Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Great Betrayal

DUMBEST MAYOR IN AMERICA CALLS FOR GUN CONTROL

In the aftermath of the Batman shootings, look for a new push to happen on gun control. Bloomberg has already come out calling for tough gun laws in a statement that takes stupid to a whole new level.

And everybody always says, ‘Isn’t it tragic,’ and you know, we look for was the guy, as you said, maybe trying to recreate Batman. I mean, there are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop.

No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them concretely, not just in generalities – specifically what are they going to do about guns?

if it was one of your kids yesterday in Aurora, maybe you’d stand up and say I’m not going to take this anymore. Maybe you get your friends and everything. And it’s not a question of what you think is right here

I’m not a physiatrist or a psychologist. I can tell you I don’t think there’s any other developed country in the world that has remotely the problem we have. There’s no other place that allows- we have more guns than people in this country. Every place else, if there are murders they’re generally not done with guns – not generally, a lot more are not done with guns.

God didn’t make everybody perfect. But this is just- you know, and we can talk about it on the talk shows, we can wring our hands and say it’s terrible. You know, ‘I need more guns to protect myself.’ And that strategy doesn’t work. That’s like saying incarcerate more people and you’ll reduce crime rate. 

I don't have any explanation for this torrent of stupidity from a billionaire and the mayor of a major city. This reads like the ravings of an overmedicated man. It's a string of unintended punchlines.

I don't like to rely on memes but this seems to call for a little Billy Madison.

Mr. Bloomberg, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

As we stand on the cusp of a fourth war in Syria, the David Horowitz Freedom Center will be publishing my pamphlet on the Obama Wars. The title of the pamphlet is "The Great Betrayal" and it exposes the disturbing levels of cynicism and dishonesty that dragged the United States into the Libyan War, as well as examining Obama's botch of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here are a few brief excerpts from the chapter on Libya on the fake genocide that was used as the basis for war.

By September, long after NATO had entered the conflict, the rebels were claiming tens of thousands dead, but morgue records showed that the dead on both sides actually numbered in the hundreds. The International Red Cross put the number of missing persons at around a thousand. The largest mass grave found had 34 bodies.

The Abu Salim Prison Massacre of armed rioting inmates, some of them Islamic terrorists, was not a massacre of innocent civilians. It was more like the local version of the Attica prison riot, with an exaggerated body count which Obama quoted without any confirmation. When the Libyan rebels unveiled the site of the mass grave, a CNN team found that the bones there were too large to have come from human beings and were likely animal remains. 

Nothing the Bush Administration had been accused of doing in conducting the Iraq mission came close to this byzantine level of deception. If Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had attempted to fight a dual war with Iraq, one conducted by NATO under a UN mandate to protect Iraqi civilians, and another outside the mandate, the critics of the Iraq war would have been up in arms. But since it was their president who was carrying on the deceptions and the war, they let it pass. 

...a war that was illegal even according to Obama's Office of Legal Counsel

Congress had never appropriated any funds for the Libyan War. Instead Caroline D. Krass, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote up a memo arguing that the War Powers Resolution only applies to “prolonged and substantial military engagements”.  It was a view however that Krass herself did not agree with. Instead Obama had the head of the Office of Legal Counsel stating a legal position that even she did not think was actually legal.

There are also chapters dealing in depth with Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is a small sample...

In February 2010, the Obama Administration appeared to have stumbled on a plan for success in Iraq; changing the name of the operation from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn. The memo explained that, “Aligning the name change with the change of mission sends a strong signal that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended and our forces are operating under a new mission." 

As usual Obama got around the technicalities of what he had actually said with more wordplay. Toward the end of the 16 month deadline, Operation Iraqi Freedom got a name change which ended the war.  The American presence in Iraq was no longer part of a war, even if American soldiers were still fighting and dying. The soldiers themselves also received a name change. The 50,000 soldiers in Iraq were now members of “Advise and Assist Brigades”.

Obama had kept his pledge not by withdrawing the troops and ending the war, but by changing the name of the combat brigades and the war. 

And a sample of the Afghanistan chapter which addresses the fatal effects of restraining American soldiers.

Though the Obama Administration oversaw the shortest period of the war in Afghanistan, more American soldiers died on its watch than at any previous time during the war. More American soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2010 than were killed during the first year of the invasion and occupation of Iraq or during Bush’s final year in Iraq. More soldiers were wounded during the year 2010 alone than had been wounded all through the war in Afghanistan during the Bush Administration.

The number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased in that same time. 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed in that year alone, with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint. This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.

By 2011, the ISAF forces were responsible for only 14.2 percent of Afghan civilian deaths, while the Taliban were responsible for 79.8 percent of them.   The Taliban had demonstrated that their reach was growing and American restraint did not save civilian lives, rather it cost even more lives by empowering the Taliban who were hard at work taking them.

You can find the rest of The Great Betrayal at Front Page Magazine and you can order print copies of it from the Freedom Center.



YOU DIDN'T BUILD ANYTHING

Let's take Obama's "You didn't make that happen" message at face value. If nothing truly happens without the gov making it happen, then the full responsibility for the bad economy, the lack of jobs and poor business rate stops with the White House.

If people don't make businesses happen, only governments make businesses happen and business isn't happening... then Obama is responsible for not making it happen.

Petard. Hoist.




MCCAIN GOES FONDA

What McCain's full-throated defense of Huma Abedin on the Senate floor and his friendly visits with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders really tells us is how pervasive Muslim Brotherhood influence has become.

In 2008 we had a choice between two presidential candidates... both of them supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.




THE LOVE STORY OF ROMEO AND OMAR

History has many great love stories. The conclusion of Romeo and Juliet proclaims, "For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

In the case of Romeo Dallaire, that might be rewritten as, "For never was a story of more woe than this of Canada and her Romeo."

Romeo Dallaire is best known for building a career on his pathetic failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda. Where other men might have felt eternal shame at the piles of bodies testifying to their failure, he saw a book deal. His book, “Shake Hands with the Devil” (foreword by Samantha Power), was turned into a movie from the director of “Turner & Hooch” and “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,” and he has made more appearances in documentaries than Michael Moore, showing up in “The Last Just Man,” “The Journey of Romeo Dallaire” and “The Greatest Canadian.”

Above all else, Romeo Dallaire is a humble man who avoids the spotlight and has built a political career on top of a media career built on top of a pile of bodies as the Liberal Senator for Quebec. In line with his expertise in doing nothing during a crisis, he sits on the Senate committee for national security and defense and the anti-terrorism committee. In that latter capacity he has been frantically lobbying on behalf of Omar Khadr.

Omar Khadr is an angry bearded Muslim terrorist who murdered Christopher Speer, a medic who six days earlier had walked into a minefield to save two wounded children. Omar Khadr, currently enjoying the hospitality of Gitmo, is often described as a “child soldier,” which at the age of 25, makes him one of the oldest child soldiers in history. 

...you can find the rest of the The Love Story of Romeo and Omar here




ANNA BRESLAW AND MODERN JOURNALISM

We already know how this works. Awful person writes awful essay that seems to exist for no other reason than to be condemned. Everyone gathers and condemns it. Awful person becomes more famous and the condemners pick up some more traffic.

There isn't much to say about Anna Breslaw. The outrage is in some ways refreshing because it shows that there are awful things that Jews can say about Jews that are off limits. But it's hard to get too worked up over it when people like Art Spiegelman, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth built lucrative careers saying similarly awful things.

Breslaw's mistake was packaging her bile in a review of Breaking Bad in 2012 instead of in a memoir in 1986. It was a branding error. Suggesting that Holocaust survivors are evil is gauche in a review of a television series because hateful things are only properly defensible when they are very serious and grounded in personal suffering.

But it's not much of a mistake. Breslaw's essay was the best thing to happen to her career, a career that otherwise had her writing little autobiographical essays, commentaries on fourth wave feminism and teen soaps. Now Breslaw showed that she could write something that would get a lot of attention.

Attention is the goal here. Dysfunctional people want attention. Especially the bad kind of attention. And the internet is great at enabling that.

The first thing that Anne Brelsaw wrote for Heeb Magazine was a piece about dressing up as Anne Frank for Halloween. That picked up 25 comments. Then she wrote three other pieces that weren't about mocking the Holocaust. They got a grand total of 1 comment.

Lesson learned. For Tablet, Anne Brelsaw didn't write a review of Breaking Bad, a topic that would have picked up 1 comment and limited appeal. She wrote that Holocaust survivors are bad people.

How many comments does that article have? 261. Lesson learned.

Tablet Magazine is refusing to apologize and explaining that Breslaw didn't really mean etc. But they know she meant it. It's why they're explaining she didn't mean it. It's called plausible deniability. That way when they run her next piece they will have an excuse. "We thought she really didn't mean it."

If Tablet didn't think that Anna Breslaw meant it, they would have to treat it as a TV review that accidentally stirred up a lot of negative publicity. Then they would have apologized and dumped her because associating with her would be a hassle and they would have no reason to think she could bring in pageviews like this a second time.

Instead they know she meant it... and they want her to do it again.

Being a bad person on the internet is a marketable skill. It was a marketable skill in literary circles before the internet. It's called being controversial, which means saying awful things in a slightly literary way.

Anna Breslaw has no future writing little culture pieces, but making up stories about her family and making fun of the Holocaust... that's still gold. The only problem is that she's going to have to top this one and when she does, the outrage machine will start up again, the pageviews will climb and a year from now Anna will be discussing book deals with her agent.

Who says evil doesn't win?




THAT'S NOT WHAT LEARNING FROM YOUR MISTAKES MEANS

"You have to make peace like you make love - with closed eyes!" Shimon Peres

... that was from an event titled "Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow"

And all Peres has learned from a 20 year disaster that has endangered the survival of Israel is to practice even more willful blindness.





OBAMA'S FOURTH WAR

As Obama is pushing to move on Syria, my latest article, "Obama's Fourth War" looks into the next war in relation to the last three wars discussed above.

While the people of Benghazi were never in danger of a massacre “that would stain the conscience of the world,” the same is not true of Tawerghas, a town of black Libyans.

A statement from the Society for Threatened Peoples reads, “The once bustling town of 30,000 people near Misurata was mostly inhabited by Black Libyans… Tawergha has been deserted after the breakdown of the Gaddafi regime. Its buildings were looted, vandalized, many torched, and its citizens… forced out by their neighbors…  Tawerghas were detained, taken from their homes… Many Tawerghas are now cowering in makeshift camps around Tripoli.”

Will a victory by the Sunnis over the Alawites in Syria lead to anything but more bloodshed? Susan Rice and the rest of the Obama administration have been unwilling and unable to answer that question. Instead the Obama administration is backing the Muslim Brotherhood which considers the Alawites to be heretics and will treat them accordingly.

BOEHNER DECIDES TO JUST TALK FOR SOME REASON

Allegations that State Department official Huma Abedin is part of a conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the U.S. government are “pretty dangerous,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). said Thursday.

Boehner told reporters that he hadn’t read letters from five Republican lawmakers detailing the allegations against Abedin and her family’s alleged ties to the Islamic group. She is a senior aide and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I don’t know Huma. But from everything that I do know of her, she has a sterling character, and I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous,” Boehner said.

So Boehner doesn't know what the letters say, he doesn't know Huma Abedin, but he nevertheless feels a need to make a statement.

Who does Boehner think he is? Obama?




TERRORISM TEMPORARILY BAD

Sometimes the pro-terrorist camp decides that some terrorist attacks are bad. For now everyone, or almost everyone, is saying that the Bulgaria bus bombing is bad. Even though it's a milder version of the bus bombings carried out by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Peter Beinart at Open Zion put on his sad face to say

In this case, the only way to understand such horrors is to understand the character of the Iranian regime, a regime willing to torture, murder and rape its young in order to keep itself in power. What Tehran did yesterday in Bulgaria was export its fundamental disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life.

For a moment you can almost confuse Beinart with a pro-Israel author. But Iran "exported" this same disregard to Gaza by supporting Hamas. Beinart has repeatedly urged negotiations with Hamas.

But Beinart is an easy target. What about the supporters of the Two State Solution who call for dealing with the Palestinian Authority and its terrorists who have done far worse.

The real question here is whether terrorism is really a "horror" that demonstrates a "undamental disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life". And if it is then does that only apply to a Muslim terrorist bombing a bus of Israelis in Bulgaria or does it apply to Hamas and Fatah terrorists bombing buses in Tel Aviv?

This is why I prefer someone like Norman Finkelstein to Peter Beinart. Finkelstein is consistent. If a terrorist attack happens, he will ignore it. Or dismiss it. He won't pretend to condemn the horror for some selective reason.

M.J. Rosenberg calls the bus bombing terrible but spends most of his time claiming that the Jews will use it as a pretext for war. It's still cynical, but less cynical than Beinart who speaks of the attack as if it is taking place in a world apart from all the other attacks.

Glenn Greenwald, whose foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of the Jewish State is positively Goebbelsian, didn't bother with any of the pretense... and even justified the attack. Greenwald is sick and evil, but he's far more honestly hateful than Beinart or Rosenberg. He says what they don't dare to say.





THE MYTH OF SETTLEMENTS

Villages such as Kfar Darom in Gaza were besieged, first by the Muslim Brotherhood, and then by the Egyptian Army. The village of 400 men, women and children had managed to throw back the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had shelled the village and failed to break through its fence with tanks, and briefly held out against the Egyptian Army, before it was evacuated, captured and destroyed. Other villages, such as Kfar Etzion, which were not evacuated in time, witnessed massacres after their capture.

When after 1967, the Jordanian and Egyptian invaders had been expelled, and East Jerusalem, Kfar Darom and Kfar Etzion were rebuilt and resettled, the international community declared those Jews living there to be “settlers” and their towns and villages, even their homes in Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world, to be “settlements.”

What is the mark of a “settlement”? It isn’t the age of the buildings or the number of inhabitants.  Jerusalem is ancient and Maaleh Adumim is about the size of Atlantic City. An Arab Muslim with Israeli citizenship who buys a house in Jerusalem is not condemned by Vice President Biden, the United Nations and the media. It is race that marks a settler as a target for persecution and ethnic cleansing. 

...that's a brief section from my article on The Settlements Myth and the Levy Report



EL WELFARE STATE

That Obama Administration, it's always finding ways to stimulate the economy. Like partnering up with the Mexican government to help educate Mexicans in America on the availability of food stamps.

Sure you might ask why can't the Mexican government take care of its own people? You could also ask why the American government can't take care of its own people, but is busy taking care of Mexicans instead.

But don't worry. According to Steyn Hoyer, we're just stimulating the Mexican economy.



KADIMA, KADIMA, KADIMA

Who play who in Israel's game of coalitions? Did Kadima outmaneuver Netanyahu by pretending to join in a coalition only to make drafting Haredim into the central issue only to jump ship just in time to make any further progress impossible leaving Netanyahu stuck with a program that won't move forward and an election that he thought that he had avoided?

Or did Netanyahu outmaneuver Kadima by getting them to associate themselves with a proposal that would make a coalition with religious parties impossible? Or is it both?

Such is the nature of Israeli politics, which like most parliamentary politics is so warped that it makes a system where two parties run for office, then scream at each other for two years, then run for office again, positively refreshing.




NOTHING TO SEE HERE

Walid Shoebat takes on the defenders of Huma Abedin with some actual facts and logic.

The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies / Islamic Trust Annual Reports of the Board of Trustees from the official government of Great Britain has Hassan Abedin – Huma’s brother – partnering with notorious Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual head and the international liaison of the Muslim Brotherhood, a known enemy of the United States and closely works with the notorious Al-Qaeda Godfather Omar Naseef whose signature is on the document that includes Huma’s brother Hassan Abedin on his board 

...and there's a good deal more where that came from...



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE NEW JACKIE O IS HERE

... no seriously. ... and the ultimate "You didn't build that" GIF.




HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH OBAMA

By calling for Abdel-Rahman's release, Mursi has aligned himself and his government with the US's worst enemies. By calling for Abdel-Rahman's release during his unofficial inauguration ceremony, Mursi signaled that he cares more about winning the acclaim of the most violent, America-hating jihadists in the world than with cultivating good relations with America.

And in response to Mursi's supreme act of unfriendliness, US President Barack Obama invited Mursi to visit him at the White House.

...from Caroline Glick.



INSIDE THE ABC WAR ROOM...

...it's where you want to be.




THE LEBANONIZATION OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Now comes word from Israeli military intelligence that it expects the Golan Heights to become anarchic as the Assad regime pulls its forces for more urgent duties and various terrorist groups make hay.

Now as a minor note, if Israel was the bloodthirsty monster that its enemies like to portray it as, it could bite off a chunk of Syria from a country that is in such chaos that it could hardly mount a defense.

Certainly Israel could push deeper to secure vital strategic areas and some rather pretty country.

Of course no one seriously thinks that Israel will do that. Even Syria doesn't think it which is why it's pulling away troops from the border with its greatest enemy.

Assad knows that Israel won't just attack and invade. But if the shoe was on the other foot, if Israel was tied up in a devastating civil war, Syrian, Egyptian and Jordanian troops would be headed right across the border, regardless of whatever understandings and peace treaties existed.

That's the fundamental difference between Israel and the Muslim world. It is why no peace can exist.