Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Who is Running both wings of the White House




What exactly does Valerie Jarrett—the Chicagoan often described as a big sister or mother figure to the Obamas—do in the White House? The instant histories of the Obama White House tend to portray her as the Obamas’ pit bull, a woman loyal only to the president, first lady and her own image. In a recent book on the 2012 campaign, Jonathan Alter writes that Rahm Emanuel, on agreeing to become Obama’s chief of staff, recognized that Jarrett would wield such outsized power that he tried unsuccessfully to finesse her into Obama’s senate seat. (Alter also speculates that Valerie Jarrett was one reason why Rahm hightailed it out of DC in late 2010 into the relative ease of the Fifth Floor.)

 Others in media and Washington circles portray Jarrett, who held top positions in Chicago government and business, as a brilliant strategist and thinker who practically runs both wings of the White House and who did as much or more than anyone to put the Obamas there. In 1991, Jarrett, then Mayor Rich Daley’s deputy chief of staff, offered Michelle Robinson a job in City Hall. Before Michelle accepted, she insisted that Jarrett meet with Michelle’s fiancĂ© Barack Obama. Jarrett promptly took both under her wing and, over the years, introduced Barack to the inner Daley circle, to wealthy business people, and to the people who mattered in her enclave, Hyde Park—all of which helped Obama as he moved up from community organizer to Springfield to Washington.
So which is it? Here are six pieces of conventional wisdom about Valerie Jarrett, 57, followed by, in my opinion, the reality.
1. Valerie Jarrett’s power in Obama’s White House stems from her position as senior adviser to the president.
Yes, she holds a conventional power position in the administration, carrying a portfolio that covers such issues as as how the administration can boost business in a down economy, implement programs to improve the lives of women and girls, develop better communication with state and local governments and other constituency groups.
The reality is that her power stems from friendship with the first couple, forged by after-hour access, total trust that her only motive is to protect the first couple’s images and advance their interests. Valerie Jarrett is not powerful because she creates and implements policy, but because she’s the last person the president and/or first lady talk to, sometimes over dinner in their private dining room. It was reportedly the Obamas who persuaded Jarrett not to pursue appointment to the President-Elect’s vacated U.S. senate seat, but instead to keep close to them in the White House.
She vacations with the first couple in Hawaii and on the Vineyard, and she can sometimes sound like their flac: Michelle is “fabulous at 50.” Barack is “just too talented to do what ordinary people do” (as quoted in David Remnick’s The Bridge). She decides who’s invited to small White House parties and state dinners.
Jarrett can save the jobs of people she likes, such as Attorney General Eric Holder, who faced calls for his ouster when he announced his decision to bring Kahlid Sheikh Mohammad to trial in New York. In advocating for Holder, she protected not just a personal favorite but one close to the Obamas as well—after she’d earlier announced that the couple wasn’t making new friends in DC. He kept his job, and is one of only two cabinet secretaries who will likely serve two full terms. Jarrett acquired the nickname “Eric’s appeals court.”
2. Jarrett has a record of success working for the President in the White House.
There’s always the historical analysis to come, but so far she is considered to have a spotty record, especially on the key portfolio item—serving as the administration’s liaison to business. Jarrett came to the White House with some impressive Chicago business credentials: CEO of The Habitat Company, a Chicago developer of housing ranging from luxury to public; chairman of the CTA; chairman of the board of the Chicago Stock Exchange; a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Yet, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has written, “current and former White House officials … raised questions about Jarrett’s effectiveness and judgment.”
Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write that Obama’s “… relations with business leaders could hardly be worse.”
Politico’s Jeanne Cummings and Ben White have characterized the Obama White House’s “…relationship with the corporate world” as having “a sort of Mars-Venus quality to it. Business leaders say Obama simply doesn’t get them and has no one in the White House with corporate experience or who is steeped in the daily challenges of operating in a global economy.”
Jason Horowitz, then writing about Jarrett for the Washington Post, described “disgruntled Obama donors in the financial industry… [who] have cast Jarrett as insufficiently sophisticated on economic issues and incapable of brooking any dissent about Obama. `I have always thought she was a liability,’ said one prominent investor and donor…. `I’ve talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.’”
It was, well, conventional wisdom, that Bill Daley was brought in as Rahm’s successor as chief of staff to clean up the administration’s messy relationships with business; perhaps understandably, Jarrett did not warm to Daley—and, according to Politico’s Glenn Thrush, “frequently shared her unflattering assessments with Obama.” Daley’s tenure as COS was short.
3. In Chicago, before the Obama presidency, Jarrett was widely admired for her skills in government and business.
In his latest book, Jonathan Alter writes that the oft-told story of Obama insisting on interviewing Jarrett before allowing his girlfriend to take a job in Daley’s administration did not “amuse” Rich Daley. According to Alter, Daley was no fan of Jarrett, finding her “indecisive as city planning commissioner” and refusing to promote her to chief of staff. Alter also writes that a CEO who visited the White House remarked, “When we go to the White House we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.”
In their book on the 2012 campaign, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write that Wall Streeters “disparaged Obama’s team for lacking anyone with a meaningful background in the private sector. When Jarrett would huff, ‘Well I have one,’ they rolled their eyes; they considered her a political hack, ineffectual and entitled.”
4. Jarrett is a mother figure to other White House staffers, especially women.
She’s certainly that to Barack and Michelle: “I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, You need to think about these three things,” Michelle told the New York Times’ Jodie Kantor. “Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.”
And she’s certainly that in her own mind: “And I try very hard to make sure that I am available to people here, particularly, I think, women often come to me. I am older than most of the people here, so I try to be a resource.”
Jonathan Alter’s reporting revealed someone quite different: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, `I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”
Derogatory nicknames abound for Jarrett: “Keeper of the Essence,” “Night Stalker” (because of her access after hours to the Obamas in their private quarters), “personal custodian of the president’s lofty motives and gifts.” The latter comes from This Town author Mark Leibovich, who quotes from an apparently leaked memo titled “Magic of Valerie,” its 33 talking points circulated to White House staffers ahead of a New York Times Jarrett profile.
The memo cites as her “magic” qualities, “her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and shine a light on them and the issues they and the President care about…. Valerie has an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy. She balances the need to be patient and judicious with the desire to get things done and work as hard as possible for the American people from the White House… Valerie is tapped in to people’s experiences, their good times and bad. …. Single mother, woman working to the top in a competitive male dominated world, African-American, working for change from the grassroots to big business…. Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)”
5. Jarrett’s dual role as the first couple’s best friend and their adviser is not particularly unusual in White House history.
The only White House adviser who comes close, personally and professionally, to matching Jarrett’s influence with both the President and First Lady is the FDR administration’s Louis Howe. Unlike Jarrett, Howe lived in the White House, but by then his power as an adviser had waned. He remained extremely close to both Franklin and Eleanor until his death in 1936 before Roosevelt finished his first term. According to University of Chicago political science professor Charles Lipson, “[Jarrett’s] position in the White House is unprecedented. No one has ever been a best friend and top adviser.”
6. On 1/20/17 Jarrett will hold the senior-adviser longevity record; she’ll turn off the lights in the White House and move on to another chapter in her life.
Jarrett will continue to harness her future to the Obamas’. Just as she helped with their transition to the White House, she’ll help with their transition out of it. She’ll be a key player in every aspect of the Obama Library and Museum, from pushing for it to be located at the University of Chicago, where she has deep ties, to helping to choose an architect, to raising money, to articulating and polishing the details of Barack Obama’s legacy.
As Jodie Kantor told me, “I don’t think Valerie’s ever leaving [the Obamas]. ….She has thrown her entire life into their cause, and she’s made it very clear that she would happily run in front of a speeding truck for them…. She has taken the president’s and First Lady’s success as the defining mission of her being.”

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Brigitte Gabriel Reads the Muslim Brotherhood Plan for America


Silence is Consent

Brigitte Gabriel Reads the Muslim Brotherhood Plan for America

ACT for America president and founder Brigitte Gabriel, speaks at the Family Research Council's Watchmen on the Wall event about the threat of radical Islam. In this clip she outlines the Muslim Brotherhood's plan for the destruction of Western civilization. The Muslim Brotherhood has spawned dozens and dozens of organizations across the globe, including the terrorist organizations al Qaeda, Hamas, and numerous Muslim organizations in America.



Thursday, November 26, 2015

Trump vindicated? WaPo factchecker outed for spin

Donald Trump (Credit: NPR) In a rather bizarre twist on the latest controversy surrounding Donald Trump – the one about his claims of seeing New Jersey Muslims cheer the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on America's soil – the Washington Post's own factchecker on the story was forced to explain his Pinocchio characterization of the presidential…

Friday, October 30, 2015

UN official, Obama had told him that the US would be a Muslim country by end of 2016

At a meeting of the David Allen Lewis “Eschatology Club” a year ago in Springfield, Missouri, where I was the featured speaker, I was told by the organizers that in the previous monthly meeting, Pastor Don Jones made a disturbing statement about President Barack Obama’s plan to Islamicize America.
Jones went to one of his orphanages in Haiti after the massive earthquake there and met with a senior UN official, who said Obama had told him that the US would be a Muslim country by 2016, or by the end of his second term in office.
While that may seem far-fetched, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. First, Obama’s biological father was a Muslim— which makes the President a Muslim. His stepfather was an Indonesian Muslim who raised Obama as a Muslim in a mosque and madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Indonesia until age 11. His halfbrothers in Kenya are Muslims.
My wife Rachel, who is a radio and TV monitor in the Arabic language for Israel Radio in Jerusalem, has picked up many broadcasts indicating that the Arabs see Obama as a Muslim. In one broadcast prior to the 2008 elections, the Saudis claimed that “we will have a Muslim in the White House.”
Another Saudi broadcast said: “Obama’s job is to terminate the Shiite threat [Iran] and the Jewish threat [Israel]. And if he cannot do this, he should pack his bags and go home.”
America has always been a Judeo- Christian nation, but demographically at least, this is no longer true. While there are more than 250 million Christians in the US, the 6 million Jews are now outnumbered by Muslims who total about 20 million (9 million Iranians who fled after the fall of the Shah, 7 million Arabs and at least 3 million black Muslims, with the remainder being from Somalia and the former Yugoslavia).
Numerically, the Jews are now no. 3 or 4 along with the Hindus in the US, whose population is about the same as the Jews. According to Obama’s Inauguration Day speech, America is a “Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu” country. Numerically, he is right. So much for Judeo-Christian America.
In the June edition of Israel Today, I wrote about the worsening conditions of the Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. International investment in Egypt has all but dried up since the Revolution. What international (Christian) corporation will invest in a country which is killing and ethnically cleansing its Christians? So the Egyptian economy appears doomed to collapse, which would create fertile ground for a takeover by the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
This would leave 70 million Muslims in Egypt in dire poverty.
The same applies to other countries in the Middle East that could be taken over by Islamic militants. In the case of Syria, the ruling Muslim Alawite sect will probably share the same fate as the Christians. This could lead to a flood of Arab Muslims to greener pastures in the West.
The Bible says Egypt will be a desolation and Egyptians will flee to other countries because the nation will be uninhabitable for 40 years (Ezekiel 29). If the official Syrian newspaper Tishrin is correct in saying that 600,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians will march on the Golan Heights to reclaim their land, then a war with Syria is inevitable, which means that Syria will be a desolation as well (Isaiah 17).
The result could be tens of millions of Muslims fleeing to the US and Europe. President Obama would welcome these “brethren” on humanitarian grounds, and in effect, America would become a Muslim country.
I was just convicted and given a three-year jail sentence in Switzerland for helping defeat a plan to build minarets at the nation’s mosques by a 57 percent majority.
But the Muslims in Switzerland are already returning with a new minaret initiative. They are tenacious in their plans to Islamicize Switzerland and Europe. Why not the US?


Obama's Plan to Islamicize America

Friday, October 2, 2015

What Obama forgot to mention, Oregon gunman singled out Christians during rampage

Oregon gunman singled out Christians during rampage

October 1, 2015 OREGON COLLEGE 2015.jpg
The gunman who opened fire at an Oregon community college was forcing people to stand up and state their religion before he began blasting away at them, survivors said Thursday.
A woman who claimed to have a grandmother inside a writing class in Snyder Hall, where a portion the massacre unfolded, described the scene in a tweet.
"The shooter was lining people up and asking if they were Christian," she wrote. "If they said yes, then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn't answer, they were shot in the legs. My grandma just got to my house, and she was in the room. She wasn't shot, but she is very upset.
The Twitter user then recalled how her grandmother attempted to save the life of one of her close classmates.
"She tried to perform CPR on her friend, but it was too late," the woman said. "I hope nothing like this ever happens again."
Kortney Moore, an 18-year-old student at Umpqua Community College who was also in the room, told Oregon's News Review that the shooter was indeed on the hunt for Christians.
Moments after hearing a bullet come flying through a window, she said the 20-year-old shooter made his way inside and targeted their teacher, pumping a single round into their head.
As the young man ordered people to the ground, Moore laid patiently with her classmates and waited, according to the News Review.
Once they all got down, she said the gunman began asking people to rise and say what their religion was. After they stood and gave their answer, he started shooting.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The Pope is here! I wonder if he read this? Obama Rips Bible, Praises Koran

 

On Thursday, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., President Obama blithely informed his audience that Christians ought not get on their “high horse” about the problem of radical Islam:

Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.
This is historically and philosophically illiterate. Historically speaking, the Crusades were a response to Islamic aggression in Europe and the Middle East; the Inquisition, as Jonah Goldberg points out while quoting historian Thomas Madden, director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, was designed to regularize executions rather than leaving them to the will of the masses. Christians undoubtedly pursued horrible brutalities against people, including innocent Jews. However, as Goldberg points out, “Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.”
Nowhere is that clearer than in Obama’s second example, slavery. Virtually all of the most ardent abolitionists were deeply religious Christians. Hundreds of thousands of American men marched to their deaths singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea / With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me / As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free / While God is marching on.” That was 150 years ago. It’s not exactly the modern Islamic slogan, “Death to the Jews.” Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was, as his name suggests, a reverend. He quoted old black Christian spirituals and the Biblical story of the exodus from Egypt. Christians obliterated slavery. Christians obliterated Jim Crow. Modern slavery is largely perpetrated by Muslims. Modern Jim Crow is certainly perpetrated by Muslims under shariah law.
There is a larger point, here, too: President Obama’s foolish argument suggests that because Christians were brutal a millennium ago, they should shut up about brutalities today. This is somewhat like saying that because someone’s great-great-grandfather held slaves in rural Alabama, that person should shut up about human trafficking in 2015. It’s asinine.
But Obama has a history of insulting Christianity and Judaism while upholding Islam. In 2006, Obama bashed the Bible and religious Christians and Jews in particular:
Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.
He then concluded that religious leaders should not speak out against publicly-funded contraception or gay marriage.
We can get into President Obama’s pathetic Biblical commentary here – his interpretation of Leviticus on slavery is incorrect, Jews still avoid shellfish, the Talmud explains that no child has ever been stoned for rebelliousness, and the Sermon on the Mount is not a pacifist document. Obama’s not Biblically literate – he’s the same fellow who says, “I think the good book says don’t throw stones in glass houses.”
He said in The Audacity of Hope that he would define Biblical values however he chose, stating that he is not willing “to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.” Both are, in fact, parts of the Bible. Citing the Sermon on the Mount to justify civil unions for homosexuals, as Obama has done, is not in fact Biblical.
But more importantly, Obama’s scorn for the old-fashioned Bible is obvious. That became more obvious in 2008, when Obama told some of his buddies in San Francisco that unemployed idiots “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The Obama administration has routinely attacked religious organizations and people who violate Obama’s personal political predilections. They’ve attacked all trappings of Christianity as well. Whether they’re using Obamacare to force religious individuals to pay for others’ contraception or toning down the National Day of Prayer instead of holding a public ceremony, whether they’re covering a monogram of Jesus at Georgetown University during a presidential speech or objecting to adding FDR’s D-Day prayer to the WWII memorial, the Obama administration clearly isn’t fond of Christianity.
This contrasts strongly with President Obama’s romantic vision of Islam. He famously called the Muslim call to prayer “the sweetest sound I know.” He said in his first presidential interview, with Al-Arabiya, that his job was “to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.” Weeks later, he said in Turkey, “We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.” A few months later, in a speech in Cairo to which he invited the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama said:
I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.  That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.  And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.
He added that Islam has a “proud tradition of tolerance,” explained, ‘Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace,” and said, “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” He said in his Ramadan message in 2009 that Islam has played a key “role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.”
ISIS, Obama has said over and over again, is not Islamic. His administration maintains that America is not at war with radical Islam. He stated before the United Nations in 2012, just weeks after the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya at the hands of Muslim terrorists, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Hillary Clinton allegedly promised Charles Woods, father of one of the slain in Benghazi, that the administration would achieve the arrest of the YouTube filmmaker behind The Innocence of Muslims. The State Department issued taxpayer-funded commercials denouncing that YouTube video. President Obama variously called the video “crude and disgusting” and stated that “its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.” At the UN in 2014, Obama lauded a Muslim cleric who backs Hamas. And, of course, Obama uses Islamic theology to promote his vision of world peace:
All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be upon them, joined in prayer.
All three religions do have access to holy sites now, in Jewish-run Jerusalem. They did not when Muslims ruled Jerusalem. But facts have no bearing in the fantasy world of the president.
Perhaps one final contrast tells the tale. In 2012, according to the Washington Post. “U.S. troops tried to burn about 500 copies of the Koran as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February.” Two American soldiers were shot in the aftermath. This prompted President Obama to apologize profusely to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, writing him a letter stating, “We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, including holding accountable those responsible.”
Three years earlier, members of the military burned Bibles printed in Pashto and Dari. CNN reported that they had been discarded “amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans.” The Bibles were burned rather than sent back to their source organization because the military worried they might be re-sent to another outlet in Afghanistan. There was no apology to the church that printed the Bibles, or to Christians more broadly.
Sure, radical Muslims around the world, supported by millions of their compatriots and friendly governments, are murdering innocents. But it’s Christian aggression that forces Muslims to burn other Muslims alive in Muslim countries.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.