Terrorism in Libya & Egypt

The Obama administration has for the past week been stumbling over itself to demonstrate just how well they are equipped for providing self inflicted diplomatic wounds with the American people and our allies worldwide. They seem to have forgotten the classic guidelines of incompetence: the American people will forgive the mistake; it is the cover-up that does a politician in.

The mass media has for that time been their more than willing sycophantic accomplices.

The September 11^th attacks this year were to even the most marginally intelligent sentient being an orchestrated terrorist attack. Spontaneous mobs upset with an online, little seen video do not protest en masse with grenade launchers  and a detailed plan to capture and assassinate a United States ambassador.

Yet the continual stream of blathering idiocy continues to be that the actions taken in Egypt and Libya were merely Moslems upset with a video.

Secretary of State Clinton this week finally acknowledged the obvious, as did White House press secretary Carney, yet the President continues to assert his belief of the proven fraudulent premise of the video as being the cause of the unrest.

What has gone unacknowledged by the administration and their media sycophants however, is the source of these terrorist attacks.

To wit:

All such acts are committed by anarchists, cowards - in a word, terrorists.

Terrorists are not associated with any normal classification of ethnic, political or religious collectives.

Consider for a moment the reality of particular actions taken around the world in the last fifty years.

The American people must ask and answer these hard questions on certain types of events.

For example, was the September 15, 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which resulted in the death of four innocent black girls, committed by Americans upset with the Civil Rights movement, or were they simply cowardly terrorists that had no connection with America and the American people?

Was the slaughter of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich really carried out by ‘Palestinian’ terrorists, or rather by cold blooded murders intent on only their anarchistic political views?

In the strife of Northern Ireland, was it really Christian’s against Protestants, and vice versa, bombing children, women, to achieve freedom for a group of people? Or was it the acts of hateful ignorant people with no allegiances to the people they professed to want to help?

Do true Christians, Protestants, Catholics really promote the death of innocents? Do any of those religions accept such actions as means to an end, especially a political one?

Do Americans actually allow the premise to perpetuate that true followers of Islam are accepting of the death of 3,000 Americans on September 11^th, 2001?

Do American condone the murders of abortion doctors as merely the acts of Christian extremists, or do Americans consider murder to be murder?

This is one of the dangerous aspects of what are euphemistically labeled as ‘hate crimes’. It attaches connection by presumed thought to a group of people who actually have no belief in the acts of cowardice and terror.

Was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 the act of a white ex-military Christian who simply had only minor disagreements with governmental policy, or was Tim McVeigh merely an evil murderer?

This nation must cease branding acts of terror as being carried out by ‘Islamic extremists’ or even ‘Islamic terrorists’

Followers of Islam cannot be terrorists any more than Jews or Christians can be terrorists. Adherence to their faiths precludes such acts of terror.

For those who may consider the Koran a document of hate, please consider a literal reading of the Bible would demonstrate the ‘eye for an eye’ philosophy. Most religious people do not take such teachings literally.

This nation must not attribute acts of cowardice and hate as religious acts of zealotry in any context.

Terrorism is terrorism, perpetrated by evil people with no greater intent than to perpetrate evil.

It is just that simple.

Teddy & Woodrow Had it Right

“in order to form a more perfect union…”

The accepted maxim amongst responsible politicians and other such elected officials once held that commentary or criticism of this nation’s foreign policy ended at the shoreline. Critique abroad of an American administration could not be seen or interpreted as being a nation divided as such perceived division could be manipulated by our adversaries; abroad, we were all Americans and spoke with one voice. The internet has rendered that stance unrealistic, as any speech or Twitter/Facebook post is automatically transported around the world and filtered back to us with any manner of interpretation.

The issue today is given that media and world interconnectivity reality, exactly what should our national policy be and how should we present our united version of democracy abroad?

History has presented us with what should be the over-arching policy and presentation standards.

President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his use of American standing and status in the pursuit of peace. He brought together Russia & Japan to resolve their war and utilized the bully pulpit of American democracy to bring about a peaceful resolution to their conflict. He did not posture to resolve the dispute by demanding an American accepted resolution. He did not attempt to overlay American political sensibilities to the combatants. He did not seek to impose American democratic values upon either party, but rather through skillful negotiations brought about the realities of peace to both sides. There is a lesson to be learned regarding our recent attempts to prescribe preconditions to those attempting to resolve the decades old peace process for the middle east. We should not try to force American reasoning on two socities that do not share our understanding of their realities.

President Woodrow Wilson, having led America through the first world war had hoped to bring to fruition his League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. He understood that there was indeed strength in numbers and that the peaceful nations of the world could, if united, thwart the possibility of another world war by demonstrating mutual resolve to peace. Herein lies another lesson in geopolitics to be gleaned by our administration with respect to recent events in Egypt & Libya. We cannot use our bully pulpit to try and enforce our governmental choices on peoples who have not experienced such freedoms. They must first witness it in action by the free countries of the world in unity and then choose their own path forward. It is folly to believe that democratic self-rule can be achieved merely because we wish to impose it.

We have lost that perspective as of late. It appears that American administrations have begun to opt to deal with world crises by attempting to impose American democratic sensibilities upon nations and peoples who have no real understanding of a working democracy. Many societies are based upon different criteria that do not hold that all men are created equal.

We as a nation need to demonstrate our freedom, our American democracy by example, not by well intentioned fiat or edict.