M2RB: Buffalo Springfield
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
By Andrew McCarthy
Democrats and their sharky Obamedia
defense lawyers are in a snit. For three dreamy convention days in Charlotte,
they told themselves that, for the first time in decades, it was their guy who
had the upper hand when it came to national security. Now that bubble has
burst, the way contrived narratives do when they crash into concrete
challenges. At that point, an airy president of the world won’t do; we need to
have a president of the United States, a job that has never suited, and
has never been of much interest to, Barack Obama.
Defense against foreign enemies is
the primary job of the president of the United States. The rationale for the
office’s creation is national defense — not green venture capitalism, not
rationing medical care, not improving the self-image of the “Muslim world,” not
leaving no child behind, not blowing out the Treasury’s credit line. Yet,
though we are entering the late innings, foreign policy and national defense
have not been factors in the 2012 campaign.
That is worth bearing in mind when
we hear the laugh-out-loud narrative of Obama as foreign-affairs chess master.
The president badly wants to win reelection. If there were anything to his
alleged prowess, we’d not have heard the end of it. What we’ve heard, instead,
is a bumper-sticker: “Obama killed Osama.” The Left hoped to paste it over the
president’s generally dreary record. Even with the Obamedia in coordinated
overdrive, the plan can work only if Mitt Romney lets it work — and,
thankfully, it looks like he won’t.
Give the president his due: In 2008,
he said he would go hard against terrorist havens, no matter how upset this
made John McCain’s cherished “allies” in Pakistan, and he has. But even the
welcome slamming of jihadist redoubts is undermined by the mess Obama has made
of terrorist detention — so our forces kill in situations where they could
capture, drying up the intelligence reservoir that has been vital to thwarting
new cells and plots.
Moreover, any president would have
given the order to take bin Laden out, and just about any post-9/11 president
would bomb jihadist hideouts. What’s extraordinary about Obama’s performance in
this regard is that he’s one you might have wondered about — he gets graded on
a curve. But, thankful as we may be, this is thin camouflage for the rest of
Obama’s agenda, which is post-American, anti-constitutional, enabling of the
ideology that spawns terrorism, faithless toward our real allies, and feckless
in the face of menacing Iran.
The game never goes according to
plan. The batted ball always manages to find the suspect fielder, no matter how
hard the coach, or the campaign, tries to hide him. On the eleventh anniversary
of the 9/11 atrocities, the world and its affairs found the Obama
administration — intruding on the president’s effort to win reelection by a
brand of domestic class warfare that gives new meaning to the word “small.”
When it came, Obama’s moment was
entirely predictable. It was, after all, self-inflicted: the inevitable fallout
of policy crafted by the faculty-lounge pinhead, whose ideas are so saccharine
smug there’s never a thought of anything so jejune as their consequences. Obama
being Obama, when the consequences came, he crawled under his desk — before
escaping to a Vegas fundraiser.
“The Embassy of the United States in
Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the
religious feelings of Muslims.” So declared the Obama State Department in a
statement issued on the website of its Egyptian embassy. At the time, it was
clear that another episode of Muslim mayhem was imminent.
The statement is a disgrace, just as
Mitt Romney said it was. It elevated over the U.S. Constitution (you know, the
thing Obama took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend”) the claimed right
of sharia supremacists (you know, “Religion of Peace” adherents) to riot over
nonsense. Further, it dignified the ludicrous pretext that an obscure, moronic
14-minute video was the actual reason for the oncoming jihad.
Here is the important part, however,
the part not to be missed, no matter how determined the president’s media
shysters are to cover it up: The disgraceful embassy statement was a completely
accurate articulation of longstanding Obama policy.
As Obama struggled to put daylight
between himself and his record, the press was duly pathetic. The president, Politico
was quick to cavil,
had nothing to do with “the statement by Embassy Cairo.” An administration
official declaimed that it “was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect
the views of the United States government.” You are to believe the Obama White
House exists in a galaxy separate from the Obama State Department, which itself
inhabits a frontier distant and detached from the U.S. embassy in Cairo —
except, one supposes, for the $38,000
in taxpayer funds the embassy spent on Obama autobiographies, apparently
thought to be craved by Egyptians, at least when they’re not ever-so-moderately
chanting
“Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”
In point of fact, the embassy’s
statement perfectly reflects the views of the United States government under
Obama’s stewardship. It is anathema to most Americans, but it has been Obama’s
position from the start.
In 2009, the Obama State Department
ceremoniously joined with Muslim governments to propose a United Nations
resolution that, as legal commentator Stuart Taylor observed,
was “all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find
offensive.” Titled “Freedom of Opinion and Expression” — a name only an
Alinskyite or a Muslim Brotherhood tactician could love — the resolution was
the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by the 57-government Organization of
the Islamic Conference (now renamed the “Organization of Islamic Cooperation”).
The OIC’s explicit goal is to coerce the West into adopting sharia,
particularly its “defamation” standards.
"As recently as December 19, 2011, the U.S. voted for and was instrumental in passing ‘U.N. Resolution 16/18’ against ‘religious intolerance,’ ‘condemning the stereotyping, negative
profiling and stigmatization of people based on their religion.’ While
this may sound innocuous, it was the latest incarnation of a highly
controversial ‘anti-blasphemy’ resolution that has been pushed by the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at the United Nations since
1999.
This concept of global “blasphemy laws,” to which the Obama
Administration is very obviously not hostile, is a long-cherished goal
of Islamic supremacists. It is also Constitutional sacrilege."
Sharia severely penalizes any insult
to Islam or its prophet, no matter how slight. Death is a common punishment.
And although navel-gazing apologists blubber about how “moderate Islamist”
governments will surely ameliorate enforcement of this monstrous law, the world
well knows that the “Muslim street” usually takes matters into its own hands —
with encouragement from their influential sheikhs and imams.
In its obsession with propitiating
Islamic supremacists, the Obama administration has endorsed this license to
mutilate. In the United States, the First Amendment prohibits sharia
restrictions on speech about religion. As any Catholic or Jew can tell you,
everyone’s belief system is subject to critical discussion. One would think
that would apply doubly to Islam. After all, many Muslims accurately cite
scripture as a justification for violence; and classical Islam recognizes no
separation between spiritual and secular life — its ambition, through sharia,
is to control matters (economic, political, military, social, hygienic, etc.)
that go far beyond what is understood and insulated as “religious belief” in
the West. If it is now “blasphemy” to assert that it is obscene to impose
capital punishment on homosexuals and apostates, to take just two of the many
examples of sharia oppression, then we might as well hang an “Out of Business”
sign on our Constitution.
The Obama administration, however,
did not leave it at the 2009 resolution. It has continued to work with the OIC
on subordinating the First Amendment to sharia’s defamation standards — even
hosting last year’s annual conference, a “High Level Meeting on Combatting
Religious Intolerance.” That paragon of speech sensitivity, Secretary of State
Hillary “We Came,
We Saw, He Died” Clinton, hailed as a breakthrough a
purported compromise that would have criminalized only speech that incited
violence based on religious hostility. But it was a smokescreen: Speech that
intentionally solicits violence, regardless of the speaker’s motivation, is
already criminal and has always been exempted from First Amendment protection.
There is no need for more law about that.
The sharia countries were happy with
the compromise, though, because it also would have made unlawful speech that
incites mere “discrimination” and “hostility” toward religion. Secretary
Clinton’s feint was that this passed constitutional muster because such speech
would not be made criminally unlawful. Yet the First Amendment says
“make no law,” not “make no criminal law,” restricting speech. The First
Amendment permits us to criticize in a way that may provoke hostility — it
would be unconstitutional to suppress that regardless of whether the law
purporting to do so was civil, as opposed to criminal.
But let’s put the legal
hair-splitting aside. Knowing her legal position was unsound, and that
traditional forms of law could not constitutionally be used to suppress
critical examination of religion, Secretary Clinton further explained the
administration’s commitment “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer
pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to
do what we abhor.” The government is our servant, not our master — besides
enforcing valid laws, it has no business using its coercive power to play
social engineer. More to the present point, however, the administration was
effectively saying it is perfectly appropriate to employ extra-legal forms of
intimidation to suppress speech that “we abhor.”
When asked the simple question, “Will
you
tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice
will
never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalises speech against
any
religion?” five times, President Obama's Assistant Attorney General of
the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez, would NOT affirm the First
Amendment right to criticise any and every religion.
That is precisely what the Egyptian
mob was about to do when the U.S. embassy issued its statement. The Obama
administration’s position? The president endorses extortionate “peer pressure”
and “shaming,” but condemns constitutionally protected speech. That’s exactly
the message the embassy’s statement conveyed.
Mind you, what is playing out in
Egypt — as well as Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia — is a charade. It has nothing to
do with the dopey movie. There is as much or more agitation to release the
Blind Sheikh — which the Obama administration has also encouraged by its
embrace of Islamists, including the
Blind Sheikh’s terrorist organization. The latest round of marauding is about
power.
Islamic supremacists see themselves
in a civilizational war with us. When we submit on a major point, we grow
weaker and they grow stronger. They win a big round in the jihad. President
Obama’s anti-constitutional policy — the one he lacked the courage to stand by
when, shall we say, the “chickens came home to roost” — has made speech
suppression low-hanging fruit. The Islamists are going for it.
In a situation that called for a
president who would actually defend the Constitution, Mitt Romney rose to the
occasion. The administration’s performance was, as he asserted, “disgraceful.”
Further, Romney admonished,
America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and
against our embassies. We’ll defend also our constitutional rights of speech,
and assembly, and religion. We have confidence in our cause in America. We
respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our constitution
protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles
of our constitution, because we recognize that these principles are the
ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.
Can you imagine the current
incumbent, the guy sworn to defend the Constitution, ever saying such a thing —
or, better, saying it and actually meaning it? Me neither. It will be
remembered as the moment the race for president finally became about the real
job of a president. It will be remembered as the moment Romney won.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a
senior fellow at the National
Review Institute and executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. His
latest book, Spring
Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, will be published by Encounter Books on September 18.
For What It's Worth Lyrics by Buffalo Springfield
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
