China Confidential
Foreign Reporting and Analysis Since April 2005
Friday, August 15, 2008
Regarding BHO's Muslim Problem
Regarding Barack Hussein Obama and his Muslim problem:
1. He was born a Muslim according to Islamic religious law, which traces religious identity through one's father. He remains a Muslim according to Islamic religious law If he did not formally convert to Christianity. If he did convert to Christianity, he is an apostate. Islamic religious law regards an apostate as an enemy of God.
2. He practiced Islam as a child in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, according to the recollections of his Indonesian classmates.
3. He was registered to attend a Catholic school in Indonesia--under the name Barry Soetoro--as a Muslim citizen of Indonesia--according to an AP photo of his Indonesian registration certificate.
4. Assuming the document is authentic, he may still be a citizen of Indonesia, a country threatened by Al Qaeda-associated Muslim separatists and terrorist groups. The US may one day have to strike at those groups--with or without Indonesia's permission. Is the US ready for an Indonesian Commander-in-Chief?
5. His former pastor and spiritual advisor is an admirer of Hamas and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The Black Liberation church that Obama belonged to for 20 years has honored Farrakhan and published Hamas propaganda.
6. A pro-Obama cell in Hamas-controlled Gaza has actively aided and contributed money to his Presidential campaign.
7. Although he has expressed strong support for Israel and opposition to Iran's nuclear arms program, Obama has also offered to meet unconditionally with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly vowed to destroy Israel. Obama's foreign policy advisers, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, who assisted the Islamist takeover of Iran as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, favor a policy of appeasement toward Iran and Islamism in general.
8. Obama has campaigned in Kenya for his cousin, opposition leader Raila Odinga, who is allied with violent Islamists (forgive the redundancy) seeking to impose Islamic religious law in Kenya.
9. Obama's campaign has attracted an alarming number of Islamist sympathizers. Sensitive to that, his campaign staffers have also sought to prevent Obama from being photographed with Muslim fundamentalists; the candidate had to apologize to young women wearing Islamic headscarves.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Afghanistan in Danger of Falling to Taliban
Foreign Confidential....
Nearly seven years after the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Afghanistan is in danger of again falling to the mass-murdering, medieval Taliban, the Islamist group that harbored and assisted Al Qaeda.
Moreover, the Islamist-infiltrated and Islamist-leaning secret services of nuclear-armed Pakistan, which created and sustained the Taliban--and also aided and still protect and provide save havens for the Taliban and Al Qaeda--are playing a critically important role in the looming catastrophe that the United States is desperately trying to prevent. The US is pinning its hopes for saving Afghanistan on both an Iraq-style surge there and a long overdue reorganization of the bifurcated, in-country allied command structure.
The strategy is not likely to succeed. Afghanistan is not Iraq; entirely different conditions prevail. A US troop escalation and more efficient deployment of forces will not work absent (a) a thorough cleansing of the corrupt, drug-pushing Afghan regime, starting with the country's clownish president, and (b) genuine cooperation from Pakistan in denying Al Qaeda and the Taliban access to the lawless tribal borderlands.
The Democrats, led by their presumptive Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, will surely seek to exploit the situation for political gain. They will blame the Bush administration for taking its eye off the ball--and they have a point. The unnecessary, terribly costly, and deeply unpopular invasion and conquest of Iraq, a vicious but practically contained and boxed-in secular enemy that had no meaningful Al Qaeda connections--arguably diverted precious US manpower and resources, discredited the war against radical Islam, or Islamism, and can thus be said to have paved the way for the current crisis.
Accent on arguably. The real reason that the administration deserves blame for the fact that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are poised to retake Afghanistan has nothing at all to do with Iraq. Rather, the US failure in Afghanistan can mainly be attributed to decades of US appeasement and accommodation of the Islamist menace--and two generations of left-liberal indoctrination of the US population. Sensitive to Muslim--and Saudi-- sensibilities, unwilling to respond to a World War II, Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack on the US with World War II rules of engagement, the President did not seek a formal declaration of war from the US Congress against Afghanistan. He did not "obliterate" the enemy, to use Hillary Clinton's term in reference to Islamist Iran (which also should have been swiftly and decisively attacked after 9/11). Instead, the President responded to the worst-ever attacks on US soil by praising Islam as a "beautiful and peaceful" religion (when it is actually ugly and violent), and took too long to do too little, relying on notoriously unreliable, reactionary and corrupt Afghan warlords for most of the dirty work.
The strategy was semi-successful. True, the warlords expelled the Taliban and Al Qaeda with US help; but Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda head Osama Binladen and their most senior commanders were allowed ample time and opportunity to escape into neighboring Pakistan. A few well aimed tactical nuclear warheads would have certainly sufficed--at a time when the world's sympathy was still with the US, and anger and desire for revenge, as opposed to liberal pleas for "healing" and restraint, were still shared and intensely felt by an overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans. The Taliban and Al Qaeda would have been .. ended ... right then and there. Nation building could have followed an unconditional Afghan surrender.
Ironically, the radical, racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's America-hating former pastor and spiritual adviser, was right when he infamously said "the chickens are coming home to roost," not because of US support for Israel--which Wright despises--but because of the influence in US society of individuals like Wright and other America-haters and Islamist sympathizers. Legions of State Department and think tank Arabists, appeasement-advocating academicians, journalists, and politicians, naive one-worlders, misguided pacifists, and other Useful Idiots--and anti-American fellow travelers and outright traitors--have weakened the nation to an alarming degree. One wonders: what will it take for the US to finally take the gloves off and win the war against radical Islam (which the Bush administration foolishly and tellingly misnamed as the "War on Terror")?
The question itself is terrifying given the capabilities and nuclear ambitions of Iran and Al Qaeda.
POST SCRIPT: Resurgent Russia is quietly rooting for the Taliban. On some level, the KGB-ruled Kremlin will never forgive the US for luring it into invading Afghanistan, suspecting that the Soviet Union was betrayed internally by a CIA-employed Politburo member who cast the decisive, 11th-hour vote for a military solution to the Carter administration's destabilizing, covert intervention in Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor, the militantly anti-Russian, Polish-born Cold Warrior, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has admitted that US support for Islamist warlords against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul--which the Reagan administration subsequently escalated into America's largest-ever secret war--began before the 1980 Moscow invasion. The roll-back operation was intended to provoke the Soviets into bleeding themselves dry by fighting a protracted land war in a backward but beautiful country that is littered with the remains of foreigners who played--and lost--The Great Game.
-Andre Pachter
Copyright 2008Is Obama an Indonesian Citizen?
Foreign Confidential....
Documents in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, where Barack Obama was schooled as a child, show that he was registered as a Muslim (in line with the fact that he was born a Muslim according to Islamic religious law); and his Indonesian classmates recall that he sincerely practiced Islam.
Atlas Shrugs and other blogs and websites have reported extensively on that.
But it appears that Obama, registered as Barry Soetoro, was also an Indonesian citizen.
Does the presumptive Democratic candidate for President hold dual citizenship? The American people have a right to know, especially in view of the serious Islamist threat to Indonesia. The country is a haven for Muslim separatists and Al Qaeda-associated terrorist groups, including the organization responsible for the bloody Bali bombings.
Obama should release his actual birth certificate and address the mystery surrounding his name and identity--and citizenship.
It is irresponsible for the mainstream media not to question him about these matters.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The media bias in favor of Obama is outrageously obvious and downright dangerous. Imagine if there was a document indicating that Joe Lieberman, who may be John McCain's running mate, was an Israeli citizen. Even though Israel is a solid strategic ally of the US, the media would rightfully be all over the story. Obama seems to inhabit a different universe with a different set of rules and laws. One suspects that even if it turns out that Obama is still an Indonesian citizen, the Obama cheerleaders--Chris Matthews of NBC comes to mind--would argue that Muslim country citizenship (like Muslim birth and religious practice) only adds to Obama's so-called foreign policy credentials.
Friday, 15 August 2008
Posts
