Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 13

Spring Fever

My new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, officially comes out today. I have a new website, AndrewCMcCarthy.com, and it will be largely devoted to book themes and related news for the time being.  

Spring Fever is an E-book, for a couple of reasons. First, the readership for books in a digital rather than a traditional paper format has grown vast due to the speed of delivery, the convenience of storing and carrying lots and lots of books on a small device (iPad, Kindle, etc.), and the many advantageous features the digital format provides (searching, note-making, instant links to source materials, etc.). I love good old books, though. Although I made the switch a couple of years ago, I sympathize with those who have resisted. That brings us to reason number two: the relevance of books to current events.

When my friend and publisher (at Encounter Books) Roger Kimball and I first talked about a book about the so-called Arab Spring, I did not leap at the idea. My previous book, The Grand Jihad, was about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, its well thought out method of revolution, and the abetting of it by the Left, the current administration in particular. If you read The Grand Jihad -- the title is taken from the Brotherhood's own words in an internal memo in which they explain their mission as a "grand jihad" to "destroy Western from within" -- you have not been the least bit surprised by the last two years of upheaval in the Middle East, including the anti-American rioting of the past week. Thus, I could certainly see the sense in following The Grand Jihad up with a book underscoring that the phenomenon we are witnessing is not a spontaneous outbreak of democracy in a region yearning for freedom but an inevitable transition to strict Islamization in a civilization yearning for sharia and hostile to Western culture.

Still, I was reluctant because of the usual book production process: you spend months writing a manuscript, then the book is finally produced and published long after you're done -- maybe six months ... maybe eight months ... My two books have held up well -- to the extent they've been predictive, they've been on the money. And, not to toot my own flute too much, I think I've had the "Democracy Project" and its "Arab Spring" iteration right for a long time. There's something scary, though, about the prospect of writing a book about a dramatically moving target. To say events are moving rapidly in the Middle East these days is to make a gross understatement. I was worried that by the time a book about the "Arab Spring" could be published, it would be stale, with my manuscript inevitably overrun by intervening months of new events.

I was ultimately convinced that the book was a good idea (Roger always has good ideas) because there were three ways to solve the moving-target challenge. First, with an E-book, freed of the need to crank out bound paper books and get them into the distribution chain, the production time is drastically shortened: I finished the book in July, and added a preface in mid-August to discuss important new developments (mainly, Mohamed Morsi's shrewd dismantling of the Egyptian military and rapid grab for dictatorial power). Presto, the book is out in mid-September. Second, the website is a good way to react to breaking news, keep up to date, and explain how new developments tie in to themes developed in the book.

Third and foremost, I did not try to write a history of the "Arab Spring." Spring Fever is, instead, an attempt to give the reader an alternative way to understand what is happening in the Middle East, an antidote to the delirious "Arab Spring" narrative. Mine is based on understanding that Islam, a culture and civilization distinct from and hostile to the West, is the most significant fact about the region; that far from being a fringe ideology, Islamic supremacism is the dominant interpretation of Islam of the Middle East; and that the most salient precedent for the current revolt, Turkey, is a model for Islamization not democratization.

Hopefully, the formula works and readers find the book relevant. In any event, there have already been some generous reviews, and a number of readers who learned about the project over the last several months have been very encouraging. I'm very grateful. I will try not to wear you out with too much book commentary. Please check out the website. Besides information about the book, it also features Eliana Johnson's terrific video on the subject.   

Law, Legalisms and Lying about Libya

Everything Mark says here about the audacious silence of the State Department is exactly right. I write only to add a couple of points about his apt distinction between "laws" and "legalisms." 

First, let's pretend for argument's sake that the paramount consideration in Libya were the criminal investigation rather than national security and political accountability (particularly at a time when the nation is about to choose a commander in chief). Even then, it would not be true that the commencement of a criminal investigation precluded comment by the government.

As a matter of law, grand jury secrecy applies only to evidence that the government learns solely by the grand jury process -- e.g., I, the prosecutor, give you, the witness, a grand jury subpoena and, under that compulsion, you show or tell me something I would not otherwise have known. To be more concrete, if an FBI agent reads a Steyn column and is then asked questions about it while testifying in the grand jury, the Steyn column is still a matter of public record; it does not become "secret grand jury material" that -- presto! -- government officials are not allowed to talk about anymore. Most people, especially non-lawyers, are not versed in these concepts. So, government officials frequently try to get away with telling the public that they cannot comment on matters that are under investigation. But it is not true, and experienced members of the press well know it's not true -- which is why they keep hounding Republican administrations that try this stonewall tactic. Furthermore, since a U.S. federal grand jury sitting in Washington has absolutely no power to compel testimony or other evidence in Libya, grand jury secrecy should not be much of a bar. 

Besides grand jury secrecy, there are no substantial restrictions on government commentary. Obviously, law enforcement investigators should protect their sources of information and should not reveal new evidence they learn of until they are ready to charge someone -- they should restrict their comments to information already on the public record. But there is no legal restriction prohibiting government agencies -- even law enforcement -- from commenting about public-record information, as well as information regarding the activities and performance of "public servants" that are of obvious interest to the public.

If the State Department and the White House have gone mum, it is because they have chosen to stonewall the American people, not because anything in the law requires them to do so.  

Second, treating national security challenges as though they were mere criminal justice issues is the major counterterrorism error the government made in the nineties -- i.e., back when Hillary Clinton was the First Lady promoting Arafat rather than the Secretary of State promoting the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the lessons 9/11 is supposed to have taught us is that there are many things related to our national defense that are far more important than litigation -- more important, even, than "bringing to justice" terrorists we happen to capture. This lesson applies to almost all aspects of foreign relations, not just counterterrorism.

It is entirely appropriate for the public to demand answers about what happened in Libya, even if the Justice Department happens to be investigating some of these events. And the killing of our ambassador and other personnel -- particularly if it was done by al Qaeda and affiliated terrorists who are enemy combatants under Congress's post-9/11 authorization of military force -- is an act of war. If we are again adopting the Clinton approach of treating a war as a crime, that, too, is something the public should be told about.

And let's think about this for a second. President Obama has (legitimately) used military force against a pair of American citizens in Yemen -- he did not have Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn arrested because he decided they should be treated like enemy combatants, not defendants. Indeed, the president used military force in Libya itself when he launched an unprovoked war against the Qaddafi regime when there were no vital American interests at stake -- he decided that, too, was a military engagement not fit for law-enforcement processes. So now, after all that, you're going to tell us that the killing of our officials by foreign terrorists with whom we are at war is a law enforcement matter that you can't talk about? Are you serious? 

One last thing: It is highly unlikely that there will be any American criminal proceedings based on the atrocities in Libya. If you think the Islamic supremacist marauding is bad now, imagine what it would be like if what passes for the Libyan government were to sign off on sending Libyans or other non-American Muslims to be prosecuted in the U.S. Don't expend too much energy imagining, though, because it's never going to happen. And do you really think these war criminals are going to be "brought to justice" by the vaunted Libyan justice system?

There is no good reason for the Obama administration to go mum on Libya. During the war in Iraq, then-Senator Hillary Clinton had no compunction about challenging General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the Bush administration's accounting of the surge, which, she inveighed, called for a "willing suspension of disbelief." Her position was that the administration should expect to be grilled on the story it was telling the public. Her own story today appears to have a good deal less acquaintance with reality than what Petraeus and Crocker were relating. It is shameful for the press so passively to accept the administration's ridiculous claim that it can make no comment beyond the State Department's dubious story.    

Obama vs. the First Amendment

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.

#ad#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.

#page#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.”

#ad#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.

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.

#page#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.

#ad#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.”

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 theNational 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.

Ooops . . . DNC Apologizes for Using Russian Ships in Tribute to U.S. Veterans

Democratic party officials apologized Wednesday for displaying a huge image of the Russian Navy during the party's tribute to U.S. veterans at last week's convention.

The Navy Times reports:

On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, a retired Navy four-star took the stage to pay tribute to veterans. Behind him, on a giant screen, the image of four hulking warships reinforced his patriotic message. But there was a big mistake in the stirring backdrop: those are Russian warships.

While retired Adm. John Nathman, a former commander of Fleet Forces Command, honored vets as America’s best, the ships from the Russian Federation Navy were arrayed like sentinels on the big screen above. These were the very Soviet-era combatants that Nathman and Cold Warriors like him had once squared off against....

Naval experts concluded the background was a photo composite of Russian ships that were overflown by what appear to be U.S. trainer jets. It remains unclear how or why the Democratic Party used what’s believed to be images of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at their convention. . . .

The veteran who spotted the error and notified Navy Times said he was immediately taken aback.“I was kind of in shock,” said Rob Barker, 38, a former electronics warfare technician who left the Navy in 2006. Having learned to visually identify foreign ships by their radars, Barker recognized the closest ship as the Kara-class cruiser Kerch . . . .

The background — featured in the carefully choreographed hour leading up to the president’s Sept. 6 speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination — showed four ships with radar designs not used in the U.S. fleet.... [T]he fact they are Russian ships is not in doubt. In addition to the ship’s radar arrays and hulls, which are dissimilar from U.S. warships, the photo features one more give-away: a large white flag with a blue ‘X’ at the ships’ sterns. [Naval historian Norman] Polmar, who authored “The Naval Institute Guide to the Soviet Navy,” recognized the blue ‘X’-mark: “The X is the Cross of St. Andrew’s, which is a Russian Navy symbol,” Polmar said. (An anchored U.S. warship, by contrast, flies the American flag on its stern.) Based on this specific group of these ship types, one naval expert concluded that this was most likely a photo of the Black Sea Fleet.

An Apology From Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Government? No, a Veiled Threat

Reuters reports that Egypt's prime minister, Hisham Kandil, has magnanimously said the U.S. government should not be blamed for the film about Mohammed that is the latest pretext for Islamic supremacist savagery. And is Egypt's government sorry about the attack on our embassy? No. Kandil says the attack was "regrettable" -- but not because rioting over a film is barbaric. Rather, it is "regrettable" because "the people who produced this low film have no relation to the (U.S.) government." So rioting against the filmmakers is fine, and if there were any nexus to the government, rioting at our embassy would be fine, too. 

... Which brings us to the second part of Kandil's statement: "We ask the American government to take a firm position toward this film's producers within the framework of international charters that criminalize acts that stir strife on the basis of race, color or religion." Translation: We're not holding the American government responsible ... yet -- but if it fails to punish the filmmakers, then all that "regrettable" stuff might not be so regrettable.

The Obama administration has brought this on itself, and the rest of us, by elevating sharia blasphemy standards over the First Amendment. As I explain in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, the State Department is working with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim governments, to impose a resolution demanding that all nations enact laws against condemning not only incitement to violence based on religion, but also incitement to discrimination or hostility to religion.

It is no secret that Islamic law brutally punishes what it regards as blasphemy -- any insult to Islam or its prophet, no matter how slight. Yet Obama has raised the expectations of Egypt's government that he stands with them on this principle. In fact, in 2011, his State Department went so far as to host the OIC's "High Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance."

If Mitt Romney did not ignore all the dumb advice he's being given, and make clear that he stands for the First Amendment over sharia blasphemy laws, there would be something seriously wrong with his campaign.

More Thoughts on Daniel Pipes's Thoughts on Terry Jones

A number of readers commenting on my post point out that I may have misconstrued Daniel Pipes, that he may have been making points similar to mine, just in a more subtle and satirical way. Daniel is a brilliant guy, so that is entirely possible. I do not see the point of dwelling on Terry Jones, as he did, when the real problem is sharia -- dwelling on Jones confuses things. And I don't see this situation as calling for an argument along the lines of "As a practical matter, we can't really regulate the grandstanding Joneses of the world, so it is more efficient to defend free speech in a bright-line." But that said, if I misunderstood Daniel, I apologize. And I acknowledge that he did make the following point, with which I fully agree, at the end of his post:  

Terry Jones and his imitators have figured out how to goad Muslims to violence, embarrass Western governments, and move history. The only way to stop this freelance foreign policy is for governments to stand firmly on principle: Citizens have freedom of speech, which specifically means the right to insult and annoy. The authorities will protect this right. Muslims do not enjoy special privileges. Leave us alone.

As Jimmy Carter can attest, not to stand strong turns U.S. missions abroad into sitting ducks. 

No, It's Sharia and the Assault on U.S. Missions

I could not more vigorously disagree with my friend Daniel Pipes, who disappointingly lays fault for yesterday's carnage at the feet of Reverend Terry Jones. In essence, Daniel -- like much of the progressive, bipartisan U.S. ruling class -- adopts the reasoning of Muslim Brotherhood jurist Yusuf Qaradawi, who admonishes that women who fail to conform to fundamentalist Islam's restrictive sartorial standards have only themselves to blame when they get raped.

Let's say Terry Jones was Imam Terry Jones. It is not hard to imagine because there goes by not a day when some Islamist leader of far more consequence than Jones matter-of-factly spouts hatred of America and the West that is more provocative, and more representative of his country or region, than anything that has ever passed Jones's lips. Would it make you riot? Would it make you commit murder? Would it foment more than a yawn? And if it did stir so much as a suggestion that this typical Muslim leader should be silenced, the only public protests and pious government caterwauling would be directed at that suggestion, not at the anti-American incitements that prompted it. 

The coordinated violence against American installations in the Middle East on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 was caused by one thing: Islamic supremacism. Contrary to the knowing lies government officials and opinion elites have been feeding the American people for 20 years, Islamic supremacism is not the fringe ideology of the terrorists; it is the predominant Islam of the Middle East. By margins of upwards of 2 to 1, the United States and the West are despised in countries like Egypt and Libya. As I point out in my just-released book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, when given the chance, Egyptians elected Islamic supremacists by a 4-to-1 margin. The only surprise in the voting was not the weakness of secular democrats -- that they are a non-factor, even though American politicians continue to depict them as emblematic of the Muslim Middle East, was a given. The surprise was that the Muslim Brotherhood, which has reaffirmed its goal of a global caliphate ruled by sharia, is not quite devout enough for about a quarter of Egyptians, who voted for the even more extreme "Salafist" parties.

#more#Under sharia, as construed by Islamic supremacists (i.e., at least two-thirds of Middle East Muslims), any negative criticism of Islam or its prophet, no matter how trifling, is deemed to be blasphemy and warrants violent reprisals -- including death. These Muslims -- hundreds of millions of them -- consider this to be a divine ordinance and thus to be imposed on Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Understand that Islam, particularly as Islamic supremacists interpret it, is not merely a religion; it is a totalitarian ideology that has some spiritual principles, which make up a small subset of the belief system. Blasphemy is not applied only to the spiritual principles -- say, to the oneness of Allah, and the like. The speech prohibition applies across the board to all Islamic doctrine. You've got a problem with a woman's court testimony being worth only half of a man's? Blasphemy! You've got a problem with needing four male witnesses to prove rape? Blasphemy! You've got a problem with the death penalty for homosexuals? With stoning for adulterers? With scourging for the consumption of alcohol? Blasphemy, blasphemy, blasphemy!

That's what causes the rioting and murder. The "blasphemers" are only a pretext. What causes this is the indoctrination of Muslim populations in an evil ideology that justifies savagery over nonsense. That's the proximate cause. If you want to look at a material cause beyond the proximate cause, the place to start would be American officials like the ones Daniel cites with seeming approval: David Petraeus, Robert Gates, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- and I'd add Lindsey Graham to the list. They are the officials who condemned Terry Jones's exercise of free speech -- book burning -- because, as Daniel gently puts it, they were "worried it would lead to Muslim violence against Americans." That is shameful. What "leads to Muslim violence" is the toxic combination of Islamic teaching that violence is the appropriate response to even minor insults and the dhimmified superpower's acquiescence in this barbarism.

At RadicalIslam.org, former CIA operations officer Clare Lopez has an excellent post this morning explaining the Obama administration's complicity in the campaign by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to impose sharia blasphemy standards on the world. (I would point you to Clare's essay even if she had not been good enough to mention something I'd written.) After laying out the Obama State Department's disgraceful statement yesterday, from its Cairo embassy, condemning American free speech and ignoring Islamist aggression ("The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims," and so on), Clare writes:

That statement came directly out of the talking points of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on its Ten-Year Programme of Action and is intended by both the OIC and the U.S. Department of State to impose legal limits on Americans’ freedom of speech by criminalizing criticism of Islam. Recall that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Washington, D.C. in mid-December 2011 to discuss implementation mechanisms for "Resolution 16/18," a declaration adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council in April 2011.

Resolution 16/18 calls on countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization" based on religion without criminalizing free speech – except in cases of “incitement to imminent violence.” If now the measure of “incitement to imminent violence” is a “test of consequences” that imposes prior restraint on freedom of expression because of the unpredictability of volatile Muslim populaces easily roused to murderous fury, as in Benghazi and Cairo, then Islamic law on slander will have been enforced.

This is the real meaning of these attacks, which were purposefully calculated precisely to elicit the craven press release quoted above from the U.S. State Department. This is how dhimmitude is implemented. Islamic Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiyya demands for the release of Omar Abdul Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”), now serving a life sentence in U.S. federal prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, also have been issued, along with a threat to burn the U.S. Cairo Embassy to the ground if these demands are not met.

We are witnessing the stepped process of the Islamization of American domestic and foreign policy unfold before our eyes and in accordance with both Sayyed Qutb’s classic book “Milestones,” as well as a November 2011 fatwa from Yousef al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s senior jurist, in which he said, “Gradualism in applying the Sharia is a wise requirement to follow.”

Sheikh Qaradawi is no doubt a happy man today. The plan is working to a T.

UPDATE: Further thoughts.

Besieged U.S. Embassy on 9/11: 'Islam Is a Wonderful Religion'

Kerry Picket's got it . . . read it and weep.

'Obama, Obama, There Are Still a Billion Osamas!'

Nina is exactly right that the appalling statement issued by the Obama State Department, apparently prior to the storming of the U.S. embassy in Cairo today, betrays the president's agenda to impose on Americans sharia speech-suppression standards in blatant violation of the First Amendment. That, however, is far from the most egregious part of today's episode in Egypt.  

To attack another country's embassy is an act of war. Now, some will be quick to point out that our embassy was not attacked by the Egyptian regime. That is no defense. Everybody was on notice that there might be rioting today. It was in anticipation of trouble that the State Department issued its despicable statement -- putting the blame for violence on American free speech rather than Islamist savagery. Further, it was almost exactly a year ago that an Egyptian mob stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo, doing almost exactly what they did today: scaling the embassy walls, tearing down the Israeli flag, and replacing it with the Egyptian and Palestinian flags.

In that instance, as in today's, the Egyptian regime could have made certain that the embassy was secure. It chose not to. Unlike the Israelis, however, we actually pay the Egyptians nearly $1.5 billion a year in military aid -- funding Obama not only continued under circumstances where it was obvious Egypt would be ruled by anti-American Islamic supremacists, but also which the president would now have our bankrupt government complement with yet another billion dollars in economic assistance.

What are we getting for this largesse? Egypt has renewed relations with Iran, is seeking to purchase submarines from Germany that could be used to attack Israeli assets, is re-militarizing the Sinai in violation of the Camp David Accords, and now cannot -- actually, would not -- even protect our embassy. And all this against a background in which the Muslim Brotherhood's Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi, called for violent jihad against the United States in 2010, cheered that excursions into Afghanistan and Iraq have put America in its death throes, and reaffirmed -- after the Muslim Brotherhood's electoral victories -- the Brotherhood's ultimate goal of a global caliphate governed by sharia.

Egypt is an enemy of the United States. We wanted free elections and we got them. What they have given us, as I argue in my imminent new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, is an Egyptian regime that reflects Egypt's Islamic supremacist population -- among the world's worst human-rights violators.

"Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas!" they cried today as they attacked our embassy, shredded our flag, and replaced it with the al-Qaeda flag -- the one so popular with the "rebels" in Libya and Syria. One of the 9/11 hijackers was an Egyptian, as is the current leader of al-Qaeda, as is the Blind Sheikh. A real ally would be embarrassed. An enemy marks the day like Egypt did. The Obama administration marked the day by apologizing for free speech and declining a presidential audience to the prime minister of Israel -- our actual ally in the region. President Obama's calendar is very busy after all: Between campaigning and rounds of golf, he's blocked a day to roll out the red carpet for Egypt's new president.

Is it too much to hope that the Romney campaign might see an opportunity here to make a point about American national security and foreign policy under Obama? Remember back in 2002, back when we were following the original "with us or against us" Bush Doctrine -- back before the doctrine was warped by delusional visions of sharia democracy? Here's the question: Would they have dared storm the American embassy in Cairo on September 11, 2002? 

Double-Minded Republicans

After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be?

Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds.

The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter -- and he has actually been much more effective, and therefore much worse -- it is unreasonable to expect a Reagan-style landslide, and would be even if we had Reagan. The people coming of age in our country today have been reared very differently from those who were just beginning to take the wheel in the early 1980s. They have marinated in an unapologetically progressive system that prizes group discipline and narrative over free will and critical thought.

The narratives are not always easy to follow. In the progressive weltanschauung, good and evil are relative. Good is whatever it is said to be in the moment; don’t ask anyone to explain why “choice” is a value when it involves killing the unborn, though it is seen as an obvious nuisance when it involves the right to choose the double cheeseburger over the salad. Evil is contextualized and root-caused into vaporous abstraction. We no longer know whether it’s wrong -- only that, whoever may have done it, it’s our fault.

#ad#Yet, even with good and evil enveloped in fog, progressive narratives remain sharply Manichaean: You can always tell the heroes from the villains. Obama is a hero because he cares. Conservatives are villains because they don’t. And Republicans are villains because they are conservative.

None of these statements is true, of course. Obama cares about Obama, which is hardly heroic. Conservatives are repulsed by government intrusions into the private sphere because we believe private citizens are better than government’s social engineers at promoting prosperity for everyone. And today’s Republican party is not very conservative: At a time when the welfare state is -- inevitably -- collapsing of its own weight, Romney and Ryan run as its guardians. They’ve come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

Still, the truth is increasingly irrelevant. Contemporary American politics is about emotion and perception. And this is a game Republicans will never win -- and not, as they would have you believe, because the deck is stacked against them.

Certainly, the media, the academy, and most of our society’s major institutions are heavily influenced by progressives, if not outright controlled by them. It is therefore a given that elite opinion will portray Republicans as villains. Yet, that longstanding challenge for Republicans has never before been an insuperable one. In America, at least until now, the avant-garde has never been able to tame the public. It has always been possible to run against elite opinion and win -- if you make a compelling counter-case.

#page#Today’s Republicans do not. Indeed, they cannot, because they have accepted the progressive framework. Their argument is not that the welfare state, deficit spending, federalized education, sharia-democracy promotion, and the rest are bad policies. Their argument is not that Washington needs to be dramatically downsized. It is that progressive governance is fine but needs to be better executed.

Ain’t that something to rally around! The counter-case is supposed to demonstrate why the other guys are deeply wrong. You’re not going to get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.”

#ad#It is hard to complain about Obama’s $5 trillion in new debt when you added $5 trillion just before he did. “Well, we took eight years and he took only four” is not exactly a response that stirs the soul -- particularly when the country took two centuries to amass the first $5 trillion.

Then there’s Medicare, which the GOP has made a pivotal election issue. The problem with Medicare is not just that its current formula is unsustainable, or that Obama diverted a staggering amount of projected future spending on it into yet another bank-breaking entitlement. It is that the national government is innately incapable of running an entitlement program. Is the election about the side that grasps this versus the side for which enough is never enough? Surely you jest.

As constituted, our government offered two visions of “providing for the general welfare.” First is the Madisonian principle that Congress’s capacity to tax and spend is strictly limited to its enumerated powers -- which do not include running social-welfare programs. The second is a Hamiltonian gloss, giving Congress additional latitude, provided that its schemes benefit all Americans equally -- which would preclude welfare programs that take from A for the benefit of B.

Once you abandon these moorings, once you accept a wealth-redistribution system in which government becomes the arbiter of “social justice,” the ball game is over. If government is given license to even the scales between the have-nots and the haves, the political incentive to even them will be constant and overpowering: Enough will never be enough. If the rationale for giving government this power is that the asset in question is corporate property, not private, what is to be the limiting principle? Why health care but not housing or income? And when it comes to providing for the truly needy among 310 million people, central-government planners will simply never be as good at it as decent societies and their local governments. And so the allocation of burdens and benefits in federal entitlement programs are guaranteed to be warped, wasteful, and ultimately unsustainable.

Yet, no political party is making that case. Both candidates want you to know they are sentries of the safety net. And no major conservative journal or think tank, it seems, would have it any other way. Concededly, the GOP’s approach, “Let’s work within this implausible system and do the best we can to patch it up#...#someday,” is a more attractive position than Obama’s “Let’s break the bank now.” But inspiring?#...#Not exactly.

The third of the country we’ve lost may seem like a decided minority. Progressives do not need more than that, though, to run the show, not today. They proved that at their own convention this week, with the laughable platform-amendment episode.

The smarter Alinskyites among them realized that taking God and Jerusalem out of the platform was a blunder, so they ordered them put back in. Under the rules (ahem), that required a two-thirds’ vote of the delegates. When the vote was publicly taken, it became embarrassingly clear not only that there were not two-thirds in favor but that the “nays” may have had a majority. But the minority “ayes” are in power, and that’s all they needed. They peremptorily deemed themselves the victors. The amendments passed, and, after some brief groaning, the rest of the Left got with the program.

It was as rigged a vote as you’d find in any banana republic. But Democrats are unembarrassed -- maybe even unembarrassable. It’s like the Obamacare debate in Congress: They’re not worried about what it looks like; they’re worried about winning.

Today’s Republicans are worried about what it looks like. Winning is secondary. What matters most is that they not appear too mean on a stage they’ve allowed their bare-knuckles opponents to set. Their consultants tell them: “It’s not what you stand for; it’s how you get to 50 percent plus one. So soften your edges, drop the philosophy crap, and if you need to show the media some backbone, find a conservative to bash.”

There is a big conservative base out there -- bigger than the third of the country we’ve lost. But they’re left to scratch their heads and say, “I’m supporting this guy#...#why?” The response comes a little less quickly after each fit of pique: “Oh, right, because he’s not Obama.”

That’s a lot, but will it be enough?

Obama’s base, that lost third of the country, may not be as enthralled as they were in 2008. But they are committed, utterly convinced about who the villains are, and are prepared to be as chameleon as it takes to reel in, from the culture they dominate, the additional 15 percent or so needed to push their guy across the finish line. That’s how what should be a landslide for his opponent becomes a squeaker.

— 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.