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Ordered Liberty

by Andrew C. McCarthy

‘Sharia Killed Ambassador Chris Stevens’

October 26th, 2012 - 7:28 am

The headline on this post could just be a statement of fact, derived from an obvious truth, albeit one that our willfully blind government refuses to assimilate despite years of anti-American atrocities.

Under the supremacist interpretation of sharia — Islam’s totalitarian societal system — that is regnant in the Middle East, non-Muslim Westerners who seek to implant Western ideas and institutions in Islamic countries are deemed enemies who must be driven out or killed. As U.S. Ambassador to Libya, as an American attempting to transition the former Qaddafi dictatorship into something approximating Western democracy, Christopher Stephens was deemed an enemy worthy of killing; therefore, sharia ideologues killed him, along with three other similarly “culpable” Americans.

That is what happened. It is, moreover, what President Obama and his administration knew happened. They no doubt knew it while it was happening. They undeniably knew it within hours of its happening. And in spite of knowing it, they weaved a web of lies, over a course of weeks, to obscure what happened. They did so in gross violation of the president’s oath of office, and in a willfully anti-Constitutional conspiracy with Islamists against American free expression rights — a conspiracy resulting in the unforgivable prosecution of an American citizen for exercising his First Amendment right to make a video negatively depicting Islam. A video top administration officials, including the president himself, fraudulently portrayed as the catalyst of murderous Islamist savagery, intentionally obscuring the role of sharia.

That could be the explanation for the headline of this post. But it is not.

The headline, instead, is a quote mined from a bull’s-eye column by the American Spectator‘s stellar Jeffrey Lord. “Sharia,” he concludes, “killed Ambassador Chris Stevens.” And unlike anything you’ve read, Jeff compellingly connects some damning dots.

The local al-Qaeda franchise in Libya is called Ansar al-Sharia — literally, the “helpers of sharia.” The organization’s goal, the goal shared by all Islamists, not just those who seek it by violent jihad, is to “impose sharia.” So declares Ansar al-Sharia’s emir, Mohammed Ali al-Zawahi. Entirely consistent with that goal, Lord reports Zawahi’s proclamation that Ansar “is all about doing ‘battle with the liberals, the secularists and the remnants of Gaddafi.’ The terms ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ of course mean Americans and Westerners.”

For those who seek to impose sharia, the liberty culture of the West is anathema because Islam prohibits in Islamic lands the licensing of anything sharia forbids and the prohibition of anything sharia permits. This supremacist construction of sharia, deeply rooted in Muslim scripture, exhorts Muslims to drive out or kill Westerners even if those Westerners believe their operations in Islamic countries are for the humanitarian benefit of indigenous Muslims.

That is why, for example, Afghan military and police recruits turn their guns on their American and allied trainers, killing scores of them in just the last two years.

It is why Islamists like Saleha Abedin, the mother of Secretary of State Clinton’s top adviser Huma Abedin, work towards the repeal of Mubarak-era laws that protected women and girls from horrific practices like child marriage and female genital mutilation — practices that are endorsed by sharia and, Islamists insist, may not be banned regardless of how the West may judge them.

Lord marshals the facts: we now know President Obama and his administration knew, in real time, while the Benghazi attack was happening on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for what was obviously a coordinated pre-planned attack. Indeed, I would add, we now finally know that the president told 60 Minutes, within hours of the attack, that the Benghazi operation was not like the protests in Egypt over the video, that it involved aggressors “who were looking to target Americans from the start.” CBS disgracefully excised this statement from the televised edition of the interview, aiding and abetting day after day for five weeks the “blame the video” lie on which the administration had settled.

Lord then refocuses us on another fact — one that the Obamedia, in characteristic suppression of any scent of their guy’s background, has steadfastly avoided covering, but one that was unearthed by the invaluable Walid Shoebat: members of President Obama’s Muslim family in Kenya are exploiting their newfound prominence and connections, particularly with the Saudis, to promote and fund sharia education.

In conjunction with the Saudis, the Obama family established the “Mama Sarah Obama Children Foundation.” The namesake is the president’s grandmother. The foundation’s ostensible purposes are education and the fights against AIDS and poverty. That’s why, Lord observes, it gets “gobs of favorable publicity from groups as varied as the International Reporting Project (in which New York Times editor Jill Abramson plays a key role), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, Greenpeace, and even the Catholic Relief Services.” Nevertheless, Obama’s cousin Musa Ismail Obama gave an inconvenient interview to al-Jazeera, bragging — as Walid Shoebat summarizes — that: “The bulk of the Sarah Fund … sends little to widows and orphans while the rest goes towards giving free scholarships to studying sharia at the most influential Wahhabist centers in Saudi Arabia.” (Emphasis in original.)

As Lord observes:

Obama has never held a press conference to disavow Granny Sarah — as he did with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Nor has he publicly asked her to stop using the president of the United States as fundraising bait to raise money for what is, in effect, the exact same objective as Ansar al-Sharia as expressed by Mohammad Ali al-Zahawi. That objective? Creating more Sharia fanatics whose sole belief is about imposing Sharia — everywhere. For all we know some Granny Obama-funded Sharia-acolyte could one day well turn up in yet another attack on Americans just like the attack in Benghazi.

You think that’s harsh? Maybe you haven’t heard about Masjid Dar al-Hijra in Virginia — a mosque lionized by the State Department as an exemplar of Islam in America, yet a mosque that has been a hub of al-Qaeda terrorists and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas support network. Maybe you haven’t heard about the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, an incubator of Islamic supremacism whose 1999 valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, seamlessly moved on to al-Qaeda and was ultimately convicted of plotting to murder President George W. Bush. Maybe you haven’t heard about the Muslim Students Association, foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure — whose now hundreds of chapters across the U.S. and Canada form a sharia promotion society, a cavalcade of whose top stars have moved on to the promotion and commission of violent jihad. Of course, not everyone reared in classical sharia becomes a sympathizer, much less a practitioner, of violent jihad; but many have, and do. Common sense leaves us no alternative but to conclude that the phenomenon is natural, predictable, and inevitable.

I’ve argued for weeks that the administration’s cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the killing of four American officials — of the jihadist nature of the operation, of the fact that the murders could have been prevented if the administration had not recklessly embraced the illusion of “Islamic democracy” in Libya — is explained by ideologically driven politics. The president’s disastrous Libya policy — the unprovoked, unauthorized war that vested Islamists with political power and Qaddafi’s sophisticated weaponry — is exposed by al-Qaeda’s murder of our officials, as is the campaign myth that because “Obama killed Osama,” al-Qaeda, too, has been mortally wounded. Ambassador John Bolton persuasively makes the case for the “ideology explanation” in interviews with Greta Van Susteren (“There’s this screen over consciousness that prevents them from seeing reality when it’s put right in front of them”) and Lou Dobbs (at about the 5:00 mark: “Reality doesn’t get through to the president often enough and … tragically, this was a case of it”).

Jeff Lord takes it a step further:

[I]n the world of leftist ideology that Barack Obama is using to run the White House, the State Department, and all the rest of the U.S. government, to consider Ansar Al-Sharia a threat of any kind would be an insult. Divisive. Deliberately egging on what the Obama administration likes to call a “man caused disaster” — formerly known as Islamic terrorism. What these leaked State Department emails are doing is raising the obvious point about Obama and Benghazi. If Benghazi is not about incompetence or lying — it’s worse. It’s about a U.S. government that is at its highest levels in some fashion simpatico with a totalitarian ideology. That ideology is Sharia.

Finally, Jeff diagnoses the fatal effects of “spring fever” — of boosting sharia totalitarianism as if it were a striving for Western liberty:

This is, after all, a president who has repeatedly gone out of his way to send a signal to Islamic radicals that he would, as he said in his Cairo University address, “consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” [Emphasis in original.]

This is a president who blithely said just the other week at the United Nations that Arab youths were “rejecting the lie that … some religions … do not desire democracy.” The lie, of course, is that Sharia — the very Sharia promoted by his own family with his silent acquiescence as well as by Ansar Al-Sharia in Libya (not to mention the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) does in fact strenuously reject democracy other than as a means of getting power. Once that power is obtained, free elections vanish and, to borrow from Churchill, the Iron Veil descends.

We may not be able to lift the veil descending on the Middle East. It is long past time, though, to lift it from our own eyes.

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