Every Supreme Court justice is required, under Article VI of the United States Constitution, to be bound by his or her oath or affirmation “to support this Constitution.” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just broken this commitment by insulting, in front of a foreign audience, the very document she is sworn to support.

In an interview during her visit to Cairo, which aired January 30, 2012 on Al-Hayat TV, Justice Ginsburg advised the Egyptian people to ignore the U.S. Constitution in preparing their own new constitution. It’s just too “old,” she said. Instead, Justice Ginsburg  lavished praise on several post-World War II foreign documents such as the South African constitution, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights.

“I might look at the constitution of South Africa,” Justice Ginsburg said. It is “a great piece of work that was done.”

“You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights,” she continued.

As for her own country’s constitution, Justice Ginsburg said she “would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a new constitution in 2012.”

Quite the contrary. Justice Ginsburg believes that contemporary foreign laws and decisions should be used by her and other Supreme Court justices in determining the meaning of provisions of our own constitution.

At least there was a time when she believed that the United States can both teach other nations from its own experience as well as learn from the experience of others:

If U.S. experience and decisions may be instructive to systems that have more recently instituted or invigorated judicial review for constitutionality, so too can we learn from others now engaged in measuring ordinary laws and executive actions against fundamental instruments of government and charters securing basic rights.

In her latest remarks to the Egyptian audience, however, Justice Ginsburg no longer saw any teaching value in our constitution.  It’s just too “old.”

Justice Ginsburg’s remarks further confirm what we have suspected all along. This far-left justice, a former general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, has little use for our constitution as it was written.  Typical of progressives, she views the constitution as malleable clay, which she is perfectly happy to refashion according to her idea of what an up-to-date document for 2012 should look like.

Consider the South African constitution, which Justice Ginsburg praised as “a great piece of work” for Egyptians to learn from instead of the U.S. Constitution.

The South African constitution contains a clause protecting free expression. But unlike the right of free speech under our First Amendment, the South African constitution says that the right of free expression does not include “propaganda for war” or “advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.” These vague exceptions go beyond the very limited “incitement of imminent violence” exception to the First Amendment that our courts have recognized. Instead, they intrude into the very areas of potentially controversial speech that our constitution protects. Is that what Justice Ginsburg is seriously recommending?

Nearly 6000 Syrians have died during the 10-month revolt against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including hundreds of children. In one of the worst single day outbursts of violence, which occurred on February 3rd, the death toll from shelling by Syrian security forces in the city of Homs alone exceeded 200.

In the midst of the escalating violence, the United Nations Security Council met in a special Saturday session on February 4th to address the crisis in Syria. It failed to take any action after Russia and China vetoed a resolution expressing moral support for the beleaguered Syrian people and endorsing a plan put forward by the Arab League to help them move peacefully beyond Assad towards democracy. The Security Council let the Syrian people down as Assad’s killing machine continues to massacre innocent civilians.

Last week started out with much fanfare. The Arab League’s secretary general and the prime minister of Qatar addressed the Security Council in person on January 31st to present the Arab League’s plan and ask for the Security Council’s endorsement.

“The government killing machine continues effectively unabated,” said Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. “The hope of the Syrian people is in your hands,” he added.

“Do not let the Syrian people down in its plight,” said the Arab League Secretary General Nabil el-Araby.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several of her counterparts, including the foreign ministers of France and the United Kingdom, followed the presentation of the Arab League plan to the Security Council with their own supportive speeches.

In her stern address to the Council, Clinton harshly condemned the Syrian regime’s brutality against its citizens and urged full backing for the Arab League’s plan. “It is time for the international community to put aside our own differences and send a clear message of support to the people of Syria,” Clinton told the Council. “The alternative – spurning the Arab League, abandoning the Syrian people, emboldening the dictator – would compound this tragedy, and would mark a failure of our shared responsibility, and shake the credibility of the United Nations Security Council.”

Russia and China had vetoed a prior resolution last October concerning the violence in Syria.  Russia in particular has been running interference for its ally Assad, whose regime is a major customer for Russian weapons and has provided Russia with access to one of its ports.

Mindful of the fate of the prior resolution, which had been spearheaded by the West, Clinton reminded the Council that this time it was the Arab League taking the lead and asking the Council for its support:

So why is the Arab League here before this Security Council?  Because they are seeking the support of the international community for a negotiated, peaceful political solution to this crisis and a responsible, democratic transition in Syria.  And we all have a choice:  Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé accused the Syrian regime of “crimes against humanity.” He added that the Arab League was offering the only viable plan to counter the violence and help facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy. “We have to take it,” Ambassador Juppé said.

However, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin made it clear in his own remarks on January 31st that Russia would oppose any Security Council resolution that attempted “to prescribe outcomes” for the Syrian regime.

In the days that followed these speeches, Morocco’s original draft resolution went through successive mark-ups that were circulated in an effort to reach a consensus among all the members of the Security Council. While China is reported to have proposed little during the informal discussions, Russia insisted upon and obtained a number of key concessions. Bringing Russia on board was the key to passage of the resolution. China, in this case, was viewed as joined at the hip with Russia and likely to follow whatever Russia ultimately decided to do.

The Arab League plan proposed specific steps to successfully transition to democracy. Under the plan, Syrian President Assad would first cede power to his vice president, followed by the formation of a national unity government with the opposition and ultimately a new constitution and new elections. The original text of the Security Council resolution laid out these same steps. However, by the end of the week, these steps were removed from the final draft of the resolution as a concession to Russia.

The original proposed resolution expressed the Security Council’s “grave concern at the continued transfer of weapons into Syria which fuels the violence” and called on the member states “to take necessary steps to prevent such flow of arms.”

The final draft removed any reference to weapons as a further concession to Russia.

The final draft also made clear that nothing in the resolution authorizes the use of any military force to accomplish its purpose.

Russia even managed to promote itself in the resolution as a partner with the Arab League in the search for a peaceful solution. The final resolution draft  noted specifically “the offer of the Russian Federation to host a meeting in Moscow, in consultation with the League of Arab States.”

Everything appeared to be on track by the end of last week to finally bring Russia on board, until Russia decided at the last moment to introduce some amendments with a few revisions to the resolution’s wording. That is where the United States, France, the United Kingdom and others on the Council drew a line in the sand. They decided that Russia had gone too far in trying to weaken the resolution’s text. Precious time was being wasted while civilians were dying in Syria.

The Left is in a horrible huff. Once again James O’Keefe, the conservative  film-maker who exposed ACORN, has demonstrated the duplicity of the Left. This time he proved why strict voter ID laws, opposed strongly by the Left, are necessary.

In more than 10 minutes of video footage, which has gone viral on the Internet, O’Keefe demonstrated how easy it was in New Hampshire for an individual to pose as a deceased voter and still receive a ballot to vote in an election.

New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, (R-Mont Vernon) called the video “a shocking exclamation point on the need for immediate reform to New Hampshire’s election laws to ensure that voter fraud does not taint the rights of our citizens to have their votes counted in an honest, responsible way and impact our state.”

New Hampshire Governor John Lynch vetoed legislation passed in 2011 requiring photo ID at the polls. Governor Lynch had stated in his veto message that there was “no voter fraud problem in New Hampshire.”

O’Brien begged to differ. He said the House will pass legislation again this year. “Hopefully, this video will shame the Governor into signing it,” O’Brien remarked.

Leftists are trying to divert attention away from the underlying voter fraud issue, which O’Keefe graphically exposed, by going after the messenger. They want to prosecute O’Keefe and his colleagues for allegedly violating federal and state election laws, even though there is no evidence that the conservative activists actually tried to cast the ballots that they received posing as deceased voters.

The far-left Daily Kos and People for the American Way, for example, are circulating a petition asking for the New Hampshire Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney to “thoroughly investigate the actions of James O’Keefe and his operatives.”

The petition accuses O’Keefe of sending “his own agents out to commit fraud.” It claims that O’Keefe’s reason was that “he wants fewer Americans to vote.”

The truth is that all concerned citizens, including O’Keefe, simply want fewer dead or fictional “voters” to be counted in determining the outcome of elections.

New Hampshire’s House Majority Leader DJ Bettencourt (R-Salem) twittered a response to the calls for O’Keefe’s head. “Fascinating some want to prosecute individuals who had guts to prove our election system had huge hole in it. Didn’t actually illegally vote,” he wrote.

Articles on FrontPagemag.com and other sites have picked apart President Obama’s latest State of the Union address, both in terms of substance and tone. The speech dragged on and on, with language recycled from his previous State of the Union addresses. The rhetoric was highly partisan. The economic proposals consisted of a laundry list of progressive, anti-private enterprise, big government ideas and so on. However, beyond the specific deficiencies in Obama’s speech, his address was more of an exercise of a state of denial than an honest accounting of the State of the Union.

The most glaring example of Obama’s state of denial was his self-righteous chastisement of others for what he has done himself:

[A]nyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Remember, Obama’s barbs at others is coming from the same man who felt that America had to be fundamentally transformed from the kind of political and economic system that has come down to us from the Founding Fathers.

Moreover, Obama himself has put down America on several occasions while representing the United States abroad. Perhaps it is time for him to admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he leveled all his criticisms of the United States in front of foreign audiences. For example, on his very first trip overseas, in Strasbourg, France, Obama said the United States had “failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world” and that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

In addition to his apologies and put-downs of America, Obama has downplayed the idea of American exceptionalism. When asked in France what he thought of America’s claim to an exceptional position among nations, he quipped that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

By extension of Obama’s logic, since every country would most likely think of itself as exceptional, the idea that America truly is a unique example of freedom, economic dynamism, and goodness to the rest of the world has no meaning. This is moral relativism at its worst, compounded by Obama’s embarrassing habit of bowing to world leaders.

Moreover, as a result of some of his own policies, Obama is helping to bring about a decline of American power and influence, if they are not soon reversed. He is planning to hollow out our military with drastic budget cuts. He is ceding economic power to China. His so-called reset policies with Russia have played into Russia’s hands. Iran is ever closer to developing a nuclear bomb while Obama’s engagement policy has cost us crucial time. The list goes on and on.

A second example of Obama’s state of denial in his State of the Union address involved energy. He still believes the sun and wind gods, with a big dose of government funding, are the answer to our nation’s energy problem.

Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Somehow, the Solyndra fiasco didn’t make it into Obama’s speech. American taxpayers were the losers to the tune of $500 million. So were the Solyndra employees when the company went belly-up. The only winners in the case of Solyndra were Obama’s campaign contribution bundlers who were lobbying for the Solyndra government loan guarantees.

Obama’s inexplicable decision to block the Keystone pipeline for crass political reasons didn’t make it into his speech either. Obama is inexcusably playing political games to hold on to his environmental base through the election, with good jobs for Americans and increased energy independence cast aside as the sacrificial lambs. Even Obama’s own jobs council has recommended building more pipelines. But then again, Obama rarely listens to the critical recommendations of his own councils and commissions such as his bipartisan deficit reduction commission.

To convince the world that sharia-based laws protect personal freedoms and human rights for all, Islamists engage in the time-honored Muslim tradition of lying about their own beliefs to conceal their true nature. This form of deception is known as “taqiyya.” Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is engaging in taqiyya as it prepares to lead Egypt’s newly elected parliament and to assure Egyptian citizens and the world at large that they are peace-loving advocates of universal human rights. The Obama administration is buying this taqiyya hook, line and sinker — and spreading it.

Just last week, for example, U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson met with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, congratulating the group for the victory of their political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), in the elections for a new parliament. She listened attentively as Badie assured her that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” When Badie told her the United States had to prove to Muslims that it has seen the error of its ways in past dealings with the Muslim world, Patterson followed the lead of President Obama. She apologized for what she said were past American mistakes and promised that the U.S. will “learn from them to avoid their recurrence in the future.”

Back in Washington, D.C., State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a January 5th press briefing that the United States trusts the Muslim Brotherhood party’s good intentions. Choosing to downplay an interview by a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader with Al Hayat, in which he said that the treaty with Israel is not binding, Nuland responded:

We’ve seen this press report. I would say that it is one member of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have‬ had other assurances from the party with regard to their commitment not only to universal human rights, but to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its Obama administration partners in taqiyya ask us to accept at face value the Brotherhood’s current face of moderation. We are supposed to believe that it has eschewed violence, wants to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and is dedicated to fostering an open pluralistic democracy in Egypt in which all of its citizens are treated equally.

The facts unfortunately do not support this rosy picture. For example, the “one member of the Muslim Brotherhood” whose hostile remarks earlier this month against Israel were dismissed as irrelevant by the State Department spokeswoman was the Brotherhood’s deputy leader, Dr. Rashad Bayoumi. He said in his interview that his organization will not recognize Israel “under any circumstance.” Bayoumi added that “we do not recognize Israel at all. [Israel is] an occupying criminal enemy.”

Dr. Bayoumi’s interview took place just a few weeks after Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie welcomed Hamas’s Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, at the Brotherhood’s Cairo headquarters. Haniyeh said during his visit that “Our presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity.” For his part, Badie had nothing but praise for Hamas, which has not renounced violence and was after all the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dr. Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni, the Director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party until he resigned on January 21, 2012 to serve as the speaker of the new Egyptian parliament, said last month that the parliament is expected to reevaluate the Camp David peace treaty that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed with Israel in 1979:

A long time has passed since the Camp David accord was signed and like the other agreements it needs reevaluation and this is in the hands of the Parliament[.]

Al-Katatni denied a report in an Israeli newspaper that had claimed the Muslim Brotherhood has reached understandings with the United States and Israel regarding the importance of safeguarding the peace treaty with Israel:

The report in the newspaper is completely unfounded. There have been no contacts or understandings with the American or Israeli side about the peace treaty that President Anwar Sadat signed in 1979.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated leader’s equivocation on a 32-year-old treaty, which has maintained peace between Egypt and Israel, what the State Department’s spokeswoman had in mind when she expressed confidence in the Muslim Brotherhood’s “commitment… to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken”?

And what do we make of the report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which closely monitors the Arab media, about the recent virulent anti-Semitic writings appearing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwanonline.com? The report stated:

The website of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt, Ikhwanonline.com, contains articles with antisemitic motifs, including Holocaust denial and descriptions of the ‘Jewish character’ as covetous, exploitative, and a source of evil in human society. While articles of this tenor have been posted on the site in the past, their posting has recently taken on greater importance in light of the group’s increasing strength following the ouster of the Mubarak regime, as reflected by the results of the recent parliamentary elections.

In addition to antisemitic content, articles on the site also include praise for jihad and martyrdom, and condemnation of negotiation as a means of regaining Islamic lands. Among these are articles calling to kill Zionists and praising the September 9, 2011 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo – which one article called a landmark of the Egyptian revolution.

Saying one thing to guarantee Obama administration support for the Muslim Brotherhood and saying another on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own website is vintage Islamist taqiyya.

How about universal human rights such as freedom of religion and expression? Again, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration want us to forget about the Muslim Brotherhood’s past positions on denying certain rights to women and religious minorities. They expect everyone to fall in line and embrace the “moderate” leadership of today, exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, and the former director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, who was just chosen as the speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni.

Both Badie and al-Katatni espouse sharia law as the basis for governing Egypt, but maintain that sharia law, inclusive democracy and universal human rights are all compatible with each other. To this end, as noted above, Badie claims that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” Al-Katatni said in an interview with al-Jazeera that the Freedom and Justice Party “is not a religious party but it’s a civil party… that seeks a modern and democratic state but with a ‘Islamic reference’.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s website describes al-Katatni as “renowned for his moderate stances.”

Congressman Ron Paul showed in the January 17th Fox News debate why he would be so dangerous as president and commander-in-chief. He believes, in a twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule, that our Islamist enemies are only assaulting us because we assaulted them first. Sorry, appeaser-in-chief Paul, but the Koran commands devout jihadists to use whatever means are necessary to destroy all infidels, no matter what we have done or plan to do to them.

As part of an exchange involving the appropriate response to al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters, Paul exclaimed:

My point is, if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in — in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nation… what we don’t want to have them do to us.

Paul even offered the absurd analogy comparing our killing of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, where he was provided a sanctuary, to the Communist Chinese government deciding to go after a Chinese dissident seeking freedom in the United States. Newt Gingrich properly labeled this comparison “utterly irrational.”

Ron Paul may have some good ideas on reining in the power of the Federal Reserve and on the need to control federal spending. But he is clueless in dealing with our Islamist enemies. He either does not understand or refuses to believe the ideology that drives them. They want to kill us because our nation is governed on the basis of principles derived from Judeo-Christian beliefs including the true Golden Rule. They hate us because of who we are, not for any alleged harm that we’ve ever caused them.

Only three years after the United States won its independence, when there was no Jewish state for Muslims to resent, and no American troops on Muslim soil, Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then U.S. Ambassador to Britain, learned from a Muslim ambassador to Britain why the Muslims were so hostile towards Americans. Jefferson and Adams were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim “Barbary pirates,” an exercise that ultimately proved to be futile.

As Jefferson and Adams later reported to Congress, the Muslim ambassador explained to them that Islam

Was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

All that Ron Paul needs to do is take a look at the Koran itself, cited by that Muslim ambassador more than 200 years ago, to understand the source of the  jihadist ideology that we are still fighting today.

Here is a sample:

• “Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.” (Koran, 2:191)

• “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each other.” (Koran 5:51)

• “Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil.” (Koran 5:60)

• “I will inspire terror into the hearts of unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them.” (Koran, 8:12)

• “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

•  “[F]ight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Koran, 9:29)

• “When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah’s word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly.” (Koran, 17:16-17)

Islamist apologists argue that the Koran also contains verses calling for tolerance and understanding.  If the verses written while Muhammad was living in Mecca, where he and his followers were then surrounded by much stronger non-Muslim populations, constituted the entirety of the Koran, they may have had a point. However, the milder verses were superseded by the far more war-like and intolerant verses written during Muhammad’s time in Medina where he successfully launched his jihad of conquests against non-believers, especially against Jews who refused to convert to Islam. Moreover, when one examines the real meaning of jihad according to Muhammad from other primary sources such as Bukhari (the Hadith, which are oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Muhammad), the fact is that 97% of the jihad references are about war and 3% are about so-called inner struggle.

On January 4, 2012 President Obama announced four unilateral appointments, citing the Recess Clause of the Constitution. These involved the appointment of the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, and appointees to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. Predictably, the Obama Justice Department ratified his abuse of his constitutional recess appointment power. In a legal memo dated January 6, 2012, Virginia A. Seitz, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the Senate’s “pro forma” sessions counted as recesses even though the Senate did not regard them as recesses. Why? Because the president says so.

Seitz claims that if during any period the Senate cannot actually conduct business on the spot and is “unavailable to perform its advise-and-consent function,” the president is free to deem the Senate in recess and make his own “recess” appointments. The absurdity of such logic means that any time between Friday and Monday when the Senate often does not conduct official business, the president can make all of the appointments he wants to.

Seitz admits that the practice of holding “pro forma” Senate sessions that were not deemed recesses by the Senate began when the Democrats controlled the Senate and a Republican occupied the White House:

Beginning in late 2007, and continuing into the 112th Congress, the Senate has frequently conducted pro forma sessions during recesses occurring within sessions of Congress… The Senate Majority Leader has stated that such pro forma sessions break a long recess into shorter adjournments, each of which might ordinarily be deemed too short to be considered a “recess” within the meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause, thus preventing the President from exercising his constitutional power to make recess appointments.

Seitz even quotes a 2007 statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.): “[T]he Senate will be coming in for pro forma sessions . . . to prevent recess appointments.”

Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader under whom the very same pro forma procedure is being followed this time around. The only real difference – there is now a Democrat occupying the White House.

Seitz tries to draw another distinction between then and now. In 2007-2008, she says, the Senate really wanted to block recess appointments by using the pro forma sessions. This time, Seitz argues, the House of Representatives made the Senate do it by refusing to pass any resolution to allow the Senate to recess or adjourn for more than three days:

While this practice was initiated by Senate action, more recently the Senate’s use of such sessions appears to have been forced by actions of the House of Representatives.

Under the Constitution, as Seitz acknowledges, “[n]either House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.” (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 5, cl. 4 ). But Seitz tries to turn this provision around to her favor by arguing that, since the House prevented the Senate from adjourning for more than three days even if it wanted to, the president can help the Senate out and decide for himself that the Senate was really on an extended recess.

Seitz then proceeds to the heart of her legal argument in support of Obama’s “recess” appointments.  She states that under a test first articulated by Attorney General Daugherty in 1921, and subsequently reaffirmed and applied by several opinions of the Justice Department, the “constitutional test for whether a recess appointment is permissible is whether the adjournment of the Senate is of such duration that the Senate could ‘not receive communications from the President or participate as a body in making appointments.’”

Seitz proceeds to take quotes out of context from the Daugherty opinion, which she uses to support her argument, such as the following:

[T]he president has broad discretion to determine when there is a real and genuine recess making it impossible for him to receive the advice and consent of the Senate.

Seitz neglects to mention that Attorney General Daugherty was dealing with the issue of whether the president can make appointments during a recess, no matter how long, if the recess occurred within a single session. Daugherty concluded that a 28-day intra-session break clearly did constitute a recess for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause. However, he wrote that a break “for only 2 instead of 28 days” did not constitute such a recess. “Nor do I think an adjournment of 5 or even 10 days can be said to constitute the recess intended by the Constitution.”

Morocco, replacing Lebanon on the United Nations Security Council, wasted no time in raising the issue of Israeli settlements after a closed-door Security Council meeting on January 10th about the unrelated topic of Children and Armed Conflict. As the United States representative is reported to have pointed out, Morocco’s request was “ill-timed and counter-productive.” Morocco’s decision to begin its tenure on the Security Council by carrying the Palestinians’ torch on the Israeli settlements issue is also the height of hypocrisy, considering Morocco’s continuing illegal occupation of the Western Sahara territory and repression of its people who yearn for self-determination.

Expect to see a continuing effort to insert the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, particularly the settlements issue, on the Security Council agenda whenever the Palestinians’ allies, such as Morocco, possibly can. It’s all part of the Palestinians’ campaign to persuade more Security Council members to support the Palestinians’ bid for full UN membership and to isolate the United States diplomatically if it does not drop its veto threat. So far, the United States has not had to exercise its veto power because the Palestinians were unable last year to garner a majority of other members to support their application for membership.

Palestine’s Observer to the UN, Riyad Mansour, told UN correspondents last week that the Palestinians would employ “new creative ideas” to gain full membership in the United Nations:

Are we giving up because there is one powerful country that has a veto power saying the Security Council should not be involved? We’re not giving up. So now we’re coming up with these new creative ideas.

Mansour referred to a letter he had handed to Bass Sangqu, the UN Ambassador from South Africa, which holds the Security Council presidency for the month of January. The letter purports to document “crimes committed by the occupying authority against our people in the occupied territory, including the terrorist activities by the settlers against our civilian population.” And Mansour called for a report on Israeli settlements to the Security Council by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Mansour also announced that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will be visiting Palestinian leaders in the West Bank within the month, presumably to report back to the Security Council their testimonials of Israeli “crimes.”

How about Ban Ki-moon adding to his itinerary a stop in the Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco? The people of Western Sahara, which was once a Spanish colony, were entitled under international law to decide for themselves whether they wanted complete independence or association with another state after the colonizing power gave up control. Morocco never gave the people of Western Sahara this chance. Instead, it invaded and occupied their territory.

President Barack Obama has abused his constitutional powers once again. This time, Obama got so frustrated with the way in which the Senate was exercising its constitutional “advice and consent” authority regarding some of his nominations that he leaped ahead to make four so-called “recess” appointments, even though the Senate did not deem itself to be in recess at the time. In accordance with precedents accepted by congressional leaders of both parties and followed during the previous Republican administration, the Senate has determined that by holding “pro forma” sessions every three days it is not in recess. Nevertheless, Obama disregarded the Senate’s constitutional right to make its own rules on when it is in session, and its “advice and consent” power over presidential nominations, by unilaterally appointing former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as director of the new controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He also filled three National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) vacancies.

Obama, running a demonize-Congress re-election campaign, was in full campaign mode when he rubbed his “recess” appointment of Cordray in Congress’s face last week. He announced the appointment, with Cordray standing at his side, at a campaign-style rally in Cordray’s home state of Ohio.

“I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Mr. Obama said, rejecting in essence the fundamental constitutional principle of checks and balances that sometimes means the Congress will say no to the president. Obama did not want to take “no” for an answer with regard to Cordray for one simple reason. Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which established the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bureau could not start exercising its considerable powers and issuing regulations until a director was actually in place. And there is nothing that excites this president more than another regulatory agency clamping down on even more sectors of the free market economy.

Indeed, chomping at the bit to get started issuing business-hobbling regulations upon his illegal appointment, Cordray warned: “We’re going to begin working to expand our program to nonbanks, which is an area we haven’t been able to touch before now.”

In order to install Cordray right away and kick-start the new consumer bureau into operation, as well as fill the NLRB vacancies, Obama relied on the presidential recess appointment power under Article II of the Constitution (Section 2, Clause 3), which states:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

The Obama White House legal team’s lame defense for Obama’s imperious action is that the Senate’s pro-forma sessions were merely dodges to thwart his recess appointment power. This circular reasoning, shared by the left-wing Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, presupposes that Obama has the authority to determine when the Senate is or is not in recess as opposed to the Senate itself – a blatant assault on the separation of powers.

This is a country of laws, not unilateral presidential fiat. Under the Constitution, each house of Congress makes its own rules for how it conducts its proceedings, which inherently includes its own determination when it is in session and when it is in recess. Not an impatient president. Not the White House legal team. Not the Department of Justice.

Also, in a country governed by the rule of law, precedents should matter. Democrats had initiated the “pro-forma” session procedure to prevent recess appointments during the administration of George W. Bush, which the Bush administration honored. The same procedure was being followed during the Obama administration with the concurrence of the congressional leadership of both parties.

For three years, Barack Obama’s engagement policy with Islamists, most notably in Iran, has proven dangerous. The Iranian regime exploited Obama’s show of weakness by moving ahead aggressively with its nuclear weapon program. Now the Obama administration is doubling down on its disastrous engagement policy. It is serving as the midwife to the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and of Afghanistan by the Taliban. And there is a distressing link between the two.

A front page article in the New York Times on January 5th reported what has been obvious since Obama took office. The administration has sought to “forge close ties” with the Muslim Brotherhood – “an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.”

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and recently joined with the ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, for a meeting with top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, compared the Obama administration’s outreach to President Ronald Reagan’s arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. “The United States needs to deal with the new reality,” Senator Kerry said. “And it needs to step up its game.”

That is a ridiculous analogy. Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union, but never waivered from his belief that the Soviet Union was an evil empire whose ideology must be defeated.  The Obama administration’s outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood is based on its mistaken belief that it has reformed in a way that brings it much closer to the Western model of a pluralistic party committed to individual freedoms.

To the contrary, when push comes to shove, the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the civil government in Egypt, by virtue of its parliamentary election victories, will mean the imposition of sharia law and jihad against infidels. Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact.  Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start.

Jihad remains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s DNA. Its motto includes the words: “Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood’s new offices are emblazoned with its emblem of crossed swords.

The Obama administration’s ostensible rationale for engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood is that it is simply bowing to political reality. Based on the results of Egyptian parliamentary elections so far, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party looks set to play a dominant role in Egypt’s new parliament and in the civil government to which Obama administration officials are pressing Egypt’s military to hand over the reins of power. But, in fact, the Obama administration is not simply being reactive. It helped bring about what is now unfolding in Egypt by throwing Egyptian president Mubarak under the bus and lending its hand to legitimize the false image of the Muslim Brotherhood as some sort of alternative moderate advocate of peace, pluralistic democracy and freedom for all Egyptians.

At the same time, in order to find a face-saving way out of the quagmire in Afghanistan in which the Obama administration finds itself after escalating the war there while simultaneously announcing a timetable for withdrawal, the administration is pursuing talks with the Taliban. It is using an untrustworthy Muslim Brotherhood connection to do so.

According to a report appearing in the Indian newspaper Hindu, diplomatic sources have said that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has emerged as a key mediator in secret talks between the U.S. and the Taliban:

Mr. al-Qaradawi helped draw a road map for a deal between the Taliban and the United States, aimed at giving the superpower a face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan which is due to begin in 2014.

In return for the release of prisoners still held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, the lifting of United Nations sanctions on its leadership and its recognition as a legitimate political group, the Taliban was expected to agree to sever its links to transnational organisations like al-Qaeda, end violence and eventually share power with the Afghan government.

But what can the Taliban negotiators really deliver, even if it were serious in wanting to reach a peaceful settlement? There is no indication that these negotiators are in a position to turn over the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his inner circle, who harbored al Qaeda when the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan. Nor will they be able to diffuse the growing power of the new generation of Taliban commanders ideologically committed to al-Qaeda’s vision.

The Obama administration’s idea of negotiations is to consider releasing Taliban detainees who are likely to return to jihad against U.S. forces without even any commitment reported to date that the Taliban would return the U.S. soldier it kidnapped. The only concrete step the Taliban negotiators have reportedly agreed to undertake in the short term is to set up an office in Qatar for talks.

It’s bad enough that the Obama administration is even considering talks on such terms – a prescription for appeasement. The fact that the Obama administration is foolish enough to trust al-Qaradawi as an intermediary with the Taliban is mind-boggling. Have they not read what this jihadist has been preaching?

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader’s call for jihad extends not only to the conquest of Israel and the killing of Jews. It includes the conquest of Europe and beyond.

In 2003 al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa declaring that

Islam will return to Europe as a victorious conqueror after having been expelled twice. This time it will not be conquest by the sword, but by preaching and spreading [Islamic] ideology […] The future belongs to Islam […] The spread of Islam until it conquers the entire world and includes both East and West marks the beginning of the return of the Islamic Caliphate [.]

A 2009 State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks, quoted a sermon by al-Qaradawi in which he condemned Jews for spreading “corruption in the land” and called for “the revenge of Allah” upon them. And he didn’t spare the United States. He condemned the United States for acting “like a god in this world” and cautioned the U.S. and the West that “according to the law of Allah, they should collapse.”

Yet this is the man in whom the Obama administration places its trust to help mediate a peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Just as the Obama administration trusts al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide for the Muslim Brotherhood, to help it escape the mess in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has come to believe in the good intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood itself in how it plans to govern in Egypt.

Interestingly, President Obama himself, during his 2011 Super Bowl Day interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, wanted viewers to know he was concerned “there are strains of their [Muslim Brotherhood] ideology that are anti-U.S.” But he dodged the question whether the Muslim Brotherhood represented a threat to the U.S., saying that they were only “one faction in Egypt” that lacked majority support.

Despite that brief glimmer of Super Bowl Day reality about the Muslim Brotherhood coming from Obama himself, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said just a few days before Obama’s interview that any new Egyptian government “has to include a whole host of important non-secular actors that give Egypt a strong chance to continue to be [a] stable and reliable partner,” a remark most likely directed at U.S. support for the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in any future government.

In February 2011, U.S. director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood “pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera….. There is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.” However, his characterization of the Brotherhood as “largely secular” went a bit too far, even for the Obama administration.

In June 2011, well before the recent parliamentary elections, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the Obama administration’s decision to ignore the “anti-U.S.” strains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and engage them in concert with its policy to deal with “peaceful” organizations. She said that “We welcome, therefore, dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.”

The Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, are poised to take control of the newly elected Egyptian parliament. As they consolidate their power internally, the Muslim Brotherhood-led Islamists will likely turn Egypt into a hotbed of jihadism against anything non-Muslim, taking direct aim at the Jewish state of Israel.

Last winter, as the Egyptian people were rising up against President Hosni Mubarak, Muhammad Ghannem, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, told the Arabic-language Iranian news network Al-Alam:

The people should be prepared for war against Israel. The Egyptian people are prepared for anything to get rid of this regime.

Muslim Brotherhood deputy leader Dr Rashad Bayoumi started off 2012 with a belligerent interview published in the Arabic daily al-Hayat, in which he insisted that his organization will not recognize Israel “under any circumstance.” Bayoumi added that “we do not recognize Israel at all. [Israel is] an occupying criminal enemy.”

Bayoumi’s declaration came less than a week after the Muslim Brotherhood, which gave birth to Hamas, hosted Hamas’s Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh with a warm welcome at the Muslim Brotherhood’s Cairo area headquarters. This was Haniyeh’s first trip outside of Gaza since Hamas took over Gaza by force in 2007. He milked every ounce of anti-Israel propaganda that he could from the visit. As quoted by Egypt’s state news agency MENA, Haniyeh declared:

Our presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badei, who greeted Haniyeh, engaged in a mutual admiration session with Haniyeh during their meeting. Badei went so far as to extol the Muslim Brotherhood offspring Hamas for now serving as its parent’s role model.

During a joint press conference, as reported in the Jerusalem Post, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders had this chummy exchange:

Badei: “You are welcome to our country; you are welcome to our headquarters. The general center of Muslim Brotherhood is paying attention all the time to the Palestinian issue as it pays attention to the issues of liberation all over the world.”

Haniyeh: “The Islamic resistance movement of Hamas, by definition is, a jihadist movement by the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian on the surface, Islamic at its core and its goal is liberation.”

The Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas are joined at the hip. Indeed, Hamas’s charter begins with a homage to Hamas’s roots in the “Muslim Brotherhood Movement,” which the charter describes as a “world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era.”

Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, and Badei, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader in Egypt, reflect the Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood partnership’s shared goal to destroy the Jewish state.

Just two weeks prior to the confab between Badei and Haniyeh in Cairo, Haniyeh was in Gaza marking the 24th anniversary of the founding of Hamas. The Hamas leader was quoted by Palestinian Media Watch as saying that Hamas’s “strategic” goal remains the complete elimination of the Jewish state of Israel:

We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel]… We won’t relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine – all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah… These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed: Palestine – all of Palestine – is from the sea to the river. We won’t relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine.

There are some people who think that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are solely Israel’s problem, not ours. Others, including senior members of the Obama administration, believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is now a reformed “moderate” organization that the United States government should recognize and do business with. They are sadly mistaken.

Rep. Ron Paul believes the United States is a greedy, militaristic empire that brought 9/11 upon itself. He believes that Iran poses no threat to U.S. or Israeli security and that Iran deserves to have a nuclear weapon if it wants one. As for Israel, he does not think it should have ever come into existence as a Jewish state. Nevertheless, Ron Paul, whose crackpot beliefs would be disastrous for the United States and the free world if ever implemented, is a serious contender for the GOP presidential nomination.

With money, good organization, a demagogic message that has a surface appeal to voters looking for a radical break with the status quo and an enthusiastic cadre of supporters fueling his campaign, Paul has vaulted into the top tier of Republican presidential candidates in the Iowa caucuses, which he could well win on January 3rd. He is virtually tied with Newt Gingrich for second place in New Hampshire after the heavy favorite, Mitt Romney. Overall, Paul is currently running third in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls.

Paul’s foreign policy philosophy hearkens back to the pre-World War II “America First” isolationist movement that was shattered with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. In fact, Paul would have been right at home in that movement. According to Eric Dondero, a former senior aide to the congressman, Paul believed that the United States had no business getting involved in fighting Hitler in World War II. “He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews,’ was absolutely none of our business,” Dondero said. “When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand.”

Paul has harbored similar conspiratorial thoughts about 9/11. Dondero said that his former boss

engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions…

Paul was opposed to the war in Afghanistan from the outset, and to any military reaction to the attacks of 9/11, according to Dondero. It was only after feeling intense political heat from his home district that Paul reluctantly reversed his initial opposition to the resolution authorizing military action in Afghanistan and decided at the last minute to vote “yes.”

In Ron Paul’s Blame America world view, the U.S. military, which conquered fascism and has since World War II helped to liberate many millions of people from the cruel grip of totalitarian communism, fanatical jihadism and secular dictatorships, is somehow the world’s greatest source of evil and conflict in the world.

“Just come home,” Paul has repeatedly intoned, echoing George McGovern’s 1972 campaign slogan “Come Home, America.” A President Ron Paul would gut the nation’s defenses and homeland security as he carries out his promises to drastically cut military spending and to repeal what he has called the “police state” Patriot Act.

It’s no surprise that the left-wing, anti-American Code Pink likes Paul’s message. Code Pink activist Liz Hourican told FoxNews.com that the “Ron Paul people are closer and closer to our talking points with each election.”

Paul also has other friends on the hard Left such as Tom Hayden, who wrote:

Paul opposes the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He opposes the empire of military bases. He opposes Wall Street thievery, tax subsidies for oil companies, the suppression of WikiLeaks, the drug war and the criminalization of marijuana. Those positions might just save America.

At the same time, Paul’s message is in sync with that of the paleoconservative, Israel-hating isolationist Pat Buchanan. Consider, for example, their common perspective on 9/11. Buchanan said that “Terrorism is the price of empire. They were over here because we were over there.” Paul has attributed the al Qaeda attack to America’s interventionist actions in Muslim lands and to our support for Israel.

In a speech he delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives in January 2003, for example, Paul said:

We believe bin Laden when he takes credit for an attack on the West, and we believe him when he warns us of an impending attack, but we refuse to listen to his explanation of why he and his allies are at war with us. Bin Laden claims are straightforward. The U.S. defiles Islam with bases on the Holy Land and Saudi Arabia, its initiation of war against Iraq, with 12 years of persistent bombing, and its dollars and weapons being used against the Palestinians, as the Palestinian territory shrinks and Israel’s occupation expands.

As for Osama bin Laden, whom our Navy Seals dispatched last spring, Ron Paul criticized the one decision that Barack Obama got right. Paul said he would not have authorized the mission, arguing that killing bin Laden was unnecessary and that he has “respect for the rule of law.”

Ron Paul remains steadfast in denouncing U.S. foreign policy as one of occupation that justifies what he has referred to as the terrorists’ “blowback” response. During a CNN-Tea Party Republican presidential debate last September, for example, Paul stated that

we’re under great threat because we occupy so many countries… We have to be honest with ourselves. What would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?

Anti-American guru Noam Chomsky claimed that what Paul said was “completely uncontroversial.”

It may be “uncontroversial” to Chomsky, as well as to Pat Buchanan who thinks 9/11 was the price we paid for empire-building. But it is way out of the mainstream to most Americans.

As the New York Times put it in a front page article on December 26th about Ron Paul’s campaign, Paul and his closest political allies have “sought to forge a movement from the nether region of American politics, where the far right and the far left sometimes converge.”

Ron Paul does not only attribute al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks to American foreign policy. He also blames America and Israel for frightening Iran into taking defensive actions to protect itself. When asked how he might deter Iran if it ever did pose a threat, Paul said “maybe offering friendship to them.”

While defending the terrorist-sponsoring Iranian regime’s right to seek nuclear arms, he denies that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is anything to worry about. He says there is no credible evidence that Iran is advancing towards achieving a nuclear bomb capability, despite a disturbing report to the contrary issued last month by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA report found that there was information indicating Iran was conducting activities “specific to nuclear weapons.” The IAEA was particularly concerned about “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

The Obama administration continues to deny that we are at war with Islamist jihadists. Indeed, the word “jihad” itself is forbidden in Obama-land if used to describe the Islamist warriors. At its highest levels, the Obama administration insists on using bland euphemisms rather than accurate language describing the Islamist ideology we are fighting.

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, the global war against Islamist killers is an “Overseas Contingency Operation.” The Fort Hood massacre, in which thirteen people were killed and dozens more wounded by an Islamist jihadist, is described  by Obama officials as “workplace violence.”

In one of the most recent examples of political correctness gone amok, Paul Stockton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, refused to acknowledge that we are fighting a radical ideology that has anything to do with Islam. Asked during a joint Senate-House committee hearing last week, conducted by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), whether “we are at war with violent Islamist extremism,” Stockton said “No sir. We are at war with al-Qaeda, its affiliates.” Stockton was then asked to at least concede that al-Qaeda is acting out violent Islamist extremism. Refusing to answer the question directly, he stuck to his talking point that “We are not at war with Islam.”

Stockton was spewing his nonsense at the same time as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department hosted a three-day international conference in Washington, D.C., which included her friends from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), representatives from the Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and representatives from countries and international organizations “selected on the basis of their geographic, religious, and political diversity.” It turns out that more than a third of the countries selected were Muslim. The Arab League was represented in addition to the OIC. Religious diversity was not enough, however, to secure the Jewish state of Israel an invitation.

The purpose of the D.C. conference was to discuss ways to implement the provisions of a new United Nations resolution, the product of a deal reached between the OIC and the Obama administration, entitled “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.”

The deal was for the OIC to at least temporarily put on hold its annual campaign to have the United Nations pass its “defamation of religions” resolutions, in favor of the “compromise” resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March of this year and then passed by the UN General Assembly in November.

The title of the new “compromise” resolution may be different from the OIC’s “Combating defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC has successfully steered through the UN over the last ten years or so. However, the net effect is that with the new UN resolution in hand and the full cooperation of the Obama administration, the OIC will actually be closer to achieving its objective, which to stamp out speech deemed offensive to Muslims.

Continuing the Obama administration’s submission to the OIC’s wishes, Clinton met with OIC officials in Istanbul last July, at a conference she co-hosted, to embark on what has become known as the “Istanbul Process.” The ostensible purpose of the Istanbul Process is to work with Muslim majority countries, the OIC and other interested nations on exploring specific steps to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping, discrimination and violence on the basis of religion or belief.

Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC was willing to have replaced. At the same time, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She also invited OIC representatives to Washington, D.C. to begin implementing the Istanbul Process, which culminated in last week’s three-day closed door conference.

The mainstream media is beginning to call out the radical left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and its blog ThinkProgress for their anti-Semitic rhetoric, particularly in their over-the-top attacks on defenders of Israel and critics of Islamist ideology.

For example, Ben Smith of Politico highlighted the following example of extreme anti-Israel rhetoric from a ThinkProgress posting by Matt Duss, a CAP policy analyst and the director of Middle East Progress. Duss wrote his piece last year, following an Israeli raid on a flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza which resulted in the deaths of nine militants:

Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values.

Comparing Israeli efforts to defend its citizens against repeated jihadist terror attacks to “segregation in the American South” or apartheid in South Africa is a favorite line of anti-Semitic attack by Islamists in their campaign to de-legitimize the Jewish state. Duss is serving as the Islamists’ useful idiot in repeating the outlandish charge.

Ben Smith also pointed to a recent article by Eric Alterman, a writer for CAP, accusing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of campaigning for war in Iran. In another example of AIPAC bashing cited by Smith, the ThinkProgress National Security reporter Eli Clifton claimed last August that “It would appear that AIPAC is now using the same escalating measures against Iran that were used before the invasion of Iraq.”

Even some progressives are pushing back against such irresponsible conspiracy theorist rhetoric. “There’s two explanations here – either the inmates are running the asylum or the Center for American Progress has made a decision to be anti-Israel,” said Josh Block, who is a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. “Either they can allow people to say borderline anti-Semitic stuff and to say things that are antithetical to the fundamental values of the Democratic party, or they can fire them and stop it.”

While CAP’s top officials did not respond directly to Politico regarding these charges, pro-Palestinian activists have approvingly noted CAP’s anti-Israel stand.  “What is actually happening is that the discourse that lot of people in the Palestine solidarity community and activists have been engaging in is starting to break down the walls of the Washington bubble,” said Ali Abunimah, a longtime activist and the co-founder of the site Electronic Intifada.

Josh Block elaborated on his charge of CAP’s “borderline” anti-Semitism in an e-mail quoted in the left-leaning Salon:

This kind of anti-Israel sentiment is so fringe it’s support by CAP is outrageous, but at least it is out in the open now — as is their goal – clearly applauded by revolting allies like the pro-HAMAS and anti-Zionist/One State Solution advocate Ali Abunumiah and those who accuse pro-Israel Americans of having “dual loyalties” or being “Israel-Firsters” – to shape the minds of future generations of Democrats. These are the words of anti-Semites, not Democratic political players.

Block is a progressive himself. However, his staunch defense of Israel, including a prior stint at AIPAC and his willingness to call out the extreme rhetoric against defenders of Israel appearing regularly in ThinkProgress, has earned him the enmity of other anti-Israel progressives. Free speech that departs from progressive-left orthodoxy is not tolerated in such circles, especially when Block decided to share his extensive documentation of  ThinkProgress writers’ extreme anti-Israel bias with the “dark” side – conservative journalists. That’s an act of apostasy worthy of banishment from the progressive echo chamber. As left-of-center commentator Greg Sargent noted in his blog post appearing on the Washington Post website, progressive organizations such as the Progressive Policy Institute, with which Block is now affiliated, are discussing severing all ties with the apostate.

To charge, as Block did, that CAP’s anti-Semitic rhetoric is “borderline” is really too kind to CAP. Its blogging arm ThinkProgress has gone much deeper into anti-Semitic and anti-Christian territory in its unrelenting campaign to paint all critics of Islamic ideology and sharia law as bigoted, hate-mongering “Islamophobes.”

CAP recently issued a report titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” which is nothing more than a 132-page diatribe whose stated objective is to “expose—and marginalize—the influence of the individuals and groups” that CAP claims are a part of an “Islamophobia network in America.”

ThinkProgress subsequently ran a series of self-righteous postings defending the Fear, Inc. report against all critics. Typical of the hard left, ThinkProgress‘ bloggers believe that anyone who does not see the world as they do is either stupid or bigoted.

The Fear, Inc. report drew an imaginary portrait of a multi-tentacle far-right “Islamophobic network” conspiracy of funders (some identified in the CAP report as donors to Jewish causes), “misinformation experts,” including the Hasidic Jew David Yerushalmi, and media outlets identified as pro-Israel or associated with Israel including this publication (which, CAP said, “gives an amplified voice to a cadre of fellow anti-Muslim bigots”) and the Middle East Media and Research Institute (whose “selective translations of Arab media,” CAP charged, “fan the flames of Islamophobia.”)

CAP threw into its fabricated conspiracy web “hate radio” shows, Fox News, and the Christian Broadcasting Network as examples of other Islamophobia enabling media outlets.

CAP’s Fear, Inc. report also went after what it called “validators” of Islamophobia such as former Muslim Nonie Darwish, who has dared to discuss openly her personal experience as a woman living under the yoke of misogynist sharia-based laws in Egypt for years before coming to the United States. Likewise, it condemned Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim and physician, whom the CAP report smeared as a “Muslim validator for Islamophobia propaganda.” The truth is that this courageous Muslim doctor has spoken out about the need for the Muslim community to look inward and reject the loud voices of the Islamist ideologues who would impose their rigid beliefs against freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and human dignity.

The report also castigated a Christian woman and founder of ACT! for America, Brigitte Gabriel. CAP’s hard left bomb-throwers accused Ms. Gabriel of engaging in “crude bigotry” and charged that she “validates the Islamophobia network’s manufactured fears and hate campaign directed against Muslims.”  The only fears and hate campaign being manufactured here are CAP’s own lies intended to vilify anyone who does not accept their dogma. The truth is that Ms. Gabriel experienced firsthand the Muslim persecution of the Christian minority in Lebanon where she grew up. She has called for “enlightened, educated and westernized Muslims in the community to begin a dialogue to discuss the possibility of reform in Islam just as Christianity and Judaism have been reformed.” CAP, on the other hand, denies that there is any such need for reform. It is guided by such Islamist organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American Islamic Relations, which the CAP report benignly described as a “civil rights group.”

Of course, the authors of CAP’s Fear, Inc. report did not seriously address the substance of the points raised by any of the critics of Islamism and sharia law, because the facts are not on CAP’s side. Instead, its authors packed the report with adjectives like “sinister,” “hateful,” “purposively deceptive,” “bigoted,” and “racist” to dismiss what the critics, relying on substantial research and evidence and, in some cases, their own personal experiences, have actually said in full context about the Islamist ideology and political-legal system.

After the Fear, Inc. report was issued, ThinkProgress‘ blogger pack circled like wolves to fend off legitimate criticisms of the report. They also carried on a vendetta against a broader circle of Jewish groups with which they disagreed, such as the non-partisan Simon Wiesenthal Center whose founder, Simon Wiesenthal, was a survivor of the Nazi death camps.

Jennifer Rubin, a right-of-center commentator who writes regularly for the Washington Post, posted a column December 11th on the Washington Post‘s website entitled “Simon Wiesenthal Center: Time to clean up the discourse.” She discussed CAP’s vicious blog assault on the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which one of its ThinkProgress bloggers, Ben Armbruster, called a “far-right” organization that had “basically called Obama a Nazi.” This was an outright lie, of course, and is emblematic of the ThinkProgress bloggers’ anti-Semitic, pro-Islamist mind-set, which its parent CAP sanctions.

Ironically, just two days before Rubin exposed Armbruster’s rant against the mainstream, non-partisan Simon Wiesenthal Center, an internationally recognized human rights organization devoted to advancing religious tolerance and combating anti-Semitism, Armbruster demanded that the Washington Post  retract an earlier post by Rubin, which Armbruster charged had “smeared CAP and its bloggers as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Israel.’” Sorry, but the shoe fits.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted a petition for a writ of certiorari to hear an appeal in the case of Arizona v. United States, in which key provisions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB 1070, were struck down as unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton. The 9th Circuit of Appeals upheld Bolton’s ruling last April.

Two of the blocked sections would make it a crime under state law for an undocumented immigrant to be present in the state, fail to register with the federal government and attempt to obtain work or to hold a job without governmental authorization. Another section mandates that law enforcement personnel ask about the immigration status of those they detain (for infractions unrelated to immigration) if there is reason to suspect the detainee may not be in the country legally. The fourth challenged provision allows for the warrantless arrests of individuals whom police officers have probable cause to believe have committed deportable offenses.

The 9th Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision to strike down these provisions on the grounds that they unconstitutionally invaded the U.S. government’s comprehensive immigration regulation authority under federal law.

Arizona has argued that SB 1070 aids the federal government in the enforcement of its immigration laws and directs “state law-enforcement officers to cooperate and communicate with federal officials regarding the enforcement of federal immigration law.” As a border state, Arizona has a particular interest in helping the federal government to enforce the law. According to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, 400,000 people live in Arizona illegally, and make up about 7 percent of the state’s workforce. She claims the number of illegal immigrants has increased by about 10,000 per year from 2000 to 2010, and “the federal efforts remain demonstrably inadequate.”

Nevertheless, the 9th Circuit appeals court rejected Arizona’s substantial state interest in helping to ensure effective enforcement of the federal immigration laws. It dismissed the idea that state efforts to facilitate federal enforcement or impose parallel prohibitions on conduct prohibited by federal immigration laws are an acceptable means to vindicate a state’s interest in protecting its citizens if the federal government does not want the state’s assistance.

Unlike the Supreme Court’s hearing of a constitutional challenge to Obamacare, in which it appears that Justice Elena Kagan does not intend to recuse herself even though she served as the Solicitor General when her office was considering litigation strategies to defend Obamacare in court, Justice Kagan is recusing herself in this case since the Obama administration’s decision to sue Arizona over SB 1070 occurred during her watch as Solicitor General. Exactly how she has distinguished the two situations remains unclear.

With Justice Kagan removing herself from the Arizona case, there is a possibility of a deadlock amongst the remaining eight Supreme Court justices, which would mean that the 9th Circuit decision striking down the key provisions of SB 1070 would stand as the final law on the matter. Thus, it will in all likelihood come down to what Justice Anthony Kennedy, frequently the swing vote on the Supreme Court, decides to do.

Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is being lauded in some Western media outlets as a moderate Muslim scholar and reformer who served as an inspiration for the freedom-fighters of the Arab Spring. The Egyptian-born cleric, who went into exile in Qatar decades ago and became a Qatari citizen, returned triumphantly to Cairo in February 2011 to address adoring crowds in Tahrir Square. He reappeared in Cairo last month on the eve of the Egyptian parliamentary elections.

In a December 8, 2011 puff piece on Qaradawi, the Financial Times fawned all over him as a moderate Muslim thinker who seeks to reconcile Islam with modern day democracy. The article opined that Qaradawi’s “pragmatic views on Islam and democracy could be a useful moderating guide for Arab societies.” The Financial Times article went on to say that Qaradawi is urging Islamist movements “to stick to a moderate, middle course.”

The Financial Times is not alone in its effusive praise of Sheikh Qaradawi. In writing about Qaradawi’s February 2011 speech in Tahrir Square, the New York Times claimed that he focused on “themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching… Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.”

What passes today for shabby, politically correct reporting at Western elite media outlets such as the Financial Times and the New York Times conveniently omits the extensive documented evidence from Qaradawi’s own words that he is the direct opposite of a moderate believer in democracy or a reformer. His language supporting the Arab Spring and the peoples’ aspirations for freedom is a phony facade of an evil man who manipulates Western terms such as “freedom and democracy” to cover his Islamist agenda. This is a man well-schooled in al-takeyya – the Islamic principle of lying to the “infidel.”

Even a cursory examination of Qaradawi’s speeches, sermons and writings meant for Muslim audiences reveals his true zealous belief in the supremacy of Islamic law, or sharia, as the basis for governing society. His own words demonstrate that he thinks the Nazi holocaust was “divine punishment” for the Jews and a good example for “believers” to follow, regards suicide bombing as an act of martyrdom, supports the Iranian fundamentalist Islamist theocracy, calls for prohibiting free expression which is critical of Islam, dismisses democracy based on self-government and man-made laws as completely incompatible with Islam, treats apostasy and homosexuality as capital offenses, and supports the beating of wives by their husbands.

1. Qaradawi’s Anti-Semitism and Call for Genocide Against the Jews:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers (January 2009 speech which aired on Al Jazeera).

The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah…. [Allah] will not allow these people [Jews] to continue to spread corruption in the land. We wait for the revenge of Allah to descend upon them, and Allah willing, it will be by our own hands (January 2009 “Gaza Victory Rally” in Qatar).

Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one (January 9, 2009 sermon which aired on Al-Jazeera).

2.  Qaradawi Supports Suicide Bombers, Including Women, as Martyrs:

I supported martyrdom operations. This is a necessary thing, as I told them in London. Give the Palestinians tanks, airplanes, and missiles, and they won’t carry out martyrdom operations. They are forced to turn themselves into human bombs, in order to defend their land, their honor, and their homeland (February 2010 interview with BBC Arabic).

[A] clear distinction has to be made here between martyrdom and suicide. Suicide is an act or instance of killing oneself intentionally out of despair, and finding no outlet except putting an end to one’s life. On the other hand, martyrdom is a heroic act of choosing to suffer death in the cause of Allah, and that’s why it’s considered by most Muslim scholars as one of the greatest forms of jihad… I think the committed Muslim women in Palestine have the right to participate and have their own role in jihad and to attain martyrdom (March 22, 2004 Fatwa appearing on Islamonline).

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is petitioning the United Nations to investigate alleged disenfranchisement of black and Latino voters in anticipation of next year’s presidential election. According to the NAACP, which issued a report on December 5, 2011 titled Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, more than a dozen states have passed laws aimed at unfairly restricting the constitutionally protected right of black and Hispanic voters to vote.

With the NAACP’s customary race-baiting hyperbole, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous charged:

It’s been more than a century since we’ve seen such a tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote. Historically, when voting rights are attacked, it’s done to facilitate attacks on other rights. It is no mistake that the groups who are behind this are simultaneously attacking very basic women’s rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and educational access for working people and minorities.

William Barber, a member of the NAACP’s national board, said the new state voting laws constituted the “most vicious, coordinated and sinister attack to narrow participation in our democracy since the early 20th century.”

The NAACP is sending its report to the United Nations. This Saturday it will be conducting a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally across from the UN’s New York headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which asks the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.” The NAACP is also said to be planning to send a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland to present its case before the UN Human Rights Council. What better forum for the NAACP to use to berate and try to embarrass the United States than the dysfunctional United Nations Human Rights Council, where  57.45% of the members are rated “Not Free” or only “Partly Free” by Freedom House?

We don’t have to imagine what this travesty of an international “human rights” organization will do with the report. Members with such stellar human rights records as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Cuba and China will have a field day trying to deflect attention from their own blatant denials of fundamental freedoms to their peoples by turning the United States into a racist oppressor.

Recall that in 2008 Dr. Doudou Diène, who was then the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Racism, went on a UN-paid junket across America to investigate charges of racism in the United States. His information-gathering meetings included officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the far-Left New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. He also met with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who is the leading advocate on the Supreme Court for using international norms and foreign law to interpret the United States Constitution.

It’s no surprise that the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Racism concluded in his final report that “racism and racial discrimination have profoundly and lastingly marked and structured American society.” He went on to say that the “historical, cultural and human depth of racism still permeates all dimensions of life of American society.”

The United Nations has no jurisdiction whatsoever to investigate how the sovereign governments of our nation’s fifty states choose to conduct elections in their states, least of all the UN Human Rights Council. Legitimate recourse for any alleged illegal voter restrictions should be through our own courts and political process, not an unaccountable dysfunctional United Nations body.

However, instead of pushing back at UN interference in our nation’s internal matters, the Obama administration has made things worse. It has conferred legitimacy on the Human Rights Council by deciding to submit its own self-examination of the U.S. human rights record to the scrutiny of the other Council members, including its core group of human rights abusers. Who did Hillary Clinton’s State Department consult when preparing the report? Groups such as the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Indeed, the Obama administration provided the NAACP with a convenient passage way to approach the UN body with charges of racism by our nation’s various states when the State Department did its own mea culpa over state immigration laws which the Obama administration vigorously opposes.

Yet when one looks at what the NAACP is actually complaining about, there is more smoke than fire. What we see are mostly good faith efforts of elected officials to foster an honest electoral process in their states, with requirements that are race-neutral.

The following is a table of alleged restrictive voting measures that is included in the NAACP’s report.

Let’s look beyond the NAACP’s loaded characterizations of the restrictions and take a look at some of its specific examples.

One example is Florida’s new requirements regarding third-party registration. The NAACP alleges that such requirements would “place restrictions on nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that conduct voter registration drives.” What they actually do is to simply require that third-party voter registration organizations register with the Division of Elections and provide the Division with certain information. The Division or Supervisor of Elections then makes voter registration forms available to third-party voter registration organizations and requires that such forms contain certain information identifying that organization. What the NAACP neglects to mention is that the prior law in Florida also required a third-party voter registration organization to name a registered agent in the state and submit certain required information to the Division of Elections. The new law provides for third party organizations to submit their information in electronic format and to turn over applications they collect to the Division or the Supervisor of Elections within 48 hours after the applicant completes the form or the next business day if the office is closed for that 48-hour period.

Barack Obama shamelessly pandered to Jewish donors last week at a New York City fund-raiser held in the private home of American Jewish Congress chairman Jack Rosen.

Omitting any mention of his speech last May in which he threw Israel under the bus, Obama assured the donors that “no ally is more important than the state of Israel.”

“I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration,” Obama added.

While Obama was busy wheedling money from the thirty or so Obama supporters who each paid at least $10,000 to listen to his self-congratulatory remarks, Obama administration officials were publicly attacking Israel with harsh verbal barbs.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying last Saturday, in remarks behind closed doors at the Saban Forum in Washington, that she feared for the future of Israel’s democracy and the rights of women in the Jewish state. How about she focuses on the virtual absence of any rights of women throughout the Muslim world, instead of bashing the only real functioning democracy in the Middle East?

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz called Clinton’s remarks “totally exaggerated,” according to Israeli media. “Israel is a living, breathing liberal democracy,” he said. Steinitz reportedly acknowledged that gender segregation was a problem in Israel, “but to claim there is a threat on Israeli democracy is a big stretch.”

One of the Clinton State Department ambassadors, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium and major Obama contributor, Howard Gutman, went much further in lashing out at Israel. He told a conference hosted by the European Jewish Union that Israel is to blame for growing Muslim anti-Semitism. “A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Gutman reportedly said, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

“A distinction should be made?” Does Gutman actually think there is a justifiable form of anti-Semitism resulting from a conflict that Muslim Arabs initiated in the first place?

Contrary to Gutman’s nonsensical remark, hatred of Jews has characterized the entire history of Islam. Here are just two examples from the Koran and the Sunna (the sayings and actions of Muhammed), cited by Islamists today in their relentless jihad against Jews:

• “Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends.” (Surah 5:51)

• “The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Moslems make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: ‘Oh Moslem, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’” (Sahih Bukhari 004.52.176)

The latter was a highlight of a pre-election rally co-sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood about ten days ago at Cairo’s most prominent mosque, the Al-Azhar mosque.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scolded Israel last Friday for isolating itself. He blamed the stalled negotiations with the Palestinians largely on Israel. “The problem right now is we can’t get ‘em to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences,” Panetta said.

Israel has offered repeatedly to engage in direct unconditional negotiations with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have refused to come to the table unless their set of demands is met first, even waiting until the last minute to commence direct negotiations while Israel’s settlement moratorium was still in effect. They also attempted to end-run direct negotiations by their gambit to obtain full United Nations member state status.

Don’t worry about what is going on currently in Egypt, Panetta also advised Israel.

However, in view of the Islamists’ major victories so far in Egypt’s parliamentary election cycle, Israel has very good reason to be worried. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party has amassed about 40 percent of the votes so far. The Salafis won about 25 percent. Together, the Islamists will control a dominant majority in Egypt’s first parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.

The Muslim Brotherhood is portrayed in the New York Times and other media outlets as a “moderate” alternative to the ultra-fundamentalist Salafis.  They may disagree about the extent to which sharia law will apply to all aspects of Egyptian life and how fast. But while their tactics and timetable may differ, they share the ultimate goal of establishing a caliphate, first in Egypt, then in as many Middle Eastern countries as possible, and finally world-wide. And they both want to see the destruction of the Jewish state.

“Christians and Jews are, for us, the kafir, unbelievers,” said Sheikh Adel el Ghihadi, one of the leaders of the Egyptian Salafi movement, last August. “We will prepare an Egyptian army capable of forming other Muslim armies, to whom Allah will assure victory. We will turn to him because Egypt is the flame that can light up the whole world under the auspices of His Prophet… We will fight for the religion: the Book in one hand and the sword in the other.”

Mustafa Mashhur, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from 1996 until 2002, called for jihad against Israel in his 1995 book entitled Jihad Is the Way:

Honorable brothers have achieved Shahada (Martyrdom) on the soil of beloved Palestine, during the years 47′ and 48′, [while] in their Jihad against the criminal, thieving, gangs of Zion. The Imam and Shahid (Martyr) Hassan Al-Banna is considered as a Shahid (Martyr) of Palestine, even if he was not killed on its soil.

Not much has really changed in the last 25 years, except for the Brotherhood’s attempt at an image make-over to appeal to a broader cross-section of the Egyptian electorate and to Western leaders and opinion-makers.

For Western ears, Muslim Brotherhood leaders today say they do not intend to jettison the 1979 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, but may wish to renegotiate some items. However, during the early stages of the Arab Spring, Mohamed Ghanem, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, told the Egyptian people to be “prepared for war against Israel.”

Israel has taken risks for peace, including giving up the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for relative peace with its Egyptian neighbor. Peace is now threatened by the rise of Islamists to power in Egypt and by the Muslim Brotherhood’s offshoot Hamas, which continues to threaten Israeli civilians with rockets launched from the Gaza Strip that Israel unilaterally left six years ago. And, of course, there is Iran, whose government has been praised by a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader earlier this year as the model for good governance in Egypt.

Instead of crowing about his fanciful support for Israel, Obama should take his head out of the proverbial sand and truly stand by our closest ally in the Middle East.

Iran’s economy runs on oil. On paper, at least, Iran would appear to be highly vulnerable to sanctions targeted at its oil export business.

Iran is the second largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (“OPEC”), and the fourth largest crude oil exporter. Iran has a 2.2 million barrel-a-day export business. It earned $56 billion in the first seven months of 2011, according to U.S. Energy Department estimates.

According to the Heritage Foundation, Iran’s oil export revenues provide about 85 percent of its government finance. Thus, aiming economic sanctions directly at Iran’s oil exports could land a serious blow to the Iranian regime’s sources of funding for its nuclear enrichment and missile programs.

The question is whether such sanctions are likely to be broad-based enough in terms of participants and happen in time to have the desired impact of crippling Iran’s nuclear ambitions, without causing a massive blowback to the global economy.

Nothing meaningful can be expected from the UN Security Council, where Russia and China will veto any further ramp up in sanctions beyond the four ineffective rounds of sanctions against Iran approved by the Security Council between 2006 and 2010. Thus, only bilateral and regional sanctions are possible.

U.S. sanctions already prohibit virtually all trade with Iran, except for limited activities “intended to benefit the Iranian people” such as humanitarian aid. The U.S. has just recently expanded its sanctions to include companies that help Iran’s oil and petrochemical industries.  However, this will have only indirect effects, assuming that Iran does not find ways to evade the sanctions as it has done before. Since the United States imports no oil from Iran, and has not done so for some time, future American oil purchase decisions will have no direct market effect on Iran’s oil revenues.

The main leverage that the U.S. has is a blunt financial instrument – a cut-off of any firms doing business with Iran’s central bank. Iran conducts its vast oil export business through its central bank, linking its national oil company with its oil customers. If the United States were to follow Britain’s example and take steps to isolate Iran’s central bank from the global financial markets by imposing sanctions on any company or government that deals with the central bank, Iran’s ability to get paid for its oil would be severely hampered. So far, however, the Obama administration has not gone that far because it fears disruptions to the global oil market, causing prices to spike at a time when the global economy is already sputtering.

Assuming the Obama administration continues to dither on cutting off Iran’s central bank, the only way to hurt Iran’s oil trade short of military action is through the decisions of Iran’s major oil customers to look elsewhere for oil.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for any bold decisions to cut off current purchases of Iranian oil, however. So far, it’s virtually all talk and no action.

The European Union governments agreed on December 1st to examine sanctions against Iran’s energy sector. However, no decision is likely until sometime in January.

According to Reuters, EU members take 450,000 barrels per day of Iranian oil, which accounts for about 18 percent of Iran’s exports.

“We need a common position of all European Union member states,” Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told Reuters when asked about a possible ban.

France, Britain, and Germany are among the EU countries that are reported to be favorably disposed to the idea of a ban. However, other EU members are balking, including – no surprise – Italy and Greece. Italy, in fact, was the largest oil importer from Iran in Europe last year, purchasing 10 percent of Iran’s exports. Perhaps Italy’s dependence on Iranian oil will decrease once Libyan oil comes back on line, but Italy’s economy is too fragile at the present time to risk losing any important source of energy.

Shouting “Death to England” and throwing in condemnations of the United States and Israel for good measure, members of the Basij militia stormed the British embassy compound and a diplomatic residence in Tehran on November 29th, causing significant damage. The rioters reportedly carried banners bearing the name of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, which runs the overseas operations of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Iranian security forces did little at first to stop the assault. The militants reportedly ransacked offices, burned the British flag, smashed embassy windows, and set at least one vehicle on fire. Militants also surrounded several British staff members. The police finally stepped in to quell the protest before it was allowed to spiral completely out of control.

The attack by the Basij militants occurred just two days after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a speech to thousands of Basijis from across the country during a meeting held in Tehran.

The next day Khamenei lashed out at Britain directly for unilaterally imposing the one sanction that will likely have a serious impact on the Iranian economy – requiring that all British credit and financial institutions cease trading with Iran’s banks, including the severing of all contacts with the Iranian Central Bank.

Addressing Iranian naval commanders, Khamenei said that Britain has a history of humiliating nations but that the Islamic Revolution resulted in Iran “single-handedly standing up to the biggest arrogant [powers] and imperialists and crushing their will.”

In addition to Khamenei’s denunciations of Britain, Iran’s parliament approved a retaliatory measure to expel the British ambassador and downgrade Iran’s diplomatic relations with Britain. All this helped to set the stage for the next day’s riot.

Referring to the militants as “students,” Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani said that the “students’” action against the British Embassy was a symbol of the public opinion of Iranians,” in remarks to reporters the day after the mob attack, according to the Tehran Times. Larijani’s expression of support for the militants gives away the lie to the Iranian foreign ministry’s official expression of “regret.”

The British government decided that it had enough of the Iranian regime. It ordered the immediate closure of the Iranian embassy in London and closed its embassy in Tehran. In announcing the decision, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that “If any country makes it impossible for us to operate on their soil, they cannot expect to have a functioning embassy here.” While technically not a complete break in diplomatic relations with Iran, Hague described his government’s action as reducing relations with Iran to the “lowest level.”