Barack Obama -- June 11, 2009

June 11, 2009

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"Islam has always been a part of America’s story"

Barack Hussein Obama

event	description
Obama Mirandizes Enemy Combatants	John Hinderaker reports that his friend Steve Hayes has blown the whistle on a real scandal (as opposed to a faux "scandal" like waterboarding): on orders of the Obama administration, terrorists captured in Afghanistan are now being given Miranda warnings: [T]he Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. "The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here's the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today -- foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them and they're reading them their rights -- Mirandizing these foreign fighters," says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan. Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. Think back to the days after September 11, 2001, and imagine how pretty much anyone would have reacted to the suggestion that terrorists captured overseas should be "arrested" and read their "rights." Those days, obviously, are long gone. You may wonder what on earth the point is. Evidently, the idea is that we may want to prosecute these terrorists someday in American courts. If you have wondered, like me, why we are talking about criminal prosecutions in the U.S. when a terrorist tries to blow up American soldiers in Afghanistan, it turns out that Congress has passed anti-terrorism statutes that purport to reach overseas, so that someone who commits a terrorist act against an American soldier can, indeed, be brought back to the U.S. and prosecuted. Of course, if the terrorists are under the jurisdiction of American courts with criminal prosecution as the aim, their rights do not stop with Miranda warnings. On the contrary: among other things, they are entitled to the assistance of counsel. So I suppose we should start shipping planeloads of criminal defense lawyers to Afghanistan to make sure that the terrorists' "rights" are fully protected. But why would we even consider criminal prosecution for captured terrorists? In what war have we ever brought enemy combatants -- legitimate ones, let alone terrorists -- back to America to be criminally prosecuted? None, obviously. All of this is emblematic of Obama's return to a law enforcement model for fighting terrorism -- the same model that failed so spectacularly in the years leading up to September 11. The best we can all do, for now, is hope that history does not repeat itself.
Obama Disarms Midshipmen	We all know that Obama doesn't care much for the military -- may even fear them -- but eliminating 200 hundred years of tradition is just nuts. Graduating midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis are being told, in writing, to leave at home or in their vehicles all "ceremonial swords" and anything else "that might be considered a weapon or a threat by screeners" for Friday's outdoor commencement ceremonies featuring an address by Obama. The Washington Times has obtained the academy's list of prohibited items for this year's graduation exercises, which, besides ceremonial swords, includes umbrellas. Wow! Obama sure is paranoid. Does he expect some middie to go all jihad and cut his head off? Just last week we learned he had a food taster on his trip to the Mideast and Europe -- now, this "threat." It must suck to be Obama.
Obama’s Fantasy Islam	With the media’s rhapsodic paeans to President Obama’s "historic" Cairo speech now receding into the background, this may be an opportune moment to take a sober look at America’s policies vis-à-vis the Muslim world and, no less important, at where Islam itself may be heading. It is now clear that the president is either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the nature of the radical Islamic threat to America and the West. To him, the problem is a few violent extremists, a "small but potent minority of Muslims," which leaves one wondering how a small minority got to be quite so potent. In any case, the West is dealing not with a few militants, or even with terrorism as such, but with a murderous, totalitarian doctrine couched in Islamic terms that has already become the dominant idiom in much of the Muslim world and its diaspora communities. Whether it is called "radical Islam," "Islamism," "Salafism," or "Islamofascism," it aims at nothing short of the conquest of the world for Islam, by violent means if need be. And not just any kind of Islam, but the most reactionary and intolerant interpretation of the Muslim faith. It is an ideology that elevates violent jihad as a religious obligation for all Muslims, openly discriminates against non-Muslims and women, banishes democracy and secularism, and ordains the murder of apostates and homosexuals. This doctrine is preached today in tens of thousands of Salafi, Wahhabi, and Deobandi mosques and madrassas, and promoted by countless Islamist organizations, from the Muslim Brotherhood networks in America to the Taliban and its fellow jihadists in Pakistan. Extremism and terrorism are the results of this malignant phenomenon. The Taliban and al-Qaeda did not bring Pakistan to the edge of the precipice on their own; rather, 30 years of state-sponsored Islamization of Pakistani society made Islamism the threat it is. While President Bush was also remiss in explaining to Americans that we’re in a deadly conflict with a violent Islamist doctrine that has deep and spreading roots among a quarter of the human population -- rather than with terrorism, which is simply its symptom -- Obama has seemingly chosen to act as an apologist for this ideology. There is no other credible reason for a man with an army of experts, researchers, and fact-checkers at his disposal to utter so many half-truths and outright falsehoods about what Islam is and what it is not. Continue reading here . . .
Gas Prices Skyrocket Under Obama	Up one dollar since the first of the year -- unemployed hardest hit.
He's Baaaack!	Obama's racist and anti-American minister and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, is now blaming "them Jews" for keeping Obama from giving him a call these days. "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office," Wright told the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. "They will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is .... I said from the beginning: He's a politician; I'm a pastor. He's got to do what politicians do," Wright continued. The White House wanted no part of another Wright controversy, and declined to comment. But officials pointed out that Obama and Bridezilla to end their 20-year relationship with Wright, pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, after he made incendiary remarks such as blaming the U.S. government for spreading AIDS. In his latest diatribe, Wright said, "Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing [by] the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don't want Barack talking like that because that's anti-Israel." Meanwhile, Obama diligently works towards driving the Israelis out of Jerusalem -- and out of the Mideast altogether, if he can.