Today, UN Ambassador Susan Rice explained to Jake Tapper of ABC News that America wasn’t “impotent” in the Middle East. What was her proof?
Let’s look at what’s happened. It’s quite the opposite of being impotent. We have worked with the governments in Egypt. President Obama picked up the phone and talked to President Morsi in Egypt. And as soon as he did that, the security provided to our personnel in our embassies dramatically increased.
Tapper rightly pointed out that for two days, Egyptian President Morsi, an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American Muslim Brotherhood leader, said nothing. But Rice continued:
President Morsi has been out repeatedly and said that he condemns this violence. He’s called off — and his people have called off any further demonstrations and have made very clear that this has to stop.
If this is demonstration of American influence and power in the Middle East, we’re in serious trouble. Far from Morsi taking American cues this week, President Obama took Morsi’s cues. Morsi was the tip of the spear during the Arab Spring; now he’s dictating the politics of the Islamist Uprising. This week, he told Obama to jump; Obama asked how high.
It began with the attacks on the Cairo embassy themselves. The Cairo embassy tweeted before the attacks, upon hearing rumors that they were coming, that they condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” After the attacks commenced, the embassy tweeted, “This morning’s condemnation (issued before protest began) still stands.”
For two days after this, President Morsi said nothing. President Obama did nothing about it.
Meanwhile, it was revealed that while President Obama would not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of this month in New York, he would be getting together with the tight-lipped Islamist fanatic Egyptian president.
When Morsi finally did speak, he informed President Obama that while he condemned the assaults on the US embassy and would up security, he wanted President Obama to “to put an end to such behavior.” He was referring, of course, to the infamous YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims,” which supposedly spurred the riots – although it is now clear that the videos had virtually nothing to do with the riots, or the attack on our consulate in Libya that ended with the murder of our ambassador.
This was Morsi saying jump. And President Obama predictably asked how high. First, he tried to tell YouTube and Google to remove the video from the internet. Then, when YouTube and Google refused, the filmmaker behind “Innocence of Muslims” found himself being questioned by federal probation officers.
We still live in a First Amendment country. But you wouldn’t know it to hear Obama and his spokespeople, particularly from the State Department, talk. Today, Rice termed “Innocence of Muslims” a “heinous,” “offensive,” “reprehensible,” “disgusting” piece of work that hadn’t been endorsed by the US government. As for the attacks on our embassies? Well, she just said there was “no excuse” for them. From her language, it’s clear that Rice was more upset about the YouTube video than she was about the attacks.
Why? Because the Obama administration must remain focused on the video. The moment they acknowledge that Americans have First Amendment rights, and that the video and its content are utterly irrelevant, they have to face the sad truth that it isn’t a video that caused all of this – believe it or not, YouTube and anti-Islam sentiment existed before last Tuesday – but the Obama administration’s gutless and spineless foreign policy.
While Obama keeps trotting out spokespeople to claim that the American hand remains at the steering wheel in the Middle East, it’s clear that we don’t. We’ve handed over the wheel to Muslim Brotherhood radicals like Muhammed Morsi. And now we’re taking cues from them.
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