The Year 2011 Was The Year That Anti-American Conservative Talking Points About Obama's Foreign Policy Crumbled

The Year 2011 Was The Year That Anti-American Conservative Talking Points About Obama's Foreign Policy Crumbled

Since President Obama took office, right-wing (conservative) media have argued that his foreign policy is making the United States less safe and is bent on attacking Israel. Those attacks have continued in 2011, even as the Obama administration has overseen the death of Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki, repeatedly supported Israel, and been praised by Israeli leaders.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama Is Making The U.S. Less Safe

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama's Actions In Libya Were Incoherent And Dangerous For Israel

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama Is Anti-Israel And His Administration Is Anti-Semitic

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama's Speech On Israeli-Palestinian Peace Based On '67 Borders With Agreed Swaps Condoned "Potential Genocide"

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama Is Supporting "Intifada" Against Israel By Restating U.S. Policy Regarding Settlements
RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama Is Making The U.S. Less Safe

Since Obama Took Office, Right-Wing Media Have Repeatedly Suggested That He Is Weak On Terror And Not Serious About Defending America From Terrorism Threats.

REALITY: Obama Administration Oversaw The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden And Other Terrorist Leaders

    [The New York Times, 5/2/11]

Obama Authorized The Operation That Resulted In The Death Of Osama Bin Laden. Following the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Washington Post reported that the "surgical" special forces operation that resulted in the terrorist leader's death was authorized by President Obama on Friday, April 29 after months of intelligence gathering, and was carried out early the following Monday morning (local time) as a small force of elite American troops descended on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. According to the Post, the U.S. "did not share any intelligence with foreign governments, including Pakistan's."

Obama Ordered Drone Strike That Killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, An American-Born Al Qaeda Leader. Reuters reported on September 30:

    The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on Friday by a U.S. drone strike is the culmination of two years of extensive U.S. efforts to track down the American-born member of al Qaeda and put him out of action.

Under Obama, FBI And DEA Agents Foiled Alleged Iranian Plot To Assassinate Saudi Ambassador To The U.S. ABC News reported on October 11:

    FBI and DEA agents have disrupted a plot to commit a "significant terrorist act in the United States" tied to Iran, federal officials told ABC News today.


Numerous Other Terrorist Leaders Have Been Killed During Obama's Presidency. In a September 30 blog post, ABC's Jake Tapper compiled a list of senior terrorist leaders killed during Obama's presidency. From Tapper's post:

    Earlier this month officials confirmed that al Qaeda's chief of Pakistan operations, Abu Hafs al-Shahri, was killed in Waziristan, Pakistan.

    In August, 'Atiyah 'Abd al-Rahman,  the deputy leader of al Qaeda was killed.

    In June, one of the group's most dangerous commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri,  was killed in Pakistan. In Yemen that same month, AQAP senior operatives Ammar al-Wa'ili, Abu Ali al-Harithi, and Ali Saleh Farhan were killed. In Somalia, Al-Qa'ida in East Africa (AQEA) senior leader Harun Fazul was killed.

    Administration officials also herald the recent U.S./Pakistani joint arrest of Younis al-Mauritani  in Quetta.

    Going back to August 2009, Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan leader Baitullah Mahsud was killed in Pakistan.

    In September of that month, Jemayah Islamiya operational planner Noordin Muhammad Top was killed in Indonesia, and AQEA planner Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was killed in Somalia.

    Then in December 2009 in Pakistan, al Qaeda operational commanders Saleh al-Somali and 'Abdallah Sa'id were killed.

    In February 2010, in Pakistan,  Taliban deputy and military commander Abdul Ghani Beradar was captured; Haqqani network commander Muhammad Haqqani was killed; and Lashkar-e Jhangvi leader Qari Zafar was killed.

    In March 2010, al Qaeda operative Hussein al-Yemeni was killed in Pakistan, while senior Jemayah Islamiya operative Dulmatin -- accused of being the mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombings -- was killed during a raid in Indonesia.

    In April 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq leaders Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were killed.

    In May, al Qaeda's number three commander, Sheik Saeed al-Masri was killed.

    In June 2010 in Pakistan, al Qaeda commander Hamza al-Jawfi was killed. [Political Punch, 9/30/11, via ABCNews.com]

RIGHT-WING MEDIA CLAIM: Obama's Actions In Libya Were Incoherent And Dangerous For Israel

REALITY: With U.S., NATO Support, Libyans Overthrew Gadhafi      

Wash. Post: Libyan Rebels Captured, Killed Gadhafi Following "Unprecedented NATO Air Campaign." The Washington Post reported on October 20:

    Former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi was killed Thursday after being seized in a sewage tunnel in his home town -- the final triumph for pro-democracy fighters who have struggled for eight months to take control of the country.

    Gaddafi's death came on a day of intense military activity in Sirte, the last loyalist holdout in Libya, where his supporters had fended off better-armed revolutionaries for weeks. Before his capture, a U.S. drone and French fighter jets fired on a large, disorganized convoy leaving the city that he appears to have been in. It was not clear whether the airstrikes hit Gaddafi's vehicles, NATO officials said.


RIGHT-WING CONSERVATIVE MEDIA CLAIM: Obama Is Anti-Israel And His Administration Is Anti-Semitic

REALITY: Obama Has Stood By Israel And Lobbied Against Palestinian Statehood At The UN

    [WhiteHouse.gov, 9/21/11]

Obama Declared His Opposition To Palestinian Statehood Bid At The UN

Obama: "Peace Will Not Come Through Statements And Resolutions At The U.N." The New York Times reported on September 21:

    President Obama declared his opposition to the Palestinian Authority's bid for statehood through the Security Council on Wednesday, throwing the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement even as he hailed what he called the democratic aspirations that have taken hold throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Has Repeatedly Praised Obama

Netanyahu On Obama's Opposition To A Unilaterally-Declared Palestinian State: "I Think This Is A Badge Of Honor And I Want To Thank You For Wearing That Badge Of Honor." From a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

Netanyahu  "Offered A Special Thank You" To Obama For Helping To Free Israelis Detained In Cairo. From a Jerusalem Post article:

    Israel will continue to adhere to the peace treaty with Egypt, which serves the interest of both countries, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Saturday night, at the end of a dramatic 24-hours during which an Egyptian mob laid siege to Israel's embassy in Cairo.

    All of Israel's emissaries to Cairo -- including six security guards who were holed up behind a metal door in the embassy and extracted by Egyptian commandos -- returned to Israel on Saturday, with the exception of one diplomat who will remain to represent Israel in the Egyptian capital.

    Netanyahu, in a televised announcement on Saturday night, offered a special thank you to US President Barack Obama who "said he would do everything he could" to extricate the six security guards, "and did.

Netanyahu "Expressed His Deep Appreciation" For U.S. Funding For Missile Defense System For Israel. From an April 18 Agence France-Presse article:

Former Israeli Prime Minister And Current Defense Minister Ehud Barak: "I Can Hardly Remember A Better Period Of ... American Support" For Israel Than "Right Now." From the August 3 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren:


A Majority Of Jewish Israelis Have A Favorable View Of Obama

Brookings: "A Majority (54%) Of Israeli Jews Polled In 2011 Expressed A Favorable View Of [Obama]." A "2011 Public Opinion Poll of Jewish and Arab Citizens of Israel" by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy found that a "majority" of Israeli Jews support Obama:

Just another year in which the deeply anti-American movement known as conservatism has the nerve to wrap its lies and Anti-American agenda in the flag and the Bible to deceive and mislead the American people. It is time for real Americans to stand up and push back at this dangerous anti-democracy political radicals known as conservative Republicans.

The Norway Christian Conservative Terrorist and The Tea Baggers

The Norway Christian Conservative Terrorist and The Tea Baggers

The revelation by CNN that Norwegian right wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik kept a diary in which he obsessed about the dangers of cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and the “Islamification” of Europe will remind many Americans of the tactics of our own right wing (only these themes have been taken up by people much more mainstream in the US than Breivik is in Norway!) The movement to ban the shariah, the castigation of a progressive income tax as “Marxist,” the condemnation of multiculturalism as a threat to Western values, are all themes commonly heard in the US Tea Party and in the right wing of the Israel lobbies.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that anyone who hits these themes is a terrorist in waiting or supports violence.

But here is the reason for which such rhetoric is dangerous and can easily lead to social violence.

It is black and white, allowing no nuance. Immigration is not a smooth process, and is attended with problems in some cases. The history of the United States, an immigrant society, suggests that whatever the problems are, they are not insuperable. But Breivik saw Muslim immigration in particular as a threat to the very identity of Europe. That is, if the immigration from the Middle East were allowed to continue, then ultimately there would be no Europe, just a big Iran on all sides of the Mediterranean. Moreover, he imagined this process of Islamification as happening very quickly.

Breivik’s thinking is not new under the sun. Protestant Nativists of the “Native American” and later “Know-Nothing” (i.e. secret society) movement in the 1830s through 1850s in the United States felt exactly the same way about Catholic immigrants to the US. America wouldn’t be America if this went on. Their values were inherently incompatible with the Constitution. Their loyalties were to an anti-modern foreign court dedicated to reinforcement of political and intellectual tyranny. The hordes of them would take over the country before too long. The combination of black-and-white thinking and a conviction that undesirable change is coming very rapidly often provokes violence. Brian Porter’s When Nationalism Learned to Hate makes the point about Poland, that peaceful democratic processes depend crucially on patience and a conviction that the future can be won. When members of a movement become impatient and believe that the situation could quickly and unalterably shift against them, they are much more likely to turn to violence.

Catholic immigrants to the US, like Muslim immigrants to Europe, cannot in fact be characterized in a black and white way. Catholics in the contemporary US are politically and socially diverse, but on the whole are more socially liberal than evangelical Protestants. That is, if the Know-Nothings were afraid of an anti-Enlightenment religious movement, it would have been to their own, Protestant ranks, that they should have looked.

Likewise, making a black-and-white division between “Christian” Europe and “Islam” is frankly silly. The European continent is itself a fiction (it is geologically contiguous with North Africa, and there is no eastern geographical feature that divides it from Afro-Asia). Islam has been the religion of millions of Europeans over the past 1400 years, whether in Umayyad Spain, Arab Sicily, or Ottoman Eastern Europe, and Muslim contributions to European advances are widely acknowledged.

As for contemporary Muslims in Europe, they are diverse. Overwhelmingly, e.g., Parisian Muslims say that they are loyal to France. About half of the Turks in Germany are from the Alevi sect, a kind of folk Shiism, and most of those are not very religious and politically are just social democrats (oh, the horror of Breivik’s nightmare– Muslim progressives in Europe!) That the few hundred thousand Muslims in Spain (pop. 45 mn.) , or the 4 million in Turkey (5 percent of the population) could effect a revolution in European affairs of the sort Breivik fears is frankly absurd, especially since Muslims are not a political bloc who agree with one another about politics and society. They are from different countries and traditions. Many do not have full citizenship or voting rights, most of the rest are apolitical. But even if they became a substantial proportion of the population, they would be unlikely to change Europe’s way of doing things that much.

Breivik, of course, also exercised black-and-white thinking about the left of center currents in Europe, amalgamating them all to Marxism, presumably of a Soviet sort, and seeing them as taking over. In fact, ironically, it is parties and rhetoric that Breivik would have approved of that are making the most rapid strides in Europe. Right wing parties that would once have been pariahs have been power brokers in Sweden and Finland, and Nicolas Sarkozy has borrowed so much rhetoric from the LePens that some accuse him of legitimizing them.

Worrying about the impact of immigration is not pernicious. Opposing leftist political ideas is everyone’s right in a democracy. Disagreeing over religion is natural.

But when you hear people talking about lumping all these issues together; when you hear them obliterating distinctions and using black-and-white rhetoric; when you hear them talk of existential threats, and above all when you see that they are convinced that small movements that they hate are likely to have an immediate and revolutionary impact, then you should be afraid, be very afraid. That is when extremism learns to hate, and turns to violence.

Democracy depends on a different kind of rhetoric. Healthy politics is about specific programs, not about conspiracy theories as to what underlies someone’s commitment to a program. Most Americans don’t want people to die because of not being able to afford health care. Lambasting that sentiment as tyrannical Bolshevism is a recipe for social conflict.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous billionaires, Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers prominent among them, have honed their propaganda skills in the media and public life. The promotion of hate, panic, and fear, especially if it is tied to specific political, ethnic and religious groups, always risks violence.

The real message of Breivik is that we should all take a deep breath and step back from the precipice.

Whatever they're calling themselves - conservatives, tea partiers, tea baggers, fundamentalist Christians - the radical Right is the same old radical Right. Where would they be without their over blown fears, the paranoia, the reactionary hatred toward anyone who is not one of them. How much have right-wing conservatives in the U.S. learned from the right-wing conservative terrorist in Norway - probably nothing. The Right could not survive without its rabid nationalism and reactionary politics. Case in point - Fox Juxtaposes Norwegian Terrorist Attack, NYC Islamic Center

Friday night on The O'Reilly Factor, guest host Laura Ingraham did a brief report on the terrorist attacks that killed dozens of people in Norway. She began by saying, "In the 'Back of the Book' segment tonight, two deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists." She went on to describe the attacks, which involved a bombing in Oslo and a mass shooting.

Ingraham then immediately transitioned into a segment on Park51, the planned Islamic community center near the World Trade Center, by saying, "In the meantime, in New York City, the Muslims who want to build the mosque at Ground Zero scored a huge legal victory. A Manhattan judge dismissed a lawsuit by former New York City firefighter Timothy Brown, who was trying to stop construction of the mosque. Bill O'Reilly spoke with a lawyer for the Muslim developers yesterday."

The Anti-American Fox News could nto wait for evidence. There was an act of terror so it must be the people that makes them wet their beds at night - radical Muslims. It turned out to be a Christian Conservative.