Islam

President Obama’s 9/11 in Libya

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President Obama faces his own “9/11” today as Islamist crowds attacked both America’s Libyan and Egyptian embassies and killed our Ambassador in Libya and two other Americans with a rocket.

So what can we expect from Pres. Obama?

A strongly worded diplomatic communique? A demarche? An Arclight air strike across Libya?

What we seem to have gotten was a weakly worded diplomatic communique with a political back pedal, when criticized.

If this follows the usual Obama Administration script, expect to see multiple emails asking for campaign contributions based on Gov. Romney “not stopping criticism of the American government at the water’s edge“.

UPDATE:
Gatewaypundit now has photos of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s body being paraded through the streets of Libya.
What I cannot believe is that both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are claiming those photos are of the Ambassador being taken to a hospital.
We should be getting a Pres. Theodore Roosevelt “America wants Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!”.
Obama Administration Reacting to Ambassidor Stevens's Murder
Instead we are getting the ROTC Cadet from ANIMAL HOUSE screaming “REMAIN CALM. ALL IS WELL!” as the riot engulfs him.

What Should the Title of This Post Be?

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Should this be a “Just Unbelievable,” or a “Sad and Disturbing, but not Surprising?”

A student at the University of Southampton discovered that her photograph had been digitally modified by university officials, in deference to the “cultural sensitivities” of certain students and prospective students.

(via Margaret Soltan)

And, in related news, here’s a Canadian man who was arrested for walking his dog in the vicinity of Muslim demonstrators.

(via Five Feet of Fury)

Blasphemy Prosecutions in America?

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A Justice Department official, testifying before Congress, repeatedly refused to promise that the Obama DOJ will never seek to criminalize speech against any religion. Report and video here. Via Pam Geller, who has plenty to say about this.

For decades now, some of American leading universities have been normalizing the idea that interference with free speech is OK, indeed is a positive good. This has been done on two levels: first, directly, via administrative restrictions and required indoctrination, second, indirectly, by allowing students and others to get away with interfering with the free speech of others, for example by theft of opposing newspapers and by outright violent intimidation. With this precedent, it was inevitable that attacks on free speech in the wider political sphere would come to be viewed as more acceptable.

I don’t think it is at all far-fetched that a second Obama Administration, coupled with a Dem-controlled Congress, would attempt to push through what would be in effect a thinly-disguised blasphemy law, using a variant of the “crying fire in a crowded theater” argument. Whether they would get away with it or not would depend on the mix of Supreme Court Justices on the Court at that time.

The Ruins of Athens

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Actually, no not the ruins of Athens … that’s a Beethoven piece that popped into my head the Turkish March, from The Ruins of Athens … I’d always wondered in a desultory way, what would happen to me, if I played that classic music piece without comment, when I was stationed at EBS-Hellenikon, back in the day. I was never reckless enough to do the experiment and find out, actually. The Greeks were hair-trigger temperamental about any mention of Greece, Turkey, or the EEC (the forerunner to the EU) on the perilous airways of the American Forces Radio station where I worked mostly on the swing and mid-shifts in the early 1980s. As exasperating and sometimes as deadly as the political stuff got during those years and it did get deadly, for the N-14 organization and elements of the PLO were more or less targeting Americans on a regular basis I loved Greece unreservedly.

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Not Morsi but Mahdi

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — Egyptian presidency, Mahdist candidate, Center for Millennial Studies, Christ candidate ]
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I ran across this reasonably remarkable web image while following a link from the tail end of Tim Furnish‘s comments on the Egyptian presidential election, and can’t really comment on the candidate himself, either as Mahdi-claimant or as (failed) aspirant to the Presidency.

I am, however, put in mind of my days with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, and a fellow I met at one of their conferences there called Chris King. But I’ll let another friend of mine from those days make the introduction — here’s Damian Thompson, writing in the Daily Telegraph a while back:

I spent the evening of December 31, 1999, climbing up the Mount of Olives, only to be confronted by a wild-haired messiah figure in a patchwork robe walking down the slope. That was surprising enough, but my jaw really dropped open when he said: “Hi, Damian.” Turned out we’d met a few weeks earlier, at a conference organised by the Center for Millennial Studies in Boston. The “messiah” was a Kiwi maths lecturer called Chris King, which he explained also meant “Christ the King”, though only in a complex esoteric way. (He was a lovely guy, actually.)

Chris King was, as Damian reports, both a likeable guy and an academic, and what I found most appealing about his self-presentation — beyond the very fact of his turning up to attend a conference on Millennial Studies — was that his view, essentially a gnostic one, was that we are all Christs in potentia, if we would but realize it… wait for it…

and his consequent request that his claim to messianic status should be peer-reviewed!