RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Sir Henry Wotton’s famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a UN ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — President Obama. Happily, it worked. Nine months after going on five Sunday talk-shows and pinning Benghazi on some unseen YouTube video, Miss Rice was promoted to National Security Advisor. The Administration’s designated fall-guy, the director of that unseen video, was thrown in jail for a year, and now lives in a homeless shelter.

My own view of Benghazi has been consistent since my column of September 14th 2012, three days after the attack and two days before Susan Rice peddled to the nation an agreed story she and the President and the Secretary of State knew was utterly false. Unlike her September 16th TV appearances, my September 14th column still holds up:

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

But the court eunuchs never did take an interest, and it would be foolish to expect them to now. Nevertheless, if Washington had a healthy media culture, the Ben Rhodes email outlining the Administration’s four goals for Susan Rice’s telly marathon would be devastating:

*To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;

*To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;

*To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;

*To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

All four “goals” are bunk, but the second was an explicit lie.

Who was this colossus of Rhodes? He’s not part of the State Department or the “intelligence community”; Ben Rhodes was a political guy in the White House. And it was the political guys who called the shots, rather than the diplomats or spooks or military or anyone else who knew what actually happened that night in the Libyan town of Benghazi, as opposed to the stage-set “Benghazi” the White House constructed and dressed with lies. Rhodes & Co “politicized” Benghazi because that’s all these fellows know how to do:

To ‘politicize’ means ‘to give a political character to.’ It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: ‘Gee, they nuked Israel. D’you think that will hurt us in Florida?’ So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be ‘bad’ for Obama — by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, it’s real bad. They’re dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as ‘Chris,’ as if they’ve known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want ‘politicization’? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your ‘friend”s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

In the vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply: ‘Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.’ That too is false.

That’s from my column of October 11th 2012, after an extraordinary month in which the three most senior figures grew ever more brazen in their dishonesty, President Obama shoring up his fake narrative by warning the UN General Assembly that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. The future’s in no danger of belonging to him: that guy’s in a California jail cell. The night of September 11th in Benghazi didn’t belong to him, either – until Obama and Clinton decided he deserved the credit.

At 8:30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9:40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose — a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12, by which point the consulate’s survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.

In Sweden, it’s old news: as Aftenposten reported a couple of years ago, the politicians in charge of local affairs in Stockholm had decided to offer returning ISIS members instant jobs, welfare handouts, and free homes.

This, mind you, at a time when one-fifth of young Swedes can’t find work, when schools, hospitals, and retirement homes are in decline because immigrants are taking too big a cut of the funds appropriated for social services, and when it’s virtually impossible to find a flat in the Swedish capital.

Erik Slottner, an opposition politician, called the new policy “a reward for criminals.” But Ewa Larsson, a Green Party member who’s in charge of social services in Stockholm, answered that charge by making a distinction between addressing criminal acts – which, she maintained, is the job of the police – and providing social services, which is her wheelhouse.

Fair enough. But why should returning members of ISIS be entitled to move to the front of the line when it comes to collecting free stuff? The closest Larsson came to offering a justification for the policy was to say this: “No human being is born as an extremist.” There it is again: the nobody’s-really-guilty Nordic mentality that will spell the death of Sweden.

Larsson isn’t alone. Last year, Anna Sjöstrand, a local official in Lund, Sweden, told a reporter that the question of how to treat returning ISIS members needs to be “undramatized” so that public officials can examine it in a practical way. She framed the issue as follows: “Here’s Kalle who has this problem and what does Kalle need in order to feel good and to remove himself from that environment?”

OK, let’s break that down. “Kalle” (not “Muhammed”?) has a “problem” (he’s butchered any number of men, women, and children in the name of Allah, but is feeling a little worn out and has decided to look into other lifestyle options). What he needs now, above all, is to escape that “environment” (ISIS as abusive family?) and “feel good.”

And what does Kalle need? Sjöstrand explains: “It could be a residential set-up, financial help, education – it’s about investigating and looking at what the individual requires in order to quit [ISIS].” In short, it’s all about what “Kalle” needs.

Think of the Korean Peninsula turned upside down.

Imagine if there were a South Korean dictatorship that had been in power, as a client of the United States since 1953.

Imagine also that contemporary South Korea was not the rich, democratic home of Kia and Samsung. Instead, envision it as an unfree, pre-industrialized and impoverished failed state, much like North Korea.

Further envision that the U.S. had delivered financial aid and military assistance to this outlaw regime, which led to Seoul’s possessing several nuclear weapons and a fleet of long-range missiles.

Next, picture this rogue South Korean dictatorship serially threatening to incinerate its neighbor, North Korea — and imagine that North Korea was ruled not by the Kim dynasty but by a benign government without nuclear weapons.

Also assume that the South Korean dictatorship would periodically promise to wipe out Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. The implicit message to the Chinese would be that the impoverished South Koreans were so crazy that they didn’t care whether they, too, went up in smoke — as long a dozen of their nuclear-tipped missiles could blow up Chinese cities and paralyze the second-largest economy in the world. Assume that these South Korean threats had been going on without consequences for over a decade.

Finally, in such a fantasy scenario, what if the United States falsely claimed ignorance of much of its South Korean client’s nuclear capability and threats? America instead would plead that it regretted the growing tension and the reckless reactions of China to the nuclear threats against it. Washington would lecture China that the crisis was due in part to its support for its North Korean ally.

For effect, the United States would occasionally issue declarations of regret and concern over the situation — even as it warned China not to do anything to provoke America’s provocateur ally.

In such a fantasy, American security experts and military planners would gleefully factor a roguish nuclear South Korea into U.S. deterrent strategy. The Pentagon would privately collude with the South Korean dictatorship to keep the Chinese occupied and rattled, while the U.S. upped shipments of military weaponry to Seoul and overlooked its thermonuclear upgrades.

The American military would be delighted that China would be tied down by having an unhinged nuclear dictatorship on its borders, one that periodically threatened to kill millions of Chinese. South Korea would up the ante of its bluster by occasionally test-launching missiles in the direction of its neighbor.

Question: How long would China tolerate having weapons of mass destruction pointed at its major cities by an unbalanced tyrannical regime?

In response, would Beijing threaten a nuclear Seoul with a preemptory military strike, even though the Chinese would know that Seoul could first do a lot of nuclear damage?

Would China conclude that the United States was the real guilty party because it tacitly sanctioned South Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons?

Would China then warn the U.S. to pressure Seoul to disarm?

Would Beijing cease all trade with America?

Would China boycott, embargo or blockade South Korea?

The sixteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks came and went with minimal recognition on the part of the media, a dreadful pity but not a surprise. Mark that slaughter and, well, people might be reminded of Islam’s intolerance, rather than the evil of the ‘no’ campaign on gay marriage

Americans and Israelis remember 9/11 yesterday, today and always. In Australia, by contrast, the sixteenth anniversary went by with barely a mention of the terror attack by Al-Qaida, which took 2996 lives and inflicted $10 billion in damages.

In Australia on the anniversary we were bombarded instead with sermons about the alleged necessity, no, the moral imperative, to vote ‘Yes’ on gay marriage. There were few mentions of the 16th anniversary of that most vile, inhuman and devastating attack by radical Islam on our way of life.

Doesn’t such a calamity deserve an honorable mention at least? Or is our collective attention so consumed by the inanity of the same-sex marriage campaign’s aggressive ‘yes’ advocates that there is simply no grey matter left to contemplate the atrocity that changed everything. Actually, make that should have changed everything.

How much effort have we put into forgetting how the Twin Towers were hit, how they burned and then tumbled, entombing those who gave offense to Islam simply by reporting for work in a high-rise office complex? Have we forgotten those heart-stopping images of human beings flinging themselves from the upper floors, choosing to die by impact rather than flames, perhaps in the hope that their bodies would be found and identified so families could bury them and find some sort of closure? Have we forgotten the bravery of ordinary Americans who found themselves on a hijacked plane and fought back? Have we forgotten the brotherhood and tenacity of the New York’s police and firefighters, ordinary men and women engulfed by calamity but rising resolutely to extend the helping hand?

Have we forgotten? Or is that we simply wish to forget?

Our mass media, I believe, ignored 9/11 attack on the the buildings that symbolised in the eyes of Islamist savages the success and confidence of the West. To be reminded that the most ardent elements of a militant creed detest us for what we are just will not do! That goes too for the hate Islamists shower on us for celebrating the equality of women and, yes, to the tolerance extended to homosexuals long before activists seized upon the same-sex marriage push as a handy tool for stroking egos and garnering look-at-me attention. The approved narrative says that we are all tiles in the gorgeous mosaic of multiculturalism, that all cultures are equal, so let’s not think about the intolerance one of those tiles represents.

That silence, it evokes the reason proponents of the SSM did everything they could to stop the national plebiscite endorsed by popular vote at the last election. Advocates were terrified that the “great unwashed” would not vote as they were told by their betters. The virtual refusal of our media to even mention the 9/11 anniversary is, I believe, a further manifestation of contempt for those whose opinion is deemed not to matter, not to the media and not to so many politicians. Remind the public of that day when almost 3000 people perished and it would prompt thoughts of Islam and how problematic it is to integrate it with Western life and norms. Any frank discussion of burqas, female genital mutilation, firebrand imams and a refusal to assimilate would be, as the media likes to put it, “Islamophobic”.

That 9/11 is remembered in Israel should come as no surprise. Israel knows the horror of Islamic terrorism on an ‘up close and personal’ basis. That is why Israelis do not delude themselves that terror attacks somewhere else are not their concern. It is. They make it so.

Some time ago, when Israelis were suffering from an incessant terror assaults, the rest of the world was indifferent to their suffering, believing it not their concern. The spread of global terrorism is a consequence of this indifference. The Jews are, indeed, the ‘canaries’ in the world’s mine – they suffered the terrorist onslaught first and learned how to fight back and survive. They have learned several lessons.

Anti-Zionism delays having to face the threats to world peace and human rights presented by Muslim supremacism.

“One girl had boiling water held over her throat: another had her tongue nailed to a table.” — Peter McGloughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal.

Muslims who spoke in opposition to the grooming behavior learned that no one outside their community had their back. Clearly, some form of displacement is going on. Jews are safe to criticize; jihadists are not.

One of the most troubling aspects about “peace and justice” activism in the current era is that the very same institutions that condemn Israel so vociferously have had a difficult, if not impossible time confronting the terrible misdeeds of the Assad regime in Syria, ISIS in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria with the same force with which they assail the Jewish state.

Yes, they issue condemnations, but their statements are lamentations that really do not approach in ferocity of the ugly denunciations these institutions target at Israel. In the United States, the problem is most pronounced in liberal Protestant mainline churches such as the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Methodist Church, denominations that have to varying degrees of intensity support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that singles Israel out for condemnation — in a transparent effort to eradicate the country by economic means — while remaining shamefully silent about the genocide of Christians in the Middle East.

We also see a tendency in institutions such as the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches and to my dismay as a Catholic, the Vatican and other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, to assail Israel while remaining silent about the problem of jihad.

The Catholic Church, which has condemned anti-Semitism in a document called Nostra Aetate in 1965, also has a difficult time dealing with the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Christian hostility in Muslim communities and the religious sources they hold dear.

One source of the problem is that it is simply a lot easier and safer to speak out about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians than it is to confront the violence against Christians in the rest of the Middle East.

If you fly to Israel, you can participate in a protest against the IDF at the security barrier in the morning and be eating in a nice restaurant in Tel Aviv that afternoon without having to worry about getting shot. Protesting against ISIS or the misdeeds of the Iranian government, which puts Westerners in jail, is another, rather more courageous, thing altogether.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has a theme park for many peace activists: Israel. American clergy go on a tour organized by an anti-Israel group like Sabeel then go back home and give PowerPoint presentations about how they protested the security barrier.

Another factor is fear — fear of Islam. The threat of violence that comes with confronting the impact of Sharia law and jihadism on human rights and national security has been significant, but it has remained doggedly unstated in the witness of churches in the United States. Condemn Israel unfairly or engage in Jew-baiting and you get a letter from CAMERA, the ADL or the local Board of Rabbis. Offend the sensibilities of jihadists and you might get killed.

On this score, it is important to note that anti-Zionism really started to manifest itself in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) — the church where the anti-Israel divestment movement got its start in the U.S. — with the election of a former missionary by the name of Benjamin Weir as moderator of the denomination’s General Assembly in 1986.

Prior to his election as moderator, Weir, kidnapped while working as a missionary, spent a year as a hostage held in Lebanon by Hezbollah.

If the United States in 2015 had received the same proportion of asylum seekers as Sweden, in relation to its population, the US would have taken in 5.2 million of them.

The survey covered the period 2011 to 2016 and concerned more than 10,000 reported crimes relating to sexual offenses.

That traditional Swedish bathhouses in Sweden today are associated with rape and sexual abuse was something unthinkable before the migration crisis in 2015. Both the Boston Globe and alternative media should please stick to statistics and facts.

Recently, The Boston Globe’s Astead W. Herndon wrote an article criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump’s ways of gathering support for his statements and proposals. While it is basically true that politicians should not only rely only on the media, Herndon’s understatement Sweden’s problems is dishonest at best.

If one mentions problems in Sweden relating to migration, it is important to describe what is really happening. Sadly, Sweden’s refugee policy has made Sweden less secure. In 2015, Sweden received 163,000 asylum seekers. The same year, the United States received about 70,000 asylum seekers. Sweden, however, has a population of ten million, while the United States has approximately 323 million. If the United States in 2015 had received the same proportion of asylum seekers as Sweden, in relation to its population, the US would have taken in 5.2 million. Would it have threatened U.S. security to host 5.2 million new asylum seekers in one year? Probably. That is what happened in Sweden.

The US already has a rigorous vetting process, but Sweden has a weak one — only slowly improving. In addition, because many “unaccompanied refugee children” lie about their age when they reach Sweden, the National Board of Forensic Medicine (“Rättsmedicinalverket”) has been instructed by the government to do medical age-assessments. These are made at the request of the Swedish Migration Agency (“Migrationsverket”), this, after the asylum seekers’ consent. The National Board of Forensic Medicine began performing these age-assessments in March; reporting on their activities on September 4, they found that in 83% of cases, the investigated person was not a minor, but 18 or older.

The problem of asylum seekers lying about their age is that these adults of unknown backgrounds have been sent to primary schools and high schools with children and placed in different homes with them. Sweden’s liberal migration policy has jeopardized the safety of Swedish children.

As a result of the migration crisis, since 2015 Sweden has been forced to introduce border controls. This activity, along with deporting illegal migrants and violent disputes in asylum accommodations, has claimed a large part of the resources of the police. In June 2016, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, surveying fires at asylum accommodations, found that only 11% of the fires were started from outside the asylum home. The resource-crisis of the Swedish police has resulted in more municipalities forced to hire private security companies. In spring 2017, Radio Sweden sent a survey to Sweden’s 290 municipalities. 200 responded, and of these, 140 stated that their security costs had increased, and of these, 35 responded that their costs had increased directly because of the lack of police officers.

In 2005, Sweden enacted a new law concerning sexual offenses, that broadened, under Swedish law, what was considered rape. In 2013, this law was extended even further to include even a passive response as a rape.

While the increase in the number of reported rapes should not be interpreted as Sweden having a “rape epidemic,” in June 2017, for example, Sweden’s public broadcasting television reported that in just a little over a year, 15 unaccompanied migrant boys from Afghanistan were convicted of gang-rapes of other boys in Sweden. In a police report published in 2016, dealing with sexual assaults, the police stated that:

“In cases where the crimes were committed by perpetrators in a larger group in public places and in swimming pools, the perpetrators were mainly young people seeking, or recently receiving, asylum in Sweden”.

In the same report one can also read that:

“All investigations in Stockholm and Kalmar from 2014 and 2015 have been closed down due to difficulties with identification or lack of evidence.”