Thursday, July 18, 2013
Dell Founder Buys Time to Buy the Company
Shareholders Gaining Because of Icahn's Bid
Michael Dell needs more time and needs to put more money on the table in order to buy the declining computer company that he founded.
Which means long-suffering Dell shareholders are poised to make more money, thanks to Carl Icahn.
Read more.
America Joins the Jihad: In-Depth Analysis
US Deliberately Siding With the Enemies of Genuine Democracy
By Clare M. Lopez
It is not just that the United States government has aligned itself with the avowed vanguard of Islamic jihad -- the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) -- or committed American troops to battle (in Libya, and maybe soon in Syria) to ensure the victory of al-Qa'eda-linked militias. It is not just that whenever an opportunity has arisen, as in Iran in 2009, or pre-and-post revolutionary Egypt, or the Syrian civil war, the U.S. deliberately has chosen to side with the forces of jihad and shariah law and against the voices of civil society and genuine democracy.
The current U.S. administration has actually managed to flip from one side to the other, from "for the people in the streets" to "against the people in the streets," as recently became evident in late June 2013, when protests mounted against the incompetent, oppressive regime of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, reportedly asked Coptic Pope Tawadros II, "to urge the Copts not to participate" -- as well as other groups, apparently -- in the demonstrations planned for June 30. There had been no such request reported two years earlier when Muslim Brotherhood supporters thronged Tahrir Square to demand that long-time U.S. ally President Hosni Mubarak step down. Nor did Ambassador Patterson pressure Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood government to return power to Hosni Mubarak, an American ally for three decades, after those street demonstrations prompted the Egyptian military to remove him from power in February 2011. She also did not protest even after Morsi seized power outright from that military command in August 2012. Patterson has, however, reportedly been pressuring the Egyptian military command to reinstate Morsi after it stepped in once again on July 3, 2013 to remove chaos from the streets by removing Morsi from office.
What these policies make painfully obvious that the United States of America has apparently abandoned the core principles of its Founding Fathers and capitulated to the forces of jihad and shariah.The vision of America as "Shining City on a Hill," an exceptional nation whose leaders champion the natural rights of the individual against the liberty crushing oppression of totalitarian theocracy, for the moment at least, has been suborned to a different vision: the vision of an America as a force for harm in the world, that apologizes for its exceptionalism, abandons its friends and allies, emboldens its enemies, and seeks unilateral disarmament so as to better meet its president's desire to be just another "citizen of the world."
The years from 2009-2013 have witnessed the remaking of the map of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The driving forces behind the Islamic uprisings were powerful indeed: beginning no later than the summer of 2010, al-Qa'eda and the Muslim Brotherhood meshed their tactics and timing in a synchrony that previously had only characterized their identical Islamic ideology. Absent any serious groundwork over the preceding years by the U.S., whether official or by NGOs, to nourish genuine pro-democracy voices, once al-Qa'eda's July 2010 Inspire magazine call for jihad had been met with MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi's answering declaration of war in the cause of Islam [jihad] in late September 2010, and al-Azhar had provided the fatwa [Islamic religious edict] of approval for offensive jihad in January 2011, there was no one capable of standing effectively against the tidal wave of popular pro-shariah sentiment. Perhaps no one could have held back that long suppressed desire for Islamic Law.
Eagerly Embracing the Muslim Brotherhood
But the U.S. did not even try. To the contrary, the current administration consistently and repeatedly appeared to respond eagerly to the calls for revolution from the Muslim Brotherhood's senior Islamic scholar, Yousef al-Qaradawi. When al-Qaradawi said that Mubarak had to go, the U.S. waited a whole three days before throwing America's key ally in the Middle East for over three decades under the bus. When al-Qaradawi called for Libyan rebels to kill Muammar Qaddafi (so the al-Qa'eda jihadis in his jails could get out and join the revolution), the U.S. led the Western military campaign that brought al-Qa'eda, the MB, and chaos to Libya. And when al-Qaradawi issued a call for jihad in Syria, in early June 2013, the U.S. quickly issued an invitation to Abdullah bin Bayyah (al-Qaradawi's vice president at the International Union of Muslim Scholars), who told an Al-Jazeera reporter that, "We demand Washington take a greater role in [Syria]." It took the U.S. less than one week after al-Qaradawi's fatwa to announce authorization of stepped-up military aid to the al-Qa'eda-and-Brotherhood-dominated Syrian rebels. The White House announcement came just a single day after bin Bayyah met with National Security and other senior administration officials.
When looking for some explanation, some reason for such astonishing behavior from the erstwhile leaders of the free world, the U.S. government's "disastrous Muslim outreach efforts," as described by Patrick Poole, must top the list. Unfortunately for us, what may have been rationalized as choosing the lesser of two evils -- picking the "good jihadis" (Muslim Brotherhood) over the "bad jihadis" (al-Qa'eda) -- instead has turned out exactly as dangerously detrimental to U.S. national security as the Islamic enemy planned.
Catastrophic Consequences of Misguided Policy
Driven by fear of more violent terror into foolish relationships with the Armani-suited, soft-spoken purveyors of the "civilization jihad" who demand neutralization of our national defenses, we have officially purged our counterterrorism lexicon and training curriculum, and blacklisted and professionally marginalized our most capable instructors of Islamic doctrine, and thereby destroyed all ability to pre-empt Islamic terror in the ideological, pre-attack phase. The carnage at the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon is Exhibit A for the catastrophic and inevitable domestic consequences of this misguided policy. Abroad, the current administration's unabashed embrace of jihadist forces, while abandoning courageous moderates to their fate, is contributing in a significant way to the march of Islamic law across the MENA region.
None of these cataclysmic changes benefits U.S. national security or that of our friends and allies. Far from inoculating the homeland against more Islamic terror, the current administration's limp response to direct enemy threats, such as its institutionalization of the U.S. government's increasingly cozy relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, has only earned it the contempt of our adversaries, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and laid the country wide open to more terrorism. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's body language at his June 2013 G-8 Summit meeting with Obama should have been enough to anticipate the predictable 'Nyet' from Moscow when it was suggested that renegade National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, Edward Snowden, might be put on a plane home from Sheremetyevo airport. Worse yet, as it is now increasingly difficult to recognize -- and even forbidden by official stated policy within the U.S. military and security agencies -- to act upon evidence of deepening jihadist commitment before an attack occurs, there will be more acts of fard 'ayn [individual jihad], just as al-Qa'eda has encouraged.
Acquiescence to islamic Conquest and Expansion
The growing list of demands being placed before U.S. leadership by its "partners" in Muslim outreach leads in one direction only: acquiescence to Islamic conquest and expansion in the MENA region accompanied by full withdrawal of all U.S. forces, both civilian and military, from allegedly "Muslim lands." Failure to comply in an expedient manner with Muslim demands will result in the repeated application of terror measures, until that state of submission is achieved which Brigadier-General S.K. Malik wrote about in his 1979 manual, "The Quranic Concept of War":
Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent's heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved.
A number of demands, some even delivered in person and (incredibly) by invitation, have already been presented. Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, a renowned juridical scholar of Islam and the emir (leader) of the Egyptian Gama'at al-Islamia terror group, is serving a life sentence in the U.S. after being convicted on terrorism charges. Those charges were based on his leadership of a jihadist cell responsible for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993, and other simultaneous plots to conduct bombings of New York City landmarks, including the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations complex, the George Washington Bridge, and more. After his successful prosecution by a Department of Justice legal team led by Andrew McCarthy, Abdel Rahman issued the fatwa that Usama bin Laden cited publicly as the shariah justification for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Demands by Gama'at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group) for Abdel Rahman's release were punctuated by the brutal 1997 massacre of tourists in the Egyptian city of Luxor. The following year, in 1998, the Islamic Group joined bin Laden's and al-Qa'eda's formal declaration of war [jihad] against the U.S. As might be expected, Gama'at al-Islamia is on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.
But being both an al-Qae'da affiliate and on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations List did not stop the issuance of a U.S. visa to Gama'at al-Islamia member Hani Nour Eldin in late June 2012 so that he could come to Washington, D.C. to accept an invitation to meet with officials from the National Security Council [NSC] to present in person a formal "request" for the release of the Blind Sheikh. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood's then-president-elect Mohamed Morsi followed up about a week later with his own pledge to seek the release of the Blind Sheikh. As September 11 of that year drew near, the Blind Sheikh was still no closer to release. So, on Aug 30, 2012, Gama'at al-Islamia announced plans for a massive 9/11 protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo; although subsequent publicity for a low-budget YouTube video about the life of Muhammad roused furious demonstrators to storm the Embassy, breach its walls, and tear down the American flag, the demand for the release of the Blind Sheikh remains.
Blaming a Film, Bogus Narrative
This same YouTube video, "Innocence of Muslims", would eventually play its own role in this litany of Muslim demands. After al-Qa'eda jihadis attacked the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, the night of September 11, 2012, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods, the current U.S. administration hastily concocted a bogus narrative for public consumption, falsely claiming for weeks that it was this YouTube video that had incited the assault. (In these murders, incidentally, the only person who has so far been jailed is the filmmaker.) In addition to diverting attention away from the Department of State's prior close working relationship with the Ansar al-Shariah and other jihadis -- who were actually responsible for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of an official U.S. diplomatic post that night -- placing blame on the film also served to help meet Islamic demands that the U.S. should criminalize all criticism of Islam.
Since 2011, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been working closely with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC] through the "Istanbul Process" to implement UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, one of the key vehicles aimed at legislating restrictions on Americans'-- and everyone's, worldwide -- right to free speech. The Istanbul Process is the name given to the OIC's high level implementation effort to achieve international-level legislation that would curtail free speech about Islam. Key to the Istanbul Process is the U.S. Department of State commitment to take a leading role in a series of OIC meetings at the Foreign Minister level, the first of which was held in Istanbul in December 2011, hosted by the U.S. State Department. The reported focus of that 3-day working session, held behind closed doors, was "Islamophobia," and how to implement tactics that would ensure Islam not be defamed. One way to do this is by claiming that any expression that may cause offense to Muslims -- the legal shariah definition of slander, 'Umdat al-Salik, r2.2 -- may constitute incitement to violence, as measured by a "test of consequences" -- a chilling prospect:
if the criterion for determining "incitement to imminent violence" is a new "test of consequences," then this is nothing but an invitation to stage Muslim "Days of Rage" following the slightest perceived offense by a Western blogger, instructor, or radio show guest, all of whom will be held legally liable for "causing" the destruction, possibly even if what they've said is merely a statement of fact. The implications of such prior restraint on free speech would be chilling (which is precisely the point).
Jaw-Dropping Submission to Islamic Law
As we saw in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, this is exactly what the Obama administration dutifully asserted, echoed within days by an international network comprised of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, and a procession of OIC member state leaders -- plus the President of the United States himself -- who made their respective ways to the microphones of the UN General Assembly a couple of weeks later to demand strict limits on free speech and expression. In a jaw-dropping obeisance to the Islamic Law on slander, Obama declared in his UN speech that "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."
Free speech has not been legislated away in the U.S. just yet, but it is headed in that direction. 2011 was a pivotal year for the First Amendment. As momentum built for an overhaul of U.S. government training curriculum on the topic of Islamic terrorism, driven by pressure from Muslim Brotherhood front-groups and affiliates, such as the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] and the Muslim Public Affairs Council [MPAC], enablers of Sharia in the left-wing media, such as Wired magazine's Spencer Ackerman, clamored for changes in FBI training about Islam. No doubt buoyed by that clamor, on October 19, 2011, a collection of 57 signatories, representing the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups, sent a letter to John Brennan, then the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and Deputy National Security Advisor, listing their supposed "grievances," mostly relating to feelings of "offense," along with a list of demands. Among these demands were:
1. Review all trainers and training materials at government agencies, including all FBI intelligence products used such as the FBI intranet, FBI library and JTTF training programs; US Attorney training programs; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Defense, and US military intranet, libraries and training materials, resources and experts;
2. Purge all federal government training materials of biased materials;
3. Implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training;
4. Ensure that personnel reviews are conducted and all trainers and other government employees who promoted biased trainers and training materials are effectively disciplined;
Texas Joins Afghanistan as One of Worst Places to be a Woman
In the tradition of Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan comes … Texas!
Click here for the Texas story; and here, for the other worst places to be a woman.
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