The Pakistani Taliban caused widespread revulsion when it recently gunned down 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, whose “crime” was to ask for an education. Although assassinations and terrorism are common in Pakistan, what provoked such outcry is that Yousafzai was targeted because of her background as a campaigner for women’s rights.

Yousafzai lives in the Mingora area of Swat in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, where scores of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have taken refuge. Yousafzai first captured their attention after launching a campaign against attempts by the Taliban to impose their version of Shariah law in the region, whereby men were forced to grow their beards and girls were prevented from attending school. She has campaigned against these demands since the age of 11.

For her efforts, Yousafzai was given a bravery award by Pakistani President Yousuf Raza Gilani last year. She was rightly celebrated and championed by politicians from across all sides of the political spectrum. Yet, not one of them ever bothered to question why a teenager needs to campaign for her right to an education. No one thought to question who would fear a small, young girl.

Herein lies the problem in Pakistan. The political class is simply unwilling to confront the Taliban which operates freely across much of the FATA region. Instead, they make political capital from criticising the drone program operated by the United States which targets terrorists in FATA. It is true that drones can sometimes be a blunt and clumsy tool, but in the absence of any will by Pakistani authorities to chase down the terrorists operating in FATA, this program is the only lifeline available to residents there who oppose the Taliban.

Two weeks ago the cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan, vowed to lead a “peace convoy” to Waziristan, another Taliban hotbed in FATA. Khan said he wanted protest drone strikes but, in the end, stopped short of entering FATA after the Taliban threatened to attack him. Without a hint of irony, Khan continued to blame the United States for the problems in Pakistan.

After the attempted assassination of Yousafzai, Khan was again directing his rage at America – rather than those who pulled the trigger. He told a press conference (available in Urdu here) that the Pakistani government has antagonised the Taliban by launching a crackdown in the tribal areas. Worse, he said that Taliban fighters who targeted coalition forces in Afghanistan are fighting a “legitimate jihad.”

The Afghan government reacted angrily to these comments, telling the Guardian:

Either [Imran Khan is] profoundly and dangerously ignorant about the reality in Afghanistan, or he has ill will against the Afghan people.

Our children are killed on daily basis, civilians killed, and our schools, hospitals and infrastructure attacked on a daily basis. To call any of that jihad is profoundly wrong and misguided.

Although Yousafzai was shot in the head she has survived the Taliban’s attempts to kill her, and is now in Britain where she is receiving special medical attention. Yet the spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Ehsanullah Ehsan, has vowed to try again to kill her.

He has branded Yousafzai an “American spy,” who spread “Western ideas.” In a statement to the Pakistani press,Ehsan said:

She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol. She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas.

In a subsequent statement, he added:

In Islam and Pakhtun traditions there is absolutely no room for an attack on a woman of pure virtues. But in cases where a woman is seen as a clear sinner who stands in defiance of Shariah, such a woman is not only allowed to be attacked but there is an obligatory instruction for such an action.

She not only spied against Mujahideen but also created propaganda against them. The Gul Makai diary [an online diary Yousafzai wrote for the BBC about life under the Taliban] is an embodiment of anti-Taliban views. She has received the punishment for her sin.

The attack on Yousafzai perfectly encapsulates all that is wrong with Pakistan today. The Taliban arrogate for themselves the role of arbiters of public morality and conduct. They kill anyone who disagrees with them and are allowed to operate with impunity.

It’s been almost 2 years since the attack. While reporting on the Egyptian uprising CBS reporter Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten by a mob of angry Egyptians chanting ‘Jew, Jew’! She was so badly beaten that she had to be hospitalized.

Lara Logan was a typically liberal media reporter. The kind of reporter that tended to side with the underdog in any world conflict. So for example when reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict she would have probably focused on the plight of the Palestinians.

By implication of course that meant that the fault of Palestinian suffering lay at the hands of the occupying forces – Israel. She may not have ever spelled that out, but the implications of reportage like that is clear. And it is typical of the liberal mindset. They rarely if ever take history into consideration. They look at the here and now and say, “Fix it!”

But leaving out the historical context makes the truth disappear or seem irrelevant. But the truth of historical context cannot be over-looked. Ultimate justice depends on it. Without it, the guilty will prosper and the innocent suffer. The consequences of overlooking historical context are so evil and unjust – that after the fact even the most cynical observer will wonder how it ever happened.

I don’t recall seeing any of Ms. Logan’s reports after her traumatic experiences in Egypt. But in a recent public appearance in Chicago she wasn’t talking about Palestinian suffering. From the ChicagoSun-Times:

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us…

Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said.

Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

I am not shocked by her conversion. They say (don’t ask me who “they” are) that a conservative is a liberal that has been mugged. I guess that is what has happened to Ms. Logan. Now instead of focusing on things like the plight of Palestinian “refuges” she is focusing on the greater truths of the Middle East.

She recognizes that the real problems of the Middle East are not caused by the here and now of Palestinian suffering. Although I’m sure she still believes that Palestinians suffer, that is only a part of the total picture. She now understands that the greater problem of the Middle East is Islamic fanaticism.

Besides her apparent new understanding of the reality of Islamic fanaticism – I would personally add that a very large portion of it includes a rabid religious hatred of the Jewish people. Something most reporters ignore or at best gloss over.

My reaction to this story is to say to Ms. Logan, “Welcome aboard.” “We could use a few more reporters like you.”

I only hope it doesn’t take any more violent sexual attacks to make it happen.

Many of you have been shocked by the story of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year old Pakistani girl shot in the head by a Taliban terrorist because of a blog she wrote and interviews she gave starting in 2009, criticizing the Taliban and calling for the education of women.

This lovely, self-possessed girl, who speaks and writes on a level far above her age, and who planned to enter politics (video), may or may not survive. If she does not, it will be an enormous loss for Pakistan and for the world.

This is not simply an atrocity of war. This was not done out of hatred, anger or because someone was crazy. Nobody lost control in the heat of battle or was infuriated by a ridiculous YouTube video. No low-level extremist was responsible for this.

No, it was something else entirely. Read about the letter sent by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership to international media today:

The letter, written in English, says a Taliban gunman “successfully targeted” Yousafzai “although she was young and a girl and the TTP does not believe in attacking women.” It says Yousafzai, who gained global recognition at the age of 11 through an online diary she wrote for the BBC about TTP influence in her hometown of Mingora, was shot because “whom so ever leads a campaign against Islam and Shariah is ordered to be killed by Shariah.”

The letter accuses Yousafzai of being “pro-West,” promoting Western culture, and speaking out against Taliban militants — charging that Yousafzai’s “personality became a symbol of an anti-Shariah campaign.” Using the term for Islamic holy warriors to refer to Taliban militants, the letter says that “Yousafzai was playing a vital role in bucking up the emotions” of Pakistan’s military and government “and was inviting Muslims to hate mujahideen.”

The letter goes on to argue that “[i]t is a clear command of Shariah that any female who, by any means, plays a role in the war against mujahideen should be killed.” It then seeks to justify the shooting of the schoolgirl by citing passages from the Koran in which a child or woman was killed…

The Taliban’s justification concludes with a threat, saying: “If anyone thinks that Malala is targeted because of education, that’s absolutely wrong and is propaganda by media. Malala is targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism and so-called enlightened moderation. And whom so ever will commit so in the future too will be targeted again by the TTP.”

The TTP also warned that if she survives, they will try again, and that it is intended as a warning to other children.

The Taliban has thus provided a coldblooded ideological and strategic explanation of their actions, a clear window into their thinking.

And what do we see through this window? For one thing, the emptiness of the idea that all disputes are based on a lack of understanding or communication between the sides. No amount of ‘communication’ can make me accept or understand the principle that promoting secularism is a death penalty crime for an eighth-grader.

We also see that these are not abnormal humans who are missing their moral senses. They are not Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. They are logically acting on the implications of the ideology that they are committed to, the ideology which informs their moral perceptions in the first place.

The ideology is Shari’a, Islamic law. A demand for strict observance of Shari’a characterizes radical Islamists everywhere, from Iran to Pakistan, to the UK.

Do I need to add that this ideology is evil and repugnant?

Visit Fresnozionism.org.

With East London hosting the world during the Olympics, a group of Islamists associated with Anjem Choudary and his group, Islam4UK, have taken the law into their own hands.

Over recent weeks the group has launched a vigilante campaign in Waltham Forest, close to the main Olympics venues, to target “Pimps and Prostitutes,” part of a wider campaign by Choudary’s associates to launch their own vigilante campaigns, based on a narrow interpretation of Shariah law. Last year, the group put up stickers around parts of East London declaring it a ‘Shariah Zone.’ It warned women to observe strict dress codes, and local residents against drinking alcohol. Homosexuals were also threatened.

“Pimps and Prostitutes” is a new campaign. Of course, few would argue with a genuine civic movement to clear the streets of prostitutes, but Choudary’s men are not motivated by public spirit. They want instead to assert Islamist principles and practice over parts of public life in London, in the hope of carving out enclaves for themselves. “As Muslims in your local area it is our duty to invite you to embrace Islam” the group states, “but we also want to share with you some of the great projects we’re involved in that can make a real change to the area.”

Underpinning this is a complete disregard for British law and the authority of the state – as is confirmed by the group’s website, which states that the local community should “give Muslims a chance to work towards eradicating prostitution, with members pointing to the Quran and declaring it to be the way forward for the area…we believe that intimate relationships should only be between married couples.”

This is the tip of the iceberg: the group also wants to target what it calls “pornographic advertising.” It argues that billboards which show revealing pictures of women “dehumanize” them and consequently promote prostitution. They also want far stricter punishments for those persons violating these rules, and, at least for for the Waltham Forest area, argue for the imposition of Shariah punishments against those who do not agree with their view.

The group’s ambitions were confirmed when they told a newspaper, “The Muslim community have taken it upon themselves to rid the streets of evil. This is just how the Taliban started in Afghanistan. To all intents and purposes you are witnessing the emergence of the Taliban in Walthamstow.”

This gives an indication of the group’s inspiration. On their website they make reference to the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan — a mosque run by radicals who slowly began challenging the government by enforcing the Shariah in parts of Islamabad. Things eventually came to a head when the group began flogging women for alleged prostitution, and the government was forced to act against the group.

“What truly set Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] apart was the desire of its students to give life to the verses in the Quran” the group boasts. “They would actively confront evils in their community, in particular brothels and prostitutes, and made sure that whatever they learnt from their teachers was implemented and did not die in their hearts.”

Islamists have launched these kinds of campaigns in the past as well. In 2009, Yusuf Patel, who is connected to the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir, launched a campaign against sex and relationship education (SRE) in schools. The core mission of the SRE initiative was described as:

As Muslims we believe in the primacy of marriage, the prohibition of sexual relations outside marriage, the unacceptability of homosexuality which is often portrayed as a lifestyle choice. We also subscribe to the concept of Hayaa (modesty) which guides the interaction between men and women.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with this. Many parents might object to aspects of sex education in school, but Patel’s campaign was cloaked in disingenuous terms. The primary aim of the campaign was to promote Hizb ut Tahrir to unsuspecting parents who might have had their own objections to SRE classes. The campaign is also dressed in deeply homophobic terms, expressing concern that same sex relationships could be “normalized” in the minds of children.

The campaign typified Hizb ut Tahrir’s approach to entering a society. It told members they should become school governors because:

Governors have a huge amount of leeway to mould the strategic direction of a school. Whether you are a parent, community, staff or LA [Local Authority] governor, you can get involved to improve the educational experience of all children.

The latest anti-prostitution campaign in East London typifies an Islamist strategy, which is to create parallel communities for Muslims that do not interact with their non-Muslim neighbors. Islamists use these initiatives to present themselves as active members of the community, often picking on legitimate and understandable concerns. Their aim is to win new recruits and further their divisive agenda. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Waltham Forest where, by their own admission, Islamists are proudly declaring the emergence of a Taliban-styled vigilante group.

Increasing numbers of Muslims in Europe are travelling to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other conflict zones to obtain training in terrorist methods.

Although intelligence agencies have been following the trend since the July 2005 bombings of the London commuter system, which were perpetrated by four home-grown Islamic terrorists, the scale of the problem has come into greater focus in recent weeks.

European security officials are especially concerned about reports that al-Qaeda is recruiting and training Western operatives who have “clean” criminal records and have the ability to travel freely and blend in with European and American cultures.

In Norway, for example, an ethnic Norwegian convert to militant Islam who has received terrorist training from al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen, is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the West, officials from three European security agencies said on June 25.

European officials have confirmed that the man is “operational,” meaning he has completed his training and is about to receive a target. Although the terrorist-in-waiting is believed to still be in Yemen, even if he is found he cannot be extradited: under Norwegian law it is not a crime to attend a terrorist training camp.

The London-based newspaper Sunday Times, quoting intelligence services, published a story on July 1 that said the Norwegian jihadist had been trained by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] to evade airport security and is plotting to hijack an American passenger plane and, in a suicide mission, crash it. The newspaper portrayed the plot as an attack on the upcoming London Olympics, to be held from July 27 to August 12, but said the target was specifically supposed to be an American aircraft.

The paper described the recruit as being a Norwegian citizen in his 30s, with no immigrant background, but who calls himself Abu Abdulrahman. The man, who converted to Islam in 2008, has apparently in recent months been undergoing training at AQAP bases in Yemen.

According to a detailed report in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, on July 5, the individual is a 33-year-old Norwegian who, in his youth, was associated with Oslo’s far-left Blitz movement. Despite his one-time radical credentials, he later worked as a babysitter at a daycare center in Oslo, the city where he was born and raised. He did not have a history of violence, the paper said.

Dagbladet went on to report that eventually he became a member of the Green Party; a source close to the suspect said that, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he had come to be viewed as an easily-influenced conspiracy theorist.

His ideological priorities shifted, according to the paper, after he married the daughter of a diplomat from an unspecified North African country. In 2008, he converted to Islam and underwent a change of lifestyle: he gave up alcohol and broke off almost all contact with his earlier friends. The newspaper stated that he recently became a father, and that his wife had travelled to her home country with their child.

Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, recently provided important context to the threat posed by would-be jihadists. In a rare public address on June 25, Evans said the Olympic Games in London “present an attractive target for our enemies and they will be at the center of the world’s attention in a month or so. No doubt some terrorist networks have thought about whether they could pull off an attack.”

“In back rooms and in cars and on the streets of this country there is no shortage of individuals talking about wanting to mount terrorist attacks here,” Evans continued. “It is essential that we maintain pressure on al-Qaeda.”

Evans also said that al-Qaeda militants are using the countries which toppled their leaders in the Arab Spring as bases to train radical Western youths for potential attacks on Britain: “This is the completion of a cycle. Al-Qaida first moved to Afghanistan in the 1990s due to pressure in their Arab countries of origin. They moved on to Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban. And now some are heading home to the Arab world again.”

“Today,” Evans added, “parts of the Arab world have once more become a permissive environment for al-Qaeda. A small number of British would-be jihadis are also making their way to Arab countries to seek training and opportunities for militant activity, as they do in Somalia and Yemen. Some will return to the UK and pose a threat here. This is a new and worrying development and could get worse.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.il/2012/07/israel-peacetime-war-or-wartime-peace.html

In the library’s history section all the shelves are crowded together. In the Middle East, opposing polemics are wedged up against each other. Alan Dershowitz rubs shoulders with Tony Judt who leans onto George Gilder who balances out Norman Finkelstein who flakes bits of paper on Benjamin Netanyahu. Though located in the history section, most of these books are not history. They are long opinion pieces, arguments for and against the Jewish State.

On the left there are vituperative diatribes and on the right there are earnest defenses. The Holocaust Industry contends with The Case for Israel, The Jewish Lobby with Start Up Nation. Every few months brings new combatants to the shelves. Shlomo Sand is swapped out with Peter Beinart who is swapped out with Noam Chomsky like a baseball team that is forever calling the same players off the bench to make the same plays.

Next year there will be another four books denouncing Israel for its settlements and its trickery in making the terrorists look like they don’t want peace by negotiating with them for twenty years. And next to them another four books asserting that Israel wants peace and has the right to self-defense.

The four-hundred thousand word argument can be summed up as, “Israel is bad and those who live there are bad people” and “No, they aren’t.”

The first argument is easier to make then the second, because all countries and people have their flaws, but the second argument has gotten easier to make once the first argument switched off to, “Israel is the worst country that ever existed (with the possible exception of South Africa) and those who live there are the worst people that ever existed.”

When the torchbearers of the Anti-Israel argument are the likes of Norman Finkelstein and Tony Judt, then anyone who appears less filled with violent hatred suddenly seems moderate by comparison. It allows opponents of Israel like Peter Beinart to rebrand themselves as Liberal Zionists because at least they aren’t claiming that the Prime Minister of Israel ritually eats four babies for breakfast every morning.

Few of the books are concerned with the reality of Israel. They are concerned with it as an ideal. The left tears apart the ideal. The right defends the ideal. There is a growing body of books by Jewish leftists who visit Israel, stop by a supermarket outside their hotel, visit one or two sites, cringe at the guns, take in a nightspot, visit the Western Wall, visit the Separation Wall, and transmit the whole thing into a miniature memoir expressing their disappointment with the experience.

The latest such offering, Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, a 70 year-old son of a Communist mother and Orthodox father who visited Israel for the first time and discovered that it didn’t live up to whatever mixed-up ideal his parents promised him. Pekar is already dead, but there is an entire conveyor belt along which the younger set rides to write critical books, graphic novels, blogs and tweets about their disappointing experience in the Jewish State.

Whatever books are on the shelves two years from now, it is likely that very little will have changed. The world as a whole, not just the occasional liberal brat, will continue being disappointed in Israel for not having magically and non-violently resolved the dilemma of people shooting at it no matter what it does. After all there’s already a book titled, How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less on the shelf. Why not just read it and do what it says?

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, two years from now a Secretary of State will be icily dressing down Israel for building houses in provocative places, using drones to kill terrorists and refusing to make peace. As the history section will bulge with eight more pro and con books; another member will have joined the choir invisible of James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. While the Democrats have been worse on Israel, each administration regardless of its affiliation, has accepted the precedents of the previous administration and eventually managed to top its attacks on Israel’s sovereignty.

http://rubinreports.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/is-obama-strong-on-national-security-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Rubinreports+(RubinReports)&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail

Let me explain to you why the Obama Administration’s propaganda leak effort to prove that the president is tough on national security is nonsense. Almost every example with two exceptions—a computer virus against Iran and regime change in Libya–revolves around the willingness to combat or kill al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

There has never been any question but that the Obama Administration views al-Qaida as an enemy and a danger that should be wiped out. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that this is the only entity in the world that this administration sees as a national security threat, since al-Qaida is eager to launch direct attacks against targets on American soil.

In contrast, though, the administration does not act against any other possible national security threat be it Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, North Korea, China, Russia, Pakistan, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, the Turkish Islamist regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, or anything else you can think of.

The administration obviously has shown its belief that engagement, flattery, refusal to help their intended victims, and concessions can win over these enemies. It has even tried to redefine the Taliban as a group that can be conciliated and given a share in a new Afghan government, despite its involvement in September 11!

The only partial exception to that list is Iran. Yet even there the Obama Administration tried to avoid doing anything for almost three years. Even now the government has been desperate to make a deal with Tehran and it is only Iran’s intransigence—and preference for stalling—that have prevented some bargain. Even on the Iran issue the administration did less than Congress wanted and virtually exempted China, Russia, and Turkey from having to observe the sanctions.

Thus, the one other case of administration “toughness” has been support for Israel’s strategy of using such delaying tactics as computer viruses. Of course, the administration is happy at low-cost, no-risk ideas to postpone its having to deal with Iran having nuclear weapons.

During its term, the administration has not been tough in terms of helping allies all over the world. A few dozen governments have been very disappointed by U.S. policy.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration has pursued withdrawal strategies initiated by its predecessor. This choice seems wise, but it should be noted that the Obama administration has been completely ineffective in Iraq, where the political system is in serious trouble. With no U.S. effort to resolve the conflict in sight, the Shia prime minister has put out an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice president on a charge of terrorism, and the Kurdish president is helping him hide out.

As for Afghanistan, the possibility of a regime collapse and a Taliban takeover is a very real danger that the administration has not been able to counter. The administration favors a “moderate” Taliban participation in government, and has found no way, despite billions of dollars of U.S. aid, to get Pakistan to stop backing the Taliban.

That leaves Libya. This intervention was done because the Arab League, the UN, and the European Union all concurred, and the Gaddafi regime was an easy target. It is not yet clear whether this operation will leave Libya worse off and will jeopardize U.S. interests. Note that the Libyan transitional government is stalling on elections, apparently because these might result in a radical, anti-American Islamist regime or a regional conflict that would produce a new civil war. At any rate, it was less a bold action than a mere going along with the crowd, and whether the operation was of any benefit to U.S. interests is still to be seen.

Finally, there is the jewel in the crown: the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The administration’s portrayal of this as some courageous decision shows more than anything how weak he is. A normal U.S. government would have taken this choice for granted, and not felt the need to stress the president’s alleged machismo. (Even Jimmy Carter didn’t posture over the comparatively brave decision to launch an armed rescue mission of the U.S. hostages held in Iran.) Actually, given Obama’s worldview — don’t make the Muslims mad, fear looking like a bully, be ambiguous about the use of force, panic lest failure have a political cost — it was indeed a hard decision. But that supposed difficult pondering, by the White House’s own admission, precisely makes the point about this administration’s weakness.

Generally, the case of Obama being tough is sold by journalists by leaving out all of the points listed above. Indeed, they are often very vague about specifics in making the case for a heroic Obama. In normal times, with a media that made some serious effort at balance, they would be laughed off the stage.

As for the allegedly mysterious source of the leaks, this is a joke. Anyone who knows how these things work would have no doubt after reading the relevant articles, especially in the New York Times. All of those interviewed were former or current Obama appointees eager to make him look good. These are the people who told the press about national security secrets that relatively few people knew, especially in some detail.

Do these leaks endanger American soldiers and intelligence sources? Ask those at the Pentagon who are outspokenly bitter about self-serving Obama administration leaks, the British services whose penetration of al-Qaeda was irresponsibly revealed, and the Pakistani doctor sentenced to 33 years in prison for helping to get Osama without a huge U.S. effort to get him released.

Finally, here is Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post on what Obama is doing wrong; Ambassador John Bolton on what Obama should be doing; and most surprisingly of all, the usually in-the-tank-for-Obama Nicholas Kristof writing in the New York Times of his disgust at the president’s policy on Syria and Sudan.

http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/2012/05/obama-government-backs-atrocity.html

How can one write satire when the Obama Administration has created an Atrocities Prevention Board to prevent mass murder and genocide while at the same time has been largely supporting the forces most likely to commit mass murder and genocide? We can almost call these regimes the Organization of Atrocity-Exporting States (OAES).

With the exception of Libya – an issue I’m not going to debate in this article – the Obama Administration has been distinguished by its accommodation with those who have committed and are most likely to commit atrocities.

For example, Obama gave a speech in Afghanistan welcoming into political life those members of the Taliban who would renounce violence and obey Afghan law or, more accurately, those who would say such things for just long enough for the Americans to leave the country. But the administration has been negotiating with a Taliban that has done neither. It has committed past atrocities, including complicity in the September 11 attack which would presumably be pardoned. No matter what it pretended, the Taliban would put Afghans under an oppressive regime again if—or should I say as soon as—it has the chance. My June 2011 article on Obama’s Afghanistan policy remains quite relevant.

Once again in his speech, Obama made the deadly error of claiming that, in effect, al-Qaida is America’s only real enemy in the world. Even the Taliban (whose name he cannot pronounce correctly) is redeemable, though it answered him with a suicide attack in Kabul. As for Obama’s other claims (international consensus for stability in South Asia, etc) he can’t even get Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban and concealing al-Qaida leaders. And India has been treated by Obama in a manner reminiscent of his policy toward Israel.

So is his administration working to prevent atrocities and is al-Qaida America’s only enemy?

Let’s start with the terrorist group Hamas which governs the Gaza Strip and has committed atrocities, keeps trying to do so, and openly advocates genocide against both Israel and Jews. The Obama Administration has opposed a serious effort to overthrow it, has accepted de facto its coalition with the Palestinian Authority, and pressed Israel in the past to reduce sanctions to a minimum.

Regarding Lebanon, the Obama Administration has ignored a law precluding interaction and aid to a government that includes a group, like Hizballah, on the State Department terrorism list. It has not been phased by investigations showing Hizballah involvement in assassinations in Lebanon. The 2006 UN ceasefire, in which the United States played a leading role, promises to keep Hizballah from building up a military zone in the south and to help prevent its importing weapons from Syria. Yet this has not prevented U.S. officials from dallying with Hizballah.

Among others, General David Petraeus, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have testified in detail about how Hizballah has committed terrorist attacks against Americans in Iraq and elsewhere in addition to training terrorists.

In Syria, the Administration didn’t just engage but actually rewarded the Arabic-speaking world’s worst dictatorship. On one notable occasion, junior administration staffers visiting Damascus – sitting within screaming distance of the prisons known for torture – tweeted away about what a good time they were having and how great the coffee tasted. And what about the Muslim Brotherhood, elected by the graduating class at Terrorism High School the group most likely to succeed in committing really big atrocities? Every day its leaders and publications pour out bloodthirsty hate and support for violence. And every day the Western mass media tells us it is moderate and has renounced violence.

I could go on to recount the White House’s softness on Sudan, arguably the most atrocity-generating government in the world. Obama has, however, announced his profound opposition to the Lord’s Resistance Army, an east African group that has not surfaced for years. It apparently has two advantages: it isn’t revolutionary Islamist and it probably doesn’t exist any more.

The Board is to be headed by Samantha Powers, whose pre-Libya ideas about atrocities seemed to revolve largely around blaming Israel exclusively. Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to participate and legitimize a UN human rights’ council run by and for atrocity-producing states. It has been largely silent on Iran, late and ineffective on Syria, has worked to save the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip and empower the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and was on the wrong side in the Sudan and a number of other countries.

That all of this was announced at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC adds to the bad taste and bad faith of the whole enterprise. And by the word “enterprise” I’m not just referring to the Atrocity Prevention Board.