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What foreign cartoonists think about Obama and Hillary's response to Benghazi! (See 1 below.)
New York Times new story serves to get the administration off the hook . Perhaps the next report by the New York Times will deny 9/11 was caused by terrorists. (See 1a and 1b below.)
Has the New York Times learned by that providing cover for Obama's lies they can gain special access so they can continue to print 'all the unfit news?'
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I have learned a valuable lesson after my third knee transplant.
"The more you complain, the longer God makes you live."
There also is no way I can adequately thank all the well wishers, the card and e mails senders, the gift and food bringers, visitors and other outpourings of kindness.
My PT urged me to keep my foot elevated to cut down on the swelling so my home therapy will be more effective so for the next several weeks I am following her advice to the letter.
On another note I want to thank CUFI ,Christians United for Israel, and all my Christian friends for their support of Israel.
Israel and its government, like all peoples and governments, are not always right in their relationships with others. However, the fact that they are constantly besieged has had a significant impact in determining their attitudes and actions.
That said, the basic reason for Israel's existence is to provide a homeland for a people who wish to live in peace, raise and educate their families and be a productive society for the benefit of all mankind. Under the most onerous of circumstances what Israelis have achieved is truly remarkable. Two of our closest Christian friends came to Israel with us this November and experienced, for themselves, what I have been telling them and I believe they had a wonderful time and made a great contribution to our travel family.
My undying wish for all is peace and a Happy Healthy New Year to you and yours.
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Eons ago when I was in college I took an English Literature course and we were assigned a satiric essay by Charles Lamb entitled "The Burning of a Roast Pig.
It was a spoof and the essence of the plot was in order to roast a pig the roaster did so by setting fire to his house.
When I think of the stated goal of Obamacare and what Obama and his devotees in Congress have done to our health system, which confessedly needed changing, it appears they burned the entire house down to help the uninsured.
Obamacare turns out to be another misguided act of liberal insanity whose goal was emotionally appealing but whose methods were beyond logic and plain common sense.
Its defenders now urge us to let the smolders of its implementation cool and all will be fine but what happens when the rain comes and the roof is gone?
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A response to my LTE as to "Why Jews are Liberal," from a dear dear friend:
"Dick, Great letter. My corollary is that we Jews may not be as stupid as we appear, but we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.
Hope you’re on the mend. A---"
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Below the radar screen. (See 2 below.)
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When Obama returns from his Christmas Vacation I assume he will attempt to redeem himself by shifting blame to the insurance companies and play the same old worn theme of blaming others. Time will tell. (See 3 below.)
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You judge, apparently the maker of this video thinks God already has. https://www.youtube.com/watch_
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1) Kerry isn't just another fool masquerading as a wise man. He's dangerous
By Caroline B. Glick
In enforcing deluded agenda, American Secretary of State ignoring decades of blood and deaths
Like his supporters, US Secretary of State John Kerry has apparently been asleep for the past 20 years.
Kerry has proffered us security arrangements, which he claims will protect Israel from aggression for the long haul. They will do this, he argues, despite the fact that his plan denies the Jewish state physically defensible borders in the framework of a peace deal with the PLO.
There are several serious problems with Kerry's arrangements. But in the context of Kerry's repeated claims that his commitment to Israel's security is unqualified, their most glaring flaws are rooted in their disregard for all the lessons we have learned over the past two decades.
Kerry's security arrangements rest on three assumptions. First, they assume that the main threats Israel will face in an era of "peace" with the Palestinians will emanate from east of the Jordan River. The main two scenarios that have been raised are the threat of terrorists and advanced weaponry being smuggled across the border; and a land invasion or other type of major aggression against Israel, perpetrated by Iraqis moving across Jordan.
It is to fend off these threats, Kerry argues, that he would agree to a temporary deployment of Israeli forces in the Jordan Valley even after Israel expels all or most of the 650,000 Israeli civilians who live in Judea, Samaria and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem.
We will consider the strategic wisdom of his plans for defending Israel from threats east of the Jordan River presently. But first we need to ask whether a threat from across the border would really be the only significant threat that Israel would face after surrendering Judea, Samaria and much of Jerusalem to the PLO.
The answer to this question is obvious to every Israeli who has been awake for the past 20 years, since Israel started down the "land for peace" road with the PLO.
The greatest threat Israel will face in an era of "peace" with the Palestinians will not come from east of the Jordan. It will come from west of the Jordan — from the Jew-free Palestinian state.
The Palestinians don't give us peace for land. They give us war for land. Whether they support the PLO, Hamas or anything in between, the Palestinians have used every centimeter of land that Israel has given them as launching bases for terrorist and political attacks against Israel.
There is no peace camp in Palestinian society. There are only terrorist organizations that compete for power and turf. And to the extent there are moderates in Palestinian society, they are empowered when Israel is in control, and weakened when Israel transfers power to the PLO.
Back in halcyon 1990s, Israeli supporters of "land for peace" told us, "It's better to be smart than right."
By this they meant that for peace, we should be willing to give up our historical homeland, and even our eternal capital, despite the fact that they are ours by legal and historic right. That peace, they promised, would protect us, neutralize the threat of terrorism and make the entire Arab world love us.
Over the past 20 years, we learned that all these wise men were fools. Even as the likes of Tom Friedman and Jeremy Ben Ami continue to tell us that the choice is between ideology — that is, Jewish rights and honor — and peace, today we know that they are full of it.
Our most peaceful periods have been those in which we have been fully deployed in Judea and Samaria. The more fully we deploy, the more we exercise our legal and national rights to sovereign power in those areas, the safer and more peaceful Israeli and Palestinian societies alike have been.
The only way to be smart, we have learned, is by being right. The only way to secure peace is by insisting that our rights be respected. We won't get peace for land. We will get war — not from the Iraqis or anyone else to our east, but from the Palestinians. And since the Palestinians are the people Kerry is intending to empower with his peace plan and his security arrangements, both his peace plan and his security arrangements are deeply dangerous and hostile.
As for the threat from east of the Jordan, here too, Kerry's security arrangements are absurd.
Kerry and his supporters claim that by enabling Israel to maintain a limited force along border with Jordan for a period of 5-15 years, he will build, in the words of Jeffrey Goldberg, his biggest fan, "an impregnable security system."
But this is ridiculous. When Israel withdrew from the international border between Gaza and Egypt, it wrongly assumed two things — first, that the regime of Hosni Mubarak would always be in power, and second, that Mubarak's regime would secure the border.
In the event, Mubarak, Israel's peace partner, did not secure the border. According to then Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, in the three months after Israel withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, the Palestinians smuggled more weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt than they had in the previous 38 years, when Israel controlled the border.
And of course Mubarak did not remain in power. He was replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood.
1a)
The report found that the deadly attack was fueled by anger over an anti-Islam U.S.-made video.
A lengthy New York Times investigation of the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, found no involvement by al-Qaeda or other international terrorists groups and was accelerated in part by anger at a U.S.-made video denigrating Islam.
The attack left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The six-part report on the investigation is written by David D. Kirkpatrick and was posted Saturday on the Times' website. It centers on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who, the newspaper says, had direct knowledge of the attack and its context.
"The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs," the Times concludes.
The newspaper notes that Republicans have argued that the Obama administration was trying to cover up al-Qaeda's alleged role in the attack.
"It was very clear to the individuals on the ground that this was an al-Qaeda-led event," Rep, Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said last month on Fox News.
"But the Republican arguments appear to conflate purely local extremist organizations like Ansar al-Shariah with Al Qaeda's international terrorist network," the Times report says. "The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack to a friend in another African country who had ties to members of Al Qaeda, according to several officials briefed on the call. But when the friend heard the attacker's boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault."
The newspaper says that a fuller account of the Benghazi attacks "suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya."
"It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment," the Times investigation says. "Both challenges now hang over the American involvement in Syria's civil conflict."
The Times says a central figure in the attack was an eccentric, malcontent local militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala. It says U.S. officials briefed on an American criminal investigation into the killings call him a prime suspect.
The report says Abu Khattala had no known affiliations with terrorist groups, and had escaped scrutiny from the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi that was set up to monitor local conditions.
Abu Khattala denied to the newspaper that he participated in the attack, but the newspaper says he was "firmly embedded in the network of Benghazi militias before and afterward."
The Times report on the attack itself says the U.S. compound had been under surveillance at least 12 hours before the assault started.
"The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements," the Times writes. "Anger at the (anti-Islam) video motivated the initial attack."
The video, titled "Innocence of Muslims" was made by an American, but had appeared almost exclusively only online, on YouTube. It had also prompted protests for hours the day before at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
"Dozens of people (in Benghazi) joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters," The Times writes. "Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras."
The Times says Abu Khattala, who still freely moves around the area, suggested that the video insulting the Prophet Mohammed might well have justified the killing of four Americans. "From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad," he told the newspaper.
1b) Times Ignores Evidence of Al Qaeda Link to Benghazi
Contradicts previous reporting from the New York TImes.
By Stephen Hayes
Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Timesand author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the reporting is incredible. Kirkpatrick describes the vase in the living room of the home belonging to the mother of Abu Khattala, a main suspect in those attacks. He reports on how the fighting in the consulate paused when Abu Khattala entered the compound, a revealing fact. Citing security camera video footage, the author describes how one of the attackers paused amidst the bedlam in the consulate to pour some Hershey’s chocolate syrup down his throat. Kirkpatrick obviously spent considerable time on the ground in Benghazi and interviewed several anti-Western Islamists, including some involved in the attacks. There’s little doubt he took considerable risks as he reported his piece.
While much of Kirkpatrick’s reporting is admirable and while these details add to our knowledge of certain aspects of the attack, they do not tell the whole story. And that’s where the piece ultimately fails.
The piece makes two main claims that challenge much of the previous reporting about Benghazi: 1) The Timesasserts that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault;” and, 2) that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”
We'll focus on the first one.
There is, in fact, evidence that terrorists linked to al Qaeda had a role in the Benghazi attacks. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of that kind of evidence. As Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence put it on Sunday when asked about theTimes report: “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved, but there were also plenty of people and militias that were unaffiliated with al Qaeda involved.” Schiff who has defended the Obama administration on Benghazi and praised the Times piece as adding “valuable insights,” nonetheless pronounced it incomplete and hinted that signals intelligence contradicted the claims in the piece. The Times report, Schiff continued, was “deficient in they didn’t have the same access to people who were not aware they were being listened to. They were heavily reliant obviously on people that they interviewed who had a reason to provide the story that they did.” He concluded: “So I think it does add some insights but I don’t think it’s complete.”
In addition to the signals intelligence Schiff mentions, there is abundant open-source reporting that contradicts Kirkpatrick’s sweeping claim about “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” And most problematic for this revisionist account, some of that evidence comes from the Times itself in a story the paper published on October 29, 2012.
That story, like this latest one, was a major front-page investigative piece. It reported that “American officials” said the Benghazi attacks “included participants from Ansar al Shariah, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Muhammad Jamal network, a militant group in Egypt.” So according to previous reporting in the Times, the Benghazi attacks included participants from the main al Qaeda affiliate in Libya and a terrorist network in Egypt, and, contrary to Kirkpatrick’s assertion, evidence that both al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups played some role in the assault. Kirkpatrick was presumably aware of that earlier report, since he was credited with contributing reporting from Benghazi.
There’s more. As my colleague Tom Joscelyn reports, the namesake of that Egyptian jihadist network, Muhammad Jamal, is not mentioned in the Times’s latest piece. Why not? The Times had previously reported the involvement of his network. When Mohammad Jamal was arrested in Egypt in December of 2012, two months after the Times article that mentioned him, the Wall Street Journal reported on his extensive ties to al Qaeda and its senior leadership, as well as his alleged involvement in the Benghazi attacks.
Have U.S. officials since concluded that his network wasn’t involved, as the Times and many others had reported? And if that were the case, wouldn’t Kirkpatrick have reported that? A U.S. official familiar with the intelligence on Benghazi tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that there has been no change. U.S. intelligence officials continue to believe Jamal’s network was involved.
Why was Jamal left out of this latest Times piece? That’s unclear. But we do know that including him would have undermined one of the piece’s central claims – that there was no evidence of any Benghazi role for either al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups.
As Joscelyn writes:
Jamal was trained by al Qaeda in the late 1980s, and has been loyal to Ayman al Zawahiri since at least the 1990s. He served as a commander in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a terrorist group headed by Zawahiri that merged with bin Laden’s enterprise. Jamal left prison in 2011 and quickly got back to work.The Egyptian press has published some of Jamal’s letters to Zawahiri. In the letters, which were written in 2011 and 2012, Jamal is extremely deferential to Zawahiri. Jamal heaps praise on Zawahiri, seeking the al Qaeda master’s guidance and additional support. Jamal even mentions that he attempted to visit Zawahiri in person, but failed to do so because of restrictions on his travel. So, Jamal writes, he sent an emissary instead.
Jamal’s letters read like status reports. He writes that he has received financing from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but requires additional funds to purchase more weaponry. Jamal also explains that he had formed “groups for us inside Sinai” and had established “an advanced base outside Egypt in Libya to take advantage of the conditions in Libya after the revolution.”Jamal’s operations inside the Sinai and Libya included training camps. Some of the trainees from those camps took part in the Benghazi attack.Since the New York Times and other press outlets first reported on the Jamal network’s involvement, both the U.S. State Department and the United Nations have designated Jamal and his subordinates as terrorists. Both the U.S. and UN designations tie Jamal’s network directly to al Qaeda.The State Department, for instance, notes that Jamal “has developed connections with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), AQ senior leadership, and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leadership.” Jamal not only received funds from AQAP, but has also “used the AQAP network to smuggle fighters into training camps.”While the State Department’s designation does not mention the Jamal network’s participation in the Benghazi attack, the UN’s designation does. The UN noted that both Jamal and members of his network are “[r]eported to be involved in the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 Sep. 2012.”
When Jamal was detained in Egypt, a U.S. intelligence official involved in the Benghazi investigation described his capture as “a big deal,” and investigators would later express frustration at their inability to interrogate Jamal to better understand the role his network played in the attacks.
U.S. officials also suspected other al Qaeda-affiliated groups. CNN reported that intelligence officials also believed jihadists from al Qaeda in Iraq also participated in the Benghazi assault.
And, as Joscelyn notes, U.S. intelligence officials told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last fall that Faraj al-Shibli, a Libyan who once served as a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden, participated in the Benghazi attacks and, in the days that followed, delivered to senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan intelligence taken from the U.S. compound after the attacks.
Are the officials who spoke to THE WEEKLY STANDARD about al Qaeda's involvement in the Benghazi attacks wrong? And those who talked to CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others? What about the Democratic congressman on the House Intelligence Committee who declared that "the intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved?"
And what about that previous major investigative piece in the New York Times, the one that reported the involvement of a key al Qaeda affiliate and international terrorist groups? Was it wrong? Should we expect a correction?
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2) Lt. Col Matthew Dooley, a West Point graduate and highly-decorated combat veteran, was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College at the National Defense University . He had 19 years of service and experience, and was considered one of the most highly qualified military instructors on Radical Islam & Terrorism. He taught military students about the situations they would encounter, how to react, about Islamic culture, traditions, and explained the mindset of Islamic extremists. Passing down first hand knowledge and experience, and teaching courses that were suggested (and approved) by the Joint Forces Staff College .
The course "Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism", which was suggested and approved by the Joint Forces Staff College , caught the attention of several Islamic Groups, and they wanted to make an example of him. They collectively wrote a letter expressing their outrage, and the Pro-Islamic Obama Administration was all too happy to assist. The letter was passed to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey. Dempsey publicly degraded and reprimanded Dooley, and Dooley received a negative Officer Evaluation Report almost immediately (which he had aced for the past 5 years). He was relieved of teaching duties, and his career has been red-flagged “He had a brilliant career ahead of him. Now, he has been flagged.” –
Richard Thompson, Thomas More Law Center "All US military Combatant Commands, Services, the National Guard Bureau, and Joint Chiefs are under Dempsey's Muslim Brotherhood-dictated order to ensure that henceforth, no US military course will ever again teach truth about Islam that the jihadist enemy finds offensive, or just too informative." - Former CIA agent Claire M. Lopez (about Lt. Col Dooley)The Obama Administration has demonstrated lightning speed to dismiss Military brass that does not conform to it's agenda, and not surprisingly, nobody is speaking up for Lt. Col. Dooley.
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3) By Peter Wehner
A new Gallup poll finds President Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent and his disapproval rating at 54 percent. But it’s not just that the public is increasingly displeased with the job Mr. Obama is doing; they are growing weary of the whole packaged deal. They are frustrated with the president, his style, his attitude, his approach to the job.
The Boston Herald reports:
President Obama’s tanking approval rating in newly released polls shows Americans are tired of his whining, according to some experts, who also see a fighting chance for Republicans to rack up coast-to-coast victories in the 2014 midterm congressional races.
“We think of presidents as being morale leaders … and he goes out and complains,” according to Richard Benedetto, a retired White House correspondent and a journalism professor at American University. “He complains about the fact that he doesn’t get enough cooperation from the other side. ‘It’s not my fault, it’s the Republicans’ fault.’ And that message gets old for the American public. … It’s not a good sign for Democrats in Congress going into next year.”
No, it’s not. And here’s one of the many challenges facing Mr. Obama: Can he alter the patterns of a presidency? I ask because the president is a chronic whiner, a habitual complainer and excuse-maker. He relied on blame shifting for his entire first term, and I suspect it’s not merely a tactic for Obama. It is how he’s been conditioned, how he views the world and his place in it. He believes deep in his bones that every setback he encounters is due to outside forces. And so he has laid the blame for his failures on his predecessor, the congressional GOP, the Tea Party, conservative talk radio hosts, millionaires and billionaires, Wall Street, Japanese tsunamis, the Arab Spring, Fox News, and more. Those excuses no longer work–and because they don’t, one of the main political arrows has been removed from the Obama quiver.
It’ll be interesting to see if Mr. Obama is emotionally able to adjust to this new situation. My guess is he’ll try the same lines of attack–including portraying himself again and again as the only adult in a room of unruly children–even as most Americans believe his act has grown old and stale. And as the failures of the Obama presidency continue to multiply and his record of incompetence becomes even more indisputable, will Mr. Obama become more aggrieved, more prickly, and more detached from reality? The new year will go some distance toward answering whether you can teach a hubristic president new tricks. This much we know: the old ones have become tedious and monotonous.
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