PrintMarch 30, 2011
President Obama: 'Mosques Destroyed'
The President finally addressed the nation and the world nearly two weeks after initiating military action against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Boiling down his speech, he claimed a moral imperative to intervene with force because Gaddafi had killed innocent civilians and destroyed mosques in his struggle to hang on to power.
"Mosques destroyed," the president said, supported his argument for air strikes. Churches are being destroyed daily in the Muslim world, but the U.S. does not intervene. Take Iraq, for example. We have sacrificed thousands of our soldiers' lives and billions in treasure in an effort to bring freedom to this war-torn country.
But the Christians there are daily being murdered and their churches bombed. As a senator, Barack Obama had no interest in preventing Saddam Hussein from filling mass graves. He vocally opposed our going into Iraq. That was then.
In Pakistan, the only Christian cabinet member was assassinated and a Muslim governor who sought to protect a Christian woman from death was also gunned down, reputedly by his own security guard. Christians in Pakistan face escalating persecution. Their churches are attacked and anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity is killed.
Yet, we support Pakistan as a partner in the global war on terror. Whether Pakistan supports us is another question. Why have we been fighting in neighboring Afghanistan for ten years against the plotters of 9/11? It's widely believed that Osama bin Laden is somewhere in the wild border regions between the two countries, quite possibly on the Pakistan side. Could Pakistan be playing a double game?
President Obama is unmoved by the plight of Christians in the Sudan. There, a twenty-year civil war has been going on with an Islamist government in Khartoum starving some five million Christians and followers of traditional African religion. This cruel oppression has led the South Sudanese to vote overwhelmingly to break away.
Human Rights lawyer Bill Saunders of Americans United for Life was in the Sudan at Christmas several years ago. He and his fellow worshipers took refuge in the woods as aircraft from the Khartoum Islamist regime came overhead to bomb their church. That was on Christmas day. (Don't we often hear how U.S. military initiatives must be delayed for Ramadan? It seems those holiday truces only work one way.)
No one suggested then or later that the United States should deploy military force in the Sudan to stop this ethnic cleansing of Christians, even though some mosques were also destroyed.
It is surely laudable for the U.S. to stand against massacres. Now, however, it seems that the leader of the Libyan rebels is one who fought against the U.S. in Afghanistan. Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi was taken prisoner in Pakistan. He also recruited two dozen jihadis to fight the Americans in Iraq.
Does it make sense for American taxpayers to give aid to Libyan rebels without first understanding who they are? Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has said that what we are doing in Libya is "what the Arab world wants us to do." Really? There's every indication that the Arab world would prefer that we bomb Tel Aviv.
Should we be supporting people who have Americans' blood on their hands? Intelligence estimates tell us that nearly one in five of the jihadis we fought against in Iraq came from Libya.
President Obama's speech to the nation raised as many questions as it answered. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs were not consulted, but the Arab League was. So was the UN. This is the same UN that applauded Gaddafi's wild rants in New York just last fall. It is the same body that elected Libya to its Human Rights Council.
Mr. Obama says that Gaddafi is on "the wrong side of history." It's interesting that the president knows where history is going in the Mideast. For the past 1400 years, there has been no democracy anywhere in the Mideast -- except in Israel. And Mr. Obama's policies seem to be aiding and abetting those who have shown the bitterest hatred of Israel.
It was surely shocking to millions of Americans when Barack Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah. Even more shocking, however, was Mr. Obama's selection of Egypt's Al Azhar Mosque as the venue for his 2009 speech to what he called "the Muslim world." The Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, says Dr. Zuhdi Jassser, a moderate American Muslim, "has served as a platform for 'Islamism' around the world, hatching the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 20th century."
So now we have a U.S. intervention in Libya that can only benefit rebels with known ties to jihadists and whose leaders have killed Americans. This all comes from an administration that refuses even to mention radical Islam as a possible threat to our nation. Is it time for "re-calibrating" our foreign policy? As Jesse Helms used to say:
We'd like the State Department better if they'd just open up an American desk.
We'd like the State Department better if they'd just open up an American desk.
