On April 18, Joe Kovacs reported for World Net Daily, “… the Saudi national who was the original “person of interest”( identified as 20-year-old Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi) in connection with Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing is going to be deported from the U.S. next week… …on national security grounds. Reuters reported President Barack Obama met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on Wednesday, noting the meeting was not on Obama’s public schedule.”
Abdul Alharbi, present at the marathon finish line is reputedly scheduled to be deported
After Obama’s closed-door meeting, terrorism expert, Steve Emerson, appeared on the Sean Hannity TV show and said, “That’s very interesting because this is the way things are done with Saudi Arabia. You don’t arrest their citizens. You deport them because they don’t want them to be embarrassed and that’s the way we appease them.”
As we await the results of the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s worth noting that, on that very same day, al Qaeda in Iraq killed more than 55 fellow Muslims in numerous similar bombing attacks across the country. Despite the desperate hopes of our president and his allies that the Boston bombers not be Muslim, it’s also worth noting, as Max Boot points out in the Wall Street Journal, “…’Crooks and kooks prefer to kill with firearms. Explosives, by contrast, are the signature weapon of terrorists.”
For that matter, practically every bit of evidence surrounding the bombing points to a Muslim act of terror. The pressure-cooker bomb was first described in detail in the al-Qaeda English Language publication, Inspire. It was one of the devices used by Times Square would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American trained in arts of terror in Waziristan. But whether or not the Boston Bombers are found to be Muslim, the fact remains that, despite this president’s endless assertions that “bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is on the run,” in eleven years since 9/11, the soldiers of Allah have carried out 20,000 attacks worldwide, from Bali to Beirut, from Madrid, London, to Ford Hood.
To use Obama’s campaign slogan, it’s been quite a run. The Muslim jihadists are getting stronger precisely because our president, now the sole architect of American foreign policy, does not understand that his policies of withdrawal, appeasement/engagement, capitulation and division are emboldening and empowering our enemies both within and outside the Muslim world.
Drone Attacks; Defenders of this administration continue to counter the accusations of weakness and appeasement by stating that Obama has ramped up drone attacks on al Qaeda and Taliban targets by a factor of ten over that of Bush Administration. While this antiseptic form of war keeps his anti-war base mollified, it fails in one very important respect. Dead terrorists can’t be interrogated. (Nor can deported terrorists)
Of the many untold stories by the anti-Bush press there is the saga of just how much intelligence was gathered from captured combatants during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. And consequently, most Americans may never know of the many plots and attacks like the Boston Marathon that were thwarted by our capturing combatants on the battlefield. Under Obama, even when we capture non-uniformed terrorists, we read them their Miranda rights, just to make sure that no intelligence is gathered.
His Alienation of our Allies Weakens Our Intelligence:
This week Obama doubled down on his undisguised, well-documented hatred for our most special ally, England. One of his first acts as President in early 2009 was to send back the bust of Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House in an act of friendship after 9/11. This week, his White House released the news that it would send a lower-level delegation to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral than the delegation it sent to the funeral for anti-American dictator, Hugo Chavez. This is understandable when Obama’s own auto-biographies not only make clear his antipathy toward colonialist Britain but when one also considers that Obama despises everything Thatcher stood for, free men and free markets. More importantly, it is acts like this, acts like his cancellation of scheduled missile defense installations in Poland and Czech Republic, that make our most important allies distrust us. Obama’s radical score settling lessens the chance that even our allies will share important intelligence so necessary to keeping us safe in an increasingly dangerous world.
Can Obama Get Iran Right?
Veteran Iran watcher, Michael Ledeen, opines in his op-ed, A Third Way to Address the Iranian Threat, that Obama now has a chance to defuse the coming nuclear showdown with Iran in a way that avoids the two other bad choices—allowing the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons or going to war. For over a decade, writers such as Ken Timmerman, Jerome Corsi, Ledeen, and I have been advocating for a US backed overthrow of the detestable theocracy running Iran. A successful implementation of this strategy would reap more benefits relative to this president’s place in history than all his other collectivist initiatives combined.
For all of us who fervently believe that Iranian theocracy must be prevented from going nuclear, we were profoundly disappointed in 2009 when the newly elected Obama saw millions of Iranians marching in the streets protesting the corrupt regime which had stolen the election and did nothing. While the crowds gathered every day for months in Tehran and other major Iranian cities, they chanted, ‘Obama, are you with us?” His answer was clearly, “No.” Perhaps in some future memoire, he will give some credible explanation as to what he was thinking about given that it was such a massive lost opportunity. But this president probably won’t even be honest in writing his memoirs.
Ledeen writes, “A survey of 98 companies (inside Iran) shows that production has declined 40% annually. Employment has dropped 36%. Finished products cost 85% more. The country is riddled with strikes and protests from workers who haven’t been paid for months.”
The vast majority of Iranians, especially the young, despises the regime. The opposition Green Movement has seen its leaders jailed, its newspapers, magazines and websites shut down. The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, has even repeatedly purged the top officers of his most trusted Revolutionary Guard Corps. This would be like Hitler killing the leadership of his Gestapo. Arrests and torture of potential enemies of the regime have created a horrific climate of fear and loathing inside Iran.
The question is–Can Obama now get it right and get behind the growing insurrection inside Iran? The revolution has begun. Armed rebels are attacking gas pipelines, ports, and refineries. Just last month, seven Revolutionary Guard officers were ambushed and killed on a highway just outside Tehran. All opposition groups, the Greens, Trade Unions, and major minorities, Baluchs, Kurds, and Azeri’s have joined forces and are coordinating attacks. All that is necessary for the regime to fall is for this president to understand that this is his chance to enhance his place in history, to side with the freedom fighters of Iran, to support them overtly and covertly. He needs to understand that most of the world will come to his side if he will just act and lead from the front. But first he must understand why the overthrow of this evil regime is his “tear-down-this-wall” moment.
(More on Iran and the meaning of its revolution next week)
