Welcome to the Arab Spring.
Before we get to a revealing article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that is stunning but hardly surprising, Seraphic Secret would like to observe that:
1. The beast that is loose in the Arab Muslim world has nothing to do with some obscure You Tube trailer which looks like it was made on a budget of maybe $1.50.
2. Using this You Tube movie as a pretext, the Arab Muslim world is attempting to impose sharia on the west.
3. And they are succeeding.
4. When the American government apologizes to murderers for a dopey film, that is sharia.
5. When the American government unleashes the forces of the Justice Department who have arrested the filmmaker — goodbye, Freedom of Speech — that is sharia.
6. When so-called journalists endlessly repeat the lie that the murdering and rioting was touched off by a home movie when we know that is false, that is sharia.
7. Sharia, whether it comes from a bunch of barbarians in the Arab street, or an American President in custom Brooks Bothers suits, it is still theocratic fascism.
8. Sharia in the Muslim world is the face of Islam.
9. Imported to the West, under the guise of religious tolerance, sharia is multiculturalism, the religion of liberals.
10. Israel has been warning America for months about radical trends in the Middle East and North Africa, including irregularities at certain foreign embassies. And for months the Obama regime trotted out unicorns and fairies.
11. Obama couldn’t get this right, and this was simple.
12. Trusting Obama to get Iran right is not just stupid, but suicidal.
For months before the most recent attacks on U.S. embassies in North African states, Foreign Ministry and U.S. State Department officials had been arguing over developments in these countries. Senior figures in Jerusalem claimed that Washington was burying its head in the sand and ignoring the increasing radicalization in states such as Tunisia and Egypt.
The Obama administration, which since the beginning of the Arab Spring has aided, directly or indirectly, the forces that brought down the dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Lybia, now finds itself in a position of helplessness. The attack on the consulate in Benghazi, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed, and the storming of the U.S. embassies in Tunis, Sanaa and Cairo, proved the great hostility to the United States and the unwillingness of these country’s new leaders to challenge domestic public opinion.
Senior Foreign Ministry officials say their conversations with their Washington counterparts have focused on what Jerusalem terms “radicalizing trends” against not only Israel but also against the United States and the West in general.
One of the most recent such meetings took place a week ago, during a visit to Jerusalem by the acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, A. Elizabeth Jones.
“The Americans were constantly trying to supply explanations and excuses for events in the post-revolution Arab states, and simply ignored the problems,” one senior Israeli official said, adding, “In practice the administration’s ability to affect events in the Arab world has decreased immensely.”
The Foreign Ministry official presented the example of Tunisia, which was expected to be moderate despite the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood. Several weeks ago Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Zvi Rav-Ner, reported that the Tunisian ambassador to Poland had been called back to Tunisia unexpectedly, ending her posting there. Rav-Ner added that all five women serving as ambassadors of Tunisia in various countries had been recalled at around the same time.
The Israel embassy in Washington was instructed to report the matter to the State Department and determine whether it was aware of the development. Several days late U.S. officials reported that the measure was technical only, involving the replacement of all ambassadors from the previous regime, and had nothing to do with gender discrimination.
The Foreign Ministry conducted its own examination and determined that many male ambassadors from the previous regime had not been recalled. “We knew what was happening, but the Americans preferred to find excuses,” said the senior official.
A similar pattern emerged as to Israeli efforts to prevent a clause being added to the new Tunisian constitution outlawing normalization or contacts with Israel. The Foreign Ministry asked the United States to intervene, but was not satisfied by the response. “They told us, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be all right, the clause will be left out,’ but the clause is still in there,” the official said.
Israel has also called American attention to the fact that for the past year Egypt has been dragging its feet over talks on reopening the Israeli embassy in Cairo. U.S. appeals have failed to speed things up.
Senior Foreign Ministry officials said the latest riots at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, and the weak condemnation of President Mohammad Morsi, demonstrated that despite its massive military and economic aid to Egypt the United States had failed to achieve any real influence over the Muslim Brotherhood. “Only now, after what happened to their embassies, the Americans are beginning to understand the situation,” the senior official concluded, “to hear the president of the United States declared that Egypt isn’t an ally, but also isn’t the enemy – that’s a real earthquake,” he said.
H/T Israel Matzav
Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Seraphic Secret will be offline until Wednesday. Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a Shana Tova.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
6 Comments
Robert,
Let’s all come out swinging for Mitt. I didn’t much care for the clumsiness of his 47% refrence, but the Israeli-Palestinian question was strong and we should not let him be hammered for being forthright. This is what we want a candidate to be.
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Un-Ambassador Susan Rice must be premedicated, because she said the attack in Libya was not premeditated.
Next she’ll reassure us that current terrorist plans in the works to hit American targets in the future will also not be premeditated when they are carried out.
Our son loves to go to some website where he creates his own little irreverent cartoons.
Mark my words that the day is coming when a couple of 15-year-old high school freshmen will upload their creative parody of Mohammed to youtube and the authorities will be leading them away for questioning. Will Obama & Co. then also blame the subsequent eruption of violence in the usual suspect places by the usual suspect characters on the American high school kids?
It boggles the mind and beggars belief!!
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Robert, I agree with all of your points. I would add one other. It appears that the film maker used an alias to produce the trailer. It was the FBI that released this man’s actual identity to the public, knowingly putting that man’s life in mortal danger – and there was no, let me say that again, No possible legal justification for doing so. That is, to my mind, the single most outrageous act of the Obama administration to date. To be clear, it doesn’t matter WHO produced this film. It is not a crime. So what possible justification is there for the FBI to publicly identify the “key figure” behind this film? There is none. Our 1st Amendment absolutely forbids any legal action against this man. This is right out of Orwell. It is thuggery in its purest form – endangering the life of the person fingered and sending a message to anyone else in the U.S. who might want to make their feelings on Islam known but are too afraid to exercise their rights without anonymity because some Salafi nut job might behead them. Whatever you do, don’t embarrass Obama.
To call the Obama regime lawless is an understatement.
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And as the wags at Breitbart suggested if these films so inflame the mobs then the Obama administration should force Sony Pictures to stop distribution of their upcoming “Killing of Bin Baden:” film.
What do you think the chances of that are happening?
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Robert:
Is naive your middle name? Did you just fall off the turnip truck last week? Do you enjoy showing your ignorance of the current events taking place all around us?
The biggest problem with the world is obviously Mitt Romney putting out a statement critical of the embassy in Cairo. If you would expand your universe of knowledge by watching MSNBC, ABC, Current TV, reading The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, and Pravda (I know, it’s redundant) you would be aware the world was all unicorns and rainbows until dumb ol’ Mitt got political with Obama. Get with the program and worship at the pearls of wisdom emanating from Chuck Todd, Diane Sawyer, Mark Halperin and the always deep, deep, deep Mika B.
Once you start watching Morning Joe first thing every day and then follow up with Al Sharpton and Chris Mathews you will be invited to all the best cocktail parties where people understand the cartoons in The New Yorker. And then your life will be complete.
Of course by then Obama will have screwed up the world to the point we wish we had it as good as the peasants in the Soviet Union and Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
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Technically, the Probation Service which arranged the “visit” to the home of the filmmaker is apparently part of the judicial system rather than the justice department, and that fact is already being used as an excuse as to why the midnight raid was not Obama’s fault. Anyone who knows anything about how large organizations function, though, knows that the desire to please a powerful individual is not always limited to those in his direct chain of command.
This is all very frightening. I’m reminded of something written by Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between the wars. Haffner was a junior lawyer at the Prussian high court, the Kammergericht. The court had a considerable tradition of judicial independence, and had imposed some resistance to Nazi lawlessness. But one day, the Brownshirt came into the Kammergericht and ordered the Jewish justices to leave.
As I left the Kammergericht it stood there, grey, cool and calm as ever, set back from the street in its distinguished setting. There was nothing to show that, as an institution, it had just collapsed.
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