The Obama administration has decided that while the Jews of the Middle East must put up with genocidally anti-Semitic barbarian Jihadis directly upon their doorstep, the United States has every right to bomb their ideological brothers half a world away, despite the fact that the Islamic State poses no direct threat to the United States.The hypocrisy could hardly be more glaring.
It was the Obama administration, in the figure of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that inserted itself between the IDF and Hamas in the 2012 heinous go-around, known as Pillar of Defense, thereby ensuring that Hamas would live to fight another day... as it just did. This decision resulted in the deaths of thousands of Gazans even as it bolstered the influence of political Islam. And despite the fact that the western-left and its allies in the PLO and Fatah condemn Israel for committing a "genocide" in Gaza, the Gazan's themselves declare victory!
The Gazans and the other local Arabs cannot declare that Israel has committed a genocide upon them even as they rejoice in victory. Someone needs to let them know that it simply does not work that way. Hamas and its western allies need to get their stories straight if they wish for anyone who cares about rationality, not to mention Israel, to take them the least little bit seriously.
Responding to Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech before the United Nations, US State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki made it very clear that if Israel wishes to defend its citizenry from Jihadi attack it will receive only pro forma support from the Obama administration, if that. In fact, as we have seen in the last two Gaza engagements, the Obama administration pressured Israel to spare the Islamists from the natural and foreseeable consequences of their own racist aggression against the Jews.
Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Michelle Malka Grossman, tells us this:
The U.S. State Department said Monday in a press conference that it disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assertion during his UN speech on Monday that “ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree.”Of course, it is a fact.
“Obviously, we’ve designated both as terrorist organizations, but ISIL poses a different threat to Western interests and to the United States,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “And that’s just a fact.”
There is simply no question that Hamas and the Islamic State pose different threats to "Western interests" and the United States than they do to Israel. Hamas poses a direct and immediate threat to Israelis, including Muslim and Christian Israelis, while the Islamic State is primarily a security irritant to the United States and to "Western interests." Hamas is right next door to Israel and Gazans favor genocidal violence against Jews, while the head-choppers in the Islamic State have to mainly content themselves with slaughtering other Muslims because they have little capacity to get at Americans, or Israeli Jews, who do not come to them.
The real problem, however, remains Obama's failure to square the Jihadi circle.
The Obama administration favored the Muslim Brotherhood, while opposing al-Qaeda. It defended Hamas twice, by demanding Israeli ceasefires, yet it bombs the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And it had, from the beginning, a schizophrenic view on the rise of political Islam. It continues to suggest that there are somewhat reasonable Jihadis, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and entirely bad Jihadis, like al-Qaeda.
This is false, yet in Ynet we read the following:
Psaki also rejected Netanyahu's assertion that Hamas, ISIS, Iran, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and other militant Islamist groups all want the same thing – a Muslim caliphate dominating the world.Obama believes in good Islamists and bad Islamists. But the fact of the matter is that all of these groups wish to impose al-Sharia upon all of us and that means the caliphate. It means all non-Muslims as servile dhimmis, all women as servants, and all openly Gay people as dead.
Even as I write this Islamists are chasing Christians out of the Middle East .
The fact is, Benjamin Netanyahu is correct and Barack Obama and his Department of State are mistaken. While Obama keeps trimming Jihadis, like the Brotherhood, into the "reasonable" camp, Netanyahu, as someone who lives in the region, understands that while the desire to impose al-Sharia may take different shapes and forms throughout that part of the world, it is unquestionably part of the same violently racist and sexist theocratic project that all liberals and "progressives" should oppose.
Meanwhile, as the Jihad arrives in America, the Obama administration and its friends in the mainstream media pretend that the recent head-chopping in Oklahoma was merely a case of "work place violence." It was, we are to believe, something akin to the popular non-sectarian 1990s fad of "going postal," except with a brand-spanking-new, emphatically non-Islamist twist to it... just for spice.
In a piece for the Washington Post by Mark Berman entitled, After a beheading in Oklahoma, debate over what to call it, we read:
Yet these officials also said that the FBI had found no link to terrorism. They also said there was no indication that Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria carried out by the Islamic State. Instead, the officials said, they are treating this as an incident of workplace violence.The FBI found no link to terrorism.
Did Nolen not screech Alahu Akbar loud enough as he brutally separated Colleen Hufford's head from the rest of her body before her horrified and flabbergasted co-workers? Head-chopping is a form of theocratically-based ritual murder associated with the Jihad. We all know this. It goes back to the Koran and its injunction to follow "the Prophet" in all manners of behavior and we all know what a fan of head-chopping Muhammad was.
We also know that Nolen was a convert into the faith and that he extolled the virtues of Holy War on his Facebook page. To pretend that this grotesque act of Jihad was anything other than Jihad is to be either dishonest or ideologically blinded.
This was not only an act of Jihad, it may be the very first high-profile Jihadi head-chopping in the history of the United States. We've seen Jihadi head-chopping in Europe for awhile, now, and Jihadi-style head-chopping in the Middle East is something of a national sport, but Americans aren't so familiar with this particular religious-political tradition. Neither are Canadians, nor Australians, I feel reasonably certain.
The problem, of course, is that because we are all so terrified of words like "racist" or "Islamophobe" we tend to keep our mouths shut and just look the other way. We just whistle past the proverbial graveyard. To be a counter-jihadi in the United States takes bravery because one's reputation will always be dragged through the mud by politically-correct cowards and there is always some chance of violence coming at you from out of the blue. To be a counter-Jihadi in Europe, on the other hand, is to risk one's life entirely. The example of Theo van Gogh is lost on no one and while the Jihadi who killed him failed to take his head, it was not for lack of trying.
All through the Clinton years I assumed that talk of terrorism and Jihad was just so much political smoke and blather and primarily right-wing political smoke and blather, at that.
Prior to 9/11 I considered Osama bin Laden to be a living contemporary equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein, the target of George Orwell's famous two minutes of hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even after 9/11 I was part of the American ten percent who still despised George W. Bush as a populist con-man in a cowboy hat.There comes a point, however, wherein we must acknowledge the obvious.
The obvious in this case comes in several packages. In one package we have the obvious fact that Islamism is the single most significant rising political movement in the world today and it has taken over large swaths of the Middle East, even as it nurtures our newly home-grown, lone Jihadis like Alton Nolen. In another package we have the ugly, but also obvious fact that president Obama actively assisted the rise of political Islam when he threw his weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
In doing so he legitimized the Jihad.
I, as a former Democrat who voted for him in 2008, will not forgive him for it.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.