Some important stories are breaking all around this week.
Fox: "Hillary sought end-run around counterterrorism desk on night of Benghazi, whistleblower will say"
On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department's own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a "whistle-blower" witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.
That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.
Fox News has also learned that another official from the counterterrorism bureau -- independently of Thompson -- voiced the same complaint about Clinton and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to trusted national security colleagues back in October.
She stressed that the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, which she is a part of, had far from finished its investigation.
Read the rest here.
And speaking of Benghazi and Syria, John Rosenthal at Newsmax reports on more evidence that the US hired al-Qaeda-style jihadist "security" forces to guard the US compound in Benghazi, and that these same forces, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, are open supporters of Jabhat al-Nusra, the offshoot of al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighting in Syria.
Read the rest here.
Andrew Bostom's analysis of the latest Pew poll compilation of Muslim attitudes isn't breaking news in the conventional sense. It is something else: invisible news, maybe, or ghost news -- news that pundits and politicians see right through in a trance of denial that must be spotlighted until, more important than the news itself, the light breaks. What Bostom reviews is more of the same data that reflects the strong support of Muslims worldwide for the most appalling tenets of Islam. These include death for "apostasy."
The criminilization of apostasy (leaving, criticizing Islam) is the ultimate law of despotism -- and, as Yusef al-Qaradawi recently declared, it is also the very basis of Islam's continued existence! Qaradawi, of course, is the leading Muslim Brotherhood, Qatari, Al-Jazeera TV sharia-propagandist -- which must make him, along with Vogue magazine, godfather (with Al Gore in absentia?) to Al-Jazera-America's "Doha Rose."
But I digress (not really).
Islamic apostasy law is a Berlin Wall of the mind, complete with searchlights and guard dogs, that supresses free thinkers within and inspires enforcers to go out and extend its reach by applying it to cartoonists, politicians, writers, or anyone else beyond the Wall who openly resists the advance of Islamic law. Thus we have seen Islamic apostasy death penalties exacted, or attempted (which also elevates the Islamic fear factor) everywhere: in a university office in Japan (Hitoshi Igarashi), the streets of Amsterdam (Theo van Gogh), all over Denmark (Kurt Westergaard, Jyllands Posten, Lars Hedegaard), anywhere Geert Wilders travels, and beyond. The godhead at its source is no exemption for this totalitarian hammer.
But we ignore the mechanism -- and not just ignore it, but wreath it in excuses and platitudes. We also went to war to "nation-build," twice, without reckoning with this and other anti-liberty tenets of Islam, even Islamic war doctrine (jihad). Like doomed sailors of yore, we were in effect lured by the siren call of the "Lewis Doctrine," named for historian Bernard Lewis, which was the tragically flawed underpinning for war planning under George W. Bush, and essentially retained under Barack Obama. The Lewis Doctrine maintained that the Islamic world could be modernized -- moderated -- by US-led intervention.
That was as false as the doctrine's basis. No? Consider the latest poll numbers indicating support for sharia (Islamic law) as law of the land in four of the five top recipients of US aid, including our two bloody fields of battle.
1) Afghanistan: 99 percent; 2) Iraq: 91 percent; 3) Pakistan: 84 percent; 4) Egypt: 74 percent.
The poll numbers measuring support for execution for leaving Islam further underscore the impotence of Uncle Sam's influence and the fundamental errors of the Lewis Doctrine, whether measured by billions of dollars, military hardware, or thousands of war dead and maimed.
1) Afghanistan: 79 percent; 2) Iraq: 42 percent; 3) Pakistan: 76 percent; 4) Egypt: 86 percent.
I can hear the hookah-half-full crowd now, chirping: Less than half of Iraqis want to kill apostates! Maybe they only want to throw them in jail! Another trillion or two and we'll have an ally in the war on whataver!
The fifth nation among the top recipients of US aid, by the way, is Israel, which, as an independent nation-state that cast off "dhimmi" status, is, by its very existence, a manifestation of the rejection of Islamic law.
More data analysis in Andrew Bostom's "Sharia Uber Alles":
Despite a number of (deliberately?) mitigating biases, both methodological and interpretative, the latest Pew Research Forum report, "The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society," released April 30, 2013, confirms the broad appeal of the totalitarian Sharia, Islam's religio-political "law," across Islamdom.
Read the rest here.