'13 Hours,' like Benghazi itself, notable for Obama's, Clinton's absence

By HUGH HEWITT (@HUGHHEWITT) • 1/10/16 5:00 PM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/

When the blockbuster movie "13 Hours" opens this week there will follow a hard few days for President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Hard, but not as hard as the years that have followed the families of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

The movie mentions neither the president nor the then secretary of state by name, and no expressed argument is made as to what the two did or didn't do to assist their embattled ambassador, his staff, and the CIA Benghazi outpost on Sept. 11, 2012. But the overwhelming impression of the huge number of people certain to see the first big release of the year, will be that they did not do enough.

In fact, it will be that they did nothing at all. Nothing.

The producers of the movie gave gifted director Michael Bay exactly what he needed: an exact replica of the layout of the special mission and the CIA "annex" as well as the chaos that pulsed through the city before and during the attacks. The warrior heroes of the film get the honor they deserve, but the sense of their bravery is mirrored on the downside by the recognition of the cowardice of the political leadership that put them in Benghazi to fend for themselves in the first place.

Four died. Many more were wounded. And then the lying began.

That lying continues still, though as recently as last week it may have begun to break. Former CIA Director and retired Gen. David Petreaus was in closed session before the House Select Committee on Benghazi as the Trey Gowdy-led panel continues its painstaking inquiry into just what happened that night.

"13 Hours" is going to tell everyone who is interested — and millions will be interested, and riveted, by the intense gunfight that breaks out early and never lets up until the dead are sent home — that the cries for help from the brave civilians and soldiers of Benghazi were many and urgent throughout the hours of attack. But the response was ... silence.

Hillary, of course, famously testified that she talked to the No. 2 in Tripoli, Gregory Hicks, and that later in the evening, as Hicks and his team evacuated to safer quarters and the ambassador's death was confirmed, that she simply went home. It was, after all, late. She was tired. She had a private server at home to keep her up to speed.

We still don't know what the president was doing as brave men fought and some died. We do not know why Hillary didn't call back Mr. Hicks. We do know she cut and ran that night.

We also now know, thanks to the document dump Friday, that Hillary knew the rules about using private email (she was shocked others did so) and that she directed her staff to alter classified documents and send them to her via non-secure means, a violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 1924.

But we don't know if it will matter to the election of 2016. If Donald Trump makes an issue of her lawlessness regarding the server, the public will get the education it deserves on that front.

It is director Bay, however, who will leave those who will open their eyes and ears to see and hear seething about Hillary's massive fail that night in 2012.

Democrats say Americans don't care, that it is old news, that she testified for 11 hours, et cetera, et cetera.

But now they get to see — to feel — what happened. "Game Change" is a book, a movie and yes, now a cliche. "13 Hours" and the latest smoking gun emails aren't "game changes" in that sense. It doesn't make political arguments or seek political changes.

Rather the movie is simply and completely an indictment. Let's hope that at least one from the Justice Department follows on some aspect of the corruption that pervaded the State Department, and the secretary and the president who superintended it.

Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, law professor at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law, and author, most recently of The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era." He posts daily at HughHewitt.com and is on Twitter @hughhewitt.

‘We were left behind’: The Benghazi soldiers tell all

By Reed Tucker
http://nypost.com/
January 9, 2016


From left, Bay, Mark “Oz” Geist, Author Mitchell Zuckoff and John “Tig” Tiegen on the set of “13 Hours.”Photo: Paramount Pictures
The first shots exploded around 9:40 p.m.

On Sept. 11, 2012, a group of local fighters, AK-47s in hand, burst through the fortified front gate of a US outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

One very long night later, the diplomatic compound was engulfed in flames and a covert CIA base a mile away lay in ruins, partially reduced to rubble by mortar fire. Four Americans were dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and two CIA members.

What happened in between is covered in “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” a new film from “Transformers” director Michael Bay in theaters Friday.

It focuses on a team of six military contractors who happened to be stationed at the CIA base when the fighting broke out. They chose to join the battle, spending more than half a day repelling attackers.

The movie is based on the book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi” by Mitchell Zuckoff and that team of operatives.

“That’s the reason we did the movie,” one of the contractors, ex Marine Mark Geist, tells The Post. “No one has talked about those 13 hours and what happened.”

Not that certain people haven’t been trying to find out. The incident has become one of the most highly politicized events in modern US history. Who was to blame for the debacle? Republicans have been hellbent on pinning it on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Congress has launched seven investigations, recorded dozens of hours of testimony and generated thousands of pages of documents.

But the men who were there say the movie has nothing to do with Washington, DC, or presidential campaigns.

“We wanted it apolitical,” Kris “Tanto” Paronto, a former Army Ranger and one of the Benghazi six, tells The Post. “From the time we got the call to the time the last [CIA Global Response Staff member] got out of Benghazi 13 hours later, it was a story of heroism. That was getting lost in the politics of it all.”

“For all of us, it was that the four [deceased] guys got honored in the way they should,” operative and ex Marine Sergeant John “Tig” Tiegen, tells The Post.

“Politicians hijacked it. The right use it, the left use it, and the true story got lost,” Paronto says. “The truth isn’t political. Now, the truth may affect political aspirations, but hey, sorry, that’s how it goes. We want people to know the true story, and if they want to use it as a determination of candidates, we can’t stop that. But we’re not going to get up there and say, ‘You should pick this person.’ ”

The day began with signs of trouble.

At 6:43 a.m., a car bearing Libyan police markings filled with three men pulled up to the diplomatic outpost. One man got out, climbed to the second floor of a restaurant overlooking the outpost and began taking photos. By the time security was alerted, the men and the car had vanished.

A mile down the road at the Annex — the walled, 2-acre, multibuilding compound that served as a base of operations for US covert intelligence services — it was business as usual for the soldiers.

Tiegen spent the morning accompanying the station chief, known only as “Bob,” on meetings with Libyan officials. Tiegen also checked in at the outpost, where Stevens had just arrived the day before.

Geist exercised and played video games. Paronto worked on computer-mapping software, then watched the Liam Neeson movie “Wrath of the Titans.”

As the men prepared to turn in for the night, down the road at the outpost a Toyota pickup bearing police insignia pulled in front of the gate and idled there for 40 minutes.

Just as it drove off, shots rang out and there was an explosion. Several dozen heavily armed men poured through the front gate. The Libyans, who had been guarding it, quickly melted away.

The seven Americans inside quickly barricaded themselves in locked rooms. A distress call was sent to the embassy in Tripoli and to Washington. The attackers dumped diesel fuel around the grounds and set it alight.

Over at the Annex, the security team was told to grab their gear and assemble. They loaded guns and body armor into a waiting armored car as they watched flames rise from the nearby outpost.

Before they could leave, however, the men were inexplicably told to “stand down” by Bob, the station chief. He preferred to let a friendly Libyan militia respond. (A congressional inquiry later concluded there was no evidence a “stand down” order was issued, but the “13 Hours” men say it happened.)

As they helplessly waited, a call from the outpost came over the radio: “If you don’t get here soon, we’re all going to die.” The group took matters into its own hands. The three contractors were also joined by ex-SEALs Tyrone Woods and “Jack Silva” (played by “The Office alum John Krasinki in the film) and former Marine “Dave Benton,” both pseudonymous names because their real identities have not been revealed.

The men made the journey to the outpost by car, then approached on foot. They arrived to find Stevens missing and officer Sean Smith dead from smoke inhalation.

As the team prepared to return to the Annex, with Smith’s body in the trunk of their car, the compound came under fire again. A vicious counterattack by the group of Libyans began around 11 p.m.

The team fought back. Tiegen climbed to a rooftop and killed a man aiming a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at one of the buildings. Minutes later, the operators and surviving outpost personnel were packed into two cars, driving the dangerous streets back to the Annex.

Around 12:30 a.m., cars full of enemy fighters began massing outside the Annex walls. A firefight began, and 10 minutes later, the first wave was repelled. More attacks followed before dawn broke. Suddenly, mortars rained down, landing atop a building and killing Woods and Glen Doherty, a former SEAL who’d arrived in the night from Tripoli.

He would be about the only outside assistance the Annex would get. Despite repeated calls for air support, none ever came. The Annex staff was ultimately evacuated to the airport and out of the country with the help of a Libyan militia. (Stevens was found by Libyans inside the outpost nearly dead from smoke inhalation. He later passed away.)

“This wasn’t the worst [firefight of my life], but it was the longest,” Paronto says. “The only difference with this one was that we were left behind. That’s just the truth. No support came. Period.”

“There are pilots that come up to us and say, ‘Sorry, dude. We were ready to go,’ ” Geist says.

The movie suggests that F-16s or gunships could have been scrambled from Europe,though a congressional committee determined none were available to make it in time.

The men who were there disagree.

“A lot of politicians don’t realize that we were all in the military and we know a lot of the military guys, and they tell us things,” Tiegen says. “One pilot said to us that [the government] was afraid of another ‘Black Hawk Down’ scenario.”

Though the men now suffer from post-traumatic stress (they refuse to term it a “disorder”), they say the movie makes them miss their other life and want to return to Libya.

“It’s enjoyable,” Tiegen says. “We’re over there whacking terrorists so they can’t come over here.”

“You’re your best person when you’re over [there]. You’re willing to give your life for someone,” Paronto says. “And you miss the brotherhood. Everything’s dull when you get back to the States.”

http://nypost.com/2016/01/09/we-were-left-behind-the-benghazi-soldiers-tell-all/

Here’s what Sean Penn agreed to do to party with El Chapo

By Laura Italiano
http://nypost.com/
January 9, 2016

El Chapo, meet El Jerko.

Hollywood blowhard Sean Penn secretly met, interviewed, and posed for grip-and-smirk selfies with murderous druglord Joaquin Guzman Loera — even as the world’s most-wanted fugitive continued to elude authorities in the months after tunneling out of a Mexican prison.

“I don’t want to be portrayed as a nun,” El Chapo says in the interview. Nevertheless, to gain access to the kingpin’s secret jungle hideout, Penn agreed that Guzman would have the final edit of the resulting story.

Penn also agreed not to alert authorities to the killer’s whereabouts. Still, Guzman’s capture in a dramatic police shootout Friday came as a direct result of Mexican officials tracking their contacts, authorities there said.

And Mexican officials now are investigating Penn and actress Kate del Castillo, who traveled with the actor to visit the vile drug lord, ABC News reported.

Penn interviewed Guzman — whose nickname means “Shorty” — in person and via cautiously encrypted e-mail and video messages for Rolling Stone magazine.

“He asks me if many people in the United States know about him,” Penn writes of the celebrity-obsessed narcotics magnate.

“‘Oh yeah,” I say . . . He seems to delight in the absurdity of this . . . We eat, drink and talk for hours,” he said of their jungle tête-a-tête.

At one point, the tequila flowing, El Chapo jokes of Donald Trump, “Ah! Mi amigo!”

The clandestine contacts were brokered by del Castillo, who’d struck up a correspondence with Guzman after tweeting her support of him four years ago, the mag said.

The resulting account, published online Saturday night, shows the killer kingpin — described variously as “serene,” and “a simple man in a simple place,” and “a businessman first” — in an almost worshipful light.

In breathless, first-person prose, Penn marvels over El Chapo’s humble, hardscrabble childhood spent harvesting in the drug fields of Sinaloa state.

Scant mention is made of the river of blood in El Chapo’s wake, and none at all of his alleged assassinations of Mexican officials and police. Guzman is credited with responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths of rivals, informants and officials in Mexico and the US, his biggest market.

A 2014 indictment by the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn charges him with 12 counts of murder among other charges; Mexico officials said Saturday they will cooperate with US efforts to extradite him.

Instead, Penn seems to swoon over the breadth of the fugitive’s deadly drug empire.

“While I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age 9, he was already working in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains of Sinaloa,” Penn says of Guzman, who, like the actor, is in his early 50s.

“Today he runs the biggest international drug cartel the world has ever known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar,” Penn says.

“He shops and ships by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.”

Penn concedes in the piece that he “may be perceived as protecting criminals.”

The actor also wants readers to know that in meeting with El Chapo — who was known to dispatch those who disappoint him with a bullet to the head — he is doing something really, really risky.

“The trust that El Chapo had extended to us was not to be f–ked with,” Penn writes.

“This will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the hazards,” Penn writes.

“I’d seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded, exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists and cartel ­enemies alike.”

But Penn was not afraid.

“I’d offered myself to experiences beyond my control in numerous countries of war, terror, corruption and disaster,” he assures the reader.

Guzman may be a billionaire murderer and peddler of poison, but what of our own guilt, as customers of his wares, Penn muses.

“We are the consumers,” Penn says, “and as such, we are complicit in every murder, and in every corruption of an institution’s ability to protect the quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics.”

Penn adds, “As much as anything, it’s a question of relative morality.”

Besides, “the War on Drugs has failed,” he announces, decrying “the tunnel vision of our puritanical and prosecutorial culture.”

Penn and del Castillo visited El Chapo in early October, a trip involving a flight to an undisclosed Mexican city and a 90-minute drive across farmlands in a convoy of ­armored SUVs to a dirt airfield.

Their escort on a subsequent, two-hour flight in El Chapo’s six-seat, single-engine prop plane is the drug lord’s 29-year-old son, Alfredo, Penn writes.

The plane has a scrambler that blocks ground radar, Alfredo boasts. After a few fortifying in-flight swigs of tequila, they land, somewhere, in a patch of dirt surrounded by jungle, and scramble into two waiting SUVs.

Nine bumpy hours later — after a drive that included their convoy being waved through a Mexican military checkpoint — “there he is,” standing beside a few “weathered bungalows,” Penn writes.

“He’s wearing a casual patterned silk shirt, pressed black jeans, and he appears remarkably well-groomed and healthy for a man on the run,” Penn notes.

“He pulls me into a ‘compadre’ hug, looks me in the eyes and speaks a lengthy greeting in Spanish too fast for my ears,” Penn says.

About 100 of his soldiers stand guard as El Chapo hobnobs with the two celebrities, del Castillo translating for Penn over tacos, rice and beans.

Penn is allowed no note-taking, so he’s unable to quote El Chapo at length. Did you know Pablo Escobar? the actor asks. “Yes, I met him. Big house,” is the answer remembered by Penn.

What was to be a series of in-person interviews was scuttled, though, when El Chapo’s security caught wind of a looming military siege.

A later, written interview consists of softball questions, including, “Do you consider yourself a violent person?”

The kingpin responds, “No, sir.”

Penn asks, “Are you prone to violence, or do you use it as a last resort?”

“Look,” El Chapo answers. “All I do is defend myself, nothing more. But do I start trouble? Never.”

Penn is no stranger to self-aggrandizement.

In the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he was pictured patrolling the streets of New Orleans brandishing a shotgun.

FILED UNDER JOAQUIN GUZMAN ,  ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE ,  SEAN PENN

Storm Clouds Form: Bob Woodward Compares Hillary Scandal to Watergate

By John Fund — January 10, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal has been a difficult one for the public to understand and for journalists to explain. But Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who helped uncover Watergate 40 years ago, clarified things a lot on Fox News Sunday today when he said that an e-mail in the most recently released batch shows Hillary trying to “subvert the rules” that she expected others to follow.

A few days earlier, Joe DiGenova, a well-respected former district attorney for the District of Columbia, told The Laura Ingraham Show that “there is vitriol of an intense amount developing” in the intelligence community and that FBI agents “are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if [the Justice Department] refuses to bring charges” against either Hillary Clinton or her former State Department staffers.

It was the State Department’s data dump in the wee hours of January 1 that revealed a particularly eyebrow-raising e-mail from Hillary Clinton: In one note in February 2011, she expressed surprise that a State Department employee was using a private e-mail to conduct State business. She wrote this e-mail, seeming to express dissatisfaction at the employee’s use of private e-mail, on her own private e-mail server — through which she sent all her e-mails while secretary of state.

Four months later, she wrote another e-mail, also released last week, that is now the subject of some controversy. In this note, she expressed impatience that a set of talking points being sent to her was delayed due to trouble with a secure fax. She ordered staffer Jake Sullivan to circumvent the rules: “Turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” The subject of the talking points has been redacted from the e-mail, almost certainly because it involved classified or confidential material.

The State Department has weakly responded that it has no knowledge “at this time” that the talking points were in the end sent to her. On Face the Nation today, Clinton insisted she never received them and that “there’s no there there.”

Not only is that implausible, but a report from the State Department’s inspector general released Thursday rebuked State for repeatedly providing inadequate and inaccurate responses to Freedom of Information Act requests about Clinton’s e-mails. That gives us little reason to believe that State’s response to the current controversy includes all the facts.

In fact, State’s record on transparency is so bad that a federal judge had to order officials there to collect Clinton’s e-mails, vet them for classified material, and release them on a monthly basis. The latest batch contains 66 additional examples of classified material that ended up on Hillary’s server, bringing the total to more than 1,200. This demolishes Hillary’s claim that she didn’t send or receive classified material on her personal account. Among the security breaches: Clinton forwarded the name of a confidential CIA source to staff at State through her insecure server. Michael Isikoff, a noted investigative reporter, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe last August that the naming of a CIA source was “evidence of a crime by somebody”

Bob Woodward said the latest revelation about Hillary’s e-mails reminded him of Watergate. He recalled that Hillary served on the staff of the House impeachment committee investigating President Nixon. “And what was the lesson, one of the lessons from that?” he asked. “Never write anything down. . . . Here, many years later, she’s saying, ‘Oh, let’s subvert the rules,’ and writing it out herself?” He concluded:

It shows that she kind of feels immune, that she lives in a bubble and no one’s ever going to find this out. Well, now we have.

DiGenova, who led the prosecution of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and conducted investigations of the Teamsters Union and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, says that Hillary’s reckless and cavalier misuse of her e-mail system has infuriated the intelligence community. Last November, he told me that “people who are the least politicized professionals you’ll find in government are appalled at the idea there might be no consequences for leaving classified and secret material vulnerable to foreign hackers.” If the FBI recommends action against Hillary Clinton or her staffers, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch decides to reject the recommendation and bury the case, the intelligence community “will never be able to charge another federal employee with the negligent handling of classified information,” he told Laura Ingraham last week.

A former top Justice Department official told me that he has no doubt that the FBI report will eventually leak, especially if the DOJ ignores its recommendations. Many old hands remember the intelligence problems the Bill Clinton administration caused when it misplaced the nuclear-launch codes, and also when Clinton conducted blackmail-bait, phone-sex conversations with Monica Lewinsky over secured phone lines that Russia and the Israelis were in fact monitoring. “There are a lot of serious people inside the government who think both Clintons have a pattern of being sloppy with national security, and there has to be some accountability,” DiGenova told me.

Hillary Clinton’s latest e-mail imbroglio didn’t catch a lot of attention in mainstream media outlets. But it’s safe to expect, at a minimum, further embarrassing revelations. And if the FBI report is sharply critical of her actions, it could upend the conventional wisdom about the race for the Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders is either just behind or just ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he could capitalize on any further damage to Hillary’s credibility. Hillary already has a big problem with credibility: Only 23 percent of independents view her as “honest and trustworthy” in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Other Democrats, including Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, would be remiss if they weren’t preparing a Plan B in case this number dips even lower, making her a more vulnerable general-election candidate.

— John Fund is NRO’s national-affairs correspondent.

RELATED: Habitual Liar Lies Habitually

When Worlds Collide: Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam

By Andrew C. McCarthy — January 9, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

80% of the Muslim “refugees” in Europe are young men.

What happens when the West’s fantasy Islam collides with the reality of an imported critical mass of unassimilated — and defiantly unassimilable — Muslims?

Cologne happens.

Nor is it only Cologne. That was just Ground Zero of the New Year’s Eve rape jihad in Germany. As National Review’s Ian Tuttle notes in an alarming column about the predictable — and, if I may say, predicted — surge of sexual assault in a Europe overrun by “migrants,” the jihad included similar episodes, albeit on a smaller scale, in Stuttgart, Hamburg, and even astride the Brandenburg gate in Berlin.

We are finally learning about the magnitude and harrowing details of the attack after days of Stasi-like information suppression. Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be big on German security, but she is a bulwark when it comes to fantasy Islam.

First there was no news; then, a few disturbing hints of gropings and robberies by gangs of “Middle Eastern or North African” men. Now, we know it was a mass atrocity — the only remaining question being: How massive?

Upward of a thousand men, overwhelmingly Muslim, executed a coordinated series of attacks on an obvious target of opportunity: street celebrations in the major cities of a reviled Western state, where they were certain to find throngs of young women and a police presence grossly inadequate to provide security — certainly not against a critical mass of Islamic supremacists.

The participation of Muslim migrants in the rape jihad is, of course, the fact most desperately suppressed by German officials. Mrs. Merkel earned her “Person of the Year” honors from left-leaning relic Time magazine by rolling out the red carpet for a staggering 1.1 million migrants in 2015 — infuriating the German public and spurring the migrant tsunami now washing over neighboring countries. In this information clampdown, the nightmare of the victimized women turns out to be the chancellor’s good fortune: Police on the scene were so outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the assailants that it was physically impossible for them to get near most of the women being savaged, much less make arrests. Most of the perps will never be identified.

The media are already using this to cast doubt on migrant culpability. “It was not clear,” the New York Times opaquely explains, “that any of the men involved were among those who arrived in Germany over the past year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Sure. In southern Germany, after two teenage girls (ages 14 and 15) were raped, police tripped over themselves to announce that the three Syrians arrested were not recently arrived asylum seekers. What a relief.

Nearly 200 women have filed criminal complaints in Cologne, the vast majority charging all manner of sexual assault. There have been few arrests, though, and nearly none involving sex crimes.

The Muslim men used a tactic that has escaped the notice of fantasy Islam devotees but is well known to those of us who’ve followed the scant reports on the rape jihad as it has proceeded from Tahrir Square to Malmö to Rotherham: A group of men encircles the targeted woman or girl, trapping her while walling off police and other would-be rescuers. Knowing they are a protected class, the Muslim men have no fear of the cops — “You can’t do anything to me,” and “Mrs. Merkel invited me here,” are just some of the reported taunts. By the time “help” reaches one victim, the assailants have moved on to the next.

It is not very effective law enforcement . . . but at least the cops can’t be accused of “Islamophobia,” right?

Still, Europe is not Nigeria — not yet. In the regressing advanced world, nothing on the scale of the New Year’s Eve siege can happen without tweets and pictures filtering out. Try as they might, German officials have been unable to put a lid on accounts from police explaining that “the large majority” of assailants they were able to identify were “from Syria,” or observing that “there were thousands of people who could not be specifically identified but who had an immigrant background, and were most probably refugees.”

Truth being the first casualty of war, it was left to Henriette Reker, the fantasy Islam–drenched mayor of Cologne, to blame the victims for their ordeal. Such assaults could be prevented, she declaimed, if German women adopted a “code of conduct” tailored to the new, multi-culti Deutschland.

In the spirit of multiculturalism, I have such a code just off the shelf (on which rests The Grand Jihad, in which I outlined it a few years back). It goes like this:

To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct . . . Islam addresses women to maintain their modesty, so as not to open the door for evil . . . The Koran calls on Muslim women in general to preserve their dignity and modesty, just to save themselves from any harassment. So for a rape victim to be absolved from guilt, she must not be the one that opens . . . her dignity for deflowering.

These pearls of wisdom come from none other than Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s renowned sharia jurist. He proclaimed them on his popular IslamOnline website about a dozen years ago, right before he was welcomed into Britain — as a trustee of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — despite his fatwas supporting Hamas suicide attacks in Israel and terrorism against Western troops in Iraq. Though he resides in Qatar, Qaradawi currently heads the Ireland-based European Council for Fatwa and Research.

Qaradawi is the most influential Muslim intellectual behind the strategy of, as he puts it, “conquering” Europe and America by “dawa” — the aggressive proselytism of Islamic mores. The plan calls for flooding the West with Muslim migrants, directing them to resist assimilation, establishing Islamic enclaves, and pressuring the host country to concede the enclave’s right to govern itself in accordance with sharia — Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

As I’ve previously explained, when Muslims are seeking conquest, Islamic scripture endorses sexual assault as a weapon to establish their dominance. “O Prophet,” Allah is said to have announced (in the Koran’s sura 33:50), “We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou has paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.”

In the Western ministries of fantasy Islam, the pols and their note-takers will thumb their chins and wonder what could possibly have motivated the German attacks — just as they wonder what could possibly explain the European sexual-assault crisis that has, by some mysterious coincidence, coincided with mass Muslim migration.

The rest of us will know that there is a strategy: conquest. Just as in the Middle East, women and girls in the West are the spoils of jihad, the vehicle for intimidating non-Muslims into surrendering sovereignty over the streets. If they want to be safe, Sheikh Qaradawi warns, they must submit to Islam’s sartorial suffocation. If not, well, they have it coming.

By the way, since President Obama entered office, the United States has issued over 100,000 green cards per year to migrants from Muslim-majority countries. That’s just green cards — it doesn’t count the thousands of visas issued to students, tourists, and temporary workers. With the Republican-controlled Congress fully funding the effort, the government is on pace to award another 680,000 green cards to Muslim migrants — with their entitlement to lifetime residency, federal benefits, and a path to citizenship — in the next five years.

As Sheikh Qaradawi and Mayor Reker might say, I’m sure it won’t be a problem . . . as long as the women “maintain their modesty.”

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

RELATED: Mass Muslim Immigration Will Bring Islam’s Problems Here

RELATED: Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs

RELATED: France’s No-Go Zones: Assimilation-Resistant Muslims Are the Real Refugee Crisis

RELATED: Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth — the Muslim World is Overcome with Hate

Today's Tune: Elvis Presley - An American Trilogy (Live) [HD]

Mass Muslim Immigration Will Bring Islam’s Problems Here

By David French — January 8, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Muslims pray on the streets of London

To hear the Left tell it, the debate over mass Muslim immigration — especially from conflict zones — is a simple contest between compassionate tolerance and cowardly xenophobia. They claim their opponents are cowards because the percentage of refugees or immigrants who are terrorists is very small (your bathtub is more dangerous than a Muslim immigrant), and they’re xenophobes because they have no understanding or appreciation for the blessings and benefits of diversity. Conservatives are all fear and no heart.

According to the rules of this debate, there are but two kinds of Muslim immigrants — the tiny few terrorists and the overwhelmingly deserving, suffering majority. Question this narrative, or call attention to the vast cultural gaps between the refugees and the Western nations they’re fleeing to, and you’re a racist. After all, our cultural elite understands the Muslim world better than you do. They went to Harvard with Muslims, and the Muslims they know have great accents, cool customs, and — most importantly — tales of imperialist oppression that turn the leftist heart to mush. What’s not to love?

The recent events in Cologne and other German and Austrian cities represent a necessary, reality-based corrective to this absurd binary thinking. On New Year’s Eve, German women faced attacks from roaming gangs of North African and Middle Eastern immigrants, including asylum-seekers. According to German officials, “sexual crimes took place on a huge scale.” More than 100 women were victimized in a single evening, with up to 1,000 attackers involved.

As my colleague Ian Tuttle notes, this sexual violence is part of a “disturbing trend” in European countries with large Muslim-immigrant populations. Sweden now has the “third-highest rate of rape per capita in the world.” Britain’s horrifying Rotherham rape scandal — where 1,400 children were systematically raped and abused over a period of 16 years while authorities turned a blind eye — still shocks the conscience.

But the challenges go well beyond terrorism and sexual violence. Immigrants and refugees are pouring into the West from regions overrun with anti-Semitism and featuring vast numbers of people who support the imposition of sharia law. For example, 99 percent of Afghans want sharia to be the “official law of the land” in their home country, along with 91 percent of Iraqis, 89 percent of Palestinians, 84 percent of Pakistanis, and 83 percent of Moroccans.

This means that substantial majorities of these populations believe, among other things, in the death penalty for leaving Islam and stoning as the punishment for adultery. Moreover, vast numbers believe that sharia should apply to both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Further, as I’ve discussed before, Western soldiers are coming home from conflict zones describing cultures that feature systematic child rape in Afghanistan, brutal treatment of women in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and a shocking level of fatalism and disregard for human life.

Simply put, there are powerful cultural reasons why many of the nations of North Africa and the Middle East are miserable places to live — and those reasons go well beyond terrorism. And while it’s true that some immigrants are intentionally fleeing that culture and hoping to embrace more humane Western values, bitter experience in Britain, France, and elsewhere teaches us that a substantial number hope to enjoy the material blessings of the West while maintaining and defending many of the worst beliefs and practices of their home nations.

The worst actions — terrorist violence and sexual assaults — are symptoms of a much larger disease. Even when the Left tries to minimize Muslim violence, it often refutes its own case. After the San Bernardino shootings, the New York Times shared this chart, showing the relative terror death tolls in the U.S. since 9/11 split between “Islamic extremists” and “non-Islamic extremists”:

Yet with Muslims representing a mere 1 percent of the American population, this chart demonstrates that 1 percent of the population is responsible for an almost identical number of terror deaths as the remaining 99 percent combined. And this chart doesn’t even include 9/11, with its staggering death toll at the hands of Muslim visa-holders.

Let’s be honest: When someone advocates for large-scale Muslim immigration from the world’s worst conflict zones, they are arguing that the West should open its borders to people who are overwhelmingly anti-Semitic, disproportionately religiously intolerant, and harboring disturbing numbers of men who have no moral reservations about sexual assault.

Culture matters, and cultural differences exist for a reason. The miserable cultures of much of North Africa and the Middle East exist in part because of the very people who now wish to migrate to Western shores. I would be proud to welcome those who’ve demonstrated they’re committed to American ideals — and we do have allies who’ve bled with us on the battlefield who should be given safe passage to the West — but the burden of proof is on the immigrant, and proper vetting for terrorists is but the beginning of the challenge.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

RELATED: Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth — the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate

RELATED: Just Asking about Islam and Terrorism

Defy America, pay no price

By Charles Krauthammer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
January 7, 2016

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran in September. (Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press)

If you’re going to engage in a foreign policy capitulation, might as well do it when everyone is getting tanked and otherwise occupied. Say, around New Year’s Eve.

Here’s the story. In October, Iran test-fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in brazen violation of a Security Council resolution explicitly prohibiting such launches. President Obama does nothing. One month later, Iran does it again. The administration makes a few gestures at the U.N. Then nothing. Then finally, on Dec. 30, the White House announces a few sanctions.

They are weak, aimed mostly at individuals and designed essentially for show. Amazingly, even that proves too much. By 10 p.m. that night, the administration caves. The White House sends out an email saying that sanctions are off — and the Iranian president orders the military to expedite the missile program.

Is there any red line left? First, the Syrian chemical weapons. Then the administration insistence that there would be no nuclear deal unless Iran accounted for its past nuclear activities. (It didn’t.) And unless Iran permitted inspection of its Parchin nuclear testing facility. (It was allowed self-inspection and declared itself clean.) And now, illegal ballistic missiles.

The premise of the nuclear deal was that it would constrain Iranian actions. It’s had precisely the opposite effect. It has deterred us from offering even the mildest pushback to any Iranian violations lest Iran walk away and leave Obama legacy-less.

Just two weeks ago, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards conducted live-fire exercises near the Strait of Hormuz. It gave nearby U.S. vessels exactly 23 seconds of warning. One rocket was launched 1,500 yards from the USS Harry S. Truman.

Obama’s response? None.

The Gulf Arabs — rich, weak and, since FDR, dependent on America for security — are bewildered. They’re still reeling from the nuclear deal, which Obama declared would be unaffected by Iranian misbehavior elsewhere. The result was to assure Tehran that it would pay no price for its aggression in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and support for terrorism.

Obama seems not to understand that disconnecting the nuclear issue gave the mullahs license to hunt in the region. For the Saudis, however, it’s not just blundering but betrayal. From the very beginning, they’ve seen Obama tilting toward Tehran as he fancies himself Nixon in China, turning Iran into a strategic partner in managing the Middle East.

This is even scarier because it is delusional. If anything, Obama’s openhanded appeasement has encouraged Iran’s regional adventurism and intense anti-Americanism.

The Saudis, sensing abandonment, are near panic. Hence the reckless execution of the firebrand Shiite insurrectionist, Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, that has brought the region to a boil. Iranians torched the Saudi Embassy. The Saudis led other Sunni states in breaking relations with Tehran.

The Saudis feel surrounded, and it’s not paranoia. To their north, Iran dominates a Shiite crescent stretching from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. To the Saudi south, Iran has been arming Yemen’s Houthi rebels since at least 2009. The fighting has spilled over the border into Saudi Arabia.

The danger is rising. For years, Iran has been supporting anti-regime agitation among Saudi Arabia’s minority Shiites. The Persian Gulf is Iran’s ultimate prize. The fall of the House of Saud would make Iran the undisputed regional hegemon and an emerging global power.

For the United States, that would be the greatest geopolitical setback since China fell to communism in 1949. Yet Obama seems oblivious. Worse, he appears inert in the face of the three great challenges to the post-Cold War American order. Iran is only the most glaring. China is challenging the status quo in the South China Sea, just last week landing its first aircraft on an artificial island hundreds of miles beyond the Chinese coast. We deny China’s claim and declare these to be international waters, yet last month we meekly apologized when a B-52 overflew one of the islands. We said it was inadvertent.

The world sees and takes note. As it does our response to the other great U.S. adversary — Russia. What’s happened to Obama’s vaunted “isolation” of Russia for its annexation of Crimea and assault on the post-Cold War European settlement? Gone. Evaporated. John Kerry plays lapdog to Sergei Lavrov. Obama meets openly with Vladimir Putin in Turkey, then in Paris. And is now practically begging him to join our side in Syria.

There is no price for defying Pax Americana — not even trivial sanctions on Iranian missile-enablers. Our enemies know it. Our allies see it — and sense they’re on their own, and may not survive.

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Read more on this topic:

The Post’s View: Iran provokes the world as Obama does nothing

Charles Krauthammer: The Iran deal: Anatomy of a disaster

The Post’s View: Mr. Obama’s complex and costly deal with Iran