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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Taliban</title>
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		<title>Taliban School Slaughter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/taliban-school-slaughter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taliban-school-slaughter</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/taliban-school-slaughter/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:54:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beheading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247651</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Islamic child sacrifice reaches grisly new low in Pakistan. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/635543241836764189-AP-Pakistan-002.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247656" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/635543241836764189-AP-Pakistan-002-450x316.jpg" alt="635543241836764189-AP-Pakistan-002" width="313" height="220" /></a>The mind-numbing savagery of radical Islam plumbed new depths in Pakistan yesterday. Taliban terrorists shouting &#8220;Allahu akbar&#8221; <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/pakistan-school-massacre/pakistan-school-attack-taliban-militants-kill-more-140-peshawar-n269011"><span style="color: #1255cc;">attacked</span></a> the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, slaughtering 142 people, including 132 children <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/taliban-storms-pakistani-military-school-kills-20-students-article-1.2046714"><span style="color: #1255cc;">between</span></a> the ages of six and 16. Another 10 staff members, including the principal, were also murdered. &#8220;They didn&#8217;t take any hostages initially and started firing in the hall,” said Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, a military spokesman.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The details of the slaughter are horrific. “We were in the education hall when militants barged in, shooting,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/world/asia/taliban-attack-pakistani-school.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> Zeeshan, a student, speaking at a hospital. “Our instructor asked us to duck and lay down and then I saw militants walking past rows of students shooting them in the head.” Another student confirmed those shootings. &#8220;The gunmen entered class by class and shot some kids one by one,” he told local media. Jamshed Khan, a school bus driver, also described the scene. &#8220;We were standing outside the school and firing suddenly started and there was chaos everywhere and the screams of children and teachers,” he said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peshawar-school-attack-taliban-burn-teacher-alive-front-pupils-behead-children-1479767?">According</a></span> to the <i>International Business Times</i>, the Taliban monsters allegedly stooped even lower to satisfy their bloodlust. &#8220;They burnt a teacher in front of the students in a classroom,&#8221; an unnamed military source revealed. &#8220;They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids watch.” Moreover, Pakistani officials revealed that many of the dead children brought to the hospital had their heads chopped off.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The assault began around 11 a.m. local time (1 a.m. EST)  when <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30491435"><span style="color: #1255cc;">seven terrorists</span></a> wearing police uniforms and suicide vests scaled the wall of the school. They immediately began lobbing hand grenades and shooting indiscriminately at a time when approximately 1,000 of the school’s 2,500 male and female students in grades one through 10 were in attendance. The siege lasted more than eight hours, with Pakistani security forces forced to deal with five “heavy” explosions heard around 5 a.m. EST, in a seeming attempt to hinder rescue efforts. All seven attackers were ultimately killed, with the <i>Daily News</i> reporting that once they were finally cornered by Pakistani commandos &#8220;they blew themselves up rather than surrender.&#8221; A sweep of the compound for additional explosives was subsequently undertaken.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">An unnamed security official illuminated the one and only objective of these savage thugs. “These attackers were not in the mood to take hostages,” he said. “They were there to kill and this is what they did.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The killers <a href="http://pamelageller.com/2014/12/126-dead-in-taliban-attack-on-school-hundreds-of-children-held-hostage.html/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">were</span></a> part of the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) group, a Pakistani terrorist organization attempting to over throw the Pakistani government, and the same group to which wannabe 2010 Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad belonged. TTP spokesman Mohammed Khurasani <a href="http://tribune.com.pk/story/807564/gunmen-target-school-in-peshawar/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> the Karachi-based <i>Express Tribune</i> the attack was an act of revenge. “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” he said, referring to Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive taking place on the Afghan border. “We want them to feel the pain.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Gen. Bajwa confirmed that almost all of the children killed belonged to members of the Pakistani military. Army chief of staff General Raheel Sharif called the killers “inhuman beasts.” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who arrived in Peshawar where authorities have declared a three-day mourning period, promised certain reprisal. “Those behind the heinous act will not be spared,” he vowed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Sharif also announced a meeting of all government parties scheduled for today. Its comes amidst political turbulence orchestrated by opposition leader Imran Khan whose political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), controls the provincial government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Khan has led a series of protests in a effort to unseat Sharif, because he believes the Prime Minister’s supporters rigged the 2013 election, and because he disagrees with the army’s ongoing effort against terrorists in tribal areas. That effort, known as Operation Zarb-e-Azb, has killed approximately 1,800 terrorists operating in North Waziristan, an epicenter of Taliban terrorist activity. And while public support for that campaign has been described as “lukewarm,” due to what by government policy-makers attribute to &#8220;lack of consensus&#8221; and &#8220;large pockets of sympathy” for terrorists, Khan&#8217;s belief the government should negotiate with the terrorists instead of fighting them has garnered considerable criticism.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unfortunately, he is not alone in that regard. The same day President Obama insisted the Taliban had &#8220;once again shown their depravity,&#8221; Breitbart News <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/12/16/Obama-2012-My-Administration-is-Negotiating-With-The-Taliban"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> a statement made in 2012 by Obama at Bagram Airfield Base, home of the U.S. Air Forces Central Command in Afghanistan. &#8220;We&#8217;re pursuing a negotiated peace. In coordination with the Afghan government my administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban &#8230; Many members of the Taliban, from foot soldiers to leaders, have indicated an interest in reconciliation,” he said at the time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The BBC wonders whether this heinous attack will constitute a “watershed” moment for the Pakistani government. Americans might be forgiven for wondering the same thing with regard to the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Other world leaders issued forceful condemnations of the slaughter. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon referred to it as &#8220;an act of horror and rank cowardice.” British Prime Minister David Cameron characterized it as “deeply shocking,” adding that it was “horrifying that children are being killed simply for going to school.<i>” </i>Indian prime minister Narendra Modi called it “cowardly,” and a &#8220;senseless act of unspeakable brutality that has claimed lives of the most innocent of human beings&#8211;young children in their school.”<i> </i></p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nobel Prize winner<i> </i><a href="http://www.dailyworth.com/posts/3014-10-fast-facts-about-malala-yousafzai"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Malala Yousafzai</span></a>, the young girl shot in the head by would-be Taliban assassins in 2012 when she was only 15, also added her voice to the mix. “Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this,” she said in a statement. “I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters — but we will never be defeated.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Pakistan has <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/16/pakistan-taliban-peshawar-massacre-attack"><span style="color: #1255cc;">already responded</span></a> to the tragedy. Gen. Shariff tweeted that “massive air strikes” had been carried out in the Khyber region of the country, and Sharif insisted that Operation Zarb-e-Azb &#8220;will continue until the terrorism is rooted out from our land.” The latest attack is part of a bloody track record in a nation where 50,000 people have been killed by terrorist violence in the past 13 years.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Devastated parent Tahir Ali expressed the grief undoubtedly shared by every parent victimized by this brutality. &#8220;My son was in uniform in the morning, he is in a casket now,” Ali said. “My son was my dream. My dream has been killed.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One would hope the world’s denial about radical Islam, pockmarked by occasional outbursts of horror whenever the next atrocity occurs, will suffer the same fate. We are two days removed from the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/lindt-chocolat-cafe-hostage-drama-in-martin-place-sydney-20141215-1278cx.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">attack</span></a> in Sydney, one of many where the mainstream media and feckless politicians seek the false comfort of the “lone wolf” theory that amounts to nothing more than a willful refusal to connect the dots.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">An Obama administration that refers to the war on terror as “an overseas contingency operation” and applauds the conclusions of a one-sided report denigrating the CIA, hardly inspires confidence that the status quo will change. Thus, the only question is when the next horrific atrocity will occur. Should Americans have confidence that it won&#8217;t be in their own shopping malls, train stations, airports and city squares? The answer is a clear &#8220;no.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Jihadist Child-Sacrifice – on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/jihadist-child-sacrifice-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jihadist-child-sacrifice-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:41:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[child sacrifice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dr. Anna Geifman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peshawar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soviet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247609</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unveiling the mindset of the Islamic terrorists who killed over 130 children in Peshawar. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Pesh.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247614" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Pesh-450x311.jpg" alt="Pesh" width="294" height="203" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook</strong></a><strong>.]</strong></p>
<p>In the recent <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/pakistan-school-massacre/pakistan-school-attack-taliban-militants-kill-more-140-peshawar-n269011">Taliban terror attack</a> against a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, Islamic terrorists killed more than 130 children. The atrocities include the beheading of children and the Taliban dousing a teacher with gasoline, burning her alive in front of her students who were forced to watch.</p>
<p>The horrifying nature of this latest Taliban atrocity serves as yet another reminder of infanticide and child sacrifice being key ingredients of Islamic terror. The long and grotesque record of Hamas’ and Arafat’s child-killing machines serves as a morbid testament to that phenomenon.</p>
<p>To shed light on why Islamic Jihadists target children, Frontpage is running <em>The Glazov Gang’s </em>special two-part series with<em> <strong>Dr. Anna Geifman</strong>, </em>the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Orders-Terrorism-Revolutionary-International/dp/0275997529">Death Orders</a> and one of the world’s leading experts on child-sacrifice by death cultures.</p>
<p>In this special series, Dr. Geifman delivers a profound analysis on <strong>Hamas and Terrorists’ Child Sacrifice, </strong>explaining why Islamic terrorists — and totalitarians in general — target children. Though her main focus is on Hamas as well as on Soviet terror, her analysis gives us a profound insight into the infrastructure of the Taliban mind and how its savagery against children in a Pakistani school satiates its yearnings.</p>
<p>Dr. Geifman’s research unveils the true nature not only of the Islamic death culture, but of all death cultures, and explains why they sacrifice their enemy’s children — as well as their own.</p>
<p>See both interviews below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-Rpug8-FL58" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Part II: </strong>(Focus on child-sacrifice starts at <strong>10:30 mark</strong>)<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/q3fZQ7i8R9U" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>School Puts on Play Against Suicide Bombing, Gets Suicide Bombed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/school-puts-on-play-against-suicide-bombing-gets-suicide-bombed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=school-puts-on-play-against-suicide-bombing-gets-suicide-bombed</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/school-puts-on-play-against-suicide-bombing-gets-suicide-bombed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 14:03:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanisan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247311</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["There were children and women crying for help. Some were running out, some were just screaming."
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141211142312-01-kabul-french-1211-horizontal-gallery.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-247312" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141211142312-01-kabul-french-1211-horizontal-gallery-450x253.jpg" alt="141211142312-01-kabul-french-1211-horizontal-gallery" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>Well that&#8217;s<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-bomber-attacks-afghan-army-bus-kabul-six-061900635.html"> depressingly predictable</a>. Muslim terrorists think that killing people is the answer to everything. Tell them to stop killing people and you can predict their response. (via <a href="http://thereligionofpeace.com/">Religion of Peace</a>)</p>
<blockquote><p>A teenaged bomber on Thursday targeted a Kabul auditorium packed with people watching a drama condemning suicide attacks and being staged at a French cultural center, killing a German man and wounding 16 people, officials and a witness said.</p>
<p>&#8220;I heard a deafening explosion &#8230; There were Afghans, foreigners, young girls and young boys watching the show,&#8221; Sher Ahmad, an Afghan rights activist who was at the performance, told Reuters.</p>
<p>He said the blast came during a performance of a new play called &#8220;Heartbeat: Silence After the Explosion&#8221;, a condemnation of suicide attacks.</p>
<p>&#8220;Pieces of flesh were plastered on the wall. There were children and women crying for help. Some were running out, some were just screaming.&#8221;</p>
<p>Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the bomber targeted the event because it was staged &#8220;to insult Islamic values and spread propaganda about our jihad operations, especially on suicide attacks&#8221;.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is why promoting so-called anti-extremism is futile. You don&#8217;t win battles like this with plays in a war zone. You do it by killing the killers. Otherwise your play turns into the real thing.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>A Little Reminder of What Al Qaeda and the Taliban Considered Torture</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-little-reminder-of-what-al-qaeda-and-the-taliban-considered-torture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-little-reminder-of-what-al-qaeda-and-the-taliban-considered-torture</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 02:45:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247124</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gitmo-protest-2014-nyc.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-247125" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gitmo-protest-2014-nyc-450x300.jpg" alt="gitmo-protest-2014-nyc" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>The release of the already discredited Senate &#8220;torture report&#8221; has left liberals in a state of gleeful pearl clutching as they pretended to be shocked by the shocking revelation that enhanced interrogation can mean sleep deprivation and assorted mind games.</p>
<p>Meanwhile here&#8217;s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1358063/I-was-one-of-the-Talibans-torturers-I-crucified-people.html">a little reminder of what real torture</a> looks like as perpetrated by the Taliban.</p>
<blockquote><p>I was one of the Taliban&#8217;s torturers: I crucified people</p>
<p>Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.</p>
<p>&#8220;Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,&#8221; Mr Hassani said, &#8220;and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water &#8211; like a knife cutting through meat &#8211; until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.</p>
<p>&#8220;We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Maybe the worst thing I saw,&#8221; he said, &#8220;was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.&#8221;</p>
<p>He was told that if he died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, he and his family would go to paradise. The soldiers were given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and were encouraged to &#8220;take wives&#8221; during battle, basically a licence to rape.</p></blockquote>
<p>These were the monsters that liberals went out of their way to defend, whose cause they took up at Gitmo and whose interrogations they are now outraged by. What happened to detained Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Gitmo wasn&#8217;t torture. This was torture.</p>
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		<title>Obama Releases 2nd in Command of Pakistani Taliban</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-releases-2nd-in-command-of-pakistani-taliban/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-releases-2nd-in-command-of-pakistani-taliban</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-releases-2nd-in-command-of-pakistani-taliban/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2014 03:01:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[American soldiers died to bring down the Taliban]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/017193694_30300.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-246984" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/017193694_30300-450x253.jpg" alt="0,,17193694_303,00" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>American soldiers died to bring down the Taliban and their sacrifice<a href="http://www.dw.de/us-hands-over-senior-taliban-militant-to-pakistan/a-18115191"> is rewarded by Obama in this way</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>United States officials handed over three Pakistani prisoners to Islamabad on Sunday, one of whom is a senior Taliban commander long sought after by the Pakistani government, security officials said.</p>
<p>Though the US did not identify the detainees, Pakistani sources say the Taliban commander is Latif Mehsud (pictured above), former number two commander in the Pakistani Taliban and close aid of Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike last year.</p>
<p>&#8220;TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) senior commander Latif Mehsud who was arrested was handed over to Pakistani authorities along with his guards,&#8221; one Pakistani security official said. &#8220;They reached Islamabad.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama did this before and Pakistan freed the Taliban leaders turned over to them. The Taliban movement was a creature of Pakistan. The Afghan authorities meanwhile had claimed that Latif was their man. So on the plus side the US did not them him over to the Afghans.</p>
<p>Last year Kerry was claiming that Latif&#8217;s capture was a major victory. Now he&#8217;s effectively being released.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Trapped in Afghanistan Between Obama and the Taliban</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. soldiers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246029</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama plays a cynical game with the lives of American soldiers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/us-soliders.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246083" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/us-soliders-450x271.jpg" alt="us-soliders" width="289" height="174" /></a>Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.</p>
<p>American forces were supposed to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but in a covert acknowledgement that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was a disaster, that isn’t happening.</p>
<p>Afghanistan has been Obama’s bloodiest war and his most neglected war. It’s a war that hardly appears in major papers anymore, but while in terms of damage done Iraq and Libya may be Obama’s biggest disasters, in terms of American lives lost there’s no question that Afghanistan was his worst war.</p>
<p>Obama never had a strategy for Afghanistan. As best as anyone could determine he made a major commitment to it to provide political cover for his Iraq withdrawal. Once he committed to Afghanistan, he had no idea what to actually do there except get a lot of Americans killed while trying to appease the “moderate” Taliban who turned out not to exist despite Qatar’s best efforts to manufacture them.</p>
<p>Since Al Qaeda was a major threat in Iraq (a threat that eventually became ISIS) and Obama needed to disguise his withdrawal from Iraq by blaming Bush for being too weak on national security (a difficult trick for an anti-war lefty), he falsely claimed that Bush had neglected fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>There was just one problem, Al Qaeda had largely been broken in Afghanistan and had scattered to other conflicts. There were a handful of Al Qaeda fighters left. There was certainly nothing that required a major troop surge to handle. There was nothing for American soldiers to do there except die.</p>
<p>Bush had gone into Afghanistan with a plan to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. Obama dusted off that same plan without caring as to whether or not there were even any Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while mixing it together with Bush’s troop surge in Iraq. If nothing else the end result was bound to be Bush’s fault.</p>
<p>Obama went into Afghanistan as a distraction. Unable to make decisions about the war, he forced the commanders to embarrass him by shaking him down for troops. Obama responded by lashing out and replacing commanders the way that losing teams replace coaches. It was an ugly spectacle that wrecked morale and set the tone for a destructive and contentious relationship with the military.</p>
<p>American soldiers were thrown into battle without being allowed to win. They weren’t fighting a war for territory, but for hearts and minds. It was a senseless strategy that threw away the lives of American soldiers in the hopes of winning a local popularity contest against the Taliban.</p>
<p>The rules of engagement focused on preventing Afghan civilian casualties in a war where the other side wore no uniforms. Air support was denied. The odds between ISAF and the Taliban were evened out. And a lot of lives were lost. More American soldiers died in Afghanistan during one term of Obama than had been killed during the entire Bush presidency.</p>
<p>The plan to split the Taliban into moderate and extreme wings by making them unpopular failed miserably. Everything since then has been a holding pattern. The number of casualties has dropped with the actual fighting. American soldiers are still there not to win or even to fight, but to keep Obama from looking bad in case anything goes wrong.</p>
<p>Obama signed on to a troop surge in Afghanistan to cover for his disastrous move in Iraq. Now the troops are staying on to avoid the spectacle of the Taliban overrunning the country ISIS style. Afghanistan has never been an actual priority for Obama. It has always been a way for him to deal with the political consequences of his decisions in Iraq.</p>
<p>Now the war has ground down to its predictable final stage in which the American presence is renamed as advisory even while combat operations continue.</p>
<p>Obama can’t leave Afghanistan because of the political consequences. But he still has no plan for Afghanistan and it’s the generals who are once again pushing him to have a strategic plan that protects American lives and accomplishes something useful instead of a political agenda that protects his own approval rating.</p>
<p><a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/11/23/nyt-blindly-reports-obamas-reluctance-let-troops-defend-afghanistan/">As J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer</a>, pointed out, “The generals… want to be proactive in defending their troops against terrorist threats. They don’t want to just wait – hunkered down on bases, or exposed and vulnerable while they’re out supporting the Afghan national forces – for terrorists to find American troops and attack them.”</p>
<p>But Obama has achieved what he sees as the best of both worlds, a troop presence with low casualty levels that provides him with all the political cover he needs, but with none of the negatives of flag-draped caskets. The official word is that the United States is assisting and advising, it’s helping stabilize the government of Afghanistan and those are safe buzzwords that few can possibly object to.</p>
<p>When it came to Afghanistan, Obama always wanted to be seen doing something. His motives were political. His objectives in Afghanistan were not those of national security, but domestic politics.</p>
<p>Obama had an actual objective, regime change, in Libya, but he didn’t even have that much in Afghanistan. Instead he constantly framed the war in terms of fighting a phantom Al Qaeda enemy. And since the enemy didn’t exist he could easily claim to have beaten it while ignoring the rise of ISIS in Iraq that so many Americans had died trying to prevent.</p>
<p>Now Obama is stuck in Afghanistan because he’s too afraid of the political fallout of leaving.</p>
<p>The only lesson that Obama learned from his disastrous withdrawal from Iraq was that it was safer not to withdraw. Instead American soldiers are trapped between Obama’s approval ratings and the Taliban with no mission left to accomplish except to avoid attracting attention to themselves by dying or killing.</p>
<p>There is no longer a plan to deal with the Taliban. The idea that Afghanistan will retain a stable government is implausible. Even the idea that its military can take the weight of a serious assault is also unlikely. But Obama wants all of that to be someone else’s problem. He is passing on Afghanistan as a hot potato to his successor so that someone else will have to take the blame for Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama’s actions in Afghanistan tell the story of his ugly disregard for national security and the lives of our soldiers. The surge was sold using a lie about an Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan that no longer existed. Now the presence of American forces is being passed off as advisory when what that really means is that Americans will be under fire, but unstable to set the terms on which they meet the enemy.</p>
<p>After all this time Americans deserve the truth. If American soldiers are going to be in harm’s way, they should have a mission and the ability to accomplish it.</p>
<p>Those are two things that they never had under Obama.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Trapped in Afghanistan Between Obama and the Taliban</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:05:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[troops]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245954</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-veterans-affairs-carejpeg-01d5e.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245955" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-veterans-affairs-carejpeg-01d5e-391x350.jpg" alt="Eric Shinseki" width="303" height="271" /></a>Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.</p>
<p>American forces were supposed to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but in a covert acknowledgement that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was a disaster, that isn’t happening.</p>
<p>Afghanistan has been Obama’s bloodiest war and his most neglected war. It’s a war that hardly appears in major papers anymore, but while in terms of damage done Iraq and Libya may be Obama’s biggest disasters, in terms of American lives lost there’s no question that Afghanistan was his worst war.</p>
<p>Obama never had a strategy for Afghanistan. As best as anyone could determine he made a major commitment to it to provide political cover for his Iraq withdrawal. Once he committed to Afghanistan, he had no idea what to actually do there except get a lot of Americans killed while trying to appease the “moderate” Taliban who turned out not to exist despite Qatar’s best efforts to manufacture them.</p>
<p>Since Al Qaeda was a major threat in Iraq (a threat that eventually became ISIS) and Obama needed to disguise his withdrawal from Iraq by blaming Bush for being too weak on national security (a difficult trick for an anti-war lefty), he falsely claimed that Bush had neglected fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>There was just one problem, Al Qaeda had largely been broken in Afghanistan and had scattered to other conflicts. There were a handful of Al Qaeda fighters left. There was certainly nothing that required a major troop surge to handle. There was nothing for American soldiers to do there except die.</p>
<p>Bush had gone into Afghanistan with a plan to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. Obama dusted off that same plan without caring as to whether or not there were even any Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while mixing it together with Bush’s troop surge in Iraq. If nothing else the end result was bound to be Bush’s fault.</p>
<p>Obama went into Afghanistan as a distraction. Unable to make decisions about the war, he forced the commanders to embarrass him by shaking him down for troops. Obama responded by lashing out and replacing commanders the way that losing teams replace coaches. It was an ugly spectacle that wrecked morale and set the tone for a destructive and contentious relationship with the military.</p>
<p>American soldiers were thrown into battle without being allowed to win. They weren’t fighting a war for territory, but for hearts and minds. It was a senseless strategy that threw away the lives of American soldiers in the hopes of winning a local popularity contest against the Taliban.</p>
<p>The rules of engagement focused on preventing Afghan civilian casualties in a war where the other side wore no uniforms. Air support was denied. The odds between ISAF and the Taliban were evened out. And a lot of lives were lost. More American soldiers died in Afghanistan during one term of Obama than had been killed during the entire Bush presidency.</p>
<p>The plan to split the Taliban into moderate and extreme wings by making them unpopular failed miserably. Everything since then has been a holding pattern. The number of casualties has dropped with the actual fighting. American soldiers are still there not to win or even to fight, but to keep Obama from looking bad in case anything goes wrong.</p>
<p>Obama signed on to a troop surge in Afghanistan to cover for his disastrous move in Iraq. Now the troops are staying on to avoid the spectacle of the Taliban overrunning the country ISIS style. Afghanistan has never been an actual priority for Obama. It has always been a way for him to deal with the political consequences of his decisions in Iraq.</p>
<p>Now the war has ground down to its predictable final stage in which the American presence is renamed as advisory even while combat operations continue.</p>
<p>Obama can’t leave Afghanistan because of the political consequences. But he still has no plan for Afghanistan and it’s the generals who are once again pushing him to have a strategic plan that protects American lives and accomplishes something useful instead of a political agenda that protects his own approval rating.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/11/23/nyt-blindly-reports-obamas-reluctance-let-troops-defend-afghanistan/">As J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer</a></span>, pointed out, “The generals… want to be proactive in defending their troops against terrorist threats.  They don’t want to just wait – hunkered down on bases, or exposed and vulnerable while they’re out supporting the Afghan national forces – for terrorists to find American troops and attack them.”</p>
<p>But Obama has achieved what he sees as the best of both worlds, a troop presence with low casualty levels that provides him with all the political cover he needs, but with none of the negatives of flag-draped caskets. The official word is that the United States is assisting and advising, it’s helping stabilize the government of Afghanistan and those are safe buzzwords that few can possibly object to.</p>
<p>When it came to Afghanistan, Obama always wanted to be seen doing something. His motives were political. His objectives in Afghanistan were not those of national security, but domestic politics.</p>
<p>Obama had an actual objective, regime change, in Libya, but he didn’t even have that much in Afghanistan. Instead he constantly framed the war in terms of fighting a phantom Al Qaeda enemy. And since the enemy didn’t exist he could easily claim to have beaten it while ignoring the rise of ISIS in Iraq that so many Americans had died trying to prevent.</p>
<p>Now Obama is stuck in Afghanistan because he’s too afraid of the political fallout of leaving.</p>
<p>The only lesson that Obama learned from his disastrous withdrawal from Iraq was that it was safer not to withdraw. Instead American soldiers are trapped between Obama’s approval ratings and the Taliban with no mission left to accomplish except to avoid attracting attention to themselves by dying or killing.</p>
<p>There is no longer a plan to deal with the Taliban. The idea that Afghanistan will retain a stable government is implausible. Even the idea that its military can take the weight of a serious assault is also unlikely. But Obama wants all of that to be someone else’s problem. He is passing on Afghanistan as a hot potato to his successor so that someone else will have to take the blame for Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama’s actions in Afghanistan tell the story of his ugly disregard for national security and the lives of our soldiers. The surge was sold using a lie about an Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan that no longer existed. Now the presence of American forces is being passed off as advisory when what that really means is that Americans will be under fire, but unstable to set the terms on which they meet the enemy.</p>
<p>After all this time Americans deserve the truth. If American soldiers are going to be in harm’s way, they should have a mission and the ability to accomplish it.</p>
<p>Those are two things that they never had under Obama.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		</item>
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		<title>The Threat Is Blowback</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-threat-is-blowback/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-threat-is-blowback</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-threat-is-blowback/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:54:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234469</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The U.S. starts down the road to the next 9/11. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/iraq-isisfighter.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234474" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/iraq-isisfighter-450x341.jpg" alt="iraq-isisfighter" width="282" height="214" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-The-threat-is-blowback-359974">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Watching the undoing, in a week, of victories that US forces won in Iraq at great cost over many years, Americans are asking themselves what, if anything, should be done.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What can prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – the al-Qaida offshoot that President Barack Obama derided just months ago as a bunch of amateurs – from taking over Iraq? And what is at stake for America – other than national pride – if it does? Muddying the waters is the fact that the main actor that seems interested in fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq is Iran. Following ISIS’s takeover of Mosul and Tikrit last week, the Iranian regime deployed elite troops in Iraq from the Quds Force, its foreign operations division.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration, along with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, views Iran’s deployment of forces in Iraq as an opportunity for the US. The US, they argue should work with Iran to defeat ISIS.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The idea is that since the US and Iran both oppose al-Qaida, Iranian gains against it will redound to the US’s benefit.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are two basic, fundamental problems with this idea.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, there is a mountain of evidence that Iran has no beef with al-Qaida and is happy to work with it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the 9/11 Commission’s report, between eight and 10 of the September 11 hijackers traveled through Iran before going to the US. And this was apparently no coincidence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the report, Iran had been providing military training and logistical support for al-Qaida since at least the early 1990s.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, al-Qaida’s leadership scattered. Many senior commanders – including bin Laden’s son Said, al-Qaida’s chief strategist Saif al-Adel and Suleiman Abu Ghaith – decamped to Iran, where they set up a command center.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Iran, these men directed the operations of al-Qaida forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi entered Iraq from Iran and returned to Iran several times during the years he led al-Qaida operations in Iraq.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran’s cooperation with al-Qaida continues today in Syria.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to The Wall Street Journal, in directing the defense of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, Iran has opted to leave ISIS and its al-Qaida brethren in the Nusra Front alone. That is why they have been able to expand their power in northern Syria.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran and its allies have concentrated their attacks against the more moderate Free Syrian Army, which they view as a threat.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given Iran’s 20-year record of cooperation with al-Qaida, it is reasonable to assume that it is deploying forces into Iraq to tighten its control over Shi’ite areas, not to fight al-Qaida. The record shows that Iran doesn’t believe that its victories and al-Qaida’s victories are mutually exclusive.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The second problem with the idea of subcontracting America’s fight against al-Qaida to Iran is that it assumes that Iranian success in such a war would benefit America. But again, experience tells a different tale.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The US killed Zarqawi in an air strike in 2006.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Reports in the Arab media at the time alleged that Iran had disclosed Zarqawi’s location to the US. While the reports were speculative, shortly after Zarqawi was killed, then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice floated the idea of opening nuclear talks with Iran for the first time.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Iranians contemptuously rejected her offer. But Rice’s willingness to discuss Iran’s nuclear weapons program with the regime, even as it was actively engaged in killing US forces in Iraq, ended any serious prospect that the Bush administration would develop a coherent plan for dealing with Iran in a strategic and comprehensive way.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, Zarqawi was immediately replaced by one of his deputies. And the fight went on.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So if Iran did help the US find Zarqawi, the price the US paid for Iran’s assistance was far higher than the benefit it derived from killing Zarqawi.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This brings us to the real threat that the rise of ISIS – and Iran – in Iraq poses to the US. That threat is blowback.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Both Iran and al-Qaida are sworn enemies of the United States, and both have been empowered by events of the past week.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Because they view the US as their mortal foe, their empowerment poses a danger to the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But it is hard for people to recognize how events in distant lands can directly impact their lives.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In March 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas statues in Afghanistan, the world condemned the act. But no one realized that the same destruction would be brought to the US six months later when al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The September 11 attacks were the blowback from the US doing nothing to contain the Taliban and al-Qaida.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile tests, as well as North Korean proliferation of both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to rogue regimes, like Iran, that threaten the US, are the beginnings of the blowback from the US decision to reach a nuclear deal with Pyongyang in the 1990s that allowed the regime to keep its nuclear installations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The blowback from Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power is certain to dwarf what the world has seen from North Korea so far.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet rather than act in a manner that would reduce the threat of blowback from Iraq’s disintegration and takeover by America’s worst enemies, the Obama administration gives every indication that it is doubling down on the disastrous policies that led the US to this precarious juncture.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only strategy that the US can safely adopt today is one of double containment. The aim of double containment is to minimize the capacity of Iran and al-Qaida to harm the US and its interests.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But to contain your enemies, you need to understand them. You need to understand their nature, their aims, their support networks and their capabilities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, in keeping with what has been the general practice of the US government since the September 11 attacks, the US today continues to ignore or misunderstand all of these critical considerations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Regarding al-Qaida specifically, the US has failed to understand that al-Qaida is a natural progression from the political/religious milieu of Salafist/Wahabist or Islamist Islam, from whence it sprang. As a consequence, anyone who identifies with Islamist religious and political organizations is a potential supporter and recruit for al-Qaida and its sister organizations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There were two reasons that George W. Bush refused to base US strategy for combating al-Qaida on any cultural context broader than the Taliban.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Bush didn’t want to sacrifice the US’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, which finances the propagation and spread of Islamism. And he feared being attacked as a bigot by Islamist organizations in the US like the Council on American Islamic Relations and its supporters on the Left.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Obama, his speech in Cairo to the Muslim world in June 2009 and his subsequent apology tour through Islamic capitals indicated that, unlike Bush, Obama understands that al-Qaida is not a deviation from otherwise peaceful Islamist culture.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But unlike Bush, Obama blames America for its hostility. Obama’s radical sensibilities tell him that America pushed the Islamists to oppose it. As he sees it, he can appease the Islamists into ending their war against America.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To this end, Obama has prohibited federal employees from conducting any discussion or investigation of Islamist doctrine, terrorism, strategy and methods and the threat all pose to the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">These prohibitions were directly responsible for the FBI’s failure to question or arrest the Tsarnaev brothers in 2012 despite the fact that Russian intelligence tipped it off to the fact that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers were jihadists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They were also responsible for the army’s refusal to notice any of the black flags that Maj. Nidal Hassan raised in the months before his massacre of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, or to take any remedial action after the massacre to prevent such atrocities from recurring.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Muslim Brotherhood is the progenitor of Islamism. It is the organizational, social, political and religious swamp from whence the likes of al-Qaida, Hamas and other terror groups emerged. Whereas Bush pretended the Brotherhood away, Obama embraced it as a strategic partner.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there is Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Bush opted to ignore the 9/11 Commission’s revelations regarding Iranian collaboration with al-Qaida. Instead, particularly in the later years of his administration, Bush sought to appease Iran both in Iraq and in relation to its illicit nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In large part, Bush did not acknowledge, or act on the sure knowledge, that Iran was the man behind the curtain in Iraq, because he believed that the American people would oppose the expansion of the US operations in the war against terror.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s actions toward Iran indicate that he knows that Iran stands behind al-Qaida and that the greatest threat the US faces is Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But here as well, Obama opted to follow a policy of appeasement. Rather than prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, or stem its advance in Syria and Iraq, Obama treats Iran as though it poses no threat and is indeed a natural ally. He blames Iran’s belligerence on the supposedly unjust policies of his predecessors and the US’s regional allies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For a dual-containment strategy to have any chance of working, the US needs to reverse course. No, it needn’t deploy troops to Iraq. But it does need to seal its border to minimize the chance that jihadists will cross over from Mexico.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It doesn’t need to clamp down on Muslims in America. But it needs to investigate and take action where necessary against al-Qaida’s ideological fellow travelers in Islamist mosques, organizations and the US government. To this end, it needs to end the prohibition on discussion of the Islamist threat by federal government employees.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Iran, according to The New York Times, Iran is signaling that the price of cooperation with the Americans in Iraq is American acquiescence to Iran’s conditions for signing a nuclear deal. In other words, the Iranians will fight al-Qaida in Iraq in exchange for American facilitation of its nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The first step the US must take to minimize the Iranian threat is to walk away from the table and renounce the talks. The next step is to take active measures to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, the Obama administration appears prepared to do none of these things. To the contrary, its pursuit of an alliance with Iran in Iraq indicates that it is doubling down on the most dangerous aspects of its policy of empowering America’s worst enemies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It only took the Taliban six months to move from the Bamiyan Buddhas to the World Trade Center. Al-Qaida is stronger now than ever before. And Iran is on the threshold of a nuclear arsenal.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bowe Bergdahl Is Not One of Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bowe-bergdahl-is-not-one-of-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bowe-bergdahl-is-not-one-of-us</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:40:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deserter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[traitor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ysQl4aW7tME" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic; color: #8f8f8f;"><p>NOT ONE OF US</p>
<p>Hi everybody: I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>Benedict Arnold is the most famous traitor in American history. He was a general who wanted the British to win the American Revolution. Charles Cornwallis was also a general who wanted the British to win the American revolution. So why why is Arnold despised while Cornwallis is not?</p>
<p>Well, Benedict Arnold was one of us. And General Cornwallis was not. General Cornwallis maintained his honor by fighting, in uniform, for a cause he believed in. General Arnold lost his honor – not just during his own time but down trough the halls of history – for wearing one color uniform on the outside and a different one on the inside. Traitors damage us in ways enemies cannot. A nation is a family, and traitors destroy their own family from within. It is the lowest form of treachery.</p>
<p>Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier recently released after five years as prisoner of the Taliban, apparently had some fairly anti-war feelings for a long time. That alone doesn’t mean he’s not one of us: many Americans have anti-war feelings. But: when you put on the uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, you join in a smaller family. A family that depends on you for their very lives. And you swear an oath to protect that family.</p>
<p>When people like Bowe Bergdahl willingly walk out on those brothers and sisters and into the hands of the people trying to kill them; when his absence weakens the security of his family members, and when six of his brothers go out into that world looking for him, and don’t come back – not that day, not ever – then Bowe Bergdahl does not deserve to come home to America because this is not his home. The six people who were killed looking for him deserve to come home – come home as heroes – but they won’t. Not ever. They were killed by Bergdahl’s real family.</p>
<p>We have, at the cost of many thousands of lives, killed or captured many of the Taliban that Bergdalh walked out to join. The very first American soldier killed in the war to avenge the three thousand members of our family killed on September 11th, 2001 was named Mike Spann. He was killed in a prison uprising on November 25th, 2001 while interrogating Taliban prisoners. The leader of that uprising, Mullah Mohammad Fazl, was captured and taken to Guantanamo bay. The man who killed the first soldier to die in Afghanistan was traded back to the Taliban, along with four other highly-skilled terrorists, in exchange for the soldier who caused six more Americans soldiers to be killed, searching for the brother that walked away.</p>
<p>When Barack Obama was up to his eyeballs in scandal regarding the appalling treatment of our soldiers at the Veteran’s administration – in Phoenix alone we let 40 members of our family die from the wounds they took on our behalf – he needed not a solution to the VA scandal, but a quick photo op that would wallpaper over that disgrace and let us know how much he cares about our soldiers.</p>
<p>Here’s the photo op.</p>
<p>So how did we end up swapping a deserter and traitor for five key terrorists? Did no one vet this deal? Does anybody actually work at the White House?</p>
<p>One person who works at the White House is National Security advisor Susan Rice. It’s ultimately her responsibility to look out for the National Security of the United States of America. In other administrations she would merely be an advisor, of course, and the ultimate responsibility would lie with the President. But this President is not responsible for anything.</p>
<p>In 1997, Susan Rice was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The government of Sudan offered to turn over actionable intelligence on the precise location of a key terrorist to US officials. Susan Rice was instrumental in blocking access to that information, not once but repeatedly. That terrorist was not one of those traded for Bowe Bergdalh. That was named Osama Bin Laden. If Susan Rice had not repeatedly turned away that help, Spann, those six soldiers, the thousands of others lost in Afghanistan, and the 3,000 of our family members that died in fire and horror in New York Skyscrapers and the pentagon and on four crashed airliners would be alive today. She is not one of us. That’s why Bergdahl’s story didn’t cause her the revulsion the rest of us feel. She’s on a side – it’s just not our side.</p>
<p>And what about this man?</p>
<p>The man who grew up in Muslim schools in Indonesia. The man whose chosen mentor was a known communist and self-proclaimed pedophile. The man who thanked his pot-smoking gang, but not the grandmother who raised him, in his yearbook picture. The man that roomed with Muslim radicals at Occidental College. The man who was President of the Harvard Law Review but who never wrote a law review. The man whose political career started in the living room of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers – by the way, here’s a picture of the President’s sponsor coincidentally taken on the same day that the towers fell thanks to his future National Security Advisors ideological blinders. The man who orders his Attorney General not to secure our borders from armed invasion from narcotics traffickers and then ordered him to sue the states for trying to secure their borders on their own. The man who offered to surrender our missile defense shield to the Russians in exchange for personal political gain – in precisely the same way that Benedict Arnold offered to sell out the defenses at West Point in exchange for personal political gain. The man who with the wave of a finger illegally and repeatedly re-writes his own health care law in reaction to poll numbers. The man who stood in front of the United Nations and gave away our first amendment rights in exchange for the promise that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. The man who decided not to attend six consecutive daily intelligence briefings prior to the Benghazi attack, who ignored the pleas for additional security, who ordered the rescue attempt to stand down then watched via surveillance drone as our family members Glen Dougherty and Tyrone Woods fought for two and a half hours in real time, then died on the roof of the Benghazi Consulate and who then went to bed to be fresh for the big Vegas fundraiser the next day.</p>
<p>That guy. What about him? Is he one of us?</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:02:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield explains the president's disastrous Afghanistan give-away.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama1.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234239" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama1.jpeg" alt="obama" width="339" height="168" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/the-point/">The Point</a>, at <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/">Frontpagemag.com</a>.</p>
<p>Daniel discussed &#8220;<span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title yt-uix-expander-head" dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died."><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/">Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died</a>,&#8221; outlining the president&#8217;s disastrous Afghanistan give-away.</span></p>
<p>The dialogue also involved an analysis of Obama&#8217;s surrender of Iraq, more revelations on the Benghazi betrayal, the scandalous Taliban-Bergdahl swap, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WUz9-fhF9uw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second <em>Glazov Gang</em> edition, joined by <strong>Dr. Mark Durie,</strong> a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Mark discussed, &#8220;<em>Our Fear of Islam</em>,&#8221; analyzing the different psychological mechanisms the West is now engaged in its surrender to a totalitarian ideology, which includes the &#8220;Tend and Befriend&#8221; response. The dialogue also involved a focus on Islamic female genital mutilation and the world&#8217;s denial about its Muslim theological foundations:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xn0km52dCIg" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Taliban Commanders Freed by Obama get Massages</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/taliban-commanders-freed-by-obama-get-massages/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taliban-commanders-freed-by-obama-get-massages</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 03:30:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234154</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Taliban Five are bringing in masseurs]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/OB-XE715_Saudi__E_20130423104621.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-234162" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/OB-XE715_Saudi__E_20130423104621.jpg" alt="OB-XE715_Saudi__E_20130423104621" width="359" height="239" /></a></p>
<p>If there were any amenities that the Jihadists freed by Obama didn&#8217;t receive in Gitmo,<a href="http://weaselzippers.us/189919-taliban-commanders-released-from-gitmo-now-have-their-own-personal-masseurs/"> they&#8217;re certainly getting them from their hosts in Qatar</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>One conference attendee told me he had spoken with a masseur who had visited the Taliban Five at their new home, a fascinating bit of information that was more than a simple lead. The Taliban Five are bringing in masseurs&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>Neither do dancing boys. But <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-12-18/news/0112180236_1_kandahar-mullah-mohammed-omar-compound">the Taliban like the luxurious life</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Five years ago Mullah Mohammed Omar began building a compound for himself against the backdrop of four towering mountain ranges, in perhaps the most picturesque part of the city.</p>
<p>This wasn&#8217;t just any compound. It had air conditioning units in every room, a mosque, a fountain with benches, a sculpture of a mountaintop, custom-designed wall units and a Western-style kitchen complete with a dishwasher.</p>
<p>By the end of his iron-fisted reign, he had not only acquired three wives and nine children, but a fabulous compound and six Toyota Land Cruisers with cruise control, tinted windows and built-in refrigerators. Not bad for a man who saw himself as the upholder of an Islamic way of life compromised by corruption and excess.</p></blockquote>
<p>After Qatar, after participating in the murder of Americans, this is the left they&#8217;ll go back to.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s New Bow to the Islamic World &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-new-bow-to-the-islamic-world-on-the-glazov-gang-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-new-bow-to-the-islamic-world-on-the-glazov-gang-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Jun 2014 04:05:40 +0000</pubDate>
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		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prisoner swap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233691</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who does the Radical-in-Chief really want to be admired by the most?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233692" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/rt1.jpg" alt="rt" width="310" height="207" /></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>[Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.]</b></a></p>
<p>This week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by Superstar <a id="js_158" href="https://www.facebook.com/josh.brewster.75" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000586693668">Josh Brewster</a> and joined by titans <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nonie.darwish.9" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=627756938">Nonie Darwish</a>, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/michael.hausam.1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1419257612">Michael Hausam,</a> a conservative writer and activist, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/karen.siegemund" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000631001262">Karen Siegemund,</a> founder of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RageAgainstTheMedia">Rage Against the Media.</a></p>
<p>The Gang discussed: <em>Obama’s New Bow to the Islamic World, </em>analyzing who the Radical-in-Chief really wants to be admired by the most.</p>
<p>The dialogue occurred within the context of <em>Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap.</em> <em><br />
</em></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/PY5W4m8rwgM" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2014 04:00:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[swap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233538</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A glance into the heart of a leftist administration's darkness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><img class="alignleft wp-image-233544 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/od-450x285.jpeg" alt="od" width="309" height="196" /><b>[Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.]</b></a></p>
<p>This week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by Superstar <a id="js_158" href="https://www.facebook.com/josh.brewster.75" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000586693668">Josh Brewster</a> and joined by titans <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nonie.darwish.9" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=627756938">Nonie Darwish</a>, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/michael.hausam.1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1419257612">Michael Hausam,</a> a conservative writer and activist, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/karen.siegemund" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000631001262">Karen Siegemund,</a> founder of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RageAgainstTheMedia">Rage Against the Media.</a></p>
<p>The Gang discussed: <em>Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap, </em>analyzing the heart of a leftist administration’s darkness: <em><br />
</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/PY5W4m8rwgM" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Dem Congresswoman: Taliban &#8220;Part of Fabric of Afghanistan&#8221;, Not Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/dem-congresswoman-taliban-part-of-fabric-of-afghanistan-not-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dem-congresswoman-taliban-part-of-fabric-of-afghanistan-not-terrorists</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/dem-congresswoman-taliban-part-of-fabric-of-afghanistan-not-terrorists/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 14:13:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[treason]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233776</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["They were part of the leadership of that country" ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe width="545" height="332" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/u9IoFLitWdA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Item 1: Everything <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/rep.-jackie-speier-taliban-are-part-of-the-fabric-of-afghanistan/article/2549534">Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif. knows about Afghanistan</a> came from Michael Moore&#8217;s books.</p>
<p>Item 2: She&#8217;s typical of her treason party.</p>
<blockquote><p>A Democratic House member said Tuesday she sees a role for the Taliban in Afghanistan&#8217;s future government after U.S. forces withdraw.</p>
<p>The Taliban are &#8220;part of the fabric of Afghanistan. They were part of the leadership of that country before we engaged there,&#8221; Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., told host Kristen Welker on MSNBC, noting that the Obama administration is trying to push the government of President Hamid Karzai to negotiate with the Islamist extremist group &#8220;because there will be some cooperation, some level of coordination between the two if that country is going to survive and move forward. So, to say that they are terrorists, at this point, is not necessarily accurate.&#8221;</p>
<p>Speier was responding to comments by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who said the deal to free five Taliban leaders in exchange for captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would come back to haunt the United States.</p>
<p>“We&#8217;re going to pay for this,” he told reporters Tuesday. “There is not any doubt in my mind there are going to be costs — lost lives associated with what came out of this.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe Speier, who is big on feminism, pluralism and gay rights, should try discussing with the Taliban what role she sees for them in Afghanistan on their own turf. I suspect it would go badly for her.</p>
<p>But at least she said in plain language what used to be confined to policy papers and vague terminology. Obama&#8217;s endgame is to bring the Taliban into the government.</p>
<p>This is what I wrote about yesterday in <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/">Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Pragmatism, Obama and the Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/pragmatism-obama-and-the-bergdahl-swap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pragmatism-obama-and-the-bergdahl-swap</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:55:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detainee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guantanamo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233712</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How ideology blinded a president to the public rejection of trading five terrorists for a deserter. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233714" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406-438x350.jpg" alt="article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406" width="293" height="234" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/OUR-WORLD-Pragmatism-Obama-and-the-Bergdahl-swap-355909">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">US President Barack Obama is an artist of political propaganda. Both his greatest admirers and his most vociferous opponents agree that his ability to manipulate public opinion has no peer in American politics today.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So how can we explain the fiasco that is his decision not only to swap five senior Taliban terror masters for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, but to take ownership over the decision by presenting it to the American people in a ceremony with Bergdahl’s parents at the White House Rose Garden? Clearly Obama overreached. He misread the public’s disposition.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This much is made clear by the immediate criticism his actions received from the liberal media. It wasn’t just Fox News and National Review that said Obama broke the law when he failed to notify Congress of the swap 30 days prior to its implementation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was CNN and NBC News.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">MSNBC commentators criticized the swap. And CNN interviewed Bergdahl’s platoon mates who to a man accused him of desertion, with many alleging as well that he collaborated with the enemy. It was CNN that gave the names of the six American soldiers who died trying to rescue Bergdahl from the Taliban.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What was it about the Bergdahl trade tipped the scales? Why is this decision different from Obama’s other foreign policy decisions? For instance, why is the public outraged now when it wasn’t outraged in the aftermath of the jihadist assault on US installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in which US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered? Politically, Obama emerged unscathed from failures in every area he has engaged. From Iraq to Iran to Syria to Libya to Russia and beyond, he has never experienced the sort of across the board condemnation he is now suffering. His political allies and media supporters always rallied to his side. They always explained away his failures.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So what explains the outcry? Why are people like Senator Dianne Feinstein, who have been supportive of Obama’s nuclear appeasement of Iran, up in arms over the Bergdahl swap? There are three aspects of the Bergdahl deal that distinguish it from the rest of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the Bergdahl deal was conducted in an unlawful manner and the White House readily acknowledged that it knowingly broke the law by not informing Congress 30 days in advance of the swap. This brazen lawbreaking angered Obama’s loyal allies in Congress who, like Feinstein, were insulted by his behavior.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Second, Obama initiated the story and made himself the sole owner of the swap.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama didn’t have to make the Bargdahl swap a story about his foreign policy. He chose to. As commentators have argued, if Obama had simply ordered the Defense Department to issue a press release announcing the swap the story probably wouldn’t have caused more than the normal amount of controversy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And whereas Benghazi was a story about jihadists attacking, and Obama was pilloried – and defended – for his response to an act of aggression initiated by US enemies, Obama presented the Bergdahl swap as his brainchild. So it is impossible to blame anyone else for this move, or wish it away.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the administration saw it, the public would rally around the leader over this feel-good story.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama obviously believed that the Bergdahl trade would help him to surmount his opponents’ criticism over the Veterans’ Administration scandal and other issues.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this is where his failure to understand the disposition of the American people comes into play.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The third aspect of the swap that distinguishes it from his other foreign policy failures is that by organizing the ceremony at the Rose Garden, and making it a story about himself, Obama denied his supporters the tools they have used in every other instance to explain away his failures and justify his counterproductive decisions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama sailed into office by presenting himself as a non-ideological pragmatist. Obama recognized that the public was tired of foreign policies based on ideology. George W. Bush lost public support for the war in Iraq, and for his foreign policy goal of bringing freedom to the Islamic world more generally, when his ideologically charged rhetoric of American exceptionalism stopped matching the situation on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A year after Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the sight of US military contractors being lynched in Fallujah soured the public on American exceptionalism. In Obama, they hoped that they found the antidote to Bush – a man who promised to replace ideology with hard-nosed pragmatism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the event, Obama turned out to be even more driven by ideology than Bush was. Obama is the anti-Bush not because he matches Bush’s ideology with pragmatism. He is the anti-Bush because he matches Bush’s grand foreign policy based on American exceptionalism with his own grand foreign policy based on American moral deficiency.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He made this clear most recently at his commencement address at West Point last month where he stipulated that “American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. We can’t exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everybody else&#8230; .”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As to American exceptionalism, Obama sneered, “What makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But while Obama’s critics have pointed out the radicalism at the heart of his foreign policy from the outset of his presidency, his supporters were always able to explain it away.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s appeasement of the Iranians was pragmatic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">We don’t want a war there, they say.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His support for the Muslim Brotherhood is not radical. It too is pragmatic, they soothe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And so on and so forth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Benghazi, in the fog of war, the media preferred its commitment to Obama’s reelection over its responsibility to report the truth of what happened.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s success in getting away with serial foreign policy failures, and his success in hiding the radical ideological basis of his decisions has always owed to his supporters’ ability to plausibly deny both the failures and the ideological motivation for his actions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His Rose Garden announcement made such spin all but impossible. Americans are not particularly interested in foreign policy. But there are a few things that they won’t buy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They won’t buy that a man who comes to the White House sporting a Taliban beard and praising Allah in Arabic is a normal American father.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They won’t buy spin that describes a deserter as an exemplary soldier.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They don’t want to free five senior terrorists and mass murderers in order to buy Bergdahl’s release.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In believing that the public would side with him and Bergdahl and Bergdahl’s dad against critics of the deal, Obama showed that for all his propaganda prowess, he doesn’t understand the public.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The public didn’t oppose the war in Iraq because they thought the US is morally deficient. They opposed the war in Iraq because Bush wasn’t winning it. And the public believed that Bush’s push for the abstract goal of democracy lay at the heart of the failure on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For nearly six years, Obama and his supporters have managed to fend off allegations that his foreign policy is even more ideological – and far more radical – than Bush’s by channeling the public’s aversion to pie-in-the-sky rhetoric and obfuscating facts. But the Bergdahl announcement at the Rose Garden ended all of that.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The reason Obama is being denounced for the Bergdahl swap is because he orchestrated a radical spectacle. Try as he may to castigate critics of the deal as partisan and cynical, Obama cannot pretend away the fact that the ceremony he arranged and oversaw was an open celebration of an American defeat, by the US president and the unsympathetic parents of an accused deserter.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And worse still for Obama’s protestations of pragmatism, his decision to take sole ownership of the swap revealed his ideological myopia. Only someone blinded by a worldview in which America is morally deficient could have thought that Americans would join him and the Bergdahls in celebrating an American defeat.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And now everyone knows what makes him tick.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Bergdahl Rose Garden &#8220;Ceremony&#8221; &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-bergdahl-rose-garden-ceremony-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-bergdahl-rose-garden-ceremony-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:34:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233768</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Everything it shouldn’t have been.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233769" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obhg-440x350.jpg" alt="obhg" width="278" height="221" /><b>[Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.]</b></a></p>
<p>This week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by Superstar <a id="js_158" href="https://www.facebook.com/josh.brewster.75" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000586693668">Josh Brewster</a> and joined by titans <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nonie.darwish.9" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=627756938">Nonie Darwish</a>, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/michael.hausam.1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1419257612">Michael Hausam,</a> a conservative writer and activist, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/karen.siegemund" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000631001262">Karen Siegemund,</a> founder of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RageAgainstTheMedia">Rage Against the Media.</a></p>
<p>The Gang discussed: <em>Obama&#8217;s Bergdahl Rose Garden &#8220;Ceremony,&#8221;</em> analyzing how it was everything it shouldn’t have been.</p>
<p>The dialogue occurred within the context of <em>Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap </em>and<em> Obama’s New Bow to the Islamic World.</em></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it:</p>
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<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>State Department: No Need to Worry About Taliban Commanders Returning to Battlefield</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/state-department-no-need-to-worry-about-taliban-commanders-returning-to-battlefield/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=state-department-no-need-to-worry-about-taliban-commanders-returning-to-battlefield</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/state-department-no-need-to-worry-about-taliban-commanders-returning-to-battlefield/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:22:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233660</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why for that matter risk so many lives going after Osama bin Laden?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama-taliban-5.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-233664" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama-taliban-5-237x350.jpg" alt="obama-taliban-5" width="237" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s odd how incompetent the press people in Obama Inc. are. As bad as Jay Carney is, Psaki and Harf are even bigger jokes. <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/state-dept-five-guantanamo-detainees-would-not-have-substantial-impact-on-battlefield/">Their sessions are strictly amateur hour</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf downplayed the risk that the five Guantanamo Bay detainees exchanged for Sergeant Bergdahl might pose should they return to the battlefield.</p>
<p>“Let’s say the worst case scenario, these five guys do return, in no way would that substantially change the Taliban’s order of battle on the ground, that’s just not even logical.” Harf was explaining Secretary Kerry’s recent statement that concerns over the five detainees are “baloney.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Sure. It&#8217;s not logical that having top commanders return to the field in a profession where experience is valuable because many doesn&#8217;t survive long enough to pass it on.</p>
<p>Never mind that the US recently argued that these men were too dangerous to set free.</p>
<p>Never mind that quite a few freed Gitmoites have already ended up running operations around the world. It won&#8217;t &#8220;substantially change anything&#8221;.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s a vague enough metric that it could mean anything.</p>
<p>But if a few top people here and there don&#8217;t change anything, why bother with the entire drone program? Why spend millions to kill the occasional commander?</p>
<p>Why for that matter risk so many lives going after Osama bin Laden?</p>
<p>Either taking out terrorist leaders is a priority or it doesn&#8217;t matter. Harf is now belatedly arguing that the entire drone program is a waste of time.</p>
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		<title>Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:58:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bergdahl deal unravels Obama’s war lies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233636" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama-450x223.jpeg" alt="obama" width="297" height="147" /></a>After presiding for six years over a war in which over 1,600 Americans were killed fighting the Taliban, Obama did not mention the enemy during his West Point Commencement Address.</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t unusual. Obama has a curious habit of avoiding the &#8220;T-word&#8221; in his official speeches. Even when delivering his Rose Garden speech about Bergdahl&#8217;s return, the Taliban were never mentioned.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s mentions of the Taliban vary by context. When speaking to the military he might say that the United States is at war with the Taliban. In international diplomatic settings however he emphasizes that the conflict is really a civil war between the Taliban and the Afghan government with the United States there to act as a stabilizing force.</p>
<p>The President of Afghanistan claimed that Obama had told him, &#8220;The Taliban are not our enemies and we don’t want to fight them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Joe Biden had expressed similar thoughts, stating, &#8220;The Taliban per se is not our enemy. That&#8217;s critical.&#8221; White House spokesman Jay Carney awkwardly defended Biden by arguing that the United States was fighting the Taliban, but was there to defeat Al Qaeda.</p>
<p>Al Qaeda in Afghanistan however had already been defeated by Bush.</p>
<p>During the campaign and once in office, Obama had proposed outreach to the &#8220;moderate&#8221; Taliban. Biden estimated that only 5% of the Taliban were incorrigible while 70% and then another 25% could be reasoned with.</p>
<p>According to Biden, these Taliban were expected to end all ties with Al Qaeda, accept the Afghan constitution and offer equal treatment to women. Obama issued the same demand last year. The Taliban who hold strict religious beliefs about the evils of democracy and the inferiority of women did not rush to take Obama and Biden up on their offer.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s dual views of the Taliban made for an incompatible policy. When playing the role of commander, he delivers applause lines about &#8220;pushing the Taliban back&#8221; and large numbers of American soldiers were sent to Afghanistan. But the rest of the time he views the Taliban not as an enemy, but like Boko Haram or Hamas, as a group that is acting violently only because their legitimate political needs are not being met.</p>
<p>Some might say that it was as a commander that Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan, but that it was as an appeaser that he brought him back. And yet both Obamas are the same man. Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan for the same reason that he brought him back.</p>
<p>This is the discontinuity that bedevils modern liberal foreign policy which fights wars it does not believe in, rejecting war, while still attempting to use force as an instrument of diplomacy.</p>
<p>When Bush sent American soldiers off to war it was because he believed that there was a real enemy to fight. Obama, as we have seen, never believed that the Taliban were our enemy and his own intelligence people had told him that Al Qaeda only had a handful of fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Then why did he send thousands of American soldiers to die or be maimed fighting the Taliban?</p>
<p>The Afghan Surge had never been meant to defeat the Taliban. The American soldiers were there for political leverage while Hillary and Obama figured out how to seduce the Taliban into political participation. The military would batter away at the incorrigible 5% of the Taliban while a deal would be cut with the other 95%.</p>
<p>But the numbers didn&#8217;t hold up.</p>
<p>Obama had claimed that withdrawing from Iraq would force the Iraqis to work out their differences. It didn&#8217;t work in Iraq. By putting clear deadlines on the US presence in Afghanistan he hoped to pressure the Afghan government into becoming desperate enough to cut a deal with the Taliban. Instead he only made the Taliban aware that they had no reason to cut a deal because they could wait him out.</p>
<p>Like many peace initiatives with terrorists, the pressure used to convince another government to negotiate with the terrorists only succeeded in convincing the terrorists not to negotiate. Obama was recreating the Israeli-PLO Peace Process disaster, except that he was doing it using American, instead of Israeli, lives.</p>
<p>Obama and Hillary&#8217;s talk of an Afghan-led approach to reconciling with the Taliban completed the breach between the Afghan government and the US. By trying to play the middle man in a deal that no one wanted, Obama alienated the rest of the country. The US no longer had allies in Afghanistan. It only had enemies. The Green-on-Blue attacks increased dramatically. Even the people we were fighting alongside now saw Americans as the enemy.</p>
<p>Not only had Obama failed to turn the Taliban into friends, but he had turned friends into enemies.</p>
<p>Despite all the setbacks, Obama&#8217;s people continued to cling to the idea that trading Bowe Bergdahl for top Taliban commanders would open up the peace process. The idea was floated in 2011 and 2012 and set aside because of Republican opposition. Proponents of Taliban appeasement blamed the GOP for sabotaging the Qatar talks. They even suggested that Republicans wanted the war to drag on to damage Obama&#8217;s popularity rating.</p>
<p>Now that Obama has firmly embraced unilateral governance at home, the deal went through. He is determined to shut down the War on Terror, close Gitmo and end the War in Afghanistan before his term ends, but his policies have put the initiative into the hands of a rising network of Islamist groups, some openly associated with Al Qaeda, others more loosely aligned with its ideas.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the American people have been lied to about the war and the Bergdahl deal threatens to unravel some of those lies. Obama did not recommit to Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda, as he has claimed, but to engage the Taliban. The Bergdahl deal was a last ditch effort to revive a Taliban peace process that Obama believes will finally disprove the Bush approach to terrorism.</p>
<p>When Obama authorized the Bin Laden operation, he did so to arrest him and put him through a civilian trial in order to dismantle Gitmo. This perverse duality characterizes his entire approach to the War on Terror. A military tactic is joined to an anti-war aim. Force is used to prove that violence doesn&#8217;t work nearly as well as diplomacy and appeasement.</p>
<p>This is the disastrous policy that led to everything from the Bergdahl deal to the collapse of the US effort in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama has spent far more time thinking how to win over the Taliban than how to beat them. It&#8217;s no wonder that the Taliban have beaten him instead.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Bowe Bergdahl Dances With Wolves</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dawn-perlmutter/bowe-bergdahl-dances-with-wolves/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bowe-bergdahl-dances-with-wolves</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:52:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dawn Perlmutter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honor code]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sex slaves]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sioux Indian tribe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233564</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The heavy price a deserter paid for idealizing the Taliban as the "Noble Savage."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/dw.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233567" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/dw-450x335.jpg" alt="dw" width="316" height="235" /></a><em>Dances with Wolves</em> is a 1990 film starring Kevin Costner as an army lieutenant who leaves his unoccupied American frontier military post because he is attracted to the lifestyle and customs of a Sioux Indian tribe. He learns their language, is accepted as an honored guest, and eventually abandons his post after he falls in love with one of their women. When U.S. army soldiers reoccupy the post the lieutenant is captured, arrested as a traitor, and charged with desertion. While being transported back east as a prisoner, the Sioux track down the convoy, kill the soldiers, and free the lieutenant. The film ends with him riding into the mountains with his Sioux wife. This liberal love story—similar to many others that demonize the white man and the military, as well as misrepresent the barbarism of their enemies—is the type of fairytale that may have inspired Bowe Bergdahl to walk off into the mountains of Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Like Kevin Costner in the film, Bergdahl began learning the native language of Pashto, and reportedly spent more time with the Afghans than he did with his platoon. A few days before he went missing, he told his parents in an e-mail that he “was ashamed to be an American,” and that “the horror that is America is disgusting.” Several news reports claimed that the night he disappeared from his base in Afghanistan he left a note in his tent saying “he wanted to renounce his citizenship and go find the Taliban.”</p>
<p>Bergdahl’s disillusionment seems to be based upon a combination of the belief in the mythology of the Noble Savage and liberal propaganda derived from postcolonial and anti-hegemonic theory that interprets history, politics, and culture in the context of Western domination and oppression. This form of disillusionment is perpetuated in Hollywood films and revisionist history that portray white men as the oppressors in every conflict regardless of factual historical accounts. <em>Dances with Wolves</em> depicted the Sioux as pacifists and environmentalists when they were the most bloodthirsty of all the Plains Indian tribes, raping, pillaging, and torturing people for entertainment.</p>
<p>Bergdahl seemed to have similar misconceptions idealizing the Taliban and not understanding the threat. His fellow platoon members contend that he was a deserter. If that is the case, then similar to the army lieutenant in the film <em>Dances with Wolves,</em> Bergdahl “Turned Injun,” a pejorative, but accurate expression for traitors who willingly convert to their enemies’ ideology and adopt their traditions, language, and customs.</p>
<p>“Turning Injun” should not be equated with “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which a person is taken hostage and may begin to sympathize and identify with their captives. The difference is significant: the latter relinquishes culpability. By choosing to abandon his unit Bergdahl was not a typical hostage who was taken captive eventually suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, rather he was a victim of liberal idealism who was mugged by reality. His suffering involved severe disillusionment &#8212; the result of bitter disappointment that the Taliban whom he idealized as the Noble Savage turned out simply to be savages.</p>
<p>Conflicting reports of Bergdahl converting to Islam and working with the Taliban while also trying to escape has provoked disagreement and contradictory interpretations of the situation. Understanding some of the Taliban sexual practices may explain some of the inconsistency in Bergdahl’s behavior. The Taliban are ethnic Pashtun who combine Islam with their Pastunwali honor code, often resulting in differences in perceptions of honor and shame particularly as it relates to sexuality. A practice that is designated as strictly taboo in Islam but widely practiced by the Pashtun and Taliban is sex between men. Pashtun reject the label of homosexuality and describe relationships with other men as something they do, not who they are. In addition, it is common for men to have sexual relationships with young boys. Pashtun men shun women both socially and sexually and one of their most popular sayings is “women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” For Pashtun men, having a young boy lover (ashna) is not only not taboo, but increases status and reputation. This is exemplified in a prevalent cultural practice called “bacha bazi,” or “boy play.”</p>
<p>Bacha bazi is essentially the practice of trafficking pre-teen and teenage boys to be used as sex slaves by Afghani Pashtun men of status. The young boys are kidnapped into the trade or sometimes sold by their parents who are desperate for money. The boys are forced to dance and sing, wear make-up, and dress like girls at parties where they are often shared with their owners&#8217; close friends for sex. Dancing boys are a lucrative business. Men pay a lot of money to purchase boys who are placed up for auction, kept as permanent sex slaves, traded, or resold. The practice was originally more common in northern Afghanistan but has spread to the South. Afghans view this tradition with pride.</p>
<p>The Taliban attempted to suppress homosexuality and eliminate the tradition of bacha bazi, but it was so pervasive among Taliban militants that there was little effort made to stop the practice or crimes related to the activity. In an attempt to mitigate the abuse of young boys, the Taliban came up with a set of 30 laws in 2007. Law #19 stated that Taliban fighters must not take young boys without facial hair into their private quarters. For the Pashtun it is simply a way of life not any different than the practice of child brides to older men, so it is neither immoral nor shameful. In fact, it is socially sanctioned, has historical precedence, and is glorified in Pashtun poetry and literature. The only instance where shame is attached is serving in the female role, and that is mitigated by growing into the male role.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether Bergdahl was a collaborator who naively joined the Taliban to help the Afghan people, or whether he was captured after wandering off base, he most likely was repeatedly raped. Bergdahl may have been relegated to one of the Taliban ‘Ashna’ boys that are groomed for sex—in prison parlance, he was their “bitch.” This may explain his attempts at escape and his clean shaven appearance during his handover to American Special Operations troops. In recent reports Bowe Bergdahl told military officials that he was tortured, beaten and locked in a shark cage in total darkness for weeks at a time as punishment for trying to escape. The Taliban also gang rape men, women and children as punishment. If he were raped by the Taliban or kept as a sex boy it is unlikely that it will become public knowledge.</p>
<p>This entire scandal can be analyzed in terms of honor. Bergdahl did not comprehend military honor as he did not have any loyalty for his fellow soldiers or allegiance to his country. He certainly did not have any comprehension of the Pastunwali honor code or he would have understood that the Taliban could never respect someone who betrayed his own people. If National Security Advisor Susan Rice had any concept of honor, she would not have stated that Bergdahl served with honor and distinction. The administration also obviously has no concept of military or Pashtun honor, as they would have understood that a prisoner swap only demonstrates weakness, shame and a loss of face for both the military and America.</p>
<p>The Bergdahl scandal exemplifies how political correctness has infected every aspect of the military, from suspending counter jihad training courses, to relaxing uniform rules to make religious allowances. The epitome of political correctness is exemplified in the fact that although Bergdahl left written notes indicating he abandoned his platoon, he was promoted in absentia twice from private first class to sergeant, and almost received a third promotion to staff sergeant.</p>
<p>Army basic training is supposed to transform civilians into disciplined infantrymen that possess the Army values, fundamental soldier skills, physical fitness, character, confidence, commitment, loyalty, and the warrior ethos ready to accomplish the mission of the infantry. Now, however, their hands are tied by a Commander-in-Chief who in one year fired nine senior commanding Generals and whose politically correct policies led to the degradation of traditional military culture. This resulted in a soldier who acted upon misguided ideals of social justice, viewed violent enemies as oppressed occupied victims of American aggression and who had no concept of loyalty and allegiance to his brothers in arms. The Army was supposed to teach Bowe Bergdahl about honor and shame; instead the Taliban did.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Pro-Taliban Holocaust Denier Invited to Concentration Camp</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/pro-taliban-holocaust-denier-invited-to-concentration-camp/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pro-taliban-holocaust-denier-invited-to-concentration-camp</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jun 2014 12:50:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233610</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[He's a 9/11 Truther who claims that Germany lives under American Colonial Rule. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/horstel.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-233611" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/horstel.jpg" alt="horstel" width="370" height="236" /></a></p>
<p>Christoph Hörstel is a great guy. He&#8217;s a 9/11 Truther who claims that Germany lives under American Colonial Rule. He lives on unemployment benefits, like so many of his Islamic colleagues, and spends a lot of time denouncing Israel.</p>
<p>Hörstel was the only Western journalist in Kabul in 2001 during the fall of the Taliban. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called him a Taliban lobbyist.</p>
<p>He founded the New Center party, which flopped, and then founded a German Center party, because the problem was just in the name.</p>
<p>Not only is he a three time winner of the New New Center Party&#8217;s &#8220;Leader who looks most like a Nazi contest&#8221;, but he&#8217;s also in bed with Putin and <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Holocaust-deniers-invitation-to-concentration-camp-memorial-nixed-after-media-expos%C3%A9-355719">then there&#8217;s his friendliness to Iran</a>&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>He has spoken at the annual Al-Quds Day March in Berlin, which attracts more than 1,000 supporters of Hezbollah and Iran, and calls for the elimination of Israel.</p></blockquote>
<p>Also he&#8217;s kinda flirted with Holocaust denial.</p>
<blockquote><p>When someone asked about revising the Holocaust, Hörstel replied, “All in good time.”</p></blockquote>
<p>So on the list of people you don&#8217;t invite to an event to a concentration camp, he would be high on the list. Unless you&#8217;re looking for someone to take a position in a guard tower.</p>
<blockquote><p>German journalist Christoph Hörstel, a zealous supporter of Iran’s regime and Hezbollah and an alleged denier of the Holocaust, was invited to an event at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp to commemorate the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler by German officers.</p>
<p>A number of the participants in the 1944 attack on Hitler were incarcerated at Sachsenhausen.</p>
<p>Organizers of the Sachsenhausen memorial cancelled Hörstel’s appearance the same day.</p></blockquote>
<p>Fortunately he has plenty of appearances on Russian propaganda outlets to keep him busy.</p>
<p>If you can&#8217;t have a Hitler, you have to settle for an Ayatollah and a Vladimir.</p>
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