Islamic Zombies and Much More

Lee Smith shares some fascinating emails from Cairo. First, he describes the matter of Islamic zombies.

“The revolution ran on two levels,” Amr Bargisi, senior partner at the Egyptian Union for Liberal Youth, emailed me today from Cairo. “There was the intellectual or ideological level, which was dominated by Islamists and leftists. This was the part of the revolution that was most visible. But there was another level as well, the street level, which was dominated by the Islamists and this same collection of young toughs, high school and technical school students who hang out around Tahrir Square. They like fights, they like to storm buildings, some, if not most, are addicted to Tramadol. It’s a great anti-police drug. You don’t feel pain. They can beat you to death and you won’t feel a thing. They’re calling it the Zombie drug. Tramadol was a big part of the revolution. The point is that for the ideological revolution to have succeeded you needed these toughs because you had to win on the street level. To take on the entire police force of a dictatorship like Mubarak’s you needed to bring them down on the street through force. That’s who these kids are. They took on the Mubarak regime alongside the Islamists, whose willingness to die for their cause cannot be underestimated.”

Zombies operating under the control of Islamists and Leftists — working together. Who said they couldn’t get along? Then there is the question of what the recent riots in Egypt were about. How about the blind sheik?

As Raymond Ibrahim first reported on Monday, an Egyptian newspaper published a story last week claiming that “Jihadi groups in Egypt…have issued a statement threatening to burn the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to the ground” unless fighters imprisoned and detained in the United States, including Guantanamo Bay, are released. According to the Egyptian media source, the group consists of many al Qaeda members and made a special point in calling for the quick release of Omar Abdul Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheikh,” sentenced for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The “mujahid sheikh,” the statement said, “was ignored by the Mubarak regime, and [President] Morsi is refusing to intervene on his behalf and release him, despite promising that he would.”

The Salafis, that is, may be looking to embarrass Morsi. The demonstration in that case is also aimed at Egyptians, a signal that the Salafis are now in open conflict with the Brotherhood—a conflict in which the U.S. embassy and its employees, from diplomats to Marines, are being used as markers.

The blind sheikh. And there you thought it was about a YouTube video. As one of Smith’s email correspondents put it, nobody was going to get his disdasha in a twist over a friggin YouTube video.

Bargisi isn’t sure yet what, if any, relationship the revolutionary toughs have with the Islamists. “It was organized by the jihadis, like Zawahiri’s brother. But that’s not who’s dominating the crowd right now. This Salafi guy I know comes over to fix stuff in my house. He’s a carpenter. He says, ‘Why care about this movie anyway? Have these people watched every movie ever made? I am quite sure this happens often. What’s new? America sucks, nothing new.’”

But to hear the media talk, it’s all Romney’s fault for talking out of turn. Melanie Phillips though, has another idea: what people are witnessing is a policy failure.

The Arab Winter has not brought forth democracy but unleashed anarchy and religious fanaticism, with Islamic mobs hitherto kept under control by Gaddafi and Mubarak now empowered, strengthened and rampaging out of control throughout the region.

We know who are the real guilty men here. Even now, Obama is stroking the enemies of the west while kicking its allies in the crutch. “Too busy” to see Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu when he comes to Washington later this month to beg for American help in preventing Iran from obtaining the nuclear weapons which it will use to achieve its declared aim of wiping Israel from the face of the earth, Obama will nevertheless meet Morsi, who has so far issued only qualified regret for the storming of the US embassy in Cairo, demanded that the US government take action against the maker of the anti-Islamic film — and who last spring released from an Egyptian prison Mohammed Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda’s current leader and who led the mob who stormed the Cairo embassy this week.

Phillips also mentions the blind sheik though she omits the role of zombie drugs. Well, you can’t cover all the bases. The obsession with blaming Romney might be related to the need to keep up the president’s ” long-running touchdown dance over bin Laden.” But even NBC’s foreign correspondent in Egypt is scratching his head over an Obama pronouncement that Egypt is “not an ally or an enemy.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXXToNNNoZc#!

I almost had to sit down when I heard that. For the last forty years, the United States has had two main allies in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the other ally in the Middle East being Israel. For the President to come out and say, well, he’s not exactly sure if Egypt is an ally any more but it’s not an enemy, that is a significant change in the perspective of Washington toward this country, the biggest country in the Arab world. It makes one wonder, well, was it worth it? Was it worth supporting the Arab Spring, supporting the demonstrations here in Tahrir Square, when now in Tahrir Square there are clashes going on behind me right in front of the US embassy?

That’s because Romney “shoots first and asks questions later.” But the NBC correspondent left out the best part. President Obama may not know who his allies are in the region at all. He’s pulled out of Iraq and refused to stand up to Iran. And the way things are going, it is increasingly unclear whether he’s sure that Israel — that other main ally in the region — is an “ally or enemy” either. The president has achieved the remarkable (possibly the historic) attainment of getting both the Islamic world and Israel mad at his policies. James Lewis at American Thinker tries to make sense of it.

In Egypt, Coptic Christian churches have been burned, and priests killed. Egyptian tanks — US-made main battle tanks — have been sent into the Sinai Desert near the Israeli border. Turkey is now run by a neo-Ottoman gang of thugs. Insanity is running amok again, and the New York Times can’t see anything wrong. But that’s the New York Times for you.

Obama has just publicly refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu while he is in our country attending the UN General Assembly. Too busy, says our hero. It’s too hard to schedule.

The Democratic Convention surrendered to American Muslims with an elaborate prayer meeting, while dropping God and Jerusalem from their official platform. American Jews are fast losing power and influence, and radical Muslims are bringing Shari’a to America. You can see it happening.

Most American Jews are still brain-locked, because they are liberals. Half of American Jews will still vote for Obama rather than admit they were wrong — disastrously wrong — about liberalism ever since the radicals took over in 1968.

Obama’s surrender signals are understood all over the world, except at home.

“Obama’s surrender signals are understood all over the world, except at home.” That is where Lewis gets it wrong. The surrender signals aren’t understood abroad either because the president is surrendering to everybody so indiscriminately that he’s got everyone confused. The very same chief executive who sends letters of condolence to the families of deceased SEALs with a form letter and an electric pen is engaged in the same promiscuous white-flag waving everywhere he goes. The message is: “To whom it may concern: I give up. I confess to Romney’s guilt and express regret for everything he has done in advance. Yours, the once-in-a-generation president.”

Whether this comedy of errors is the manifestation of genius or the second coming of the Three Stooges, we will soon see. More likely, it is sheer incompetence. The British Independent reports that the Libyan consulate’s secret security plans were penetrated and that although the State Department had had warnings that something sinister was afoot, nobody bothered to alert the diplomats on the scene.

Chris Stevens had been back in the country only a short while and the details of his visit to Benghazi, where he and his staff died, were meant to be confidential.

The US administration is now facing a crisis in Libya. Sensitive documents have gone missing from the consulate in Benghazi and the supposedly secret location of the “safe house” in the city, where the staff had retreated, came under sustained mortar attack. Other such refuges across the country are no longer deemed “safe”.

Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted.

What is in lockdown is media coverage of the debacle. The MSM is still in full cry after Terry Jones, assorted Egyptian Copts, nameless conservatives, and of course Mitt Romney. The State Department’s security is as full of holes as a mosquito screen. Wikileaks has published thousands of classified emails. The White House itself has been accused of leaking documents to the press and even to Hollywood. Andrew McCarthy’s calls for Huma Abedin to recuse herself from access to classified documents because of her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have been met by hoots of derision. The answer in every case was the same. “We are above all that paranoia. Our enlightenment will keep us safe. Obama’s face alone will repel all hate.” Doubtless it will, when the answer to every problem is “it’s Romney’s fault.”