:: Monday, May 20, 2013 ::
The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam Revisited
::
Posted by Edward Cline at 2:22 PM
At the moment, I would rather
be writing about the smiley mask that is falling from President Barack Obama
and his tyrannical administration regarding the fabricated Benghazi
"talking points," the Internal Revenue Service's targeting
conservative and Tea Party groups for special attention, and the government's
stealing the Associated Press's phone records. There is also the matter of the
federal government stealing millions of personal health records in order to screen
who will and will not be beneficiaries of Obamacare.
On top of all that, I learned
that the Obama administration and the Mainstream Media are "like
that." Imagine my index and second fingers crossed. For example, CNN vice
president and deputy bureau chief Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary
Clinton's deputy secretary, Tom Nides. CBS president David Rhodes is the
brother of Ben
Rhodes, master's degree holder in fiction-writing from NYU, Obama's
deputy national security advisor, whose editing of the Benghazi "talking
points" qualifies as fiction-writing. ABC president Ben Sherwood is
the brother of special Obama advisor Elizabeth Sherwood. And, NBC was co-opted
because its parent company is General Electric, which got $150 billion in
stimulus money. What an incestuous extended family!
That leaves Fox News as the
only other major news outlet that hasn't been co-opted or corrupted by the
government. But there is one place Fox won't go, either: criticizing the
Saudis. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Group, which is about 10% owned
by a Saudi
royal prince.
The New York Times is
completely liberal/left and shows no signs of wanting a reality check, so it
can be written off. The same goes for the Washington Post, whose only saving
grace is Charles Krauthammer's weekly column. Whether or not he's a neocon or merely
a straight conservative, I've never been able to determine.
So, we don't need a 50-story
pyramid housing Minitru in the middle of a squalid London in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to have a compliant
propaganda entity. We have glitzy studio news sets and groomed talking head
fashion plates and razzle-dazzle special effects to accomplish the same end:
falsehoods and news reportage that is so biased it verges on fantasy.
That being said, I move on to
another subject that must be raised, even though it is tangential to the
foregoing vis-à-vis our foreign and domestic policies.
The following is a revised
and expanded version of "The
Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam," which first appeared on October
30th, 2010. The revision and expansion are prompted by a May 13th,
2013 article by Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, "Islam vs. Islamism,"
which also appeared in the Washington
Times on May 13th. His article reflects a troubling central
premise of alleging a necessary distinction between Islam and
"Islamists," that is, between ordinary, non-violent Muslims and their
violent, "extremist" or "radical" brethren.
Pipes
opens with a reference to the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15th
and the foiled attack on the Canadian rail link to the U.S.:
What
motives lay behind last month's Boston Marathon bombing and the would-be attack
on a VIA Rail Canada train?
Leftists
and establishmentarians variously offer imprecise and tired replies – such as
"violent extremism" or anger at Western imperialism – unworthy of
serious discussion. Conservatives, in contrast, engage in a lively and serious
debate among themselves: some say Islam the religion provides motive, others
say it's a modern extremist variant of the religion, known as radical Islam or
Islamism.
As a
participant in the latter debate, here's my argument for focusing on Islamism.
His argument proposes a false
dichotomy between Islam and "Islamists," that is, between Muslims who
wage violent jihad on the West and
even amongst themselves for sectarian reasons, and those who don’t.
Islam
is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes
everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis. Muslims achieved remarkable
military, economic, and cultural success between roughly 600 and 1200 C.E.
Being a Muslim then meant belonging to a winning team, a fact that broadly
inspired Muslims to associate their faith with mundane success. Those memories
of medieval glory remain not just alive but central to believers' confidence in
Islam and in themselves as Muslims.
Major
dissonance began around 1800, when Muslims unexpectedly lost wars, markets, and
cultural leadership to Western Europeans. It continues today, as Muslims bunch
toward the bottom of nearly ever index of achievement. This shift has caused
massive confusion and anger. What went wrong, why did God seemingly abandon His
faithful? The unbearable divergence between pre-modern accomplishment and
modern failure brought about trauma.
Muslims
have responded to this crisis in three main ways. Secularists want Muslims to
ditch the Shari'a (Islamic law) and emulate the West. Apologists also emulate
the West but pretend that in doing so they are following the Shari'a. Islamists
reject the West in favor of a retrograde and full application of the Shari'a.
These paragraphs astounded
me. The first one glosses over the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa
which necessitated forced conversion, butchery, and slavery. Remarkable military
successes, indeed. But for their defeat at the Battle of Tours, the
"Islamists" would have carved out a huge empire in Europe. What
economic accomplishments? The period he cites spans the economically stagnant
Dark Ages and early Western Medieval periods. Cultural successes? Other than a
certain architectural style, translating some Aristotle and other ancient
thinkers – whose works Islam subsequently rejected – I can't recall any great
symphonies, artwork, or literature Islam produced in those six hundred years.
"Major dissonance" within Islam began over who was going to
be Mohammad's official successor in the 630's. Thus the interminable conflicts between
Sunnis and Shi'ites and other splintering sects of Islam. Islam never had any
"cultural leadership."
Secularist Muslims may want Islam
to ditch Sharia law but only at the risk of being deemed apostates and of their
deaths. Apologist Muslims feign a hypothetical reconciliation between Sharia and
Western concepts of freedom, and demand the incorporation of Sharia into
Western law. "Islamists," however, are consistent with their creed,
know that it is
"retrograde" and primitive, and wage jihad to achieve that end.
Raymond Ibrahim, associate director
of the Middle East Forum, on October 28, 2010, however, published an article, “Offensive Jihad: The One
Incontrovertible Problem with Islam,” also in the Middle East Form (October
28, 2010), which seems to be at fundamental odds with Pipes' article. Ibrahim's
article addresses one of the fundamental problems of and with Islam, one which I
have continually stressed: jihad. Jihad is a core tenet in what is a
codified system of irrationalism that cannot be “reformed” without obliterating
Islam as a distinct religious creed. Remove the belligerent jihadist commands from the Koran and Hadith to wage jihad, for
example, and it would cease to be Islam, not only in Muslim minds but in
non-Muslim, as well.
There would, of course,
remain a host of other irrational assertions and imperatives, such as the
sanctioning of wife-beating and the murder of apostates and the like, which constitute,
after some astounding mental gymnastics by Islamic clerics and scholars, the
byzantine and illogical underpinnings and text of Sharia law. The jihadist elements of Islam, however, are
easily transmutable into a political policy, which is conquest of all
non-Muslim or infidel governments and societies and their submission to Sharia.
That makes it an ideological doctrine. Muslims are either obliged to wage jihad, or they are not. Mohammad and Muslim
scholars say they are. End of argument, so far as Koranic interpretation goes, and that interpretation is biased towards
the literal.
Reading the debates about what
Islam’s mission is and the role of jihad
in it and what they truly “mean,” I am always reminded of H.L. Mencken's
observation on religious zealotry: "The urge to save humanity is almost
always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." Islam is a puritanical
creed that makes no allowances for either infidels or apostates or its
adherents. I cannot believe that beneath the pious exterior of any person who
would be seduced by Islam is not a seething, percolating envy of men who are
indeed free, an envy easily and maliciously transfigured into violent jihad.
This policy is operative and
underway today in Western nations with varying degrees of success, and it is
making progress only by default. Islam is strong only because the West’s
defenders are emasculated by multiculturalist premises and a general
disinclination to condemn any religion. Aggravating the problem is an
unadmitted but general fear in tolerance-obsessed pragmatists of “offending”
Muslims, who might start rioting and demonstrating again, claiming
discrimination, defamation, and disrespect, and etc., none of it spontaneous
but clearly organized and orchestrated by so-called “radicals.”
I was initially impressed by Ibrahim’s
quotation from an entry on jihad in
the Encyclopedia of Islam, which is
an admission that “Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated” – until I
realized that it could just as well mean that, after a global caliphate has
been established, there would be no more justification for violent jihad. Every nation would by then be
conquered, recalcitrant infidels slain, enslaved, or reduced to dhimmitude, and Sharia made the law of
every land.
In short, after all the
killing, enslaving, and oppression, jihad
would be wrong!!
But, if Islam is completely
“made over” in the sense of reforming
it, what would be left of Islam that virtually any other creed could not claim as
its fundamental tenets, as well? And to
“make over” Islam, its principal font of “kilman” or wisdom, the objectionable
and barbaric Mohammad, would need to be dispensed with. He is a role model for
killers and tyrants and other psychopathic individuals. Remove that one
critical link of the irrational and arbitrary in Islam, and all the other links
fall to the floor or dissolve into nothingness.
What would be substituted for
Mohammad? It would need to be something as enduringly fable-worthy as Mohammad,
but measurably benign. But, Islam has no alternative icons that meet that description.
What then, would be Islam’s driving force, if not jihad as commanded by Allah as told to Mohammad?
Once Mohammad is removed the
text, the next step would be a "blasphemous" exercise and question
the existence and credence of Allah; if he commanded jihad, and if his word is sacred and unalterable, and known only
through Mohammad, then he would need to be subjected to a “make over,” much as
the focus of Christian doctrine was shifted from an Allah-like Jehovah of the
Old Testament to the largely pacific New Testament with Jesus Christ and his
pacifist homilies.
But Christ, to Islam, was
merely an itinerant preacher, not a prophet. If a “reformation” of Islam is
undertaken, who in Islamic lore would take Mohammad's place? Would it be
Abraham or Moses? But, in the Old
Testament, neither of them was much better than Mohammad in terms of their
behavior towards men of other faiths; they also advocated the righteous
slaughtering of unbelievers and sinners and distributing slaves, women, and
sheep among their more zealous followers.
From where, then, would any
"sacred word" come? Who would act as the incontestable vehicle of
higher mysteries and moral diktats? On whose divine or temporal authority?
Ibrahim writes: “Worse,
offensive jihad is part and parcel of
Islam; it is no less codified than, say, Islam's Five Pillars, which no Muslim
rejects.” In sum, it is either-or: repudiate Islam entirely, or submit to the
whole palimony of irrationalism that is Islam, including the imperative of jihad. The one incontrovertible problem
with Islam (aside from the untenable claim of Allah’s existence) is its
dependence on violent conquest, or the initiation of force. This renders the
creed absolutely inconvertible to a
pacific doctrine. That is its unarguable dead-end.
Ibrahim goes to the nub of
the conundrum that faces "moderate" critics of Islam:
Worse,
offensive jihad is part and parcel of Islam; it is no less codified than, say,
Islam's Five Pillars, which no Muslim rejects. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's
entry for "jihad" states that the "spread of Islam by arms is a
religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done
until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be
made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated." Scholar Majid
Khadurri (1909-2007), after defining jihad as warfare, writes that jihad
"is regarded by all jurists, with almost no exception, as a collective obligation
of the whole Muslim community."
Even
that chronic complainer Osama
bin Laden makes it clear that offensive jihad is the root problem:
"Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately
revolve around one issue… Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power
of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes.
There are only three choices in Islam... Either submit, or live under the
suzerainty of Islam, or die."
Or, as Ayn Rand might have
put it: “You can’t have your mystic of muscle and deny him, too.” He is either
the source of Islam’s potency, or he isn’t. And if he isn’t, whither Islam?
Andrew McCarthy, in his
Family Security Matters article, "Obama's
Betrayal of Islamic Democracy" (May 13th) remarks that it
is difficult for "moderate" Muslims to "democratize"
Islam: "As we have seen time and
again, however, this is a very hard thing for moderates to do." McCarthy
sympathizes with them.
It is hard for "moderate" Muslims to do because it would
entail repudiating Islam altogether, and then they would no longer be
"Muslims," moderate or otherwise. Islam is already a
"democratic" system; once it attains hegemony wherever it reigns,
that is pure "democracy" or majority rule in its original,
unadulterated, and un-sweetened sense. Because "democracy" means
"majority rule," that democracy would be represented by the Islamic Ummah, or the collective.
Is there such a thing as
"moderate" Nazism, or "moderate" Communism? Or "moderate"
totalitarianism? The "extremists" of Islam despise
"moderate" Muslims because they know that Islam practiced
consistently, that is, practiced root and branch, gives them political power. A
"moderate" form of Islam, were such a thing possible, would deny them
that power. A "moderate" form
of Islam would be an emasculated form of it and no longer "Islam."
The "extremists" or "radicals" know this, if the
"moderates" don't.
Walid Shoebat, in his Pajamas
Media column of May 18th,"Islam
vs. Islamism: A Case for Wishful Thinkers," tasks Pipes, and,
indirectly, McCarthy, as well, on not only the terminology of Islam vs.
Islamism, but the core means and ends of Islam, which cannot be conveniently
divorced from the ideology. After making hash of Pipes' statistical argument
that not all Muslims condone violent jihad,
and after citing Muslim authorities, dead and alive, on the legitimacy of jihad as central to Islam's existence, he
quotes another authority on jihad and
the establishment of a global caliphate by violence and stealth:
What
about Al-Ghazali, the famous theologian, philosopher, and paragon of mystical
Sufism whom the eminent W. M. Watt describes as “acclaimed in both the East and
West as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed, and he is by no means unworthy of
that dignity”? Scholars like Pipes know the truth, yet completely ignore it.
Al-Ghazali said:
One must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids)
at least once a year… one may use a catapult against them when they are in a
fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…. If a person of
the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book—Jews and Christians, typically] is
enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked.… One may cut down their
trees/…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty
whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need.
Shoebat writes that Pipes "even
went as low to claim that Muhammad was a 'Muslim not an Islamist' and even
distinguished him since, 'Islamism represents the transformation of Islamic faith
into a political ideology.'"
By
switching Muhammad from “Islamist” to “Muslim, Pipes must then answer a crucial
question: Is Islam defined by its founder or by Mr. Pipes? Muhammad defined
Islam as “Al-Islamu deen wa dawla” (“Islam is a religion and a
state”). Pipes then must remove the “and” to substantiate his false case.
Islam is nothing if not a
political ideology. The first time Mohammad raised his sword to forcibly
convert men to Islam, and abandoned persuasion, that was the inauguration of
political Islam. It has not changed since then. Force, coercion, slavery,
death, and submission are the sole hallmarks of Islam.
The problem with Islam is
that it is a religion. Religion is a primitive form of philosophy that explains
existence and purports to give men a moral guide to living. Qua religion, it
depends on faith in the existence of a supernatural being, and a form of
altruism and collectivism, an altruism that is extended only to other Muslims
and the collectivism of the Ummah. One
could also argue that jihad
represents a special kind of altruism: Jihad
as seen as a vehicle of "salvation," with suicide bombers and plane
hijackers acting as selfless and self-sacrificing drones to spread the word of
Allah.
Allow me to pose this
question: If one removed altruism and pacifism from Christianity, could one
credibly call what was left "Christianity"? One could pose the same
question about Judaism or Buddhism. Christianity, as a religion, it should be
noted, has never been "moderated"; it has only been barred from
acquiring political power. That was another unprecedented accomplishment of our
Founders.
Pipes, dividing the discussion about Islam
into three groups, writes that he belongs in the third group, which views
"Islamism" as a "modern extremist variant of the religion, known
as radical Islam or Islamism." He dismisses anyone who views Islam in its
totality as succumbing to a "simplistic and essentialist delusion." This
is an implicit disparagement of such survivors of Islam as Wafa Sultan and Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, and of such champions against Islam as Geert Wilders. Treating Islam
in its "totality" is as correct a way of treating it as it was of
treating Nazism or Communism in their particular "totalities."
Those "totalities"
are fundamentally, and incontrovertibly, totalitarian.
There is no other way of looking at Islam, either.
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:: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 ::
Benghazi: Obama's "Wag the Dog" in Reverse
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Posted by Edward Cline at 4:12 PM
Some time ago speculation ran
through the Mainstream Media and the Internet about which "playbook"
the Obama administration has been following in terms of its domestic and international
policies. Was it George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four, or Ayn Rand's Atlas
Shrugged?
The consensus came down for Atlas Shrugged, a novel whose villains
seemed to have enjoyed a kind of ethereal, literary karma and wound up in
President Barack Obama's administration. The premise behind the consensus was
that before you can depict a country in ruins governed by an all-knowing,
all-controlling totalitarian régime, it must first be ruined.
I agreed with that consensus.
But, here's a new twist on that hypothesis.
In 1997, Hollywood released a
cinematic spitball aimed at President George H.W. Bush, Wag the Dog,
about a phony war concocted by – don't be too surprised – a Hollywood producer
to distract attention away from a fictive president's sex scandal just before
an election. The ruse succeeds, and the (presumably Republican)
president is reelected. The ruse is so successful that its creator is bursting
with frustrated pride and wants to tell the world about it. He is warned not
to. He insists. Consequently, he has a heart attack at poolside and dies, an
unfortunate "tragedy" arranged for him by a fellow spin-doctor
working for the government.
Lately,
reality has had a habit of emulating fiction, even Hollywood's leftist digital
and celluloid fiction. Today we have, in the geyser of revelations about what
happened in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012, just the reverse of
what transpired in the movie. There is a real war, a president and former Secretary
of State are embroiled in a scandal, and there have been real deaths, and not
so much a covered-up sex scandal as a set of lies and fabrications intended to
distract Americans' attention from the criminal behavior and statements of the
administration just before an election, in this instance, the 2012 election.
President
Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and advisor and
fiction writer Ben
Rhodes apparently failed to wag this particular dog convincingly enough to
stop the truth from coming out, although it wasn't for lack of trying by the
stooges and cheerleaders in the MSM and by Obama's geekish press secretary, Jay
Carney. In fact, a whole kennel of dogs is barking outloud about how their owners
mangled their tails in multiple attempts to wag them. These are dogs that date
back to Obama's first term in office.
There
is the IRS
scandal over Associated Press phone records being seized by the Department of
Justice to see who was saying, writing, and doing what, and when, and the IRS
scandal over that beloved "service" targeting the Tea Party and
other organizations for special attention, all with the implied sanction of an
all-too-real president
to weaken their opposition
to Obama's reelection.
There
is "Fast and Furious," Attorney General Eric Holder's pack of rabid
pit bulls concocted to implicate private gun owners and sellers in the Mexican
drug cartel's depredations with the aim of imposing gun controls on the country to reduce
"gun violence."
There
are the Solyndra-class, fascist subsidies to companies that ultimately failed
and continue to cost taxpayers.
There
was TARP and the whole subprime mortgage meltdown that cost billions and
billions of taxpayer dollars. There were the car industry bailouts that
continue to cost billions. There is Obama's opposition to any energy plan that
would make the country independent of the whims and political influence of OPEC
and especially of Mideast oil potentates.
There
is Obama's endorsement of the so-called "Arab Spring," which was heralded
as a chance to bring "democracy" to Egypt and Tunisia and Libya, but
which has resulted in the establishment of one of this country's most determined
and deadly enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention the murderous
turmoil in Syria.
There
is the astronomical debt rung up by the Obama administration for which we might
need to coin a new term that would describe it.
There
is Obamacare, a dictatorial "health insurance" scam that forces all Americans
to participate in, and whose true costs are now beginning to reveal themselves.
There
is terrorism itself, and Obama ordering the destruction or redacting of all government
training materials that would identify our enemy, Islam, reducing our law
enforcement agencies to a blinded, bumbling Mr. Magoo.
But,
it's Ben Rhodes who is the focus of attention here. I focus on him because, as
a novelist, I wish to redeem the good name of novelists who produce fiction. I cannot
speak for other novelists, but I can distinguish between writing fiction for a
reading public and concocting lies to be consumed by the same public. Rhodes is billed
as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic
Communications and Speechwriting, overseeing President Obama’s national
security communications, speechwriting, and global engagement. And, before being
appointed to that post, was Deputy Director of White House Speechwriting, and
as a Senior Speechwriter for the Obama campaign.
In short, Rhodes is the Dustin Hoffman character in Wag the Dog, Stanley Motss. It is too
early to project whether or not he will meet Stanley Motss's fate. Probably not.
More likely he will be thrown under another of Obama's buses, figuratively
speaking, in the guise of a tearful resignation. He is, after all, an important
"advisor," and he advised Obama, not too well, and wrongly, at that. His
hand was in the talking points cookie jar, and the jar was fabricated by his
fellow staff spin-doctors.
Rhodes apparently is implicated in the
"talking points" issue over what to say and what not to say about what
happened in Benghazi, why the consulate was attacked, by whom, and who knew it
and when. By "who knew it," I mean anyone in the government outside
of Al Qada and the Muslim Brotherhood, two organizations which seem to be formulating
our foreign policy.
Obama has more or less laughed
off the Benghazi investigation. As the Washington Post reported:
“We don’t have time to
keep playing these political games in Washington,” Obama said, arguing that the
more important work is ensuring that U.S. diplomats are adequately protected.
“We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.”
Rhodes was apparently aided in the deceit by Samantha Power, consort
of former would-be speech censor and Obama staffer Cass Sunstein. Having resigned
from the first Obama term because of an "off-the-record" remark she
made about Hillary Clinton, she is back in the administration and heads the
Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of
Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council. She is a
Pulitzer Prize winning author and is closely entrenched in Harvard University's
liberal establishment.
What did she say about Hillary "It doesn't
matter" Clinton that forced her to resign? It is precious, and it is correct.
The Washington
Post wrote:
" 'She is a monster, too -- that is off the
record -- she is stooping to anything,' Ms. Power said, hastily trying to
withdraw her remark."
… Power was quoted as taking other swipes at Obama's Democratic
presidential nomination rival, which Gilson says came after the
"monster" comment and which Power did not attempt to place off the
record. Power said of Clinton, "You just look at her and think, 'Ergh' . .
. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."
Ben
Rhodes, however, got a master's degree in fiction-writing at New York
University. The only fiction he is known to have written is some of Obama's
speeches. A puff-piece in the Collegiate
School's blogsite quotes him:
“For a long time, my focus was on being a writer,”
Rhodes said. “But I was definitely politically engaged [in school], and I don’t
think it would surprise anyone I went to high school with that I ended up doing
something in politics.” [Syntax, sic]
Like
writing fiction for the President ever since 2007, and for former Virginia governor
and now Senator Mark Warner, and for Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana.
As for
the "talking points" new and old, and how the administration was
concerned about their credibility, The Weekly
Standard, in Stephen Hayes' May 13th article, "The
Benghazi Talking Points: And how they were changed to obscure the truth," reported
In an attempt to address
those concerns, CIA officials cut all references to Ansar al Sharia and made
minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., [State Department spokesman
Victoria] Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did
not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not “resolve all
my issues or those of my building leadership,” and State Department leadership
was contacting National Security Council officials directly. Moments later,
according to the House report, “White House officials responded by stating that
the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.” One
official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to
President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the
group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials
the following morning at the White House.
By "resolved," Rhodes did not mean the
resolution of conflicts and plots in a work of fiction. That skill, presumably
(but doubtfully) acquired for his master's degree in fiction-writing at NYU,
did not come into play here. He meant reaching a credible lie in the work of
fiction that is Obama's ongoing work-in-progress.
That is, concocting disingenuous statements and
postures to preserve the alleged credibility of Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Obama, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Victoria
Nuland, and Ben Rhodes all cried havoc, but let slip the dogs of war – on their
own houses. For once.
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:: Sunday, May 12, 2013 ::
Obama's Fruits of Falsehood
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Posted by Edward Cline at 4:00 PM
There is an understandable
reluctance in President Barack Obama's critics – a reluctance verging on a
fastidious decorum and civility regarding the office of the President – that
stops them from making the ultimate judgment of President Barack Hussein Obama
and his administration. It is a damnation they have avoided. Perhaps it is too
horrible for them to contemplate. They can excoriate him over the details of
his policies and actions, but never quite reach a logical conclusion. Perhaps they
believe he isn't beyond redemption.
However, I don't think I'm
putting my life at risk by stating, without apology, regret, hesitation, or
trepidation that: Obama is evil. Even if he never committed another
evil action, he is irredeemable. As irredeemable as Richard Speck or Charles
Manson.
And by evil I do not mean evil by
accident, or by omission, by hypocrisy, by happenstance, by character flaw, by
insanity, or even by criminal negligence. I mean: Consciously, purposefully,
determinedly evil.
Obama is a public figure. His
policies and actions are fair game for observation, examination, and
evaluation. They're there for all to see. His private life also has been made
public, from his closeness to America-hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright to his
frequent golfing outings to his numerous lies and cover-ups. There is not a
single speech of Obama's, not a single pubic gesture of his or a piece of
legislation he has signed or vetoed, that has not telegraphed his malevolent motives
and intentions.
It is fruitless to take him
to task on incompetence or willful negligence or over a character flaw or even
over his ostensible "pragmatism," which tends to backfire when his
pragmatism encounters the pragmatism of seasoned veterans like Vladimir Putin. One
can understand Mark Steyn, as he wrote in "The Benghazi
Lie" on May 10th about the insouciance of Obama and Hillary
Clinton about why Benghazi happened:
And,
in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president
and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their
buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins
and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family
that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the
video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula
Basseley Nakoula [maker of the "Innocence of Muslims" video on
YouTube] in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was
such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and
sawn Stevens’s casket in half.
Steyn issues a warning to Obama's
and Clinton's defenders and apologists, that they, too, can be policy fodder:
The
dying Los Angeles Times reported this story on its homepage…under the
following headline: “Partisan Politics Dominates House Benghazi Hearing.” In
fact, everyone in this story is a Democrat or a career civil servant. Chris
Stevens was the poster boy for Obama’s view of the Arab Spring; he agreed with
the president on everything that mattered. The only difference is that he
wasn’t in Vegas but out there on the front line, where Obama’s delusions meet
reality. Stevens believed in those illusions enough to die for them.
One
cannot say the same about the hollow men and women in Washington who sent him
out there unprotected, declined to lift a finger when he came under attack, and
in the final indignity subordinated his sacrifice to their political needs by
lying over his corpse. Where’s the “partisan politics”? Obama, Clinton,
Panetta, Clapper, Rice, and the rest did this to one of their own. And fawning
court eunuchs, like the ranking Democrat at the hearings, Elijah Cummings, must
surely know that, if they needed [to], they’d do it to them, too.
The subtitle of Steyn's
column is, "A failure of character of this magnitude corrodes the
integrity of the state." I beg to differ. This particular failure of character
had nothing to do with the integrity of the state or of the office. A
character, if it is fundamentally malign, as Obama's is, cannot fail unless it
is opposed. And he has been opposed only haphazardly. Yes, Cummings and Rice
and Clapper can be sacrificed, if need be. In fact, by extrapolating Obama's
penchant for sacrifice, of partisans and American lives overseas alike, one can
imagine that he can and will throw Hillary to the wolves, as well, if that will
buy him time.
Daniel Greenfield, writing as
Sultan Knish in his May 11th column, "With
Blood on Their Hands," ends his column on the Lady Macbeth theme on which
it is pegged, about the morbid senselessness of Obama's and Clinton's policies:
The
social revolution of her 1969 thesis [Clinton's Wellesley thesis on Saul
Alinsky] is once again here, and like most revolutions, it's a bloody mess.
Once again social values are under attack by radicals while soldiers die
overseas without being allowed to fight back. And the radicals care for nothing
for the blood that they spill for their radical revolution. Not the blood of a
single man or of a thousand men.
"What is a traitor?" Lady Macduff's son asks his mother, before being
murdered by Macbeth's assassins. "Why, one that swears and lies," his
mother replies. "Who must hang them?" her son asks. "Why, the
honest men," she answers. "Then the liars and swearers are
fools," he says, "for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the
honest men and hang up them."
The liars and swearers have hung up the honest men from Benghazi to Kabul to
Capitol Hill. And the traitors walk through the night with blood on their hands
and do not even see.
Nor, as Greenfield notes, will
they wail in remorse or in fear of the consequences of being party to murder,
as Lady Macbeth did. If they see blood on their hands, well, that's life, isn't
it? What difference does it make? They are not guilt-ridden, not shaking with
fear of moral disapprobation. After all, they will think: Aren't we the epitome
of the oblige noblesse of altruism
and sacrifice? Sometimes that duty requires self-sacrifice, as well, but we won’t
go there, because if we sacrificed ourselves and not someone else, who would be
left to be, well, moral?
Clinton's aggravated but
arrogontly elitist protest on January 23rd, 2012, of "What difference, at
this point, does it make?" about the lives lost at Benghazi sums up Obama's
approach to things. Nothing matters to him at any point. Clinton is desperate
to salvage her chances for the presidency. Obama is so hollow, so malign, so
filled with the poisonous glop of hatred, he cannot feel desperation for anything.
I think the outrage expressed
by Mark Steyn and others over Obama's and his cohorts' actions and behavior is
misplaced; it is a response which resists acknowledgement that Obama is what he
is: evil. But all the details about the Benghazi cover-up and the Seal
Team killings in Afghanistan which are coming out, not to mention his de facto alliance with the omnivorous Muslim
Brotherhood, only confirm the evil. As in any portrait of any Dorian Gray,
the devil is in the details. But the brushstrokes make up the portrait. It's the
sum of those brushstrokes that matters. It's what you see when the canvas is
finished and the artist steps aside after explaining how all the brushstrokes
work.
So, I'm going the extra mile by
saying what must be on everyone's minds: Obama is evil.
So are former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, and all the other policy
makers and advisors in his administration. The recurring leitmotif in all their
actions and policies from the very first day of Obama's first term in office has
been: Destroy for the sake of destruction. Out of destruction will come
construction of a world more to our liking. Sacrifice your own allies, if
necessary, such as Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, if it will
sustain the falsehood and allow us to continue to destroy without obstruction
or surcease.
But Clinton, Holder and all
the others have merely been enabled by Obama. They are his vindictive flying
monkeys, the stinking, badgering Harpies of Hussein.
Or, try this analogy on for
size: They are the human bagworms killing this country and abbreviating our
lives. Bagworms can strip a tree of its protective bark and foliage and leave it
to die, exposed to disease and the elements. Obama wishes to strip this country
of its defenses to leave it and us exposed to the machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood,
Vladimir Putin, and other predators.
But, what, after all, is evil?
The Oxford English Dictionary has two principal definitions. The first
is "morally depraved, bad, wicked, vicious." The second is: "Doing or tending to do
harm; hurtful, mischievous, prejudicial." I would amend the second
definition to read: Doing or wanting to
do harm, to be hurtful, to be insidiously nihilistic.
It would complement the first definition.
You cannot accuse him merely
of fiddling while Rome burns, even though it becoming apparent that he ordered
the arson. After all, Obama is not blindfolded and whacking a stick at a piñata
to see what falls from it once he's smashed it. He stuffed the piñata himself,
presented it to the country as a gift, and dropped it in the country's lap. It has
broken open and what has spilled from it is offal and excrement and toxic bile.
You doubt it? Take a look at
the shape of the country. At the character of our foreign relations.
You will excuse the imagery. I
am not given to exaggeration. I have been calling this man evil for years. I have
never hesitated to identify the reality of the man and of his motives. It was
time to be frank and that cannot entail decorous language or distaste for acknowledging
the moral repulsiveness of this creature. Kid gloves don't agree with me. It is
time to divorce the office from the man who occupies it, to make a distinction between
the dignity of the office and the low character of the man who works every day
to rob it of every vestige of dignity.
What must be understood by Americans
is that, whether it's Benghazi or the Afghanistan Seal Team killings or what
he's done to this country economically and politically since taking office in
2009, is that he doesn't mind these things happening. The "perfect"
world message propagated by Obama and his stooges in the MSM
isn't possible. He knows this if his stooges don’t. His perfect
"transformed" America is a continent lying in ashes, overrun by Third
World illiterates and religious barbarians picking through the ruins and
savaging the survivors. At the present, the only thing he might be worried
about is how a full-blown Congressional investigation of Benghazi might hurt
his being able to continue doing what he's been doing. He is only afraid of
being found out.
And the only thing that might
worry Clinton
is how it might sink her chances of running for president in 2016. But, down
deep, that hatred of existence, and of this country, and of us, is her driving
force, as well. It just isn't as obvious.
Obama is more obviously evil.
That is the long and short of it.
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