Shoebat: Why Bashar Assad needs to stay in Power

Former PLO member and Muslim Brotherhood activist Walid Shoebat makes the case that despite the rising body count resulting from the Assad regime's crackdown in Syria, the best scenario is if Assad stays in power.

Via Shoebat:

More than 5,400 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began in March. The number of dead in Homs alone is now over over 200 and climbing. The Assad regime says terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to destabilize the country are behind the uprising, not people seeking to transform the authoritarian regime. He’s right, it was Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood that claimed responsibility in December 2011 for two suicide bombings in Damascus that killed 44 people.

Yet, you have Israeli politicians like Moshe (Boge) Ya’alon telling Army Radio that the end of Assad’s regime could bring ‘relatively moderate’ Sunni elements into power, adding that he did not think radical Islam would take over the country if Syrian President Bashar Assad is ousted. Boge says that, “there could be different developments in such a situation, some of which could be positive as far as Israel is concerned, like a fissure in the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Hamas axis of evil… There’s a difference between Syria and Egypt,” says Ya’alon.

Syria is not a trophy for Iran exclusively; Turkey is waiting in the wings, ever ready to control the entire region. Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan has been urging Assad in Arabic, “Ya Bashar! Man dakka dukka.” In English, that means: “He who hammers will be hammered” or “what goes around comes around.” He reminded Bashar of what his father did when the Syrian army massacred 10,000 Sunnis in 1982; it will come back to hound him. Paradoxically and quite hypocritically, Erdogan neglects to confess the Armenian Genocide. 

It is no secret that Turkey has worked extensively with the Muslim Brotherhood and has set its sights on Syria. The Turkish Muslim Brotherhood Network, written last year by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, lays out an iron clad case for Turkey’s involvement in the Flotila and its collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Boge needs to study his region’s history. The Syrian regime’s arch-nemesis is the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria was the first nation after Egypt where the Ikhwan’s movement took root. It was the Arab nationalist Baath Party that banned the brotherhood and tightened state control over religious institutions to weaken its influence. Israel has two choices relative to Syria. It can support one side of the same two-sided tyrannical coin: Arab Nationalism or Islamist Utopianism. I opt for the first and Ya’alon opts for the second while affixing an oxi-moronic “moderate” label to his argument. This in not the first time that the Sunnis wanted to take control. Violent clashes between the Ikhwan and the regime ensued a short time after the Ba’athists came to power in April 1964 when violence erupted in Hamah, led by Marwan Hadid. In 1965, the events in Hamah ignited violence in Damascus as well. Subsequently, in April 1967, riots erupted among the Sunni population all over Syria, but the regime managed to suppress the violence. Law No. 49 stipulates the death penalty for membership in the Ikhwan. In February 1990 the establishment of an Islamist alliance, the “National Front for Saving Syria” (preceded by the “National Alliance for the Liberation of Syria”), ‘Ali Sadr al-Din al-Bayanuni’ declared that the main purpose of this body was to “topple the Syrian regime.”

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Video: Obama Blames Founding Fathers

During an interview with leftist media personality, Matt Lauer, Barack Obama, perhaps inadvertently, revealed a weakness. Said Obama, "Our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes." This admission also indicates that Obama is frustrated that he has not been able to do as much as he would like since getting elected in 2008.

Yes, it's enraging but Obama's discouragement is reason to be encouraged.



h/t Freedom's Lighthouse

Video: RNC Chairman says Fast and Furious Investigation will not "let up"

RNC Chairman Reince Preibus is now publicly chiming in on Eric Holder's culpability in the Fast and Furious scandal. Specifically, he seemed to hone in on a subject that reared its head in the exchange between Attorney General Eric Holder and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) during the February 2nd Oversight Committee hearing.

In that exchange, Chaffetz pressed Holder on the reasons why the latter did not consult with his colleagues in other Departments - colleagues like Hillary Clinton and Janet Napolitano.

Though there have been reports that Speaker John Boehner may be putting the breaks on Issa's investigation, Preibus doesn't seem to be hinting at that possibility. In fact, he refers to Holder as carrying "an air of indictment" and says the Attorney General "lied under oath."

Here's the video via Daily Caller:



Here is the exchange between Holder and Chaffetz that Preibus seems to be referring to:



Hearing Preibus talk about this is encouraging but getting a strong public statement from Boehner would be much better.

Military Archbishop Defies Secretary of Army

The recent ruling from Obama's HHS that all entities providing healthcare services must include contraceptives and abortion prevention services to include the "morning-after" pill. Though Archbishops all across the United States wrote letters that their priests read aloud during Sunday masses, one Archbishop was instructed not to do so.

His name is Timothy Broglio and he is at the head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, which is responsible for providing Catholic services to Catholics in the military all over the world. He was instructed by the Army's Office of the Chief of Chaplains not to have his letter read from the pulpit during his masses.

The decision seemed to set up a showdown between the Military and the administration.

Via CNS News:

Archbishop Broglio’s letter opposing the regulation and describing it as a violation of the constitutional rights of Catholics was read verbatim at Masses served by Navy and Air Force chaplains around the world.

However, the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains attempted to silence Catholic Army chaplains from reading it at their Masses—an effort rejected and resisted by Archbishop Broglio.

“On Thursday, January 26, Archbishop Broglio emailed a pastoral letter to Catholic military chaplains with instructions that it be read from the pulpit at Sunday Masses the following weekend in all military chapels,” the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military said in a statement.

Someone had to blink. Fortunately, it appears Broglio is not the one who did:

“The Army's Office of the Chief of Chaplains subsequently sent an email to senior chaplains advising them that the Archbishop's letter was not coordinated with that office and asked that it not be read from the pulpit,” said the archdiocese’s statement. “The Chief's office directed that the letter was to be mentioned in the Mass announcements and distributed in printed form in the back of the chapel.”

On Saturday, Jan. 28, after the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains issued this directive, Archbishop Broglio spoke with Secretary of the Army John McHugh, a political appointee of President Barack Obama.

Archbishop Broglio’s position was that, in trying to stop Catholic Army chaplains from reading his pastoral letter, the Army was violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion and the First Amendment rights of Catholic chaplains and Catholic service members.

“Archbishop Broglio and the Archdiocese stand firm in the belief, based on legal precedent, that such a directive from the Army constituted a violation of his Constitutionally-protected right of free speech and the free exercise of religion, as well as those same rights of all military chaplains and their congregants,” said the statement from the archdiocese.

In his Jan. 28 telephone conversation with Army Secretary McHugh, Archbishop Broglio was able to extract from the secretary an admission that it had been wrong for the secretary to try to silence the Catholic chaplains. The archbishop decided that the line in his letter that said Catholics cannot and will not comply with the “unjust law” of the HHS regulation would not be read aloud in Catholic Masses by the chaplains, but that the rest of the letter would.

The line stating "we will not ... comply with this unjust law" did remain, however, in the printed letter that was distributed at Masses said by Army chaplains and it remains in the copies of the letter posted on the website of the Archdiocese for the Military.

It's safe to say that the Obama administration appears to have lost this particular battle and that Broglio's one concession was so minor, that to call it a face-saving gesture for Obama would be a stretch.

While a good sign, rhetoric alone will not accomplish much. The Archbishops will have to get out of their chairs and organize at some point, if they want to see this rule withdrawn.

Read it all.