Tag Archives: Tunisia

Left-wing media turning on Obama over his foreign policy failures

Dr. Stuart Schneiderman has read all the left-wing news sources and found some surprising views.

Excerpt:

The news hasn’t really reached the public, but Obama-supporting media outlets are starting to see the mess that the Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy has produced.

It is so bad that columnists are not even trying to moderate their negative judgments.

From Frida Ghitis on the CNN site:

America’s foreign policy has gone into a tailspin. Almost every major initiative from the Obama administration has run into sharp, sometimes embarrassing, reverses. The U.S. looks weak and confused on the global stage.

This might come as happy news to some opponents of the administration who enjoy seeing Barack Obama fail, but it shouldn’t.

America’s failure in international strategy is a disaster-in-the-making for its allies and for the people who see the U.S. model of liberal democracy as one worth emulating in their own nations.

On Russia, she continues, the verdict is clear:

Relations with Russia have fallen off a cliff, making the theatrical “reset” of 2009 look, frankly, cringe-worthy.

Syria, of course, is even worse:

Obama dramatically warned Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as he slaughtered his people by the thousands, that if he used chemical or biological weapons, he would cross a “red line.” The line was crossed and not much happened. Syria is crumbling, self-destructing in a civil war that I, for one, believe could have turned out quite differently if Washington had offered material and diplomatic support for moderates in the opposition. Fears that the opposition would be dominated by extremists became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The centerpiece of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy initiative was Egypt. You know how that has worked out:

But it is Egypt where America’s foreign policy fiasco is most visible.

It was in Cairo in 2009, where the newly elected Obama, still reflecting the glow of sky-high expectations, launched his campaign to repair relations with the so-called “Muslim World.”…

Nobody knew what would happen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square a few years later. But today, the same people who yearned for democracy despise Washington. When Egyptians elected a Muslim Brotherhood president, Washington tried to act respectfully, but it showed a degree of deference to the Muslim Brotherhood that ignored the ways in which the group violated not only Egyptians’ but America’s own standards of decency and rule of law.

As tensions in Egypt grow between Islamists on one side and the military and anti-Islamists on the other, there is one sentiment shared by all: Both sides feel betrayed by Washington.

Egypt’s most powerful man, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, said, “You [the U.S.] left the Egyptians; you turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that.”

It’s not just CNN, though. He has quotations from articles in the radically, radically leftist New York Times and the left-wing extremist New Yorker, too. The New Yorker is disgusted with the way that Obama has handled Libya. It’s getting so bad that not even Obama’s biggest cheerleaders can ignore it.

Obama administration gave $500 million of foreign aid to Islamic radicals

From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

The sequester has “cost jobs,” says President Obama, and “gutted investments in education and science and medical research.” But somehow he’s earmarked $500 million for Hamas terrorists.

Circumventing Congress and with no fanfare, President Obama last week issued an executive order enabling him to send an additional $500 million directly to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — much of which you can bet will wind up going to the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.

According to Obama, “it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions of” Congress’ legislative restrictions “in order to provide funds . .. to the Palestinian Authority.”

At the beginning of his first term, Obama promised close to $1 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledging none of it would reach Hamas.

But the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Acharonot has documented that tens of millions of dollars in aid for the PA — from Israel — ended up being used by Hamas for weapons. If Israel can’t guarantee its own aid is safe, how can we?

The Christian Science Monitor has more on Obama’s generous use of taxpayer dollars.

Excerpt:

The US military has been ignoring warnings that its spending in Afghanistan is funding Al Qaedaand the Taliban. And John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), appears to have had enough.

He issued a blistering cover letter with SIGAR’s quarterly report to Congress today that called into question what “appears to be a growing gap between the policy objectives of Washington and the reality of achieving them in Afghanistan.”

The US has $20 billion of Afghan reconstruction spending scheduled, and a further $10 billion requested for the 2014 budget. But after 11 years of war, there are “serious shortcomings in US oversight of contracts: poor planning, delayed or inadequate inspections, insufficient documentation, dubious decisions, and – perhaps most troubling – a pervasive lack of accountability,” Mr. Sopko wrote. Good intentions, he added, appear to be running way ahead of commitment to execution.

Now I know what Obama meant when he said that the economy works better when you “spread the wealth around”.

Thousands of Muslims demand Sharia law in Tunisia

Political Map of Africa
Political Map of Africa

Huntr sent me this disturbing AP article.

Excerpt:

Several thousand men and women demonstrated outside the Tunisian parliament on Friday to demand the inclusion of Islamic law in the north African country’s future constitution.

“The people want the application of God’s sharia”, “Our Koran is our constitution”, “No constitution without sharia,” and “Tunisia is neither secular nor scientific, it is an Islamic state”, cried the protesters, drawn mainly from the Islamist Salafist movement.

Some men climbed on the roof of the building and unfurled a banner that read: “The people belong to God.”

Several women sported the niqab, or full-face veils.

Tunisia’s moderate Islamist leaders, who took power following last year’s ouster of strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after a popular uprising, are under pressure from a radical Muslim fringe.

The ultra-conservative Salafists have in recent months demanded full-face veils for female university students, castigated a TV channel for an allegedly blasphemous film and beaten up journalists at a protest.

“We are here today to peacefully demand the application of sharia in the new constitution. We will not impose anything by force on the Tunisian people, we just want that the people are convinced of the principles,” said Marwan, a 24-year-old trader.

Sharia law in Malaysia condones child marriages, even as young as 11 years old – as long as the Sharia court approves it. Here’s a story about about a child aged 9 given to someone in marriage, in Yemen.