From Bare Naked Islam
According to transcripts published by Palestinian Media Watch on
Monday, Abbas Zaki, Member of the Fatah Central Committee, said the PA
would agree to a treaty with Israel if a Palestinian state is
established on the 1967 lines, which would only be the beginning of a
multi-stage plan to achieve their ultimate goal:
“Even the
most extreme among us, Hamas, or the fighting forces, want a state
within the ’67 borders. Afterward, we [will] have something to say,
because the inspiring idea cannot be achieved all at once. [Rather] in
stages.”
“Israel will come to an end,” which “you can’t say to
the world,” on the official PA television channel, on September 23,
2011:
“The agreement is based on the borders of June 4
[1967]. While the agreement is on the borders of June 4, the President
[Mahmoud Abbas] understands, we understand, and everyone knows that it
is impossible to realize the inspiring idea, or the great goal in one
stroke.
“If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, if Israel uproots
the settlements, 650,000 settlers, if Israel removes the (security)
fence – what will be with Israel?
Israel will come to an end.
“If I say that I want to remove it from existence, this will be great,
great, [but] it is hard. This is not a [stated] policy. You can’t say it
to the world. You can say it to yourself.”
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The Worst Defeat for the United States Since 9/11
Two years after Obama declared that the administration has decimated
Al Qaeda worldwide, Al Qaeda has delivered the most devastating blow to
the United States since the 9/11 attacks that precipitated America’s war
on Islamic terrorism.
The fall of the Iraqi Anbar province towns of Ramadi and Fallujah recently to foreign fighters under control of Al Qaeda, called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, represents not just a tactical defeat in Obama’s “Smart Power” strategy, but a strategic surrender of the entire U.S. foreign policy conception for the last 50 years.
“US policies and leaders in three years have destroyed a state system that earlier generations evolved over decades,” said an intelligence analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with the press. “The U.S. has nothing to show for it but suffering and has nothing to replace it with.”
Anbar province is strategically situated, sharing a border with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. While Jordan and Saudi Arabia remain tenuously allied with the United States, the spread of military operations by Al Qaeda out of Syria and into Iraq must mean that they will continue to cast around for more reliable allies than the Obama administration has proved to be.
“US policy makes no sense to anyone in the region,” the analyst continued. “In the view of the US administration, however, the US is consistent in trying to promote democratically elected government, despite the total irrelevance of that concept to region.”
The analyst further observed that the administration has crafted the ridiculous foreign policy conditions in which they support what the Al Qaeda rebels are doing in Syria in opposing that government, while the administration opposes the same rebels across the border in Iraq who are trying to topple the government installed through the Iraqi elections.
The rebels on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL), has been Al Qaeda since 2004 and mostly consist of foreign fighters.
In the fall of 2012 the administration tried to paint a very different picture of the strategic situation for Al Qaeda.
"The intelligence picture shows that al Qaeda's core is a shadow of its former self,” said Obama’s National Counterterrorism Director Matt Olsen in September 2012 as the administration was making its case for a second term.
A year earlier then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that the war against Al Qaeda was all but won: "I'm convinced that we're within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda."
As late as November 1st, 2012 wearing his flight jacket as commander in chief Obama told a crowd on the campaign trail: “Thanks to sacrifice and service of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over, the war in Afghanistan is winding down, al Qaeda has been decimated, Osama bin Laden is dead.”
Not quite the “mission accomplished” speech George Bush indulged in from the deck of an aircraft carrier. In fact, it’s much, much worse. Because the comeback for Al Qaeda has been armed and fueled by Obama’s incomprehensible foreign, military and strategic policies in the Middle East and North Africa, starting with arming Al Qaeda in a bid to topple Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in the spring of 2011. Since then American arms and American money has been helping to rebuild Al Qaeda in Africa, Syria, Iraq and throughout the Arab world. And it’s not just the stability of Iraq at stake anymore: Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Israel are all affected.
Each in turn now have very real concerns about the spread of fighting to their own country, an eventuality that never was contemplated while Bush was in charge.
One young Marine who supported operations in Ramadi when the fight was in doubt back in 2004 told me he was “irritated” by the loss of the town to the same Al Qaeda fighters that they chased out previously.
“The people in that town relied on us to protect them. They didn’t like Al Qaeda then,” said the Marine who supported the 2nd Battalion 4th Marines, “and they probably don’t like them now. 80 to 90 percent of those fighters weren’t even Iraqi anyway.”
A Navy veteran of Enduring Freedom, who walked the sand in Iraq, told me that he had been watching the situation “unfold for a while now. It’s incomprehensible to me,” he said “that we lost so much there and these guys just threw it all away.”
Like the Marine veteran, he didn’t want his name used for fear of retaliation from the Obama administration.
Tony Marsh, a U.S. contractor who helped with elections in Iraq has no such scruples. He blasted the administration for squandering the “sacrifice of American soldiers who in 2004 fought and won a bloody battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar Province.”
“From day one,” said Marsh, “president Obama has sent a very clear message that this is not a fight he or his Administration have the stomach for. Al Qaeda has been biding its time when they can finally emerge, unopposed by U.S. forces, to rebuild their networks and reaffirm their fight against the west. We see them doing that now in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and large parts of Africa.”
This defeat is worse than the Tet Offensive, the highly successful new years attack staged by the communists in Vietnam in 1968. While ultimately defeated by U.S. and Vietnamese forces, Tet was widely seen as convincing many that the war in Vietnam could not be won.
But here’s the difference. We can’t just walk away from the Middle East, as we did Vietnam. There is too much at stake for the United States and the West in the region. Recent developments show just how farsighted the Bush administration was in trying to prevent the very eventuality that Obama’s guns and money have enabled in Iraq and across the Middle East.
Whatever else one might say, it’s clear Bush had more strategic sense in his middle finger than Obama has in his whole administration.
Just think of that.
The fall of the Iraqi Anbar province towns of Ramadi and Fallujah recently to foreign fighters under control of Al Qaeda, called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, represents not just a tactical defeat in Obama’s “Smart Power” strategy, but a strategic surrender of the entire U.S. foreign policy conception for the last 50 years.
“US policies and leaders in three years have destroyed a state system that earlier generations evolved over decades,” said an intelligence analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with the press. “The U.S. has nothing to show for it but suffering and has nothing to replace it with.”
Anbar province is strategically situated, sharing a border with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. While Jordan and Saudi Arabia remain tenuously allied with the United States, the spread of military operations by Al Qaeda out of Syria and into Iraq must mean that they will continue to cast around for more reliable allies than the Obama administration has proved to be.
“US policy makes no sense to anyone in the region,” the analyst continued. “In the view of the US administration, however, the US is consistent in trying to promote democratically elected government, despite the total irrelevance of that concept to region.”
The analyst further observed that the administration has crafted the ridiculous foreign policy conditions in which they support what the Al Qaeda rebels are doing in Syria in opposing that government, while the administration opposes the same rebels across the border in Iraq who are trying to topple the government installed through the Iraqi elections.
The rebels on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL), has been Al Qaeda since 2004 and mostly consist of foreign fighters.
In the fall of 2012 the administration tried to paint a very different picture of the strategic situation for Al Qaeda.
"The intelligence picture shows that al Qaeda's core is a shadow of its former self,” said Obama’s National Counterterrorism Director Matt Olsen in September 2012 as the administration was making its case for a second term.
A year earlier then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that the war against Al Qaeda was all but won: "I'm convinced that we're within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda."
As late as November 1st, 2012 wearing his flight jacket as commander in chief Obama told a crowd on the campaign trail: “Thanks to sacrifice and service of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over, the war in Afghanistan is winding down, al Qaeda has been decimated, Osama bin Laden is dead.”
Not quite the “mission accomplished” speech George Bush indulged in from the deck of an aircraft carrier. In fact, it’s much, much worse. Because the comeback for Al Qaeda has been armed and fueled by Obama’s incomprehensible foreign, military and strategic policies in the Middle East and North Africa, starting with arming Al Qaeda in a bid to topple Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in the spring of 2011. Since then American arms and American money has been helping to rebuild Al Qaeda in Africa, Syria, Iraq and throughout the Arab world. And it’s not just the stability of Iraq at stake anymore: Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Israel are all affected.
Each in turn now have very real concerns about the spread of fighting to their own country, an eventuality that never was contemplated while Bush was in charge.
One young Marine who supported operations in Ramadi when the fight was in doubt back in 2004 told me he was “irritated” by the loss of the town to the same Al Qaeda fighters that they chased out previously.
“The people in that town relied on us to protect them. They didn’t like Al Qaeda then,” said the Marine who supported the 2nd Battalion 4th Marines, “and they probably don’t like them now. 80 to 90 percent of those fighters weren’t even Iraqi anyway.”
A Navy veteran of Enduring Freedom, who walked the sand in Iraq, told me that he had been watching the situation “unfold for a while now. It’s incomprehensible to me,” he said “that we lost so much there and these guys just threw it all away.”
Like the Marine veteran, he didn’t want his name used for fear of retaliation from the Obama administration.
Tony Marsh, a U.S. contractor who helped with elections in Iraq has no such scruples. He blasted the administration for squandering the “sacrifice of American soldiers who in 2004 fought and won a bloody battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar Province.”
“From day one,” said Marsh, “president Obama has sent a very clear message that this is not a fight he or his Administration have the stomach for. Al Qaeda has been biding its time when they can finally emerge, unopposed by U.S. forces, to rebuild their networks and reaffirm their fight against the west. We see them doing that now in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and large parts of Africa.”
This defeat is worse than the Tet Offensive, the highly successful new years attack staged by the communists in Vietnam in 1968. While ultimately defeated by U.S. and Vietnamese forces, Tet was widely seen as convincing many that the war in Vietnam could not be won.
But here’s the difference. We can’t just walk away from the Middle East, as we did Vietnam. There is too much at stake for the United States and the West in the region. Recent developments show just how farsighted the Bush administration was in trying to prevent the very eventuality that Obama’s guns and money have enabled in Iraq and across the Middle East.
Whatever else one might say, it’s clear Bush had more strategic sense in his middle finger than Obama has in his whole administration.
Just think of that.
If there is ever a contest for the biggest lie in politics, this one should be a top contender.
While there have been all too many lies told in politics, most have some little tiny fraction of truth in them, to make them seem plausible. But the "trickle-down" lie is 100 percent lie.
It should win the contest both because of its purity -- no contaminating speck of truth -- and because of how many people have repeated it over the years, without any evidence being asked for or given.
Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this "trickle-down" theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a "trickle-down" policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them.
Mayor de Blasio is by no means the first politician to denounce this non-existent theory. Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called "an economic philosophy" which "says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else."
Let's do something completely unexpected: Let's stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we "give" something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? But all this is moot, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place.
The "trickle-down" theory cannot be found in even the most voluminous scholarly studies of economic theories -- including J.A. Schumpeter's monumental "History of Economic Analysis," more than a thousand pages long and printed in very small type.
It is not just in politics that the non-existent "trickle-down" theory is found. It has been attacked in the New York Times, in the Washington Post and by professors at prestigious American universities -- and even as far away as India. Yet none of those who denounce a "trickle-down" theory can quote anybody who actually advocated it.
The book "Winner-Take-All Politics" refers to "the 'trickle-down' scenario that advocates of helping the have-it-alls with tax cuts and other goodies constantly trot out." But no one who actually trotted out any such scenario was cited, much less quoted.
One of the things that provoke the left into bringing out the "trickle-down" bogeyman is any suggestion that there are limits to how high they can push tax rates on people with high incomes, without causing repercussions that hurt the economy as a whole.
But, contrary to Mayor de Blasio, this is not a view confined to people on the "far right." Such liberal icons as Presidents John F. Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson likewise argued that tax rates can be so high that they have an adverse effect on the economy.
In his 1919 address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson warned that, at some point, "high rates of income and profits taxes discourage energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures, and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils."
In a 1962 address to Congress, John F. Kennedy said, "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."
This was not a new idea. John Maynard Keynes said, back in 1933, that "taxation may be so high as to defeat its object," that in the long run, a reduction of the tax rate "will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget." And Keynes was not on "the far right" either.
The time is long overdue for people to ask themselves why it is necessary for those on the left to make up a lie if what they believe in is true.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) scheduled briefing with al-Qaeda-linked group
From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer
This shouldn't surprise anyone. The Democrats have for years now been focused on "Islamophobia" and building relationships with supposedly "moderate" Muslims, without having any way to discern whether the Muslims they were dealing with were "extremist" or "moderate," since they deny the reality of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify and assume that it's a Religion of Peace. The Republicans, of course, are no better.
"Rep. Alan Grayson Slammed for Scheduled Briefing With al Qaeda Linked Group," from the Washington Free Beacon, January 6:
A GOP challenger to Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) is blasting the Democratic congressman for hosting a Capitol Hill briefing with a human rights group run by a designated al Qaeda terrorist.
A representative from Geneva-based NGO Al Karama was scheduled to participate in the Nov. 19 briefing on U.S. drone policy with Reps. Grayson, Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), and Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.), the Washington Free Beacon first reported Monday. The representative was unable to attend because of reported visa issues.
Al Karama’s president and founder Abdul Rahman Naimi was designated as a global terrorist and al Qaeda financier by the U.S. Treasury Department in December.
Jorge Bonilla, a Republican running for Grayson’s seat in Florida’s 9th district, called the briefing a “slap in the face to the brave men and women who have served in the Global War On Terror,” according to a statement published by the National Review...
Grayson was reelected to congress in 2012, after losing a prior seat in 2010. He drew fire during his 2010 campaign when he released an ad calling his GOP opponent Daniel Webster “Taliban Dan.” The ad was widely criticized by fact-checkers as misleading.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)