Crisis In Egypt Underscores The Problem Of Islam – AND LIBERALISM

It has rightly been said that Islam is a murderous totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.

That fact makes an “Islamic democracy” a contradiction in terms.  You simply cannot have both.  If you want a democracy, you cannot have Islam; if you want Islam, you cannot have a democracy.

If you have a large population of Muslims living in a country, there are only two alternatives for governing that state: a totalitarian dictatorship, which is what we essentially have seen in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, or a religious theocracy such as we see in Iran today.

Even alleged counterexamples, such as Turkey, are transforming.  Turkey is steadily becoming “less Europe, and more Islam.”  And I believe – primarily as a student of Bible prophecy – that Turkey will ultimately end up in the Islamic column.  It will ultimately be one of the Islamic nations that attacks Israel in the last days.

Jordan, which is at least less thuggish than most other Islamic countries, is reaping the whirlwind of Islamic unrest just as Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Algeria.

Democracy becomes nothing but a tool for radical Islam – which itself utterly despises democracy.  Tayyip Erdogan compared democracy to a bus, saying, “You ride it to your destination, and then you step off.”

Other Muslims are even more crystal clear: Tarek Ramadan states:

“We must exploit the so-called democracy and freedom of speech here in the West to reach our goals.  Our Prophet Muhammad … and the Quran teach us that we must use every conceivable means and opportunity to defeat the enemies of Allah.  Tell the infidels in public, we respect your laws and your constitutions, which we Muslims believe that these are as worthless as the paper they are written on.  The only law we must respect and apply is the Sharia’s.”

Imams in England say, “You have to live like a state within a state until you take over.”  And Mohamed Akram says of America, Muslims “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”  While Omar Ahmad says, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant … The Quran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

For the record, I found all the above quotes from Tulsaworld.com.  And of course there are a million more where those came from.

We have a problem.  We want the world to benefit from democracy.  We want to spread the superiority of democracy as a political system.  We want to benefit from the fact that no democracy has ever once attacked another democracy.

But Muslims take our democracy, pervert it and exploit it for their own ideological advantage with a very radically different political system in mind.  And we tolerate this why?

One of the things that makes Islam so dangerous is that it puts itself and it’s prophet Muhammad above and beyond questioning or criticism.  As a case in point, the Danish cartoons revealed that the entire Muslim world will go berserk and literally become murderous over even the slightest “slights.”  Compare the Danish cartoons to the routine insults suffered by Christianity, such as placing a crucifix bearing an image of Christ in a jar of urine and calling it “art.”  That mindset represents the death of even the possibility of a free society.

Liberalism and secular humanism merely weakens our own society and makes us more ripe for the picking: to begin with, liberals react through their cultural relativism (e.g., “pluralism,” “multiculturalism”) by essentially saying, “We must not offend.”  And they proceed to actually help the radical Muslim extremists impose their system.  Liberal media routinely attack Jesus Christ and Christianity, but they are only all too willing to self-censor themselves when it comes to Muhammad and Islam.

And yet Christianity brought us the democracy liberals claim to love, while Islam is antithetical to it.  Liberals are literally helping radical Muslims poison the tree of democracy and freedom.

There’s more.  One of the reasons we so frequently see liberals enabling radical Islam is because it turns out that liberals and the sorts of radical Muslims I have already introduced share the same tactics.

Case in point: three quotes from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

• The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. …the essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. — P.36-37

• …The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.  Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

• …the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

You look at what the Muslims are saying above, and you look at what liberal Saul Alinsky is saying here, and they are advocating identical tactics, with basically the same goal in mind: Muslims want sharia, with total power over a government that itself has total power; and liberals want control over a big government system which extends over every sphere of life.  And both say, “make the enemy live up to their own rules.”  Let’s take advantage of their morality and use it against them as a weapon.

And, of course, when Muhammad was weak (e.g., his Mecca phase), Islam was tolerant and peaceful; when Muhammad’s forces became strong (his Medina phase), Islam suddenly became profoundly intolerant, determined to impose itself and determined to use as much force as was necessary to attain its ends.  That is exactly what the American political left says.  And the only thing that that American liberals are truly intolerant of is Christianity and political conservatism.

And what is even more frightening is that America today actually has a president who actually lectured and taught from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a community organizer.  As Discover The Networks points out, “For several years, Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method. Also, beginning in the mid-1980s, Obama worked with ACORN, the Alinskyite grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley‘s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).”

Part of this idea of using your opponent’s own morality against them turns into the strength of radical Islam and the weakness of liberalism when the two confront one another.  As one example, think of Jimmy Carter undermining the Shah of Iran – who clearly was a dictator, but a pro-American dictator.  Carter allowed the Shah to be deposed, and got as his reward the Ayatollah and an Iranian theocratic regime that undermined and ultimately deposed Carter via the hostage crisis that played out day after day through the Carter presidency.

And here Obama is apparently doing much the same thing: we find out that Obama has secretly been backing rebels of the Mubarak regime from the Wikileaks papers.

Barack Obama invited the terrorist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood when he gave his speech in Cairo – the very same group that is poised to wreak havoc in that same city today.  And Obama – who is on the record siding with the Egyptian demonstrators against secular tyrant Mubarak – was pointedly absent from siding with the Iranian demonstrators against theocratic tyrant Ahmadinejad.  That contrasted with Obama making statements against Mubarak’s regime such that the Egyptian foreign ministry says  Obama’s words actually “inflame the internal situation in Egypt”  as the situation turns increasingly deadly and more and more signs are being written in English for American media consumption.  Bizarrely, it is almost as if liberals prefer Islamic theocratic tyrants over secular Muslim leaders.

It’s very easy to pooh-pooh thugs like Mubarak or the Shah and denounce their despotism.  But if you take away the thug, what else is there to control a people who will ultimately insist upon an Islamic theocracy?  You roll the dice and take your chances.  And in Islam, the “chances” have a pronounced historic tendency to become anti-American theocracies.  Which become even worse dictatorships then the ones that bleeding-heart liberals decried in the first place.

Liberals decry religion as being anti-democratic, never realizing that it is they – rather than religion – who are profoundly anti-democratic.  A few quotes from the founding fathers whose vision created the first sustained democracy:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
– George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.”
– Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.”
– Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

“Without morals, a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.”
– Charles Carroll (signer of the Constitution), Letter to James McHenry, November 4, 1800

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.”
– Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol III

The Egyptian crisis reveals the problem of Islam:  You cannot have a nation of Muslims without tyranny.  It is only a matter of which form of tyranny you prefer.  Conversely, the same crisis is also revealing the problem of liberalism.  Because as they weaken our Christian religious foundations, the same liberals who would undermine Hosni Mubarak also undermine the very pillars that would enable us to resist the conquest of democracy by Islam.  And they further erode our once great democratic system by employing the very same tactics that our Muslim enemies are using against us.

Obama, How Have You Failed America? Let Me Count The Ways

I can’t get away from Obama’s arrogant boast from last year.  It has just been thoroughly destroyed too many times, in too many ways:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

Let’s examine this on a clause-by-clause basis and see how Obama has fared:

This was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick? Another way to put it is “This was the moment companies dropped their health care coverage so every sick person could one day lay helplessly in their own filth on Medicaid.”

(Fortune) — The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans — coverage they know and prize — will react to the new law’s radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we’re getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation.

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That to go along with ObamaCare now acknowledged to cost FAR more than Democrats falsely said, and along with the fact that this boondoggle has forced businesses to write down billions of profits that could have been used to create jobs.

Good jobs for the jobless? How about any jobs whatsoever for the jobless?  Unemployment was 7.6% when Bush left office.  Obama promised it wouldn’t get over 8% because of his stimulus, but he lied.  And now it’s 9.9% and unlikely to get much lower for a long time to come.

When the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal? Let me just say three words: Gulf of Mexico.  The oceans are rising due to millions and millions of gallons of oil that Obama has done nothing to even slow down.  I mean, my God: it took him like six weeks to even tell us that he was responsible.

This was the moment when we ended a war? How about this was the moment when we tried to take credit for George Bush ending a war? Just what war has Obama ended?  The general in command in Afghanistan says its a “bleeding ulcer” over there, and that “nobody’s winning.”  So it’s probably not that war.  And it’s hard to imagine he’s talking about North and South Korea, given the fact that those countries are on the verge of total war in a situation that has gone to hell during his misrule.  Nor is it likely he’s talking about Iran, given the fact that his fool policy that even his own Secretary of State once openly mocked as “irresponsible and frankly naive” has completely fallen apart, and now Iran can build nuclear weapons any time it wants to.

And secured our nation? Oh, yeah.  You’ve done a hell of a good job on that one, Barry Hussein:

Washington (CNN) — For the first time in nearly four years, a majority of Americans think that a terrorist attack is likely to occur somewhere in the United States in the next few weeks, according to a new national poll. . . .

Fifty-five percent of people questioned say an act of terrorism in the U.S. over the next few weeks is likely, up 21 points from last August. Forty-three percent said such an attack is not likely, down 21 points from August. . . .

The survey’s release comes one day after the Obama administration released its first National Security Strategy, a 52-page outline of the president’s strategic approach and priorities on battling terrorism.

And now here’s the very last one, tumbling into the toilet like the turd-in-chief is tumbling in the polls:

And restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.  Here’s what Obama’s “restoration of America’s image” actually looks like:

Japan’s prime minister resigns over Okinawa base
By Mari Yamaguchi The Associated Press
Posted: 06/01/2010 07:52:12 PM PDT

TOKYO – Embattled Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Wednesday he was resigning over his broken campaign promise to move a U.S. Marine base off the southern island of Okinawa.

The prime minister had faced growing pressure from within his own party to resign ahead of July’s upper house elections. His approval ratings had plummeted over his bungled handling of the relocation of the Marine Air Station Futenma, reinforcing his public image as an indecisive leader.

Or let me put it this way: “You have restored America’s image, Mister President Obama-san.  We now revere your country as never before due to your most wonderful greatness.  Now will you please take all your American crap and your American prestige and get the hell out of our country?  It is only because we honor YOU so much, Obama-san, that we want America the hell out of Okinawa after being here for 65 years.”

“We had so much contempt for Bush – you see, we don’t even call him Bush-san – that we allowed America to remain during his presidency.  It is only because of our profound and deep admiration of you that we are kicking your ass to the curb now, Obama-san.  You are last, best, greatest hope on earth, Obama-san.  Now please not to let door hit your skinny ass on way out.”

So let’s tally up: fail until we die of socialist health care, fail big time until our unemployment benefits run out, fail all over the Gulf of Mexico and likely all over Florida and then the East Coast, fail until we cut and run, fail while getting ready for the next massive terrorist attack, and, finally, fail ingloriously all over the world.

I know, I know: I didn’t tell the truth.  I’m nowhere NEAR through with the list of all the ways that Obama has completely failed America.  Obama has failed to control spending as our deficit soars like a rocket ship.  Obama has failed to secure our financial system as our banks have closed at MORE THAN DOUBLE THE RATE OF LAST YEAR.  Obama has failed to act on illegal immigration.  Etcetera.  Etcetera.  Obama has failed his own rhetoric.  Obama has just failed, period.  Obama has even failed to kick his smoking habit.

Let me try to paraphrase Obama’s speech above in a way that properly corrects the record:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to realize that we had the absolute suckiest president in our nation’s entire history at the very time we needed a good one the most.

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Obama ‘believes that words are a substitute for reality’

Newt Gingrich gave the following sober assessment of Barack Obama:

“It’s a nice fantasy. It sounds good. It would be wonderful. It just doesn’t fit this particular planet. And, over here you have North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Al-Qaeda and a whole host of potential enemies…

I think if you were to say, “He’s potentially the most dangerous because he completely misunderstands reality.” …You get an embrace if you are Hugo Chavez. You get acceptance if you’re Ahmadinejad in Iran. But, if you’re an American ally, somehow you’re not acceptable. He can bully you.

And, I think this is a typical pattern on the left. Jimmy Carter did it to some extent. The other thing that Obama does on a scale that Carter never dreamed of, is he believes, maybe because he believes in his own rhetoric… He believes that words are a substitute for reality.

Youtube:

I wrote a 3-part series on postmodernism and the danger it poses to Western civilization:

How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 1)
How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 2)
How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 3)

That final assessment by Gingrich – “He believes that words are a substitute for reality” – couldn’t be more spot-on.  And it literally is the quintessence of postmodernism.

Postmodernists base their relativism and the view that all meaning is socially constructed on a particular view of language taken from a literary technique known as “deconstruction.”  As such, they begin with the assumption that language cannot render truths about the world in any kind of objective way.  On their view, language, by its very nature, shapes what we think.  And since language is a cultural creation, meaning must be nothing more than a social construction.  Thus, for postmodern linguists, the very meaning of words constitutes a self-contained system.  Words merely refer to other words.  And as human beings, we are unable to step outside of the boundaries, limits, or demands of language.  And since language is bound up within culture, it is therefore largely beyond our control, and we can’t even think for ourselves.

Postmodernists believe there is no objective meaning, no realm of absolute truth, that exist beyond the bounds of human language.  As a postmodern slogan puts it, “We are incarcerated in a prison house of language.”  And our language thinks for us.

Thus you understand how a Barack Obama believes that words are a substitute for reality.  On his view, what else is there but words?

Postmodernists along with deconstructionists view meaning as a social construct, which is to say that societies construct meaning through language.  But they also view societies as inherently oppressive.  They draw upon Frederich Nietzsche, who contended that human life and culture are only expressions of an innate will to power.  They draw upon Karl Marx, who reduced culture to economic class conflict and exploitation.  And they draw upon Sigmund Freud, who interpreted culture in terms of sexual and gender repression.  Postmodernists assume that the true significance of culture lies beneath the surface, and that institutions are really simply “masks” for a sinister conspiracy.

Modern liberalism is every bit an offshoot of postmodernism.  Take one of the most powerful tools of liberalism, “political correctness.”  Being politically correct is not simply an attempt to make people feel better.  It’s a large, coordinated effort to change Western culture as we know it by  redefining it. Early Marxists and fascists designed their postmodern takeover long ago and continue to execute that plan to this day: to control the argument by controlling the “acceptable” language. Those with radical agendas have been taking advantage of an oversensitive and frankly overly gullible public for decades.

This is where the fundamental elitism of postmodernism rears its ugly head.  They believe that all of the above is true for everyone else.  But they alone have the intellect, the courage, the foresight, and the academic tools to decipher the codes and understand language and culture.  They are the priests who can get beyond the limits they ascribe to all other human beings.

And so they alone have the right to rule the world.

It should be obvious why this point of view has been so dangerous every single time it has been imposed in history.

My response to all this is agreement with George Orwell, who once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Obama believes that he can “fundamentally transform” reality with his words.  And yes, in agreement with Newt Gingrich, that makes him a profoundly naive and ultimately incredibly dangerous fool.

Hillary Clinton Tacitly Acknowledges Obama Administration Has Failed With Iran

Remember a shameless Bill Clinton telling us “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” as he tried to wriggle out of his lies?

He won politically, as he was able to remain Liar-in-Chief.  But he lost factually, as he was deemed unfit to practice law, and had to surrender his law license.

There’s a joke that goes, “What do you call a million attorneys at the bottom of the ocean?  A good start.”  Well, Bill Clinton proved himself to be such a weasel that he wasn’t even fit to pursue the weasel’s favorite profession.

Well, the meaning is considerably more clear with Bill’s wife’s repeated usage of participles.  As in, “Iran is becoming a military dictatorship”; as in “Iran is sliding into a military dictatorship”; as in “an ever-dimming outlook for persuading Iran”; as in “Iran is increasingly dominated by the Revolutionary Guard Corps”; as in this increasing decision-making (by the Revolutionary Guard)”; as in “in effect supplanting the government of Iran.”

As in, words and their tenses are actually important.  All this “becoming” and “sliding” and “ever-dimming” and “supplanting” is in the tense of the present active participle.  Which is to say that it didn’t occur in the past while George Bush was president; it is something that is happening right now, under the failed presidency and the failed foreign policy of Barack Obama.

Clinton: Iran is becoming a military dictatorship
By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer Robert Burns, Ap National Security Writer   – 1 hr 21 mins ago

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday Iran is sliding into a military dictatorship, a new assessment suggesting a rockier road ahead for U.S.-led efforts to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

As the first high-level Obama administration official to make such an accusation, Clinton was reflecting an ever-dimming outlook for persuading Iran to negotiate limits on its nuclear program, which it has insisted is intended only for peaceful purposes. The U.S. and others — including the two Gulf countries Clinton visited Sunday and Monday — believe Iran is headed for a nuclear bomb capability. […]

Earlier in the day, in Doha, Qatar, Clinton spoke bluntly about Iranian behavior and what she called the Obama administration’s view of Iran as increasingly dominated by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. […]

The Revolutionary Guard has long been a pillar of Iran’s regime as a force separate from the ordinary armed forces. The Guard now has a hand in every critical area, including missile development, oil resources, dam building, road construction, telecommunications and nuclear technology.

It also has absorbed the paramilitary Basij as a full-fledged part of its command structure — giving the militia greater funding and a stronger presence in Iran’s internal politics.

“The evidence we’ve seen of this increasing decision-making (by the Revolutionary Guard) cuts across all areas of Iranian security policy, and certainly nuclear policy is at the core of it,” Clinton told reporters flying with her from Doha to Saudi Arabia.

Asked if the U.S. was planning a military attack on Iran, Clinton said “no.”

The United States is focused on gaining international support for sanctions “that will be particularly aimed at those enterprises controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, which we believe is in effect supplanting the government of Iran,” she said. […]

Private U.S. experts on the Iranian regime said they agreed with Clinton’s assessment of Iran’s drift toward military dominance.

“When you rely on the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to remain in power it is only a matter of time before the regime becomes a paramilitary dictatorship — and it is about time we realize this,” Iranian-born Fariborz Ghadar, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an e-mail to The AP. He said the current regime is “beholden to the Revolutionary Guard for its survival.”

Ray Takeyh, a former administration adviser on Iran who now follows Iranian developments from the private Council on Foreign Relations, said by e-mail, “The Revolutionary Guards are increasingly represented in all aspects of governance.”

Clinton told reporters it appears the Revolutionary Guard is in charge of Iran’s controversial nuclear program and the country changing course “depends on whether the clerical and political leadership begin to reassert themselves.”

She added: “I’m not predicting what will happen but I think the trend with this greater and greater military lock on leadership decisions should be disturbing to Iranians as well as those of us on the outside.”

Clinton said the Iran that could emerge is “a far cry from the Islamic Republic that had elections and different points of view within the leadership circle. That is part of the reason that we are so concerned with what we are seeing going on there.”

In her Doha appearance, Clinton also said she foresees a possible breakthrough soon in stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“I’m hopeful that this year will see the commencement of serious negotiations that will cover every issue that is outstanding,” she said, adding that “everyone is anticipating” progress after more than a year of impasse between the negotiating parties. […]

And we have a clue as to how “hopey changey” relates to Obama foreign policy:

From Secretary Clinton: “I’m hopeful that this year will see the commencement of serious negotiations that will cover every issue that is outstanding,” she said, adding that “everyone is anticipating” progress after more than a year of impasse between the negotiating parties.

And a Haaretz article provides us with more “hope n’ change”:

We have Vice President Biden: “Referring to U.S.-led effort to force new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, Biden told Meet the Press on Sunday that he hoped to recruit China’s support to the campaign.”

We have JCS Chairman Admiral Mullen: “He added that he still hoped a solution could be found through diplomacy and sanctions, and that there would not be a regional war.”

I am personally very hopeful that magic unicorns will fly over Iran and melt the mullahs’ heart with their rainbow sprinkles.  And my hope for change is no less ridiculous than the three above.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy is so desperately failed that they are now incredibly trying to claim credit for the Bush victory in Iraq which they did everything they could to prevent.

Thirteen months and counting, Barry Hussein has still not lived up to his promise of personally sitting down with the Ayatollah without preconditions and discussing why the latter wants to exterminate the state of Israel as a precursor to destroying the “Great Satan” America.

Barry Hussein’s foreign policy was so shockingly bad and so woefully pathetic that even then-candidate for president Hillary Clinton said he was “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

But now “naive and irresponsible” is the law of the land.  And Obama’s Good Ship Lollipop is steaming toward a nuclear-armed Iranian rogue regime.

As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Iran is now a nuclear state.” Which shortly follows their demonstration that they are well on their way to being an intercontinental ballistic missile state to deliver their nukes, too.

French President Sarkozy said that we haven’t gained anything whatsoever from Obama’s “irresponsible and frankly naive” policy of dialogue with Iran “but more enriched uranium and centrifuges.”

He has also said, ““We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

But not in Hopey Changey Land.

There wasn’t a single carbon-based conservative on the planet who didn’t say that Obama’s irresponsible and naive policy would utterly fail.  And surprise, surprise, it’s utterly failed.

You mark my words.  Due to Barack Obama’s irresponsible, naive, and failed leadership, Iran WILL obtain nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them.  And as a result of Iran’s successful defiance of Obama, the Sunni Arab world WILL develop their own nuclear weapons and ignite a terrifying new nuclear arms race in the most insane region in the history of the planet.

In addition to that terrifying outcome, Iran will have the capability to do any of the following:

1) Start a global nuclear holocaust in order to force the appearance of the Twelfth Imam.  Mutually Assured Destruction may very well play no part in the Iranian leaderships’ apocalyptic worldview.

2) Invade Israel with their nuclear weapons as a protective shield against Israel’s “Samson option.”  Iran would have numerous Islamic allies to attack with them.

3) Shut down the Strait of Hormuz and send oil prices (and therefore the cost of just about everything else that requires energy to produce) into the stratosphere.

4) Massively increase global terrorism with impunity.  If Iranian-trained or based jihadists manage another massive 9/11, what will we do if going to war will mean the destruction of several U.S. cities and millions of dead Americans?

Allow me to restate something I wrote back in April of 2008 (and cited again in December of last year):

A President John McCain can assure the Iranians, “We attacked Iraq when we believed they represented a threat to us, and we will do the same to you. You seriously might want to rethink your plans.” A President John McCain can say to Sunni Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, “We have stood by Iraq even when it was difficult, and we will do the same for you. You don’t need those weapons; the United States will be there for you.”

Barack Obama can’t do any of that.  He won’t go to war with Iran to stop their nuclear weapons program (did you notice Hillary Clinton’s “NO” to the question whether the US was planning any sort of attack?).  He can’t assure Arab allies that they can completely count on him to protect them.  And he is therefore completely powerless and completely useless.

Liberals will naturally (being deceitful, dishonest, and demagogic) want to blame George Bush for not dealing with Iran.  But an article from the Los Angeles Times from December of 2007 underscores why Bush was not able to mobilize America against the building Iranian threat.  In a word, it was DEMOCRATS:

“DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.”

George Bush believed Iran was a threat that needed to be confronted.  Democrats like Barack Obama shrilly screamed him down.  This is therefore genuinely Barry Hussein’s mess, and it has become increasingly obvious that doesn’t have the stones to handle it.

America’s failure to wisely choose its 44th president leaves us in the greatest crisis we have ever known, both domestically and internationally.

And when the fecal matter hits the rotary oscillator, there won’t be anybody to bail us out.

Iran, Iraq, and the Future in Bible Prophecy

The huge demonstrations protesting the election issues in Iran put that country on the front pages of every newspaper.

For nearly two weeks, demonstrations have raged.  Early on, some said that they didn’t know what would happen as to whether the protests would succeed in overthrowing the regime, but most recognized that the endgame was a foregone conclusion: the regime has the tanks, the guns, and the military.  It was only a question as to whether how far things might get before they used them.

As it stands, they won’t have to, as an AP article entitled “Intensified crackdown mutes protests in Iran” indicates.  While the demonstrations might well briefly flare up again (presidential candidate Mousavi has said he would appear at a demonstration on the 24th), there has never been any serious question that the theocratic regime would stand.

The serious question that remains is, stand as what?  Will it become a more open society, more willing to seriously interact with the Western world, or will it become more hostile and more determined to pursue a violent agenda in the coming months?

Based on the prophecies in the Bible, and based on my own belief that we are entering the last days, my view is that Iran will become more hostile and violent as it is increasingly isolated in the Western world.  Furthermore, my view is that it will engage in an increasingly close alliance/partnership with Russia and with other Islamic Arab and African states.

It is important to realize that the Iranian Constitution (Article Five) is inherently apocalyptic in nature.  The still-revered Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 proclaimed that the basis for Iran’s constitution and its government would be the authority of the Hidden (or Twelfth) Imam.  This apocalyptic figure has been called the ‘expected one,’ (al—Muntazar), the ‘promised one’ (al—Mahdi’), or the ‘hidden one,’ (al—Mustatir) in the Shi’a tradition.

The threats of impending destruction of Israel and even of war against the United States have been issued in the name of this Twelfth Imam who will (according to Iranian/Shi’a Islam) come in the last days.

According to the tradition, the Hidden Imam was taken into hiding by Allah and kept there until he reappears in the last days to purify the umma and take the world for Islam.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many others in the Iranian leadership passionately hold to the coming of the Hidden Imam.  That in itself is not necessarily frightening: Shi’ite orthodoxy has it that humans are powerless to encourage the Twelfth Imam to return.  However, in Iran a group called the Hojjatieh believe that humans can stir up chaos and violence to encourage him – even force him – to return.  And Ahmadinejad is at least a former member, and quite likely a current member of this sect.  When Ahmadinejad became president, $17 million was spent on the Jamkaran mosque, which is central to the Hojjatieh movement.  And it is even more frightening when such a man sitting as President of Iran claims to have a direct link to God.

And Dr. Serge Trifkovic has said this regarding Ahmadinejad’s theology/eschatology:

Ahmadinejad, by contrast, shares with Trotsky an apocalyptic world outlook. He favors direct action in pursuit of a permanent Islamic revolution that will pave the way for the return of the Hidden Imam, pave it with blood, sweat and tears. Indeed he’d like to speed things up, as you point out, and implicitly he hopes to achieve this by twisting the arm of the Almighty – no less so than the cloners of red heifers and would-be re-builders of the Temple hope to do as a means of speeding up the Rupture. The fact that he is more sincere in his beliefs and more earnest in his endeavors than the kleptocrats of the House of Saud are in theirs, is alarming but unsurprising. He is a visionary; they are Machiavellian cynics.

A much-more detailed analysis that comes to much the same conclusion about Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic vision is available via FrontPage Magazine.

Mind you, re-building the Temple or cloning a red heifer are scarcely the source of inherently cataclysmic activities that many too many Shiite Muslims are pursuing.

So when one considers Iran, under such leadership, to be dedicated to the acquisition of nuclear weapons after stating that Israel should be “wiped out from the map” – and with the current Ayatollah Khamenei stating that Israel is a “cancerous tumor” on the verge of collapse – well, one should be very worried.  Wiping out Israel in a fiery blaze of atomic glory would indeed be a way to create the holocaust that would prompt the return of the long-awaited Hidden Imam (if anything ever could).

Clearly Jews understand this, as 1 in 4 would seriously consider leaving the country if Iran succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons.  Given that such an event would literally mean the end of the state of Israel even if Iran didn’t nuke them, Israel has little choice but to attack Iran’s nuclear capability (since – clearly – no one else will).

Would Israelis hold back from a planned attack of Iran if they believed the United States would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?  Probably.  But the problem is, they clearly don’t believe that any more.  And they certainly no longer believe that America under Barack Hussein Obama is on their side.  When George Bush was president, fully 88% of Israeli Jews believed the president was “pro-Israel”; today under Obama, only 31% of Israeli Jews think so.

Such an event, of hated Israel swooping into an Islamic country to destroy their Russian-built nuclear facilities, would itself be a likely cataclysmic event.  Do you even dare to imagine how the Islamic world would react?  And realize that just such an event is very likely coming – and coming all-too soon.

Now Vice President Joe Biden predicted that Barack Obama would be “tested” by an “international crisis” that would test his mettle.  He went on to say:

I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’ We’re gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you’re going to have to reinforce us.”“There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don’t know about that decision’,” Biden continued. “Because if you think the decision is sound when they’re made, which I believe you will when they’re made, they’re not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they’re popular, they’re probably not sound.”

Joe Biden quickly turned his discussion of this international crisis and Barack Obama’s seeming poor handling of said crisis to politics and the hopes of Democrats.  But Iran obtaining nuclear weapons won’t be about politics; it will be about Armageddon.

Frighteningly, Barack Obama’s very own VP has said that Barack Obama is most certainly not ready for what may very well prove to be the most terrifying crisis in human history:

“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden,” McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said in a written statement, according to CNN. “Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be president.”

Biden frequently raised questions about Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience during the primaries. “I think he can be ready, but right now, I don’t believe he is,” Biden said during one debate. “The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”

North Korea looms large, and may loom far larger in the days soon-to-come.  But a nuclear Iran is an even more terrifying prospect.  You’ll see.

As I turn to Iraq – and then to how Iraq relates to Iran in the context of Bible prophecy – allow me to first discuss Joel Rosenberg.

A Wikipedia article on Joel Rosenberg probably provides the most concise summary (accessed June 23, 2009):

Rosenberg’s novels have attracted those interested in Bible Prophecy, due to several of his fictional elements of his books that would occur after his writing of books. Nine months before the September 11th attacks, Rosenberg wrote a novel with a kamikaze plane attack on an American city. Five months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he wrote a novel about war with Saddam Hussein, the death of Yasser Arafat eight months before it occurred, a story with Russia, Iran, and Libya forming a military alliance against Israel occurring the date of publishing,^[7] the rebuilding of the city of Babylon,^[12] Iran vowing to have Israel “wiped off the face of the map forever” five months before Iranian President Ahmadinejad said the same,^[13] and the discovery of huge amounts of oil and natural gas in Israel (which happened in January 2009).^[14] The U.S. News & World Report have referred to him as a “Modern Nostradamus,”^[15] although Rosenberg tries to play down those proclamations, stating that “I am not a clairvoyant, a psychic, or a ‘Modern Nostradamus,’ as some have suggested.”^[16] He gives the credit for his accurate predictions to studying Biblical prophecy and applying to the modern world.^[16]

Why did Rosenberg predict that there would be a “kamikaze plane attack on an American city” by Islamic terrorists?  Because he accurately understood the evil at the heart of Islam.

Why did Rosenberg predict a war between Saddam Hussein and the United States resulting in the overthrow of Saddam and his brutal regime?  That’s where it gets interesting.

Joel Rosenberg had done a thorough study of the Book of Ezekiel and of the Bible (as a couple of overlapping articles summarize – Article 1; – Article 2).  He learned that one day, according to the Bible, a massive army under the leadership of Russia and many of its former republics (Magog) and Iran (Persia) and consisting of many countries that are today Islamic [e.g. “Cush” (modern-day Sudan and Ethiopia); “Put” (modern-day Libya); “Gomer” (modern-day Turkey); “Beth-togarmah” (modern-day Armenia); and many peoples “along the mountains of Israel” (modern-day Lebanon and possibly Syria)] would form an “exceedingly great army” that would one day attack Israel.

What Rosenberg noted was the absence of two countries: Egypt and Babylon (i.e. Iraq).  Egypt had been a perennial enemy of Israel until 1973, when Egypt alone in all the Arab/Muslim world forged a historic peace treaty with the state of Israel.  That left Iraq.  Rosenberg asked himself, “How could a nation like Iraq, under the leadership of someone like Saddam Hussein, NOT participate in this mega-colossal-last-days attack on Israel?

Rosenberg concluded that Saddam Hussein WOULDN’T refrain from such an attack.  And that meant that Saddam Hussein would have to go.

And so, NINE MONTHS before the 9/11 attack, Rosenberg in his “fiction” created a scenario in which terrorists flew a plane in a kamikaze attack, and the United States took out the Iraqi regime and replaced it with a stable Western-friendly government.

And because the Bible is the true Word of an all-knowing God who knows the end from the beginning as revealed through His prophets, the scenario laid out by Joel Rosenberg turned out to be eerily true.  It wasn’t a “lucky guess”; it was based upon the God who had revealed the last days to an inspired prophet named Ezekiel some 2,600 years ago.

Thus we have Iraq, its tyrant who had filled mass graves with the bodies of at least 400,000 of his own people, overthrown and a stable democracy growing in his place.  And we have Iran, a country strongly allied with Russia; a country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons; a country that has announced its intent on the destruction of Israel; a country under the leadership of men who in all likelihood believe in establishing a future by an act of violent apocalypse.  Two countries on two very different paths.  And both paths known to God 2,600 years ago.

International Scholar Ajami Explains How Obama Is Failing Re: Iran

There is no question that Barack Obama has been widely criticized for offering weak statements on a developing Iranian situation with demonstrators literally risking death to protest what they view as a

While women are being gunned down in the streets, Obama has said he doesn’t want to “meddle” in Iran.  While such women and hundreds of thousands of others are demonstrating and even dying for their vote of Mousavi to be counted against the man whom the Iranian mullahs put in power (Ahmadinejad), Obama has publicly claimed that there is no difference between the two.  And while the Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a progressively harsher and more lethal crackdown on his people, Barack Obama has taken the Ayatollah’s side, claiming:

President Barack Obama says he believes supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has deep concerns about the civil unrest that has followed the hotly contested presidential election there.

Obama repeated Tuesday at a news conference his “deep ir own, concerns” about the disputed balloting. He said he believes the ayatollah’s decision to order an investigation “indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns.”

The Iranian Ayatollah really isn’t that bad of a guy.  You heard it from Barack Hussein first.

It’s not a question as to whether Obama has been tepid in his response to the mass demonstrations in Iran; it is OBVIOUS he has been tepid.  To date, he has delivered three statements on Iran — having been forced to make the third, somewhat more strongly-worded statement, as a result of Congress’ display of unity in its resolve to stand with the Iranian people.  His first statement delivered on June 15 was simply pathetically weak.  Pure and simple.   And even the French and the Germans have shown more moral backbone and more moral indignation than Barack Obama.

When a French president displays moral outrage, while an American president displays political appeasement, it is more than a shame: it is an absolute abdication of leadership.  And, even worse, when an American president is behind Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in exhibiting moral courage, it is truly a sign of the last pathetic gasps of a fading republic.

No, the question isn’t whether Obama is being tepid; it’s merely a matter of asking why he is being so incredibly tepid.

The reason, from all accounts, is that Obama (cynically if realistically) expects the Iranian leadership to prevail in this current struggle, and he doesn’t want to antagonize the Iranian regime in a way that might undermine his subsequent efforts at the direct negotiations he campaigned on.  That, and he doesn’t want to be accused by the Iranians of “meddling” when that has already been proven absurd: the Iranians have ALREADY accused us of meddling whether we have been or not.

I would argue that Ronald Reagan’s “meddling” when he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and when he  said, “Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall!” are what is in order.  It isn’t “meddling” to call a spade a spade.  It is hardly “meddling” to decry in the strongest of terms the absence of liberty and freedom in support of a demonstrating people who clearly yearn for them.

We can never know what would have happened had we only done something that we were too timid to do.  It is right to stand with the Iranian people against an evil and unjust system; it is wrong to cynically play realpolitic in the faint hope of having that same evil and unjust system offer a diplomatic bone down the road.

But, getting back to the main point, are Obama’s concerns that he might undermine future negotiations with Iran valid?

I would argue that Obama’s whole project of attaining success through diplomacy with Iran was a fool’s project to begin with.  We are talking about a regime that has based itself for over 30 years on conflict with and opposition to “the Great Satan”, America.

At no time during the Obama presidency have they demonstrated any willingness to cease their efforts toward nuclear weapons.  They simply have no reason to do so.  And there is virtually no reason to believe that Barack Obama will be able to give them one.

By any realistic expectation, Obama’s policy of diplomacy and negotiation with Iran has ALREADY FAILED, as even the New York Times recognizes.  There is nothing left in terms of hopes of future negotiation breakthroughs to hope for.  If nothing else, how is Obama going to personally meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the Ayatollah Khamenei, when the fundamental legitimacy of their government is in such open question?

An insightful article by one of the premier experts on Iran offers insights on precisely how and even why Barack Obama has failed on Iran:

JUNE 22, 2009

Obama’s Persian Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.

By FOUAD AJAMI

President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to “unclench” its fist.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the “diplomacy of freedom” that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran’s rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.

Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: “Good will begets good will,” he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America’s role in the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

Iran’s rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination. The drama of Barack Obama’s election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a son of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary order, a man from the brigades of the regime, austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks — was up for re-election.

The upper orders of his country loathed him and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad’s message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country’s nuclear quest is a “closed file,” settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country’s identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome. We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to “cheat” — an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers’ cynicism and utter disregard for their people’s intelligence and common sense — and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama’s statement that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised” put on cruel display the administration’s incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history’s burden: “Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.” No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the “foreignness” of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice. The Obama administration believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama’s coattails to an electoral victory. (It had given every indication that it expected similar vindication in Iran.)

But the claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon’s politics. That contest was settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.

Mr. Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. I was in Saudi Arabia when Mr. Obama traveled to Riyadh and Cairo. The earth did not move, life went on as usual. There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America’s relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution — and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its “inordinate fear of communism,” and to put aside its concern with “traditional issues of war and peace” in favor of “new global issues of justice, equity and human rights.” We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water.” The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran’s ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama’s Persian tutorial has just begun.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007).

It is more than fitting that, in an article that is ostensibly about Barack Obama’s poor handling of the Iranian election opportunity, Dr. Ajami should begin and end with Jimmy Carter.  Because we truly have seen much of Barack Obama’s native and failed policies before in the person of Jimmy Carter.

The biggest problem facing Barack Obama is that he is viewed – and I believe very rightly – as weak.

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” – and he defeated it without even having to fire a shot simply by forceful and continuous confrontation.  George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea “the axis of evil” – and he defeated one of its members and replaced it with a stable democracy (over Barack Obama’s opposition, by the way).

Barack Obama is viewed by rogue regimes as being unwilling to go to war to stand up for American policy or American values.  He will pursue negotiation and diplomacy come what may – and in so doing allow tyrants to take advantage of the United States.

That is why “North Korea’s Kim Jong Il has challenged President Obama more in four months than he did President George W. Bush in eight years.”

Bottom line: with a Reagan, or with either Bush, dictators knew that there was a point beyond which they dared not go, lest the U.S. unleash its might upon them.  They have no such fear about Barack Obama, and for good reason.

Do American Christians Care About the Iranian Election Demonstrations?

We see you, Iran.

We don’t fully know what to make of what is going on, but we definitely see you.

For one thing, we don’t know for sure if the election that is being protested was fraudulent in the first place.  We know that a pre-election poll from May 11 (three weeks before the election) predicted much the same results that were officially released by Iran: a more than 2-1 victory for Ahmadinejad, with Ahmadinejad even winning in leading contender Moussavi’s home town.

And we don’t know what to make of Mir Hussein Moussavi: a man who took part in the Iranian Revolution that ushered in the rule of the ayatollahs; a man who governed with the full backing of the ayatollahs as Prime Minister; and a man who supported Iran’s nuclear program.  We don’t know that the man who may or may not have been usurped by fraud wouldn’t be better than, as bad as, or worse than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been.

What we DO know is that millions of Iranian demonstrators are out on the streets.

We also know that the Iranian regime is attempting to block the world from seeing these public demonstrations by restricting journalists and blocking demonstrator’s access to media, internet, and cellular sources.

And we know that demonstrators are being beaten and even killed.

The world IS watching, Iran.  And it DOES SEE what is happening.

You do not need to fear that no one knows or cares what is happening.  You do not need to fear that the regime can simply crack down by cracking skulls, and that no one in the rest of the world will care.

If you are living in Iran, you should know: we in America do not support the Iranian theocratic regime.  We do not support the Ayatollahs, and we want to see the “1979 revolution” defeated.

Nor do we support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Or Mir Hussein Moussavi, for that matter.

We do not even necessarily support the Iranian people.

What we DO support is liberty and democracy, not only for the Iranian people, but for ALL people of every race, and of every creed.

Nearly fifty years ago now, President John F. Kennedy said:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

And while America has never perfectly defended liberty, we have always had the best of intentions in trying to defend and spread liberty to the world.

The United States fought against the evils of communism nearly alone.  The war in Vietnam was one battle in the Cold War which we ultimately won.  But in the aftermath of our defeat and withdraw from Indochina, millions were murdered or allowed to starve to death by the communists.  And in the decades that followed, the United States took the side of the oppressed Muslims against the Serbs in Bosnia.  That same United States would later overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had buried at least 400,000 of his own people in mass graves, and help bring about a stable democracy in Iraq.

In the 1980s, Russian dissidents – some of whom were literally being tortured in the gulags – expressed being “overjoyed” when an American president announced that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” which the United States would oppose.  Great dissidents such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Natan Sharansky realized that they were no longer alone against a monstrous system.  That they had powerful allies on the outside who were aware of the crimes going on, and who sided with them against the brutal regime.

When freedom finally came to Poland, after decades of totalitarian control by the U.S.S.R., it turned out to be Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan who had been at the heart of the revolution.

It was Natan Sharansky who called George W. Bush “the dissident president” because of his goal of bringing democracy to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and who predicted Bush would largely fight for democracy in the world alone.

Mr. Sharansky says of his adversaries among the Western intellectual elite: “Those people who are always wrong–they were wrong about the Soviet Union, they were wrong about Oslo [the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal], they were wrong about appeasing Yasser Arafat–they are the intellectual leaders of these battles. So what can I tell you?”

In the same way, the great writer and Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who likewise experienced the gulags, likewise found himself attacked by Western “intellectual” elites after he delivered his great address entitled “A World Split Apart.”  Following that address, the same “Western intellectual elite” that Sharansky would come to deride as “wrong about everything” attacked Solzhenitsyn.

And upon what value system did these great changes occur?

As you seek to throw off the yoke of theocratic oppression by Ayatollahs, allow me to humbly advise you not to sever yourselves from religion or religious principles, however.

It was George Washington who said:

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…  Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
– George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

It might amaze you, Iranian Muslims, that your greatest allies in the West could be Christians.

Christians disagree with Muslims regarding the name and even the nature and purpose of God, but we can agree with any Muslim dissident that there is in fact a transcendent God who created human beings and intended them to have personal freedom, liberty and dignity.

Read Solzhenitsyn address, Iranian people.  Understand what he meant.  His speech excoriated the West for its immorality, materialism, and godlessness.  He affirmed traditional cultures against the all-encompassing mass culture of Western secularism.  He dissected Western materialism and its fixation on comfort and pleasure, which had drained away its capacity for courage and sacrifice.  He deplored the way our laws had been divorced from morality.  And he said, “Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.”

Solzhenitsyn argued that both the communist East and the secularist West suffered from the same spiritual sickness.  And he concluded that, “No one on earth has any way left but – upward.”  Toward God and His transcendent values.  An outraged New York Times editorial summarized the very postmodernism Solzhenitsyn was damning: “He believes himself to be in possession of The Truth” (from “The Obsession of Solzhenitsyn,” New York Times, 13 June 1978).

But Alexandr Solzhenitsyn did have The Truth.  He had found it in the transcendent values of religion.  By contrast, he had NOT found it in Western secularism.

If the people of Iran truly want to throw off the shackles of brutal government control and oppression, we Christians in the West will stand with you.  Because we believe – as the American founding fathers believed – that every human being is created in the image of God, and possesses God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We don’t care who you want for your president.  And we believe you have a right to be Muslims because God gives you the ultimate freedom – along with the ultimate responsibility – to be who you want to be, and to believe what you want to believe.

We care only about a peaceful and democratic Iran, where every citizen has God-ordained liberty and the right to pursue freedom, along with the happiness and prosperity that come with genuine freedom.

And it is as a Christian that I pray for the safety and success of Iranian demonstrators.

Bush, Obama, the Mainstream Media and the Iranian Election Demonstrations

Watching the mainstream media coverage of the demonstrations in Iran following their elections, you would think that the protests have been all about Obama and his Cairo speech delivered on June 4.

Barack Obama appeared to take great credit for whatever would happen when he delivered a rambling answer to a press question about what was happening in Iran prior to the election results being released (and Ahmadinejad being declared the winner):

“Uh, we are excited, uh, to see, uh, what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran. And obviously after the speech, uh, that I made in Cairo, uh, we tried to send a clear message that, uh, we think there is the possibility of change, uhhh, aaaand — ehhh, yuh– oh – Ultimately the election is for the Iranians to decide, but just a-as has been true in Lebanon, uh, what’s, uh — can be true in Iran as well is that you’re seeing, uh, people looking at new, uh, possibilities. And, uh, whoever ends up winning, uh, the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help, uh, advance, uh, our ability to engage them in new ways.”

But there are some major problems with the “Obama’s speech changed the world” thesis:

For one thing, Obama’s speech failed to offer any new changes in American policy. As an example, even PBS’ positive article on the speech confessed:

While President Obama’s speech contained no new policy proposals on the Middle East, he called upon Israelis and Palestinians alike to live up to their international obligations and to work towards a two-state solution.

And with all due respects, it’s not like Obama’s devoid of actual policy change “call” ignited the Islamic world.

Any many Muslims rightly said, “Nice speech, but let’s wait and see what Obama actually does.”

One late night comedic take on the speech a group of terrorists wearing masks and bandoleers of weapons and ammunition listening to Obama’s speech in front of a television. When Obama seemed to say something about offering peace, they got up, “high-fived” one another, and began to take off their weapons. But then, even as they were in the process of taking off their weapons, Obama seemed to say something that went against the grain of his immediately previous statement, so the terrorists shrugged and started putting on their weapons again.

Bottom line: the comedic take ended up with the terrorists still armed with all of their weapons, just as they had been prior to the speech.

Fausta’s blog dealt with some of what was missing from the speech:

1. The word TERRORIST. “Violent extremism” doesn’t happen on its own. It’s done by terrorists.

2. Details on closing Gitmo “by early next year.” Surely Pres. Obama realizes that it’s not enough to say “I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.” Where will those terrorists be sent? What will be the international reaction?

3. A firm position on women’s rights. As Peter Ladou said regarding the tepid language on this issue:

Is that a joke?With women being stoned, raped, abused, battered, mutilated, and slaughtered on a daily basis across the globe, violence that is so often perpetrated in the name of religion, the most our president can speak about is protecting their right to wear the hijab? I would have been much more heartened if the preponderance of the speech had been about how in the 21st century, we CANNOT tolerate the pervasive abuse of our mothers and sisters and daughters.

Most troubling of all, the speech lacked
4. An unequivocal, firm stance on democracy: A “commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people” is not enough. Tyrants since the dawn of history have been summoning the masses to demonstrate their regimes “reflect the will of the people.”

Additionally, the statement, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone” is equivocating on a moral point. America, from its birth, has been a champion of democracy, and should remain stalwart in its position.

Did Obama truly think there was little or no difference between the so-called “glass ceiling” women might find in America with the stonings and mutilations of women all-too common in the Islamic world?

As to this last point, Charles Krauthammer – after citing specific examples of just such moral equivalency from Obama’s speech – says this:

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership, but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Let me offer a rival explanation as to why Iranians are revolting against the results of the elections, even after the Ayatollah “sanctified” the results by claiming the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reflected a “divine assessment.”

How about the hard-fought-for result of an actual democracy in Iraq right next to Iran?

How about the fact that Iranians had the chance to see not one, but now several, freely-held elections with Iraqi people being able to victoriously hold up purple-ink-smudged fingers as proof that they had been able to freely vote for the candidates of their choice?

Just how is it that Obama’s speech is somehow more important than that?

Let’s not forget the fact that neither Barack Obama nor the mainstream media wanted the Iraqi people to be able to freely vote for the candidates of their choice. They opposed the toppling of dictator and tyrant butcher Saddam Hussein – who had murdered at a minimum 400,000 of his own people and buried them in mass graves – having the opportunity to vote that George Bush and the magnificent American military courageously won for them.

And these same people who opposed the establishment of an Iraqi democracy in the heart of the Arab world are now telling you that a damn SPEECH filled with meaningless moral equivalencies and devoid of substance or policy accomplished a change in the heart of the Iranian people?

Seriously?

The mainstream media gleefully covered every death and every failure in Iraq and continued to cover it – until President Bush and the American military began to turn things around. And then the coverage dried up. These dishonest peddlers of propaganda were unwilling to represent the effort in Iraq as successful.

You can go back and find the left predicting in 2003 that “Bush’s declared attempt to introduce democracy in Iraq by force seems set to fail.” In 2005 the naysayers who called hope for democracy in Iraq “the province of fools” abounded. Then you can find media elites in 2006 suggesting that the elections in Iraq are good news, but still not as good as it should have been. Now we have a full-fledged stable democracy in the heart of the Arab world, and it is seemingly irrelevant to whatever positive pro-democracy changes that might be taking place immediately around Iraq.

The mainstream media allowed the Democrat Party to literally cut-and-run from its earlier positions on Iraq without coverage or analysis. Democrats were allowed to be for the deposing of Saddam Hussein before they were against it. Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were allowed to claim “I believe that this war is lost“ while our troops were still fighting on foreign soil to secure victory.

Articles still condemning Bush for Iraq by the mainstream media continue to go for about a dime a dozen, but the Wall Street Journal on January 31st, 2009 offered this far more accurate and honest conclusion:

Say what you want to say about the administrative debacle the situation became after Saddam was ousted, but Saturday’s endeavor is a sign of a better Iraq in a region infested with despots and tightly-gripped political systems, where elections, if allowed, are not that different from those held under Saddam – sham, corrupt and pointless. Arab regimes across the Middle East and Arab people around the world who bristled when they saw Saddam toppled, and later executed — and who may still easily shrug off Iraq’s elections as unconstitutional for being held under U.S. military occupation — have a right to know what it means to have a sense of hope. True, Iraq was safe under the Baath regime and walking in Baghdad at any time of the day felt to me even safer than walking in some parts of New York now, but give me any police state in that region or elsewhere that doesn’t enjoy a relative sense of protection.

The left got to take credit for the good times, and blame Bush for the bad ones. On December 15, 2003, Hillary Clinton crowed upon the capture of Saddam Hussein:

“I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote.”

Hillary Clinton was for that war before she was against it. And the mainstream media – dishonest, deceitful, and disingenuous itself – allowed Hillary Clinton to be dishonest, deceitful, and disingenuous.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, prior to his declaration of defeat in Iraq, had justified the war in 2002 when “being tough” was politically in vogue. On October 9, 2002 he was on the record saying:

“We stopped the fighting [in 1991] on an agreement that Iraq would take steps to assure the world that it would not engage in further aggression and that it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

He was not only allowed to be for that war before he was against it by the media, he was allowed to utter outright treason by declaring a war our troops were still fighting “lost.”

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said on October 10, 2002:

“I come to this debate, Mr. Speaker, as one at the end of 10 years in office on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was one of my top priorities. I applaud the President on focusing on this issue and on taking the lead to disarm Saddam Hussein. … Others have talked about this threat that is posed by Saddam Hussein. Yes, he has chemical weapons, he has biological weapons, he is trying to get nuclear weapons.”

But the mainstream media allowed Nancy Pelosi to get away with the outright moral depravity of attacking President George Bush as a liar when she had publicly held the very same positions herself.

And now we have these same deceitful, dishonest demagogues ignoring the hard-fought accomplishments won under George Bush, and crediting an empty speech as the driving force behind any changes in the Islamic world.

Following the beginnings of the Iranian public demonstrations, even in the aftermath of public statements of condemnation by European leaders, Barack Obama had failed to take a public stand. EVEN FRANCE HAD DISPLAYED MORE COURAGE IN STANDING BEHIND THE IRANIAN PEOPLE THAN OBAMA.

Obama finally provided a weak statement of support for the Iranian people. But it was criticized as being not nearly enough. Finally, he offered a somewhat stronger statement, but only after both the House and the Senate passed strongly-worded resolutions:

Congress voted resoundingly Friday to condemn the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters, sending a strong bipartisan signal to the White House that it wants less caution and more outrage.

Obama hasn’t been at the forefront of democracy for Iran; he has in fact been the Western and American leader most behind on the issue of supporting true democracy in Iran.

But we’re supposed to believe that it was an empty-worded speech from an empty suit on foreign policy that is rocking the Iranian world?

Don’t believe it for a nanosecond.

Iran And The Bomb: What Are We Going To Do?

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program five years ago? A December 2007 Washington Post article cast it this way:

A major U.S. intelligence review has concluded that Iran stopped work on a suspected nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, a stark reversal of previous intelligence assessments that Iran was actively moving toward a bomb.

The new findings, drawn from a consensus National Intelligence Estimate, reflected a surprising shift in the midst of the Bush administration’s continuing political and diplomatic campaign to depict Tehran’s nuclear development as a grave threat. The report was drafted after an extended internal debate over the reliability of communications intercepts of Iranian conversations this past summer that suggested the program had been suspended.

If Iran ever truly did in fact suspend its nuclear weapons program, it did so immediately after – and obviously as a direct result of – the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Understandably Iran didn’t want to be the next country to face the consequences for illegal weapons programs.

When the story came out that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program (the one Iran claimed it never had in the first place), Democrats and liberals immediately pounced all over President Bush’s claim that Iran continued to represent a nuclear weapons threat. President Bush was called a liar, he was called a warmonger, for continuing to describe Iran as a threat. The left openly mocked conservatives for calling for a tough stance against Iran. We didn’t need to worry about Iran, they said.

The Washington Post claimed that Iran was actually ten years from developing the bomb.

Given these reports, liberals made the argument that any “threat” from Iran was theoretical or academic. And President Bush was merely proving that he was the paranoid neo-con that they had been casting him as all along.

When Barack Obama initially said that Iran did not represent a threat, he was merely assuming the longstanding standard doctrinaire liberal mentality. It was only when he began to be presented with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that he “refined” his remarks to acknowledge that Iran was in fact a threat.

In any event, as the United States began to succomb to increasing internal division over the war in Iraq, and as the United States began to bog down, the facts now overwhelmingly reveal that Iran clearly decided to restart its nuclear weapons program.

How long until Iran develops enough nuclear material to build a bomb? Ten years, like the elite media says?

Try six months to one year. That abstract academic threat is getting real concrete and very, very real.

Israel has been warning for some time now that Iran could have the bomb far more quickly than many Western experts were willing to acknowledge. They’ve been claiming that Iran could have enough material to build a bomb far earlier than most estimates stated. But they were ignored. After all, in the leftist view of the world, Israel is the biggest and most paranoid warmonger of all (or at least a very close second to the United States).

But now someone else is affirming that President Bush and the state of Israel were right all along.

And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying this but none other than the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei:

Mohamed ElBaradei: “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has…”

Interviewer: “How much time would it need?”

ElBaradei: “It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

Interviewer: “Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months…”

ElBaradei: “Or one year, at least…”

Interviewer: “… to produce [nuclear] weapons?”

ElBaradei: “It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon.”

Sadly, ElBaradei – in the words of one writer – “seems to be more obsessed with politics than with doing his job. His job is to monitor the nuclear developments of countries, such as Iran, and to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. That’s what he should be concerned about. Instead, he’s concerned with what countries may do when other countries ignore the UN and develop nuclear weapons regardless of world opinion.” Mohamed ElBaradei has claimed that any attack on Iran would be “unnecessary” and that he would resign if such an attack were to occur. That’s a pretty political statement from a supposedly apolitical weapons inspector.

And meanwhile Iran is getting closer and closer to the bomb with each passing day.

What would happen if Iran actually got the bomb? Many pooh pooh the possibility that Iran would start World War III by attacking an also nuclear-armed Israel. But only a fool would ignore the numerous “death to Israel” statements from both Iran’s president and its Ayatollah. What is particular frightening is that these Iranian rulers hold to an apocalyptic interpretation of Islam which holds to the doctrine that the last Imam will return during a period of crisis.

But Iran doesn’t actually have to use its nuclear weapons to make use of them. Ask yourself: would the United States dare attack a nuclear Iran? Even if Iran – through its terrorists surrogates – carried out another 9/11 attack against it?

Will they share nuclear technology and materials with terrorist organizations, and attempt to carry out nuclear attacks by proxy?

Iran is and has been the leading source of terrorism around the world. If they obtain a nuclear weapons capability, you can only expect them to be more emboldened and feel more invulnerable to meaningful retaliation than they have ever felt before. President Ahmadinejad has said, “I Have a Connection With God, Since God Said That the Infidels Will Have No Way to Harm the Believers”; “We Have [Only] One Step Remaining Before We Attain the Summit of Nuclear Technology”; The West “Will Not Dare To Attack Us.”

Are you ready for that? Are you ready for the kind of hell that a rogue, terrorist, totalitarian, jihadist, and Armageddonist state could unleash upon the world given the impunity of being protected by nuclear weapons?

What are you willing to do to prevent that nightmarish scenario from occuring?

One thing is certain: we absolutely cannot count on diplomacy to prevent this catastrophic threat to world stability and security.

Russia and China – both veto-wielding permanent United Nations security council members – have both repeatedly disallowed any meaningful sanctions against Iran. I write about this in detail in an article.

There’s all kinds of evidence of their refusal to all for any sanctions that would have any chance of forcing Iran to comply.

From August 5, 2008:

The United States, Britain and France warned Monday — two days after the deadline expired — that they would press for additional sanctions against Iran if it did not respond positively and unambiguously to the offer. The six powers will hold a conference call Wednesday to consider their response to the statement. But they remain divided, with China and Russia reluctant to support tough sanctions.

“I don’t see any reason to believe that the Russians and the Chinese are any more willing today to support really tougher sanctions against Iran,” said Flynt Leverett, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and former Bush National Security Council staffer.

Iran is clearly more interested in becoming a nuclear power than it is in taking any of our carrots. And with the stick being removed from the proceedings, diplomacy simply has no chance of succeeding.

And we’ve seen all this before. I have written a three part series titled, “Iraq War Justified” that points to the fact the United States was placed in this exact same situation prior to 2003 (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3). A pitifully pathetic and corrupt United Nations was absolutely incapable of doing anything. The United States had good reasons to believe that Iraq was engaging in the illegal production of weapons of mass destruction, and inspectors were blocked from carrying out any meaningful inspection program. Iraq was able to use its abundant oil – and even the United Nations’ own oil for food program – to buy allies who would prevent the implementation of tough UN sanctions. And an attitude of anti-Americanism and a view that American influence should be siphoned away in favor of “a multi-polar world” (which is really just a cosmopolitan way of being anti-American) all combined to make it impossible for diplomacy to work in forcing Iraq to open itself up to inspections.

The United States was forced to attack Iraq because every other available option had failed, and we were not willing to allow the possibility of an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.

When we attacked Iraq in the Gulf War, it was learned that Iraq was FAR closer to developing nuclear weapons than had ever previously been believed by Western “experts.” It was also realized that this threat – stopped in 1990 – carried through into the future:

In summary, the IAEA report says that following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq launched a “crash program” to develop a nuclear weapon quickly by extracting weapons grade material from safe-guarded research reactor fuel. This project, if it had continued uninterrupted by the war, might have succeeded in producing a deliverable weapon by the end of 1992. [PBS source: Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, a Guide in Maps and Charts, 1998, Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. NcDonough, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (1998). p. 191] …

Nuclear physicist and Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza agrees. He told FRONTLINE that Iraq did not relinquish certain critical components of the nuclear program to the inspectors, and that it retains the expertise necessary to build a nuclear weapon. He believes that Iraq may have one completed within the next couple of years.

Even now, the United Nations is questioning the intelligence pointing to Iran developing the bomb. How are we ever going to attain the “consensus” that liberals demand we have in this sort of perennially hazy political environment?

How can one condemn the Iraq attack and then sanction an Iran attack given all the similarities? On just what logical or moral basis?

It’s the exact same thing happening all over again, and Israel and the United States will be faced with the same choice: Are we willing to allow an Iran with doomsday capability? Are we willing to carry out an attack alone given a pathologically weak, corrupt, and frankly both pathetic and apathetic world?

This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.

If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And he continues to do so even today. Just how was a preemptive attack on Iraq wrong if a preemptive attack on Iran is right? If Barack Obama believes that our intelligence will be flawless regarding Iran’s nuclear program when it was so flawed regarding Iraq’s program, then he is a genuine fool of the very worst kind. And if he refuses to attack until the evidence against Iran is certain, he is an even greater fool. For Iran would greet our attacking soldiers with mushroom clouds.

Israel is clearly doing far more than threatening to attack Iran in order to prevent this patently anti-Semitic and defiantly evil regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. It is clearly merely a matter of time, with many thinking that Israel might even attack prior to the change in American administrations. If and when they do, we will see just how vulnerable the Democrats have made us over the past thirty years in refusing to allow America to develop its own source of domestic oil as the price of oil goes up to over $300 a barrel and over $12 a gallon for gasoline.

NBC’s Deceptive Editing Reveals Why Bush Right and Obama Wrong

A May 19, 2008 post titled “We Help ‘The Hill’” provides illumination all too-often lacking in today’s distorted and biased media:

Matt Drudge links to a Hill story that badly needs supplementation:

The White House on Monday sent a scathing letter to NBC News, accusing the news network of “deceptively” editing an interview with President Bush on the issue of appeasement and Iran.

At issue were remarks Bush made in front of Israel’s parliament earlier this week.

Specifically, White House counselor Ed Gillespie laments that the network edited the interview in a way that “is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that [Bush] agreed with [correspondent Richard Engel’s] characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it.

“This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President’s responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts,” said Gillespie in the letter to NBC News President Steve Capus.

That does not present much with which to opine on the merits of the dispute.

Here is a transcript of the interview in question via Newsbusters, the White House release of the full interview, and Bush’s Knesset speech. [Marc Ambinder reprints the White House letter.]

Gillespie objected to “both initial questions”; here is the first as presented by NBC:

RICHARD ENGEL: Good morning, Meredith. I started by asking the President about his controversial comments he made in Israel, which Democratic candidates interpreted as a political attack. You said that negotiating with Iran is pointless and then you went further. You’re saying, you said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama? He certainly thought you were.

GEORGE W. BUSH: You know, my policies haven’t changed, but evidently, the political calendar has.

Left on the cutting room floor was this:

People need to read the speech. You didn’t get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you’ve got to take those words seriously. And if you don’t take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn’t take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.

But I also talked about a vision of what’s possible in the Middle East.

So Bush did in fact dispute Engel’s characterization of the speech. Here is the next question as presented by NBC:

ENGEL: Negotiations with Iran. Is that appeasement? Is that like appeasing Adolf Hitler?

BUSH: No my, my, my position, Richard, all along, has been that if the Iranians verifiably suspend their enrichment, which will be a key, key measure to stop them from gaining the know-how to build a weapon, then they can come to the table and the United States will be at the table.

Omitted:

…then they can come to the table, and the United States will be at the table. That’s been a position of my administration for gosh, I can’t remember how many years, but it’s a clear position. We’ve stated it over and over again.

But I’ve also said that if they choose not to do that — verifiably suspend — we will continue to rally the world to isolate the Iranians. And it is having an effect inside their country. There’s a better way forward for the Iranian people than to be isolated. And their leaders just need to make better choices.

Like a body after an autopsy, it’s them parts that got cut out tend to matter most.

President Bush states that it’s not “talking” to dictators that qualifies as “appeasement,” but rather the failure to take the evil intentions repeatedly stated by evil regimes seriously. But that got cut from NBC as being an irrelevant point.

I posted an article titled Iraq War Justified. I begin with the fact that the “experts” in both the intelligence community and the media utterly failed to understand Saddam Hussein’s evil and therefore refused to comprehend his repeatedly stated intentions until after he invaded Kuwait.

In the 1930s, the world failed to take Hitler seriously. They simply refused to believe that he would push the world into war. In the 1990s, the world failed to take Saddam seriously. They simply refused to believe that he would push the world into war. And now we have Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly stating that they intend to annihilate Israel, and the world is failing to take them seriously. We are taking lightly an Iranian administration that buys into a cataclysmic Armageddon theology, whose president has said, “I Have a Connection With God, Since God Said That the Infidels Will Have No Way to Harm the Believers”; “We Have [Only] One Step Remaining Before We Attain the Summit of Nuclear Technology”; The West “Will Not Dare To Attack Us.”

And there’s that legitimate question that Obama has not been pressed to answer, namely: if you meet with these people, what do you intend to say to them? Just what is it you think you can accomplish with your words that a legitimate, longstanding American foreign policy position has failed to achieve?

Also omitted were two-thirds of his answer to the question, “Negotiations with Iran. Is that appeasement? Is that like appeasing Adolf Hitler?”

President Bush’s answer: “No my, my, my position, Richard, all along, has been that if the Iranians verifiably suspend their enrichment, which will be a key, key measure to stop them from gaining the know-how to build a weapon, then they can come to the table and the United States will be at the table.”

And combined with the part that got left out by NBC: “Then they can come to the table, and the United States will be at the table. That’s been a position of my administration for gosh, I can’t remember how many years, but it’s a clear position. We’ve stated it over and over again.

But I’ve also said that if they choose not to do that — verifiably suspend — we will continue to rally the world to isolate the Iranians. And it is having an effect inside their country. There’s a better way forward for the Iranian people than to be isolated. And their leaders just need to make better choices.”

Clearly, the editorial intent was not to clarify the president’s position, but to leave it as murky – and thus as easy to mischaracterize and attack – as possible.

The question is, if we are NOT going to declare war and launch a massive invasion of Iran, just what ARE we going to do? And the position of the United States – along with most of the civilized world throughout the course of modern history – has been to attempt to isolate dangerous and offensive regimes as a course to force them into change.

That has obtained far superior results to “I’m going to give them a nice, long moral lecture.”

Some years back, liberals cheered and encouraged the use of the isolation policy to bring about the downfall of apartheid South Africa.

But we’re going to change course now, and – instead of trying to force a regime to come into line with a policy acceptable to the world – and – instead of trying to repudiate a despicable regime’s depraved record by refusing to dignify their policies – we are going to start reaching out and talking to them.

Barack, before you try to put your policy to work in Iran, why don’t you go to some of our state prisons and try to have a nice chat with a few of our most violent inmates? [“Guard, will you release this man from his shackles before you leave? I want to have a real conversation with him, without preconditions”]. Tell me how it works out for you.

There are plenty of countries that would love the prestige and influence of a dialog with the leader of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The privilege of such a visit – which brings status, legitimacy, and benefits – should now be accorded to the most vicious, murderous regimes bent on terrorism and quite possibly even Armageddon.

Neville Chamberlain talked with Adolf Hitler three times, and all it got him was the title of the worst APPEASER in human history. But you know what they say: records are meant to be broken.

Hey, maybe all those countries who have wanted a state visit with the President of the United States but haven’t gotten one should start massively supporting global terrorism and building their own nuclear weapon. Call it ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ diplomacy.

More Americans would probably realize just how stupid Obama’s policy really is compared to the Bush policy he has been vilifying, but we have media like NBC to insure that they don’t get the full story.