Et Tu Brute! (See 1 below.)
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Meanwhile, Emperor Obama is transforming our nation one appointee at a time. (See 1a below.)
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More Perry inanities according to Daniel Pipes! (See 2 below.)
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Obama losing all around! (See 3 below.)
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I was recently taken to task by a local who wrote about the virtues of what Obama has accomplished and had Republicans not stood in is way he would have accomplished even more.
I wrote a response which the paper may not publish so here it is:
"Unemployment is over 12 million and the best index for tracking the employment trend is to relate employed to the total population. In 2006, 63.4% of the working-age population was employed. That percentage declined to a low of 58.2% in July 2011 and now stands at 58.6%. By this measure, the labor market's health has barely changed over the past three years.
We are not producing enough jobs to return back to full employment for a long time and the jobs being produced do not pay enough to offset the rise in the cost of living.
Consumer confidence is high, the stock market is up, home prices are up and the economy has stabilized. True, but this confidence has been bought with Federal Debt not capital investment. The Federal reserve prints money, keeps rates low and the money has nowhere else to go but into the stock market. Retired folks are being screwed and forced to take greater risks because they receive no return from safety. Bernanke knew this would be the effect of his Q policies.
What happens when the Fed tries their inevitable soft landing? History suggests we enjoy a decline in the value of our currency and, being an importing nation, we have more inflation. Of course, currently if you do not eat or drive to work, assuming you have a job, there is no inflation.
Domestic energy is booming because of technology, ie. fracking. Obama has done everything to restrain energy independence but capitalism has ignored Obama's efforts to appease 'Greens.'
Health care costs are up, medical practitioners are retiring and when the 'Affordable Health Care Act' is fully implemented it will cost probably twice Obama's projections but, what the hell deficits, don't matter because the world loves our dollars. Yet, less trade is now transacted in dollars so maybe our creditors and trading partners know more than William Peterson.
bin Laden is dead but al Qaeda is very much alive. Meanwhile, the IRS is out of control and our government is spying on us. I do not take comfort from this but maybe these facts have alluded Mr. Peterson.
Yes, deficits are shrinking because of sequester something Obama thought Republicans would not stand for but they called his bluff. The consequence is a defense posture that will make us vulnerable to Russia's growing influence in The Middle East and China's in Asia. Leading from weakness is not a good foreign policy but then Obama has no foreign policy.
Keep dreaming Mr. Peterson. I guess we live on different political planets."
I could have made my response shorter had I said what I thought of Mr. Peterson's lack of vision because of where his head was but I refrained!
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Samantha Power will serve Obama well because she has expressed her public antipathy towards Israel so Obama can maintain he has Israel's back while she stabs Israel in the chest!
Meanwhile, it appears Obama adheres to his long held view that the white world, and Israelis in particular, are the cause of Muslim anger. Kerry, Hagel, Rice and Power have been chosen to rectify eons of wrongful behaviour!
If you have not noticed Syiria, Iran, Hezballah and Russia are moving to supplant our influence in The Middle East and that way Muslims will be better served. (See 4 and 4a below.)
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1)President Obama’s Dragnet
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.
Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.
A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose.
Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.
The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”
But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?
The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”
That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.
We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”
Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”
On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.
1a)Transforming America One Political Appointee at a Time
By Janice Shaw Crouse
Even Democrat partisans like James Carville describe the latest Obama political appointees as "in your face" appointments. President Obama just named two very controversial, radical women to top-level foreign-policy appointments in his administration. Susan Rice has been appointed the next National Security Adviser -- significantly, this choice does not require Senate clearance. Such a clearance would be highly unlikely because Ms. Rice figured prominently in the recent Benghazi debacle for her role as the television front-person promoting the myth that the Benghazi massacre was fanned into reality by an obscure Christian video.
The President also nominated the highly controversial and even more radical Samantha Power to replace Ms. Rice as the American U.N. ambassador. Glenn Beck called Ms. Power the "most dangerous" woman in America and Sean Hannity identified her (and her husband) among the "10 most dangerous people in the Obama administration." Clearly, she is a very polarizing figure based on her radical ideology and far-out policy proposals.
With tongue firmly in cheek, the Daily Caller reported that Ms. Rice is "UNsuited for the job." Philip Klein, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, tweeted the rhetorical question, "With Samantha Power as the UN Ambassador, who is supposed to represent the US at the UN?" Ms. Power, who won a Pulitizer Prize for her book on genocide advocating an interventionist approach, chaired President Barack Obama's Atrocities Prevention Board. Further, she has publiclyexpressed concern about the "sins of our allies in the war on terror." This woman who explained that "a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States" is needed because the United States "brought terrorist attacks upon itself by aping Israel's violations of human rights" will now be in a position on the Human Rights Council to see her radical ideas translated into U.S. Policy around the world.
In the past as a "foreign policy confident" of the President, Ms. Power was known as one of the "main architects" of the Obama administration's Libya policy. The New York Times called her the "foremost voice" for the President on human rights issues, even though Power famously compared U.S. foreign policy to Nazi Germany. Further, Power is a vocal anti-Israel activist who blames wealthy American Jews for the failure of peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Ironically, Ms. Power is married to President Obama's former White House Regulatory Czar, who, if possible, is even more controversial than his wife. Cass Sunstein is known for his radical views advocating government paternalism (but then, what W.H. Czar is not known for radical ideology) and his bizarre beliefs about the "humanity" of animals, i.e., he likens having household pets to slavery.
During the 2008 campaign when she was an Obama campaign operative, Power called Hillary Clinton a "monster" who would "stoop to anything" to win the presidency. The political backlash for such blunt, impolitic remarks forced her into the background during the rest of the campaign. Even though Power was known to seek the limelight and was eager to become famous for her intellectual influence on policy, she has worked largely behind the scenes since the "Hillary goof-up," but few doubted that Ms. Power would be awarded a plum position and be back in the media spotlight sometime in the future. Sadly, that appointment puts her in a position where her public policy stances -- advocating "external intervention" in Israel and "mammoth protection" forces -- can cause extensive damage for U.S.-Middle East relationships, not to mention the potential for far more serious ramifications.
Power has a long history of blaming America. She wanted Mr. Obama to embark on an "apology tour." In an article critical of the Bush Administration, she proposed a "doctrine of the mea culpa" that recommended the U.S. "look back before it moved forward" in order to assure other countries that the U.S. does "not endorse the sins of their predecessors." She recommended that U.S. foreign policy be "completely re-worked" in order to "tell the world we are sorry" (implying that the U.S. sinned against other countries).
An old adage says that "personnel is policy." Clearly, President Obama's political appointees are burrowing into the government agencies to implement their far-left, radical ideology; they are quite literally transforming America, just as the President promised he would do.
Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., a former Presidential Speech Writer for President George H. W. Bush, is now Senior Fellow for Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute.
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2)Happy Israel
By Daniel Pipes
In a typically maladroit statement, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry recently complained that Israelis are too contented to end their conflict with the Palestinians: "People in Israel aren't waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity."
While Mr. Kerry misunderstands Israelis (Palestinian rejectionism, not prosperity, caused them to give up on diplomacy), he is right that Israelis have a "sense of security and … of prosperity." They are generally a happy lot. A recent poll found 93 percent of Jewish Israelis proud of be Israeli. Yes, Iranian nuclear weapons loom and confrontation with Moscow is possible, but things have never been so good. With thank
-- Women need to give birth to 2.1 children to sustain a country's population; Israel has abirthrate of 2.65, making it the only advanced country to exceed replacement. (The next highest is France at 2.08; the lowest is Singapore at 0.79.) While Haredis and Arabs account for some of this robust rate, secular Jews are the key.
3) Why Obama Keeps Losing at the Supreme Court
Up to now the Obama Administration has faced three big scandals—the IRS, the bugging of
-- Israel enjoyed a 14.5 percent growth of gross domestic product during the 2008-12 recession, giving it the highest economic growth rate of any OECD country. (In contrast, the advanced economies as a whole had a 2.3 percent growth rate, with the United States weighing in at 2.9 percent and the Euro zone at minus 0.4 percent.) Israel invests 4.5 percent of GDP in research & development, the highest percentage of any country.
-- Due to major gas and oil finds, Walter Russell Mead observes, "the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be ... inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world."
-- With Syria and Egypt consumed by internal problems, the existential threat they once posed to Israel has, for the moment, nearly disappeared. Thanks to innovative tactics, terror attacks have been nearly eliminated. The IDF has outstanding human resources and stands at the forefront of military technologies; and Israeli society has proven its readiness to fight a protracted conflict. Mr. Inbar, a strategist, concludes that "the power differential between Israel and its Arab neighbors is continuously growing."
These resources enhance Israel's position in the world.Israel has, for the moment, nearly disappeared. Thanks to innovative tactics, terror attacks have been nearly eliminated. The IDF has outstanding human resources and stands at the forefront of military technologies; and Israeli society has proven its readiness to fight a protracted conflict. Mr. Inbar, a strategist, concludes that "the power differential between Israel and its Arab neighbors is continuously growing."
-- The Palestinian diplomatic focus that dominated the country's politics for decades after 1967 has receded, with only 10 percent of Jewish Israelisconsidering negotiations the top priority. Mr. Kerry may obsess over this issue but, in the acerbic words of one politico, "Debating the peace process to most Israelis is the equivalent of debating the color of the shirt you will wear when landing on Mars."
-- Even the Iranian nuclear issue may be less dire than it appears. Between the vastly greater destructive power of Israel's nuclear arsenal and its growing missile defense system, military analystAnthony Cordesman predicts that an exchange of nuclear weapons would leave Israel damaged badly but Iranian civilization destroyed. "Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term." Maniacal as the Iranian leadership is, will it really risk all?
-- Successes of the "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" movement are pretty meager (Stephen Hawking snubbed the president's invitation! A United Nations body passed another absurd condemnation). Israel has diplomatic relations with 156 out of the United Nations' 193 members. Looking at multiple indices, Mr. Inbar finds that, globally, "Israel is rather well integrated."
-- In public opinion surveys in the United States, the world's most important country and Israel's main ally, Israel regularly beats the Palestinians by a 4-to-1 ratio. And while universities are indeed hostile, I ask handwringers this question: Where would you rather be strong, the U.S. Congress or the campuses? To ask that question is to answer it.
-- Ashkenazi-Sephardi tensions have diminished over time due to a combination of intermarriage and cultural cross-pollination. The issue of Haredi nonparticipation is finally being addressed.
-- Israelis have made impressive cultural contributions, especially to classical music, leading one critic,David Goldman, to call Israel a "pocket superpower in the arts."
Listen up, anti-Zionists and antisemites, Palestinians and Islamists, extreme right- and left-wingers: You are fighting a losing battle; the Jewish state is prevailing. As Mr. Inbar rightly concludes, "Time seems to be on Israel's side." Give up and find some other country to torment.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2013 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) Why Obama Keeps Losing at the Supreme Court
In cases before the Supreme Court last year, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department relied on
outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power. That
posture led to unanimous losses in three very different areas of law: religious liberty (Hosanna-Tabor
Church v. EEOC), criminal procedure (U.S. v. Jones) and property rights (Sackett v. EPA).
A year later, as the Court prepares to rule on affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and gay marriage,
the administration’s track record hasn’t improved. Notwithstanding the technical win on the health-care
law, which was only achieved thanks to
Chief Justice John Roberts’s controversial decision to rewrite it, the government has continued to
suffer unanimous defeats. Not all its cases are losers, to be sure, but this administration’s pursuit of
expansive authority tends to lose big.
Consider another major case from the 2011-12 term: Arizona v. U.S.
The conventional narrative is that the Supreme Court smacked down a perniciously anti-immigrant
Arizona law that gave state police more power to enforce immigration laws. That interpretation simply
isn’t correct. Only four sections of the law reached the Supreme Court -- most of its provisions weren’t
even challenged -- and the U.S. won split decisions on three and unanimously lost the fourth.
Immigration Powers
The three splits involved complicated statutory interpretation regarding pre-emption of state law by
federal law. In the ruling on the fourth, however,not a single justice accepted the government’s theory
that mere federal enforcement priorities -- as opposed to laws or regulations -- trumped state law.
The government argued that discretionary decisions not to enforce certain federal laws overrode
parallel state laws that enforced those same laws. The unanimous Supreme Court rejected that
breathtaking claim of “pre-emption by executive whim.”
In the current term, another trio of cases highlighted the government’s overbroad assertions of power.
First, in Arkansas Fish & Game Commission v. U.S., the government tried to take property away from
citizens without paying just compensation. It claimed that the Army Corps of Engineers’ periodic
flooding of a wildlife preserve, causing severe damage, didn’t meet the criteria for compensation under
the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. Even though the Supreme Court has required the government
to compensate property owners for temporary physical invasions and permanent flooding, the
government argued that it could freely engage in temporary flooding.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled for the property owners in an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, not a noted conservative. “No decision of this Court authorizes a blanket temporary-flooding
exception to our Takings Clause jurisprudence,” she wrote, “and we decline to create such an
exception in this case.”
Second, in Gabelli v. Securities & Exchange Commission, the government argued that it can prosecute
people regardless of any statutes of limitations. Over time, evidence can be corrupted or disappear,
memories fade and companies dispose of records. The government, with all its investigative tools, has
to bring charges within a reasonable time so that the justice system can operate effectively.
In the case, the SEC sued mutual-fund managers for alleged fraudulent conduct that ceased more than
five years earlier. Its lawyers argued that the standard statute of limitations only took effect once the
government discovered the claimed wrong-doing.
Discovery Rule
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Justice Department’s reliance on the discovery rule was
misplaced because that exception only applies to individual plaintiffs seeking recompense, not to the
government bringing enforcement actions for civil penalties.
“Given the lack of textual, historical, or equitable reasons to graft a discovery rule onto the statute of
limitations of (the relevant law), we decline to do so.”
Finally, in PPL Corp. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the government tried to impose double
taxation on a company that had paid a windfall tax in the U.K. The government argued that the Internal
Revenue Code’s foreign-income-tax credit wasn’t available to the company because the U.K. statute
considered the tax to be on profit rather than income. That contrary theory had already been rejected by lower courts in another case, but the government insisted on presenting it again.
Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s tortured logic on the grounds that what
matters isn’t a foreign government’s characterization of a tax but how the tax applies and whether it
would be an income tax if enacted in the U.S.
These cases have nothing in common, other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually
unlimited: Citizens must subsume their liberty to whatever the experts in a given field determine the
best or most useful policy to be.
If the government can’t get even one of the liberal justices to agree with it on any of these unrelated
cases, it should realize there’s something seriously wrong with its constitutional vision.
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4)Message from the ruins of Qusair
By
On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-
Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad’s Alawite
heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base.
It’s a major strategic shift. Assad’s forces can now advance on rebel-
dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo.
For the rebels, it’s a devastating loss of territory, morale and their
supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune
will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper
hand
What altered the tide of battle was brazen outside intervention. A
hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the
Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin.
This is a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow, which
sustains Assad in power and prizes its warm-water port at Tartus,
Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union.
Vladimir Putin has stationed a dozen or more
Russian warships offshore, further protecting
his strategic outpost and his Syrian client.
The losers? NATO-member Turkey, the major supporter of the rebels;
Jordan, America’s closest Arab ally, now drowning in half a million
Syrian refugees; and America’s Gulf allies, principal weapons suppliers
to the rebels.
And the United States, whose bystander president, having declared
that Assad must go, that he has lost all legitimacy and that his fall is
just a matter of time, is looking not just feckless but clueless.
President Obama doesn’t want U.S. boots on the ground. Fine. No one
does. But between nothing and invasion lie many intermediate
measures: arming the rebels, helping Turkey maintain a safe zone in
northern Syria, grounding Assad’s murderous air force by attacking
airfields — all the way up to enforcing a no-fly zone by destroying the
regime’s air-defense system.
Obama could have chosen any rung on the ladder. He chose none.
Weeks ago, as battle fortunes began changing, the administration
leaked that it was contemplating possibly, well maybe, arming the
rebels. Then nothing.
Obama imagines that if America is completely hands-off, a civil war
like Syria’s will carry on as is, self-contained. He simply does not
understand that if America withdraws from the scene, it creates a
vacuum that invites hostile outside intervention. A superpower’s role in
a regional conflict is deterrence.
In 1958, President Eisenhower — venerated by today’s fashionable
“realists” for his strategic restraint — landed Marines in Lebanon to
protect the pro-American government from threats from Syria and
Egypt.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Russia threatened to send troops on
behalf of the Egyptian army. President Nixon threatened a U.S.
counteraction, reinforced the Sixth Fleet and raised the U.S. worldwide
military alert level to DEFCON 3. Russia stood down.
That’s how the region works. Power deterring power. Obama deals
instead in empty abstractions — such as “international legitimacy” —
and useless conclaves, such as “Friends of Syria” conferences.
Assad, in contrast, has a real friend. Putin knows Obama. Having
watched Obama’s retreat in Eastern Europe, his passivity at Russian
obstructionism on Iran, his bended-knee “reset” policy, Putin knows he
has nothing to fear from the U.S. president.
Result? The contemptuous Putin floods Syria with weapons. Iran,
equally disdainful, sendsRevolutionary Guards to advise and shore up
Assad’s forces. Hezbollah invades Syria and seizes Qusair.
Obama’s response? No warning that such balance-altering
provocations would trigger even the most minimal American response.
Even Obama’s chemical weapons red line is a farce. Its very
pronouncement advertised passivity, signaling that anything short of
WMD — say, massacring 80,000 innocents using conventional
weapons — would draw no U.S. response.
And when that WMD red line was finally crossed, Obama went into
lawyerly overdrive to erase it. Is it any wonder that Assad’s allies are
the ground war, Russia
sending a small armada and mountains of military materiel, Iran
warning everyone to stay out?
Obama’s response is to send the secretary of state, hat in hand, to
Moscow. And John Kerry returns actually thinking he’s achieved some
great diplomatic breakthrough — a “peace” conference that Russia will
dominate and use to re-legitimize Assad and marginalize the rebels.
Just to make sure Kerry understood his place, Putin kept him waiting
outside his office for three hours. The Russians know how to send
messages. And the one from Qusair is this. You’re fighting for your life.
You have your choice of allies: Obama bearing “international
legitimacy” and a risible White House statement that “Hezbollah and
Iran should immediately withdraw their fighters from Syria” or Putin
bearing Russian naval protection, Iranian arms shipments and
thousands of Hezbollah fighters. Which do you choose?
4a)MAKE ROOM FOR ISLAMISTGATE:THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S NEW
SCANDAL
By Barry Rubin
Up to now the Obama Administration has faced three big scandals—the IRS, the bugging of
AP and Fox, and Benghazi. And now here is scandal Number 4: For the last four years the
Obama Administration has conducted a major “outreach” program to Islamic groups in the
United States and in the Middle East. Patrick Poole has been investigating this project and in
a comprehensive article now presents the full scoop and scope of what’s been going on. His
article, “Blind to Terror: The U.S. Government’s Disastrous Muslim Outreach Efforts and the
Impact on U.S. Policy” in the new, Summer, issue of MERIA Journal is a game changer
You may think that you know about this subject but it goes far beyond what you have heard
You may think that you know about this subject but it goes far beyond what you have heard
about. The majority of groups and individuals promoted by the Obama Administration have
been radical Islamists, particularly Muslim Brotherhood cadre, and more than occasionally
people involved in terrorist activity.
Moderate Muslims have been neglected and isolated by this project which has helped the
radicals, Islamists, and pro-terrorists gain hegemony in the Muslim community in America.
Again, you may think that you know this story but it is far more extensive than has ever before
Again, you may think that you know this story but it is far more extensive than has ever before
been revealed. Often, the White House and FBI have granted access and worked with those
who were simultaneously being investigated on serious charges of terrorism.
The whole “outreach” program has been a farce and it would be charitable to describe it as
The whole “outreach” program has been a farce and it would be charitable to describe it as
incompetent on the part of the Obama Administration. Patrick Poole pulls all of the material
together for the first time and shows serious flaws that have endangered Americans in scores
of cases.
Radicals have been given credentials as moderates, been provided with information that should have remained secret, been allowed to advise and influence U.S. policy. The kind of government mishandling of terrorist threats that
Radicals have been given credentials as moderates, been provided with information that should have remained secret, been allowed to advise and influence U.S. policy. The kind of government mishandling of terrorist threats that
characterize the Fort Hood case and the Boston bombing has been business as usual.
Here is a portion of Patrick Poole’s article:
“When President Obama hosted his annual Iftar dinner in August 2010 to commemorate the
Here is a portion of Patrick Poole’s article:
“When President Obama hosted his annual Iftar dinner in August 2010 to commemorate the
Muslim celebration of Ramadan, the list of invitees published by the White House was curiously missing the names of several attendees – all of whom were top leaders of organizations known to be purveyors of jihadist ideology and
implicated by federal prosecutors in financing terrorism.
“But it wasn’t like they had crashed the party. In fact, one of the individuals missing on the
“But it wasn’t like they had crashed the party. In fact, one of the individuals missing on the
official White House list, Mohamed Majid, president of the Islamic Society of North America
(ISNA), was pictured in a news service photograph sitting at the front table just a few feet from
the president as he spoke When Majid was hailed by Time Magazine in November 2005 as a
“moderate Muslim cleric” that was helping the FBI fight terrorists, he quickly published an
open letter to his congregation on the mosque’s website assuring his congregants that he was
doing no such thing stating that his relationship with the FBI was a one-way street only to
communicate Muslim community concerns – not to report on individuals suspected of terrorist
activity.
“It was just a few years ago the Attorney General of the United States was canceling Muslim
“It was just a few years ago the Attorney General of the United States was canceling Muslim
outreach events for the sole reason that Majid would be present at the meeting, because the
Department of Justice had just named ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest
terrorism financing trial in American history.
“But Majid’s connection to terrorism goes back even farther than that, since the offices of the
“But Majid’s connection to terrorism goes back even farther than that, since the offices of the
mosque he leads, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, were raided by U.S.
Customs authorities in March 2002 in a wide-sweeping terror finance investigation. In an
affidavit requesting a search warrant for the raids, Customs Agent David Kane testified that
Majid’s mosque was being used to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars for the targeted
terror finance network that shared offices with ADAMS. An appendix to the Customs Service
affidavit also names eleven ADAMS Center officials as targets of their terror finance
investigation.And yet Majid and the ADAMS Center are still considered legitimate outreach
partners by the FBI.
“This was just the most recent episode in the disastrous attempts at outreach to the Muslim
“This was just the most recent episode in the disastrous attempts at outreach to the Muslim
community since the 9/11 attacks. And with the release in 2011 of President Obama’s
strategic plan to combat “violent extremism” to expand outreach to these same terror-tied
groups, the present administration seems intent on compounding the disaster wrought by
previous administrations.”
The results of this investigation should be a serious embarrassment for the Obama
The results of this investigation should be a serious embarrassment for the Obama
Administration and should be distributed as widely as possible. It involves the expenditure of
millions of dollars of taxpayer money and the promotion of the forces most dangerous to
American interests and to the American people in the world today.
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