Why is ObamaBidenHarris so keen on Iran?
[NOTE: This topic has been discussed recently in a comment thread, but I assume most people didn’t see it and so I’m highlighting the issue by giving it its own post.
Also, that’s not a typo in the title. I keep trying to figure out what to call this administration, and that’s what I’ve fastened on for the moment, abbreviated to OBH. The names are in their order of succession.]
Part of the reasoning of OBH in enabling Iran is that, if the right hates the mullahs, then the mullahs must not be so bad. If Bush called Iran out as part of an axis of evil, well then it must be pretty good. Also, helping Iran is a way to unify with much of western Europe, which has long been willing and eager to do business with the country.
In addition, like all good post-1967 leftists, Obama hates Israel and Netanyahu also. (Do Biden and Harris? They certainly have been acting like it.) Iran hates Israel. Therefore, the enemy of my enemy is my friend – at least, potentially.
Leftists have a long history of allying with the mullahs for strategic reasons, strange though that may seem, and it began before the revolution. At the time, the left thought it would prevail over the mullahs in forming the succeeding government, and although that didn’t work out for them (au contraire; many were purged), that was over forty years ago. I wonder how many leftists today are even aware of it.
Then there’s the fact that George Bush, Obama’s predecessor, was fairly tight with the Saudis. So still another reason to try to empower Iran was to stick it to the Bushes. Now, of course, there’s an additional motive: to stick it to Donald Trump, Obama’s successor. Obama will get the last laugh on both of them this way. Biden has the same motives, if he’s even mentally competent enough to be a significant part of the decision-making process.
The next motive is one I think is actually quite important to them, and it’s ego. George Bush said that Iran was part of the axis of evil. I believe that Obama, even before becoming president – when he’d make remarks about how he, unlike the previous administration, was going to try to talk with Iran – thought that he could work miracles there and be lauded to the skies for it if he signed some sort of peace treaty. The cost of that treaty in terms of what we would give up and what Iran would get, whether the treaty was real or a headfake by Iran, whether the American people wanted it or not – none of that was a consideration so much as how everyone (particularly in Europe) would think he was the Light Bringer if he could pull it off.
And so Obama moved mountains to make it happen, and then he had to live through seeing it all undone by Trump. Now the policy is both revenge on Trump and an attempt to prove that Obama was right after all. The same is true for everyone onboard in the Biden administration who was originally with Obama. It’s a Restoration.
I’d be extremely surprised if the reasons turned out to be the emotional ones given here. I would be much less surprised if turned out to be that there were clients of these politicians who stood to make a lot of money by normalizing relations in Iran.
I think we need to be cautious about the motives we attribute to our political opponents; it’s unlikely that they and the 50% of the country that supports them is disproportionately the irrational and bad and haters of freedom and we and the 50% of the country that agrees with us is disproportionately rational, good, and lovers of freedom.
I think if large numbers of career politicians and high officials persistently engage in something that appears to be irrational, it’s because we don’t have all the facts that would make it rational. Washington DC being Washington DC it probably comes down to who stands to get paid.
Obama and harris imported the most extreme antiwestern sentiments (see trevor loudon for background) also discover the network.
Iran hates the USA.
Biden, Obama, Harris, the demokrats hate the USA and Israel.
Ergo, let’s chummy up with a nation that believes and desires what we want.
It really is that simple.
And if it should come to pass that Iran drops a few nuclear tipped missiles on Israel – essentially wiping it off the face of the earth – expect Bidet, Obama, et. al. to blame Trump and , of course, Israel.
Why Israel?
For FORCING !!! Iran to drop a few nuke on Israel as a result of Israel’s “nazi” policies.
As crazy as this sounds, this is exactly the reaction you will receive from Bidet, Obama and the demokrats.
I’ve always thought that of all the billions that Obama gave to the Iranian regime that a good percentage got funneled back to the Left here one way or another. Getting government money laundered into Left politicians and activists hands has been a hallmark of all spending and policy decisions of the Democrats for decades.
I think ObamaRiceHarris is more accurate but I get why having Biden in there makes it clearer.
You were so close when you observed the Islamic tenet that, “The enemy is my enemy is my friend.”
It isn’t just that ObamaBidenHarris hate Israel, and therefore the Iranian Mullahcracy must be OK because it hates Israel. Every Friday at the entrance to every Mosque in Iran, Iranians stomp on the Israeli AND U.S. flags painted on the floors. And once inside following the sermon they chant, “Death to America” BEFORE chanting “Death to Israel.”
Just look at the policies the Democrats are pursuing. Just look at how the CHICOMs humiliated the Biden administration simply by using the Democrats’ own political rhetoric against them; describing the U.S. as an illegitimate garbage country in the same words the Democrats use to call the U.S. an illegitimate garbage country. Of course the Biden admin reps were rendered speechless and defenseless; they’ve already agreed with everything the CCP reps said about America. Just look at how it’s the virtually non-existent violent right that is the existential terror threat, while the much more frequent and far larger scale violence from the left doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned. Antifa/#BLM is their mob advancing their goals. And those groups, like all leftist groups, openly state their goal is to destroy America.
The Democrats don’t like Iran because it hates Israel as much as they do. The left loves Iran because it hates the U.S. as much as the American left does (Hint: the “violent right-wing” terrorists ARE an existential threat; to Democrats and the vile future they would impose by force).
Why shouldn’t the “Death to America” party love the “Death to America” Iranian theocracy?
Related in that this podcast discusses foreign policy and the “West Wing” wannabees that are now in charge of the State Department. I did a write-up for my group of election integrity workers. Baris (People’s Pundit) and Barnes really do very good commentary. It may end up being two posts.
Very rarely do I recommend an entire podcast but this is one of them. Baris and Barnes discussed several topics in great detail and made cogent point after cogent point. The last section on Biden Foreign Team policies or more accurately follies. Normally I listen in background to a podcast but this one I stopped and listened to it. The ** segments are one that I really recommend and definitely listen to the 59:00 segment.
Episode 26 — Barnes and Baris: What Are the Odds? – YouTube
But before we do that. Remember “RELEASE THE KRAKEN”? Powell is in deep trouble and she is trying to get out of it. QANON did a masterful job distracting us from effective election challenges.
Sidney Powell Says ‘No Reasonable Person’ Would Conclude Her Voter Fraud Claims Were Statements Of Fact | The Daily Caller
0:00 – bumper music
4:00 – Baris comes on and talks about the quarterly polling initiative he is doing to get a true sense of what people are thinking.
7:00 – ** Baris goes into a China discussion and plays he plays a clip from the Anchorage Summit where Blinken was being self-congratulatory stating that the “adults are back in charge” and China needed to listen to America’s moral advice. Then the Chinese Foreign Minister came back with “who are you to criticize us when you can’t control your own borders and you lock up your own citizens without trial. We do what we want to do and you had better like it.” It was that bad.
Baris makes the following points:
• Chinese are realists. There is no human rights in foreign policy.
o Biden is compromised through Hunter. They have pictures and documents and will use them when the time is right.
o China wanted Biden because he was compromised and they couldn’t take another 4 years of Donald Trump. Their economy was hurting with his trade policies.
• The current DC crowd (including Republicans) isn’t reality based.
• The Chinese use bait and bleed pressure tactics and demands to distract and wear you down to agree to their demands. (I can attest to this from my Automotive business days).
13:00 – Biden mental dementia and how the world sees and comments on it even though the US Legacy media doesn’t cover it.
• They know Harris will be president and she is even more incompetent than Biden
• China will wait it out.
16:45 – Border Crisis and how the wall dramatically reduced the inflow. The Border Patrol actually has on it’s webite statistics that show this. The compliant media does not tell the whole story as we know. It is literally “Baghdad Bob” time in DC.
20:00 – Election Fraud, wife got permanently banned from Twitter for posting
22:00 – Chauvin Trial (Barnes joins at this point). Jury selection is done and demographically speaking it is a “hanging jury”. The demographic profile does not resemble Milwaukee’s. However the life experiences of the jurors may end up helping the defense. The defense got a huge boost with the judge allowing evidence that George Floyd did the same thing in his arrest in 2019. As always the media is mis-characterizing the trial. This is a long segment.
54:30 – **The upcoming Georgia elections. Baris believes that Herschel Walker should run for governor and Vernon Jones for Senate. The reasons why are interesting.
57:30 – **Shifts gears and discusses Kelly Loeffler’s voter initiative. Thinks it is an ineffectual sham. It is a way that the GOPe is trying to grift/get a piece of the action for Election Integrity. It was the GOPe fault that Georgia was lost.
59:00 – ****Then they talk about the 2020 election and the incompetence of the Trump team and the RNC at the pre-election preparation, the election itself and the aftermath. Scathing comments about Bill Stepian, Brad Parschele (didn’t mention Jared Kushner but he was just as culpable) and Justin Clark most of all. Justin Clark was told of what the Democrats were doing and took no meaningful actions to stop it. Then after the election essentially the RNC abandoned the states with their challenges. (I would like to talk with some of Michigan’s state officials about this). Ronna McDaniel didn’t do her job. (In prior posts I talked about competence vs. loyalty. This is a situation that requires change.)
• They make the point that the RNC fund raised $250M off that appeal process. Remember those 1000% match emails. Only a small portion was given to the appeal process.
• Trump has great policy instincts (trade, border security) but not Issues instincts (Covid Management). He gets and listens to really bad advice on issues particularly after the purge of Bannon, Lewandowsky and Gorka.
o Before the 2016 election he followed conservative Radio hosts
o Twitter was also a way of him getting feedback too. Now he is isolated with his bad advisors.
• Shifts topic to Trump’s announcement of his own social media platform. Both think it is a bad idea as creating a platform takes several years and if he does so will not be able to impact it
• Instead he should affiliate with some established platforms and give them his name as a brand. Very interesting discussion on this topic.
• Also he should be a booster and promote US domestic manufacturing. One of his strong suits. This also enhances his base of support vs. the Professional “Keyboard” Class that are not goods producers.
o This growth of Keyboard professionals is a reason why some states are turning color like Georgia, Colorado, Arizona and with the mass exodus of California, Texas. Interesting thought.
• Then they shift to Asians and the latest Democrat appeal to them using victim politics which shouldn’t work if the Republicans have the right message and work for their support.
o Democrat policies adversely impact them. Critical Race Theory, Reparations, College Admission bias and so forth.
o Asian Keyboard professionals are Democrat but entrepreneurial Asians are natural Republican supporters.
1:38:00 – ** Biden Foreign Policy follies (disastrous) vs. Trump’s Achievements (solid if not spectacular)
• Why Trump was realism based and not human rights based. It is National Economic Sovereignty based and mutual self interest driven.
• Biden is being pushed around by foreign leaders because they know he is weak. They never would have done that to Trump.
o Hilarious sequence about how the Biden Team thinks they are “West Wing” operators and the play “Hamilton” devotees.
o They live in their little fantasy land bubble of their self-importance and the Anchorage Summit was a dose of reality popping their bubble.
o They have made our friends mad and our opponents contemptuous. Use this on your Biden supporter acquaintances.
• The damage of the deep state psychological operation of the Russian Collusion has badly damaged US international interests. This is pushing Russia and China together in an alliance against the US. They just hope these clowns don’t get the US in a war with their bungling. (Talleyrand, Napoleon’s Foreign Minister who was a cynical operator once said about a diplomatic issue “This is worse than a mistake. This is a blunder!”)
• A podcast called “The Gaggle” follows US Foreign Policy and has been making the same points. I heard them once and may go back over the past two weeks and listen.
• Because the Chinese own Biden, this administration can not make China accountable for the one great sin. Release of the virus on the world. Under Trump they would have been held accountable. Meanwhile the “West Wing” wannabees will stay in their bubble and think they are doing great things.
Politics are not static. Change is coming. We have to work to get the results we want.
Frederick:
Only some of these reasons are emotional. The need to please Europe and facilitate its financial plans re Iran was not emotional – the left is politically and philosophically allied with the left in Europe, and doing business with Iran is part of the plan.
How can anyone trust Iran? Mullahs are criminals
I think you’re forgetting that Obama is a man of a particular vintage. For those of us of similar vintage, his shticks (Solyndra, toadying up to Iran) have a certain familiarity. It’s just the sort of thing someone who was reading Anthony Lewis column and Mother Jones during the late Carter Administration would do. Note Blinken, Klain, and Harris. are of similar vintage. (Admittedly, Sullivan and Austin are not).
Frederick @ 5:14: Regarding motives. Embrace the power of “and.” Obama gets exponentially more payback if he can enrich his people, be given a tongue-bath by the Left, screw Trump and feel vindicated in his geopolitical genius. Win-win-win-win.
I have long attributed Obama’s Iran affection to several of his advisors. One obvious one is Valerie Jarret. Born in Iran and Persian speaking, she was born pre-revolution but many Iranians, including a couple of my friends, were anti-Shah.
She was deep in the machine that runs Chicago. She has continued those deep ties since Obama left office.
Additionally, blacks, even those with sun tans only, retain a history of anti-Semitism. In poorer blacks it comes from, I think, dealing with the Jewish owned businesses in black neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Koreans have replaced Jews in this category. Since Obama was raised in Hawaii by white grandparents, his antipathy may be simply adopted to appeal to the black voters. Anti-Israel is almost always anti-Semitism dressed up for company.
Iran may simply be something that Obama thought he could do to gain Gravitas.
From Wikipedia:
I don’t think Obama is genuinely religious in any fashion, but I do think he has a real affection for the Islamic world he inhabited as a child. He has said as much on a few occasions during his presidency, or campaigns.
Having said that, I am not far from Frederick’s opinion. The one thing I’d add is, what if the Obama admin. did a number of secret and very illicit maneuvers to accomplish the original Iran deal? If the Harris-Biden admin. doesn’t keep Iran happy now, Iran could spill the dirt. So Iran might have leverage.
It isn’t just that ObamaBidenHarris hate Israel
I doubt any of these people hate Israel. I think what it is is that he and Jimmy Carter have default reactions to conflict which are almost a defining feature of the liberal mentality. They’re cruel to the kind and kind to the cruel. Also, both are vain men and characters like Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu were not co-operating with their self-aggrandizing schemes. It’s compounded in Obama’s case in that he’s something Carter is not – an empty suit with no authentic accomplishments outside of grabbing political offices when the media is an extension of his campaigns. He’s inadequate next to Netanyahu and that galls him.
http://caldwellscorner.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ObamaNetanyahu-300×258.jpg
As for Harris, my wager is she’s just a sociopath and it’s always business, never personal.
I don’t think Obama is genuinely religious in any fashion, but I do think he has a real affection for the Islamic world he inhabited as a child. He has said as much on a few occasions during his presidency, or campaigns.
Agree on religious sentiment. His preceptor was his grandfather, who joined a Unitarian congregation because ‘you get five religions for the price of one’. Doubt he has any serious thoughts on the matter.
Disagree on affections. There was once on Youtube a video of him attempting to make some remarks in the Malay trader’s dialect that’s used as a lingua franca in Indonesia. The remarks are 40 seconds long, painfully halting, and delivered in a generic American accent. I doubt Indonesia made much of an impression on him, even though he lived there for four years.
Steve Sailer has been making the case that Obama’s circle of friends, ca. 1982, had in it a mess of Pakistani expats. I’d look there for any visceral attachments. (I actually don’t think Obama is capable of visceral attachments and Mooch is willing to live without them if she gets what she really wants).
Valerie Jarret. Born in Iran and Persian speaking, she was born pre-revolution but many Iranians, including a couple of my friends, were anti-Shah.
I’m going to spin the roulette wheel and suggest she re-inforced an existing tendency. See Thos. Sowell on ‘one-uppers’, a subset of his thesis on The Anointed. Obama’s a one-upper and was raised to be. For someone reading the papers in 1979, that means siding with Iran against the United States.
Since Obama was raised in Hawaii by white grandparents, his antipathy may be simply adopted to appeal to the black voters. Anti-Israel is almost always anti-Semitism dressed up for company.
See Charles Silberman and Glenn Loury on black anti-semitism. It’s more pronounced among professional class blacks than among ordinary blacks. Loury offers the hypothesis that this originates in the social dynamics of law schools. Obama would have escaped that particular set of influences, as he was one of the better students in his class (albeit over-rated). However, we have every reason to believe (see Stanley Kurtz work) that Obama’s associations and sympathies were not with people of ordinary persuasions, but rather with the characters on the axis which ran from Michael Harrington to Barbara Ehrenreich to Victor Navasky to Paul Sweezy to David Dellinger.
I like Mike K’s assessment.
I thought Barack Hussein attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, not a Catholic parochial school, though a public school followed. was it in the latter that he was registered as a Muslim?
As to Obama and the Iran “deal”, it was not a treaty, since all treaties require ratification by the Senate. Thus it was a Deal, an “Agreement”.
I believe BHO got a commission on doing the Deal; 2% of $150 billion is enough to vault him up there into the financial stratosphere. Maybe it was more like 5%, for loot to spread to Nancy, Harry and the other Dem movers. Well hidden, of course!
The Euros supported the Deal because they are ahead of us in selling rope to the mullahs that wish to hang us. Western civilization no longer exists in Western Europe, its birthplace. Instead there is pornography, sex “work” and euthanasia, and the great cathedrals are “tourist attractions”, not places of Christian worship though it was for that purpose that they were of course built.
That Iran now has missiles that can reach Germany & France seems not to trouble the Krauts and the Frogs.
” I don’t think any of these people hate Israel.”
Sure.
When Netanyahu visited the White House during the Obama presidency, he was escorted out of the White House through the basement where trash bins are placed.
I will guess that no foreign leader in the last 50 years who visited the WH was escorted out of the building through the basement trash bin area.
Also, the BDS bunch are well entrenched within the demokrat party. BDS just about considers Israel a Hebrew speaking version of Nazi Germany. Recall that in recent democratic presidential conventions, they voted on formally condemning Israel.
The demokrats (as well as most voting UN nations) consider Israel the ONLY impediment to peace in the ME.
Honestly, if the dems had their way, Israel would cease to exist tomorrow (along with white males, the traditional family, and our Constitutional Republic).
Agree with a lot of what’s being said here, especially Jarrett’s pro-Iran leanings and Obama’s sentimental attachment to the Islam he saw as a child in Indonesia. I recall his comment about how the call to prayer from the minaret was such a lovely sound. An idealized remembrance of a happy time for him in a then-moderate Islamic country might have a strong influence.
The black Jew-hating is harder for me to understand. I met a woman in Georgia whose excellent education was from a Rosenwald school, established by a wealthy Sears, Roebuck founder to give a better education to southern blacks than the segregated schools. There were hundreds of these schools.
Iran may simply be something that Obama thought he could do to gain Gravitas.
Mike K:
Ditto on Valerie Jarrett and the above.
Ever since I read David Remnick’s lickspittle interview with Obama in the “New Yorker,” I was struck anew by Obama’s enormous sense of himself as Master of History:
___________________________________________
Obama told me that what he needs isn’t any new grand strategy—“I don’t really even need George Kennan right now”—but, rather, the right strategic partners.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/going-the-distance-david-remnick
___________________________________________
George Kennan was Truman’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union and top advisor on the Cold War. Kennan was the author of the “containment policy” with regard to the USSR.
In Obama’s imagination he was Truman and Kennan wrapped into one.
You can explain everything happening in the Middle East by the Mullahs quietly implying–revealing that they are nearing demonstration of their Bomb. Eg. if you were BidenHarrisObama what would you give to Iran to get a promise that the bomb wouldn’t be demonstrated in 4 years? If you were Israel’s Bibi, about to go under another fourth corruption investigation, what negotiations would you desire with your Arab neighbors? If you were the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and you were terrified the Israelis would launch a counter-force strike, what would you do?
As a result of those four years in Jakarta, he was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child. During his time in Indonesia, Obama’s step-father [Lolo Soetoro] taught him to be resilient and gave him “a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works”.
Listen to him later. That’s not the way a rusty fluent speaker sounds. My bloody schoolboy French sounds better. And I’m seeing no evidence from his life he ever had a robust sense of ‘how the world works’.
When Netanyahu visited the White House during the Obama presidency, he was escorted out of the White House through the basement where trash bins are placed. I will guess that no foreign leader in the last 50 years who visited the WH was escorted out of the building through the basement trash bin area.
Which is an indication that Obama’s a spiteful bitch. It’s not an indication that Biden or Harris (or even Obama) hates Israel. (I thought the story was that he abandoned Netanyahu and went and had dinner with Mooch and the girls).
You can explain everything happening in the Middle East by the Mullahs quietly implying–revealing that they are nearing demonstration of their Bomb.
The quantum of lethal violence in Iraq has declined by about 80% in the last four years or so. Is it your contention that that’s explained by whatever it is to which you’re referring?
Art Deco:
That was one of many indications that he hates Netanyahu. The indications that he hates Israel came in other ways, for example this, his parting shot. That parting shot was actually a threefer, hurting Netanyahu, Israel, and Trump all in one fell swoop.
Valerie Jarrett parents were Communists. That is why they had to leave Chicago for Iran. Frank Davis, also from Chicago, was a communist and was young Obama’s friend almost a father figure. The Iranian Mullahs were educated by Khomeini who fused Marxist teachings with Shia Orthodoxy. They are totalitarians. Hence the affinity by the Obama coterie to Iran.
Both hate Judaism because Judaism promotes a locus of morality/truth external to man and the state (ummah) in the name of Yahweh. Thus a Jew lays claim to a truth that totalitarians cannot demand bend to their interpretation. Yahweh dictates are immutable and unchangeable though Lord many people try. You are commanded to study his ways to live closer to him and his truth. Hence the history of intellectual prowess by Jews.
The kicker is that many Totalitarians are of Jewish heritage. Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the Rosenbergs of atomic spy fame were Jewish. They grew up in the Jewish intellectual tradition but they rejected that God is real. That is why they were the greatest champions of atheism. Why do atheists’ have an affinity for the Theocratic state like Iranian Shia is because both believe everything is subsumed in service to the state. Mussolini summed it up as “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Politics are like a circle with state control being one end of the circle and anarchy/libertarianism being the other end. Right or Left makes no difference how you get there. The Iranian Communist Party initially worked with Khomeini when he returned in 1979. They thought based on past historical models like the Russian revolution that they were sufficiently ruthless enough to take power. But Theocratic totalitarians are even more ruthless than atheists as they soon found out. A stark and chilling reminder to the daft over educated bartender. Ilan Omar will violently replace her if there was a civil war. She will come out on top vs. any other member of the squad.
“…no indication…”
So when exactly did “chickens**t prime minister” become a term of esteem, respect and/or appreciation?
Or even a remark reserved for so-called “allies”? (Or even so-not-called allies?)
No doubt, Netanyahu’s bad luck that he wasn’t from Cuba, I guess…. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that his pant creases are undeniably sub-par)
The Democratic Party Politburo cracks open a bit (but just a bit):
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/439944/
File under: Dear Leaders
Lee Smith suggests a motive I have not seen described anywhere else
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/iran-deal-inevitable-sequel
From the article: “Downgrading Israel as an American ally was a way to take down the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, whose power depends on the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship and which is generally seen as less “progressive”—and which had generally supported his rival, Hillary Clinton. By making the U.S.-Israel relationship toxic, Obama made the wing of the party leprous. Unmaking “Jewish power” within the Democratic Party meant permanently decoupling the United States from Israel by wedding America to the most credible anti-Israel force in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was through that deliberate political math that Obama’s Democratic Party became the Party of Iran.
So please don’t waste your time trying to parse whatever Biden negotiators and Iranian diplomats in Vienna or Berlin are reported to be saying six months or a year from now. As far as the Middle East is concerned, none of what Iran deal supporters say about the JCPOA is real. And as far as Americans are concerned, the real explanations lie closer to home.”
My observations: Lee Smith is correct. It is easy to misunderstand the inner workings of the Democratic coalition. Something is driving those who vote in the Soros DA’s. Their apparent world view looks crazy to me, but it must seem logical to them. I am reading The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikotter. The failures of collectivism, instead of forcing a move away from its policies, forced an attempt to destroy anything and everyone who might oppose it, resulting in an orgy of murder and destruction. Children, teenagers, and young adults did the killing, guided by the true believers at the top. Obama was a Red Diaper baby. The Left is believing that a transformation is possible and near.
It is easy to misunderstand the inner workings of the Democratic coalition.
Dick Illyes:
This is wise.
That political parties are political is a tautology. Still, there is a sliding scale on power obsession versus civic duty to provide responsible, effective leadership with some moral compass.
Democrats have been slip-slidin’-away towards power obsession for some time. I recall a counterculture guy — Hunter S. Thompson, Carl Oglesby — who described the liberal initiatives to reform the CIA/FBI in the 70s as less a moral crusade than an effort by the Young Turks to roll the Old Guard.
And now the Young Turks are the Old Guard. They were so successful, they are now the Very Old Guard.
–“Paul Simon – Slip Slidin’ Away (Official Audio)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUODdPpnxcA
“Iran-deal-inevitable-sequel”
To be sure, the “deal” was made with the “sequel” already planned. (Kind of like the Lucasfilms gambit…)
More correctly, the “deal” was made so that the “sequel” could be produced. (Oh, there were other reasons, too; but now that the US is in the Democrats’ “bag” (“locked in”, that is), they can focus—finally—on taking care of that long and irritating itch commonly referred to by more than a few as The Zionist Entity.
One can begin to understand why Trump was such a disaster for the “transformationalists”—because of the momentum “lost” on the uber-important Israel agenda item but for others as well (most prominently momentum lost on the planned disembowelment—sorry, fundamental transformation—of the US.)
Certainly, there’s a very good reason why Iran and the Palestinians (not to mention China, though China may be said to have a generally positive relationship with Israel, mostly having to do with trade and “R and R” as well as for more “sentimental” reasons—e.g., ancient civilizations, which may or may not play a role here) clamored for “Biden” ‘s election. Regarding the end-game (that the Obamanites believe, with great expectation, is finally within reach and for which they will be barreling ahead “with all deliberate speed”), well, American liberals who for all intents and purposes are on the same page as those three great friends of America (mentioned above), will have to find a way to blame Trump and Netanyahu for this “development’. Which shouldn’t prove to be too hard, given their own predilections, though mainly because the Corrupt Media will be churning out the party line unceasingly.
(Since the good, the decent, the caring, the empathetic, the intelligent—and especially the brilliant—are able, rather amazingly, to rationalize practically anything…. Though perhaps to be fair to them, one might admit that their cries of “But, but, but we have been deceived”—that is, if they make them—would not be altogether inaccurate…even if one might claim, with equal accuracy, that they made their fateful, if enthusiastic, choices in November with “eyes wide shut”.)
File under: Paging Bari Weiss?
Valerie Jarrett parents were Communists. That is why they had to leave Chicago for Iran.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/citation_needed.jpg?w=300
Frank Davis, also from Chicago, was a communist and was young Obama’s friend almost a father figure.
He actually was a Communist Party member for some time. Note, the Communist Party’s membership declined by about 85% between 1947 and 1972; there were far more disaffected Communists than true believers. Davis arrived on Oahu ca. 1946 to take a job on the staff of the west coast Longshoremen’s union. By the time Obama made his acquaintance, he was running a small distributorship which delivered paper to business clients. (I think he was in the advertising business at one point too). IIRC, his leisure activities including playing checkers and sharing a hookah with Stanley Dunham, Obama’s goofy grandpa.
Correction:
“R and R” (above) should be “R and D”.
(I seem to have been influenced by that fascinating recent series of comments on the railroads….)
The indications that he hates Israel came in other ways, for example this, his parting shot.
The head of the UN mission was Samantha Power, an exemplar of cruel-to-the-kind-kind-to-the-cruel Eurotrash attitudes. The resolution is a bit of asinine posturing and that’s all.
I’m going to advance a hypothesis: that in their mundane lives, Barry and Mooch are remarkably empty people and do not have the sort of emotional spectrum or capacity for reflection an ordinary person does. They’re well-matched for that reason. He’s characterized by vanity and spite and otherwise there’s not a whole lot of there there. She’s Material Girl. (Recall Ava Gardner’s self-assessment, “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial”). And I bet you Genevieve Cook, Sheila Jager, and Maya Ng are well aware of this, at least in regards to him.
I suppose there is a certain kind of satisfaction to be gained by casting ruthless, malicious and totally unscrupulous ideologues of destruction as simply dopey, non-dimensional narcissists.
Moreover, I think even Samantha Power would be surprised, if no doubt tickled, to find out that she was the one actually driving America’s Middle-East policy in the Obama administration….
(Could it be that she was the one who sent Kerry on his secret mission in the fall of 2016 to “drum up” (or more accurately, pressure certain countries to) support for UNR 2334?)
Moreover, I think even Samantha Power would be surprised, if no doubt tickled, to find out that she was the one actually driving America’s Middle-East policy in the Obama administration….
She’s was the chief of the UN Mission and it was a UN resolution.
I suppose there is a certain kind of satisfaction to be gained
No, there isn’t any ‘satisfaction gained’. It’s just an assessment, like yours. (I think a better substantiated one).
Does Valerie still live with Barack? How weird is that relationship?
Art Deco:
Why would you think Power was calling the shots? I VERY much doubt that was the case. And “asinine posturing” is what a great deal of “diplomacy” is about. Actually, it’s what a great deal of Obama’s presidency was about. And it often has consequences. Obama was breaking with a formerly completely bipartisan consensus on how to handle such votes, and it was accompanied by a statement (unprecedented from a US government) that Israel’s actions were illegal. It did not go unnoticed around the world.
I have no idea what you’re basing your emotional assessments on, but they have no special validity, nor do they preclude (as you yourself point out) vanity and spite as potent motivators. I have always felt that Obama is a cold-blooded idealogue who learned to hide his true feelings, personality, and aims under a smooth veneer of “likeability” in order to get power.
Why would you think Power was calling the shots?
I dunno. She ran the UN mission….
I have always felt that Obama is a cold-blooded idealogue who learned to hide his true feelings, personality, and aims under a smooth veneer of “likeability” in order to get power.
I’m going to be more cynical and just suggest he lacked the people skills to make deals with other politicians. See Steve Sailer on Obama’s recreations, e.g. golf. Other politicians use recreation to build relationships. Obama assiduously avoided his peers.
Does Valerie still live with Barack? How weird is that relationship?
Mr. Sailer has used the term ‘godmother’.
Have a gander at Ann Dunham. From the time she was 18 to the time she was 37, other people were cleaning up after her – her mother, her father, her 2d husband. And that’s what you can see on the surface. For what was under the surface, you’d need to have a look at Madelyn Dunham’s check journal. Everything she did with herself over a period of 30-odd years suggests an unattractive self-centered twit who turned into Mrs. Jellyby. I doubt he had much visceral affection for her.
Art Deco:
My reading of Obama is different than yours. He had the people skills he wanted and he made use of them. His way wasn’t the schmoozy way. He used charm on the public and the MSM. Otherwise, he was about power. For example, there was the way he ingratiated himself with the guy who was in charge of the Illinois legislature – I forget his name – and impressed him with his ruthless ambition and got him to facilitate Obama’s taking credit for the work of others. Can’t find my posts about that right now, but I’ve researched it enough to know that Obama knew exactly what he was doing and how to work the right people who could help him gain power.
Art Deco:
You’ve commented here a long time, and you’ve been many things, but “dumb” has never been one of them.
So I cannot believe you actually think the head of the UN mission is responsible for the US policy there. He or she presents it and is a spokesperson for it and can perhaps have some input which only matters if the president agrees. Obama was fully in charge, as are all presidents who are not cognitively-challenged figureheads. Obama was in possession of his faculties.
So I cannot believe you actually think the head of the UN mission is responsible for the US policy there.
There is such a thing as delegating authority, particularly when the agency in question is unimportant.
there was the way he ingratiated himself with the guy who was in charge of the Illinois legislature – I forget his name
Emil Jones.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
I think this take is mostly right, but the problem also has a bit to do with the way our foreign policy/intelligence community is organized. In the State Department, different countries and regions get their own offices, run by bureaucrats who guard their turf very jealously. So the Iran “experts” don’t care very much about Iran’s web of alliances with bad people all over the globe. That’s someone else’s problem. They aren’t even worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons program because the State Department has a separate office that deals with nuclear non-proliferation. So its very easy for these people to tell the president (or whoever is in charge) that the Iranians are our friends.
Can’t find my posts about that right now, but I’ve researched it enough to know that Obama knew exactly what he was doing and how to work the right people who could help him gain power.
It’s known what he gained was graft. Michelle got handsome promotions and raises over the years in her wheel-spinning job. One thing about Obama’s career, however, has been that he occupies offices but isn’t known to do anything with them.
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
But this shows Obama as a project of Jones, not as a power center in his own right.
I’ve noticed that Art Deco mostly dismisses Obama as a serious actor and attributes his presidency to the result of “vector forces” or something like that.
IMO Obama was neither the messiah nor mastermind as some have held him. He had many faults, but he was quite shrewd and effective. He was the perfect key for the lock in 2008. I don’t believe there was another Democrat who could have moved the US as far to the left as Obama did.
And I believe Obama is still at work and driving much of what we see today. neo’s OBH acronym is on point.
The JCPOA was designed to extend Iran’s “breakout time”–the time it would take for Iran to make an atomic weapon–if it pushed its centrifuges to make greater than or equal to 20% U-235, to one year. This was supposed to give the world enough time to snap on sanctions and prevent Iran from actually entering the atomic club. Since Trump’s withdrawal from this agreement, Iran has announced that it is now enriching to that level (and more?…we don’t know) as punishment to the Trump administration.
“20% is the lowest enrichment that is considered practical for making a nuclear weapon,” Edwin Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety, Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Live Science in an email.
“However, 20% is not a magical dividing line between weapon-usable and non-weapon-usable material,” Lyman said.
By breaking these limitations, Lyman says that the time — the “breakout time” — has decreased, meaning they are developing their nuclear program beyond what was agreed and are getting closer to being able to create nuclear weapons more quickly if that is their intent. “My guess is that it is well below a year at this point (if it ever really was greater than a year),” Lyman said.
How long has it been since Trump pulled out of the JCPOA?
If a nation is approaching this watershed, its use of extortion is going to become its de facto modus operandi. This extortion may be either deliberate or granted gratuitously by frightened neighboring countries….trying desperately to prolong this quantum leap in power in Iran.
I believe one can explain much of the politics of the Middle East by awareness of this fact.
Art Deco:
Obama did PLENTY during his presidency. He didn’t do it alone, but he was definitely in charge of the fundamental transformation of America – including huge changes in the immigration policy (DACA, etc.), the military, the DOJ and other agencies, as well as the way colleges treated complaints of sexual offenses, and the liberal use of the race card.
As far as Emil Jones and Obama went – it was Obama who was the instigator. He made a proposal to Jones and Jones saw that it was to his own advantage as well. I told the story in this post. If you haven’t read the post or don’t remember it, I suggest you do so. The following excerpt is a link from this article:
.
Obama knew who to go to and how to appeal to that person. The prize was power. Any graft was secondary.
You wrote that Obama lacked the people skills to make deals with other politicians. Hardly. He made certain very efficient deals with those politicians he chose to make deals with. He didn’t have the traditional hail fellow well met people skills, but he certainly had other sorts of people skills.
Art Deco:
This was not a delegation of authority. Are you kidding? Seriously, I’ve read tons of articles on that vote, and not one – on left or right or in-between – suggested for a moment that this huge break with all precedent was anything other than Obama’s decision.
IMO Obama was neither the messiah nor mastermind as some have held him. He had many faults, but he was quite shrewd and effective.
Effective at what? At stomping his feet and refusing to do anything constructive (remember Simpson-Bowles)? At generating an electoral disaster for Democratic legislators at the federal and state level?
Shrewd about what? Friendly accounts of how he worked had it that he got memos from his staff with canned options, selected one of the options, and scribbled on inane marginalia.
And I believe Obama is still at work and driving much of what we see today. neo’s OBH acronym is on point.
There was one session early in his administration where Obama calls up Reid and Pelosi while they’re negotiating over the Porkulus. They shut the microphone off on their end so he couldn’t hear them and continued negotiating, treating his yammer as white noise.
You wrote that Obama lacked the people skills to make deals with other politicians. Hardly. He made certain very efficient deals with those politicians he chose to make deals with.
Huh? I need an example. I’m not seeing one. You’re telling me this fellow Jones adopted Obama as a protege.
Effective at what? At stomping his feet and refusing to do anything constructive (remember Simpson-Bowles)? At generating an electoral disaster for Democratic legislators at the federal and state level?
Art+Deco:
Apparently you missed that he became president and set the country on a hard left course from which it may take a generation or two to recover…if we do.
But other than that, yeah, totally incompetent. As long as you can call up minor negative anecdotes (almost never with cites) against Obama, I’m sure we’re fine.
No one else here notice pro-Shia actions by Obama from the get go (besides the *ahem* pallets of money to Iran) during his presidency? I think his association with Valerie was more than just random. But pure speculation. I do tend to also agree with @Spartacus.
OBH… is that pronounced Obama Bin Harris? Kinda catchy…
Apparently you missed that he became president and set the country on a hard left course from which it may take a generation or two to recover…if we do.
Eyeroll. The strange cultural shift among the young took place before he took office and the appellate judiciary has been a scandal for 60 years.
Art Deco:
You don’t seem to understand what Obama did as president and what he is still doing. I listed a lot of things that were not just cultural shifts continuing at the same pace as before. In particular, he normed certain types of behavior for officeholders, and he politicized the DOJ and the military to a much greater extent than previously. And you don’t seem to get the Emil Jones story, either. If you didn’t understand its significance from that quote or from my longer post that I linked to, that’s not much more point in trying to explain further.
Art likes to argue but never concedes, when all else fails him, he cites a statistic (sometimes, a relevant one); just a little exaggeration IMO. 🙂
Thank you for this commentary, esp about Jarrett. It is illustrative.
Very interesting discussion….I wonder about the people and organizations behind Obama, besides Bill Ayers. Obama seems like a “front man”, an actor, and not smart or hardworking enough to explain his ascendance.
I thought Barack Hussein attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, not a Catholic parochial school, though a public school followed. was it in the latter that he was registered as a Muslim?
It was a public school, but in Muslim-majority Indonesia students don’t get religious instruction. Obama “wrote” in one of his “autobiographies” (I forget which one; two autobiographies while a non-entity!) that he used to get in trouble for acting as the class clown in Quran class.
A student only attends Quran class in Indonesia if the student is registered as a Muslim. What that also means is that while at school as a registered Muslim he attended Friday prayer services as part of that religious instruction. Not that I am under the impression that he’s religious in any meaningful sense. In fact like a true Bolshevik (socialism is his actual religion) he is hostile to religion. Note that he constantly referred to “freedom of worship.” He meant that people had the right to go into a room and engage in their primitive liturgies but once those people left that room they had no right to practice their religion or live according to their religiously conscience. Which is why Obamacare was written the way it was; the Little Sisters of the Poor had to break their religious vows; an order of celibate (and mostly elderly nuns) had to provide their employees with contraceptives. The “compromise” the Obama offered was that they could be exempted from that requirement if they provided written instructions to their employees telling them how to get contraceptives.
Does anyone in this day and age need to be instructed by their employers about how to get contraceptives? There are clothing stores that have bowls of condoms on their shelves and display cases. Free for the taking; anyone can walk in and grab a handful. No one was going to be helped by this law, and that was the point. The important thing was force the nuns to break their vows and violate their consciences. Just like the Greeks of the successor kingdoms of Alexander’s empire tried to force the Jews to violate Mosaic law, and the pagan Romans demanded Christians worship their gods. In particular their deified emperors.
Pagan rulers are jealous gods, and thou shalt have no gods before them. Mother Theresa was free to open hospices in Calcutta, and the religious order she founded (the Missionaries of Charity) can do so in other countries. But they better not try that **** in Washington D.C. or they’ll enrage the gods who live on that Mount Olympus.
Obama did gloss over that part of his upraising to present the illusion he was raised in a far more secular environment than he actually was. But Obama’s takeaway, formative lesson was that he was exposed to and impressed by the Islamic social order. He does see it’s value as a means of subjugating a people and ordering society.
Another thing is that grossly misrepresented by the media is Sharia law. Because like all leftists, particularly Obama who was raised in Islamic culture, they have an affinity for Islam. And just as the western left has to lie about its core ideology, goals, and methods so does Islam, and leftists are willing to do likewise for their brothers in arms. According to all schools of Sharia (the Sunni Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and Hanafi and the “twelver” Shia Jafari schools govern 95-98% of all Muslims; although there are minor, barely extant lesser schools they don’t differ in any significant way) anyone who is born to a Muslim father is a Muslim. It doesn’t matter if the man is a practicing Muslim or not. Anyone who says the Shahada (the Muslim profession of faith; “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”) in Arabic before a Muslim man is a Muslim. For life. It’s like joining a gang, and as with all real gangs it’s blood in, blood out. Apostasy is a crime. Male apostates must be executed. Some schools, such as the Maliki, rule that the apostate isn’t even given a chance to return to Islam if they apostatized in secret, on the theory that their word couldn’t be trusted. Others are given a varying period of time to recant their apostasy and return to the Ummah. The Sunni Hanbali and Shia Jafari schools decree that women apostates aren’t to be executed. Not out of charity; according to all schools of Sharia women are inferior to men (they’re half as intelligent, therefore their testimony in court is worth half that of a man) in all respects. So they’re weaker. Therefore they’re to be imprisoned either by family or in Iran in actual prisons, fed essentially a starvation diet to further weaken them, and beaten during the five times a day they should be praying to break their will and force them to take up Islam again.
Recall that in 2014 naturalized American citizen Miriam Ibrahim was denounced by her half-brother as an apostate, arrested, and sentenced to death in her native Sudan. The official school of Islamic jurisprudence at the time was Hanbali; the same school that is predominant on the Arabian peninsula. She, her full siblings, and her half brother shared the same Muslim father. Miriam’s father had abandoned her Ethiopian Orthodox mother while she was still pregnant with her. Miriam never knew her father and was raised by her mother as an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian.
Her relatives whom like her father she didn’t know knew damned well who she was. She had several successful businesses and tracts of productive agricultural land. That’s why she kept returning to the land of her birth. And they wanted to seize her property (Islamic blasphemy laws always operate in this fashion; see Pakistan and how Christians there are normally accused for further examples). The court ruled it didn’t matter that Miriam didn’t know her father, or that he was Muslim. It didn’t matter that she was raised her entire life as a Christian, and she was a deeply convicted Christian woman. She was born a Muslim according to ALL interpretations of Sharia law, not just Hanbali, and either she recant Christianity, embrace Islam even though she didn’t believe in it, or she would be executed. She was imprisoned with her two year old son. The son’s father could have no contact with him. In fact, since Miriam’s husband was a Christian and Islam doesn’t allow Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men she was also convicted of adultery and sentenced to 100 lashes, to be administered before she was executed.
When she was imprisoned she was pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter in prison. Both children had to be raised by the family that denounced Miriam since it would be heresy to allow a Christian to raise them. Miriam was by law a Muslim, her children were therefore by law a Muslim, and therefore the Muslims who had engineered their mother’s execution to take her properties would raise them as Muslims. And therefore to hate their mother and father (Surah 60 Aya 4 of the Quran, if you’re interested, in which Allah commands Muslims to follow Abraham’s example when he professes “enmity and hatred forever” against his own father and the rest of his family “until you worship Allah alone”).
She was released and allowed to leave Sudan under intense international pressure. Of course she forfeited her property, which would have went to her Muslim relatives, so, mission accomplished! But everything that applied to Miriam Ibrahim applies to Barack Hussein Obama. He didn’t know his sperm donor Muslim dad; nor does it matter that his father renounced Islam and became a communist and an atheist. Obama’s grandfather was a Muslim convert and remained so until his death. Obama’s father was born a Muslim and practiced Islam in youth, later becoming an apostate. So Obama was born a Muslim, and therefore per Sharia law of every stripe he remains a Muslim to this day.
Somehow, the same MFM that reported the Miriam Ibrahim story, which became an international story precisely because under Sharia once you are born or convert to Islam you are a Muslim for life, and your children are Muslim for life, pretended Obama can choose not to be a Muslim. Of course, being a leftist requires cognitive dissonance.
Which brings us to Hillary! Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin. Huh? Yes. Like Miriam Ibrahim she is a Muslim woman who married a non-Muslim man. Unlike Miriam Ibrahim she was raised as a Muslim. Her father was Syed Zainul Abedin, who presented as a scholar and was the nominal founder of the London-based Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. The IMMA poses as a scholarly organization with a mission to study Muslims in non-Muslim countries. In fact it is a seditious organization that is the foreign policy arm of the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs. It’s true mission is to ensure that Muslims don’t assimilate into western societies and to indoctrinate them to see oppression everywhere and press grievances in order to cultivate and maintain a siege mentality. Huma Abedin’s mother was a prominent member of the Muslim Sisterhood, the women’s auxiliary of the original Islamic terrorist group and ideological ancestor of all follow-on terrorist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan. Upon Syed Zainul Abedin’s death, Huma’s mother Saleha Mahmood Abedin took over as head of the IMMA.
Not only was Michigan-born Huma Abedin raised as a Muslim in Saudi Arabia from the age of 2 until she entered college, she has extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi government via their front groups in her own right, so this isn’t a guilt-by-association accusation. Although, note for the record the left is fine with guilt-by-association when accusing non-leftists of non-crimes. It’s just that I have higher standards.
It isn’t my mere opinion that the Musllim Student Association is a MB front-group. The government proved as a matter of fact in the 2008/9 Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial held here in Dallas that the MSA was founded by the North American arm of the Ikhwan, and its mission is the same as the Saudi government front group IMMA. To ensure that Muslims in western societies don’t assimilate and remain a hostile element to the countries they live in.
CAIR, BTW, is also a MB front group under the facade of being a civil rights organization. In fact it was founded at the behest of Hamas, which by its own charter self-identifies as merely the Gazan wing of the Ikhwan.
Huma Abedin wasn’t merely a member of the MSA while attending Georgetown university. She was a member of its board of directors. The rank-and-file membership may not be aware of what kind of organization they’ve joined, duped into believing it’s just a social and student activist club. The leadership knows damned well the real mission of the MSA. In addition to keeping Muslim students segregated and perpetually aggrieved, they also evaluate Muslim students for their dedication to Islam and therefore their potential to go onto bigger and better things. In other words, they are the recruiting arm for their terrorist founders and like minded groups. In Britain the MB front groups that pose as student organizations are called Islamic Societies. It’s no accident that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who gained notoriety as the “underwear bomber” for his failed attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas day in 2009, was the former president of the Islamic Society at the University College London when he was a student there. He was the fourth former president of a London student Islamic Society to be charged with terrorism-related crimes in three years. Many American jihadis have similar pedigrees, having been heavily involved in MSAs and even as officers of MSAs. Just like Huma Abedin.
As an aside, in North America the MB has front groups called Islamic Societies, too. But these are MB affiliated Mosques. The Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, were identified, groomed, and indoctrinated at the Islamic Society of Boston and Cultural Center. When rightly accused dropping the ball since Russian intelligence & security services had notified their U.S. counterparts of the Tsarnaevs’ jihadist tendencies the worse than useless FBI bristled and attempted to defend itself by pointing out its agents had visited the ISBCC.
Not to investigate its obvious links with terrorist groups. As part of Obama’s Muslim outreach program, as it turns out.
For twelve years beginning in 1996 when Huma Abedin was a student at Georgetown she worked for her father and later her mother as assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Her mother, still a prominent member of the Muslim Sisterhood, as the head of the IMMA remains the executive editor of the JMMA. It purports to be a scholarly journal, but it is in fact a Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs propaganda organ. Her immediate supervisor in Washington is currently a fugitive of justice who fled numerous terrorism-related charges.
When people point out her ties her leftist apologists cry “Islamophobia” and “racism” and “misogyny” and claim these honest people are simply finding her guilty by association. Her associations are important, but in fact she is guilty by participation.
Are we supposed to believe that Huma Abedin, given her family’s terrorist ties and her own involvement with MB/Saudi subversive front groups, didn’t know her own marriage to a Jewish man was like Miriam Ibrahim’s null and void? Of course she knows, just like BHO knows he is a Muslim per Islamic law.
Yet unlike Miriam Ibrahim they’ll get away with it because they’re performing too valuable a service. The Ikhwan is quite open about the fact that, given its terrorist history and ties to other terrorist groups (it’s banned as a terror organization in many Muslim countries) it has to advance its agenda using front men that aren’t officially members. And by using fraudsters who appear to be entirely secular and westernized. They’re not alone; the USG has captured Islamic State training materials that instruct jihadis entering western countries to commit acts of terrorism to shave their beards, never have a Quran in their possession, avoid Mosques, and go to bars and strip clubs (just like the 9/11 crew did on the night of 9/10/2001) and drink alcohol. If their identifying documents can support the deception they are to pretend to be Christians, wear a crucifix, attend church, and carry a Bible (I know it’s a touchy subject, but these aren’t original ideas and are the reason behind the Spanish Inquisition; Muslims were given very lenient terms and granted religious freedom after the reconquista, but they continued to wage jihad at every rumor of an advancing Muslim army and when finally the exasperated Spanish gave them the ultimatum of converting to Christianity or be exiled they pretended to convert but still waged jihad just like these MB/IS “Christian” jihadis).
Many people are familiar with the Islamic concept of taqqiyah, which actually means “concealment.” It doesn’t cover all forms of lying, several of which are divinely ordained in Islam. Muruna is one of those divinely ordained forms of lying. It means “setting aside;” jihadis are allowed to “set aside” the laws of Sharia in order to deceive their non-Muslim targets. As Muhammad said in a sahih hadith, if a Muslim drinks wine (alcohol is haram) in the morning and dies in jihad in the afternoon he goes straight to paradise; his sin doesn’t count against him. As Muhammad is also recorded teaching in all the canonical hadith collections, “All war is deceit.”
Islam is also forced collective in which no one has an individual identity. Instead everyone’s identity is the group identity forced upon them by their totalitarian overlords. In Islam the group identity is based upon religion. In communist/socialist countries it’s economic class. In the leftist western/U.S. caste system the group identity is of course one’s ethnic/racial/gender/gender identity/orientation.
In summary, having gone the long way around the barn to get here, leftists recognize in Islam a kindred totalitarian spirit. Both rely on terrorizing their own subject peoples including, and perhaps especially, their own “party members.” Both demand unthinking compliant populations to give total submission (again, Islam means submission and that’s what leftists mean when they say they want an “inclusive, tolerant” society; by inclusion the mean rigidly enforced orthodoxy and by tolerant they mean no dissent is tolerated). Neither are consistent ideologies but then totalitarian ideologies are never consistent except in two important respects. The first of these is that the totalitarian impulse is simply about gaining and keeping power “by any means necessary” as Antifa/#BLM helpfully never fail to tell us. Do communist countries allow free markets? It depends. If it keeps the communists in power they do. If free markets pose a threat they’re banned. Do leftists care about gay rights or women’s rights? It depends on whether agitating for those rights serve their cause. On the other hand, if propping up Muslims as “the real victims” is more important than who cares if Muslim gangs are raping non-Muslim girls and women across the width and breadth of Britain; the authorities will ignore it. And if Muslims are throwing gays off of tall buildings or toppling walls on them, burying them alive in the rubble, oh well. When building the worker’s paradise on earth you have to break a few eggs. There are Muslim bakeries, you know. Just go to Muslim dominated areas in the U.S. like Dearborn, MI, and try to order a custom SSM wedding cake. And you’ll never see a lawsuit against Muslims. Apparently on the leftist totem pole of “intersectional” victimhood Muslims outrank women and the LGBT miasma of competing interests the left laughably calls a “community.”
The second and only way these ideologies are consistent is that while free markets in goods and services my be legalized, there can be no free markets in ideas.
This is why the left instinctively has an affinity for Islam as their fellow totalitarians. Like Stalin truly believed he understood Hitler, hence the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And it the leftist-Islamic alliance will work out just as well. Leftists really can’t comprehend that Islamic totalitarians my actually believe that veneer of religion they apply to their governing ideology. They believe that Muslim leaders are like “devout Catholics” Pelosi and Biden, or “devout Christian” Obama. Their actions betray the fact they think religion is complete B.S. Hell, in one of Obama’s own vacuous “autobiographies” Obama admits he only became “Christian” to be taken seriously in the Chicago black community as a community organizer. Naturally he chose to join Rev. Wright’s TUCC, which is no more Christian than Pelosi/Biden’s post-scriptural, post-Jesus “Catholic Catechism.”
Muslim leaders have always been perfectly willing to align themselves with infidels. Like Stalin, who was so shocked when Hitler invaded the USSR he stayed drunk in his dacha for an entire week, the infidels are always surprised when the Muslims turn on their allies. Obama’s shock may turn out to be greatest of all. Indonesian Islam has never been particularly virulent. His step dad, Lolo, was for all practical purposes only a nominal Muslim. Obama, who is nowhere near as intelligent as he’s portrayed, apparently extrapolates from his “lived experience” that all Islam is like Indonesia’s and all Muslims are like Lolo.
Sorry for the long comment. I truly am; now I’m afraid no one will bother reading it. I didn’t see how to cut any of this out, though.
My bad; it’s the Sunni Hanafi school of fiqh that agrees with the Shia Jafari school that female apostates aren’t to be executed. And instead imprisoned, starved, and beating into submission.
The Hanbali school most definitely does prescribe execution for female apostates, as the story of Miriam Ibrahim amply demonstrates.
Steve57– Thanks for your very interesting (and not too long) comment!