How many ways can you say “workplace violence”? The writers of The Narrative have their work cut out for them today. With hostages still in the grasp of al-Shabab in Kenya, ABC News reports that 43 people have died in a suicide bombing attack on a church in Pakistan.
Police officer Mohammad Noor Khan says the bomber struck as worshippers were coming out of services at the church in the city’s Kohati Gate district. He said the attacker’s severed legs were found.
Hard-line militants have been blamed for previous attacks on Pakistan’s Christian minority, as well as Muslim groups they consider heretics.
Unsurprisingly, women and children were killed. The BBC says that “a bomb blast outside a church” wreaked the customary havoc and “the victims were said to include women and children.” The numbers are still rising: the VOA has upped the death toll to 50, with a hundred more wounded, and NBC News now has the number of dead at 55.
Since only a little over 1% of the population in that region is still Christian there isn’t a whole lot of design margin left among the holdouts. They are going to be wiped out. Not that the administration has proved very sensitive on the issue of ethnic cleansing without a lobby to plead on their behalf. The administration’s effort to reach out to the Muslim community has proved so successful one wonders Who’s On First. Or who employs whom. Andy McCarthy noted that “Gehad [as in Jihad] el-Haddad”, the spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, was recently arrested in Egypt on terrorism charges. Prior to his arrest he was a top official for the Clinton Foundation.
Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by former President Bill Clinton.
El-Haddad gained a reputation for pushing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda in the foreign press, where he was often quoted defending the Brotherhood’s crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt.
He was raised in a family of prominent Brotherhood supporters and became the public face of the Islamist organization soon after leaving his post at the Clinton Foundation. However, much of his official work with the Brotherhood took place while he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation.
That’s bringing coziness to new heights.
This raises the question of how deeply committed the Obama administration is to the narrative that Islam is a fundamentally pacific ideology whose reputation for gentleness is only occasionally marred by a few misguided and miserable souls. They seem determined to push that story on the public come what may.
One of the problems with that storyline is that it is patently false. The Islamic world is currently convulsed by a widespread sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia, a rivalry which with Iran’s pending acquisition of the atomic bomb, threatens to go nuclear.
Anyone with access to the Internet can readily see that vast numbers of people — a hundred thousand in Syria alone — are dying in its myriad battlefields, and although the deaths among Christians may be great in number (even if the papers refuse to pay much attention to events like the recent attack on Zamboanga City) the deaths among Muslims are even greater.
A search on “mosque blast” in Google readily reveals that Muslims are blowing up mosques even faster than they are wrecking churches and malls.
“Scores killed in bombings at Sunni mosques in Tripoli”, “Blast Near Shia Mosque Kills 3, Injures …”, “Iraq Sunni mosque blasts kill 18” and then another “Deadly blast hits Iraq Sunni mosque, kills 11”. That’s leaving out the barrel bombs, car bombs, artillery and aerial bombardment, the starvation and disease or even the nerve gas that is now in vogue.
Not all the verbal gymnastics of Jay Carney can indefinitely conceal the possibility that just maybe there is an actual conflict going on in the world involving deep and fundamental issues in Islam. They are having it out, not just among themselves, but with the infidel as well.
It takes an idiot not to notice, but that’s what the administration seems to think everyone is: a low information voter mesmerized by the Talking Points and celebrity scandals, the old twerk and jerk routine.
The trademark of the Obama administration has been self deception. So much of its public pronouncement consists of lies that its spokesmen habitually speak falsehood even when the truth would cause no embarrassment whatsoever. They are now lying out of habit for no other reason than Pavlovian conditioning.
It would be nice however, if the administration could summon up the decency to say nothing further about such “workplace violence” attacks, whether they are inflicted on schools in Russia, malls in Kenya, cities in the Philippines or churches in Egypt or Pakistan. There is something utterly disgusting, almost blasphemous about their expressions of regrets, no sooner uttered than qualified, that desecrates the memory of the dead.
It has become standard practice for an administration spokesman to emerge, on these occasions, like a figurine from a windup music box, to talk about “Red Lines” or breaking “cycles of violence”, “responsibilities to protect” or about trying to “build understanding” or issuing a boilerplate condemnation. They should stop. Nobody believes them any more, not even the Syrian rebels.
Those expressions are now too tawdry, shopworn and so patently insincere that to use them is to give offense. Please could they just shut the hell up and let the survivors bury the dead?
Move along, nothing to see here
The word “religion” in the context of these attacks is just a word of convenience for the real term which is “organized”. Religion is the skin of this conflict, but the flesh and bones of it are the ladders of recruitment, the ideology, funding, and training which make up its functioning corpus. For example, while not everyone in a madrassa becomes a militant, it is nevertheless constitutes the conveyor belt from which the most promising apples are picked by the recruiters.
We know from the Mumbai attack that a considerable amount of preparation goes into the bombings and assaults that are daily reported. A suicide team is sequestered somewhere remote, brainwashed, trained and sneaked into position by complex arrangements. It just doesn’t spring into existence and its members go for a walk, as Hillary suggested, and suddenly decide to kill some Americans, or Kenyans or Pakistani Christians one night. The attacks are planned, plotted, organized.
The Narrative avoids the word “Jihad” or Islamic terrorism in relation to these violent events, not because they are sensitive to the religious sensibilities of Muslims, though they are but because their primary goal is to make the public unaware the danger facing them is organized and purposeful, based on definite organizations, in hostile states and funded by billions.
The fundamental reason why Benghazi has to be distorted and spun is because to describe it accurately requires telling the story in terms of enemy action. And while action in itself is innocuous to admit, the word “enemy” is fatal to the Narrative. For then the question becomes, “who is he?” They would have us believe instead that everything from September 11 on down is just the outcome of some Rage Boy type resentment somehow provoked by Western insensitivity and/or videos. But that kind of narrative falls apart when the dead are black Africans, Syrians, Pakistanis or Filipinos who never did a thing except breathe. Yet despite this the narrative of the “rogue attack” is pushed for two reasons:
1. the system has not yet nerved itself to confront the hostile forces or even admit their existence;
2. it still believes it can do a “deal” with them even though there is no “them”.
The existence of organized aggression will be painted over for as long as possible and ridicule of the “tinfoil hat brigade” will be encouraged. There’s nothing to see out there in the dark, we will be told. Even if you can hear its approach and feel its heated breath.
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