle East expert Barry Rubin. “But we are now seeing that this simply isn’t true. What happens when the Egyptian government helps Hamas fight Israel?”
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It’s astonishing that this administration could have pretended the Muslim Brotherhood would usher in a more democratic, peaceful, or America-friendly Egypt. As
Investors.com
reported, Obama was aware of the Brotherhood’s propensities while he was engaging with them, including their threats to revoke Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. He was also aware, as revealed by embassy cables and other intelligence, that Egyptians were highly sympathetic to the Brotherhood and its belligerence toward Israel. And Obama certainly knew it after the Brotherhood dominated Egypt’s parliamentary elections, yet still asked Congress for $800 million more in his budget to prop up the “Arab Spring” countries. As
Investors.com
editors wrote, “The real scandal is that Obama appears to have engineered the Brotherhood’s ascendancy. It’s no coincidence he invited the Brotherhood to his 2009 Cairo speech over the objections of Mubarak, who had outlawed the group.”
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Investors.com
reported, Obama was aware of the Brotherhood’s propensities while he was engaging with them, including their threats to revoke Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. He was also aware, as revealed by embassy cables and other intelligence, that Egyptians were highly sympathetic to the Brotherhood and its belligerence toward Israel. And Obama certainly knew it after the Brotherhood dominated Egypt’s parliamentary elections, yet still asked Congress for $800 million more in his budget to prop up the “Arab Spring” countries. As
Investors.com
editors wrote, “The real scandal is that Obama appears to have engineered the Brotherhood’s ascendancy. It’s no coincidence he invited the Brotherhood to his 2009 Cairo speech over the objections of Mubarak, who had outlawed the group.”
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The administration’s outreach to Islamists was not confined to Egypt. In March 2012 in Tunisia—another “Arab Spring” country where Islamists have filled the vacuum left by an ousted autocrat—thousands of secular Tunisians demonstrated against Obama’s close cooperation with the Islamists of the ruling Ennahda party. “People here are against the United States helping Ennahda,” said Tunisian journalist Ashraf Ayadi. “All Americans who come here are against the Islamists, but the American government is supporting them. I wish we had a good, modern, respectful Islamic party. I’m a Muslim and I’m proud of it, but I’m not proud of this party.”
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As the so-called Arab Spring spread through Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria, dewy-eyed western optimists had high hopes for a radical democratic explosion in the Middle East. Obama mostly welcomed these rebellions, calling for Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt and providing military assistance to the rebels in Libya, blind to indications that the uprisings would likely empower rulers even more repressive, Islamist, and anti-American than their predecessors.
“The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense,” observed Andy McCarthy. The Islamists, he noted, may well use democracy as a train to take them to their destination, which “is the implementation of sharia.” That, said McCarthy, is “the undeniable trend in Egyptian society” and “in such basket cases as Libya, where each day brings new evidence that today’s governing ‘rebels’ include yesterday’s al-Qaeda jihadists, and in Yemen.” While Obama and the European Union are deluded into believing democratic elections will bring peace, stability, and more “progressive” societies, added McCarthy, once these Islamist regimes are in power, “they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel.”
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Obama’s solicitous policy toward the Islamists of the Arab Spring complements his markedly ingratiating attitude toward Muslims in general, an approach he introduced, in grand fashion, with his fawning Cairo speech of June 2009. This attitude runs through his whole administration, including his national security officials. Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of “political, economic and social forces,” and said that “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” though he admitted “there is nothing holy or legitimate about murdering innocent men, women and children.”
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In a speech on national security at NYU in February 2010, Brennan wistfully praised Islam for the “tolerance and diversity which define [it],” and said he “came to see Islam not as it is often misrepresented, but for what it is … a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity.” He even used the Arabic term “Al Quds” for Jerusalem.
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In a speech on national security at NYU in February 2010, Brennan wistfully praised Islam for the “tolerance and diversity which define [it],” and said he “came to see Islam not as it is often misrepresented, but for what it is … a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity.” He even used the Arabic term “Al Quds” for Jerusalem.
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Indeed Obama and his administration constantly go to great pains to show their deference and admiration for Islam. These displays include:
* Obama launching into an impassioned paean to the “great religion” of Islam, whose adherents, he said, overwhelmingly believe in “peace and justice and fairness and tolerance,” when asked by a student in Mumbai about jihad. The city had been the site of a jihadist massacre just two years earlier in which more than a hundred people were killed.
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* Obama drawing a link in his Passover message of April 2011 between the suffering of Jews in Egypt and the Muslim uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
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* The Justice Department scuttling numerous terror-related prosecutions, reportedly outraging some of the prosecutors and FBI agents involved.
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* The administration granting U.S. citizenship to three people convicted of crimes in terrorism-related cases.
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* Obama revoking the ban on photos of coffins of U.S. soldiers, but refusing to publish the Osama bin Laden death photos for fear of offending Muslims.
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* The administration sanitizing all references to “radical Islam” and the “War on Terror” from our national security documents.
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Perhaps most disturbingly, the Obama administration collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to combat “Islamophobia” and supported implementing a UN resolution against religious “stereotyping” specifically as applied to Islam. Nina Shea, in National Review Online, noted, “With the United States providing this new world stage for presenting grievances of ‘Islamophobia’ against the West, the OIC rallied around the initiative as the propaganda windfall that it is.” It reasserted demands for global blasphemy laws, said Shea, and “has made plain its aim to … pressure Western governments to regulate speech on behalf of Islam.”
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The administration’s relentless PR campaign to win the hearts and minds of Muslims prompted Senator Joe Lieberman to warn, “The administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism.” The administration, said Lieberman, “still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism. To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning.”
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To Lieberman’s point, Vice President Joe Biden, in an interview with Les Gelb of
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
, insisted, “Look the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.”
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“THE HEIGHT OF IRRESPONSIBILITY”71
To Lieberman’s point, Vice President Joe Biden, in an interview with Les Gelb of
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
, insisted, “Look the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.”
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Obama apparently doesn’t realize or care that he is not advancing democracy or any other legitimate foreign policy goals through his constant criticism of his own country. He indulges Muslim grievances and implies we are bigoted against the entire religion—that with our tactics in intelligence gathering, detention, rendition, and the like, we have behaved in ways justifying our declining image in the world.
The administration’s America-flogging reached new heights with a bizarre utterance from Vice President Joe Biden during his visit to Iraq in November 2011, just as we were irresponsibly withdrawing from that country so quickly that we didn’t even renew a treaty to maintain a residual force for training and security purposes. “We’re not claiming victory,” declared Biden. “What we’re claiming here is that we’ve done our job—ending the war we did not start, to end it in a responsible way, [and] to bring Americans home.”
With Biden’s statement, the administration, again, consciously made a stark break from pre-Obama America, as if to say that the America that initially invaded Iraq is not the America they represent. “The most outrageous thing about this statement is Biden’s conceit that he and Obama are ‘ending the war we did not start,’” Max Boot aptly observed. “Obama and Biden are the two most senior elected officials of the U.S. government. The U.S. government as a whole made a decision to intervene in Iraq, and it is the height of irresponsibility for one administration to think it can abandon with impunity the commitments made by its predecessor, whatever it may think of those commitments.” What made Biden’s assertion even more preposterous was that “Biden himself was part of the majority in both Houses who voted to go to war.”
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The administration has habitually sent these reckless signals to the world, such as when we were contemplating military intervention in Libya. At that time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced questions from the House Foreign Affairs Committee about why we were not at least threatening to use force to protect our own citizens from danger arising from the Libyan turmoil. Amazingly, Clinton told the committee that the administration didn’t want to raise “alarm bells around the region and the world that we were about to invade for oil. If you follow, as we follow, all of the websites that are looking at what’s happening in the Middle East, you see a constant drumbeat that the United States is going to invade Libya to take over the oil—and we can’t let that happen.” Apparently feeling the need to assure Congress and the world, Clinton declared, “Well, we are not going to do that.”
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Thus, the administration based certain important national security decisions on crackpot allegations found on foreign and leftist websites that the United States invades countries to steal their oil.
When it’s not indulging anti-American sentiments, the Obama administration seems to feel driven to create them. For example, in Mumbai, India, in November 2010, Obama gratuitously portrayed his countrymen as ignorant, prejudiced rubes. “I want to be honest,” he told his audience. “There are many Americans whose only experience with trade and globalization has been a shuttered factory or a job that was shipped overseas. And there still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs. That’s a real perception.”
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