The West, particularly the U.S., is facing a formidable enemy in radical Islam. But sometimes, we are our own worst enemy. Posted on 04/15/2012 10:21:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
The West, particularly the U.S., is facing a formidable enemy in radical Islam. But sometimes, we are our own worst enemy.
It seems our leaders’ decisions, and our national will, sometimes oppose our best interests.
The most egregious case in recent days was President Obama’s hot mic incident. Last Monday, Obama was overheard asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for “space” on the contested issue of the missile defense. After he wins re-election, Obama implied, he would offer the Russians “more flexibility” in negotiations. Presumably, once he’s elected for the final time, he won’t be accountable to the American people and can negotiate away our defensive strength.
Another case of “cutting of our nose to spite our face” was the Obama administration’s recent rejection of the Keystone Pipeline. The pipeline would have delivered approximately half-a-million barrels per day of oil from Canada to the U.S. That’s half-a-million barrels we could have bought from an ally instead of the Middle East.
For many decades, oil has been our national addiction. And Islamic countries have been more than happy to be our “dealer.” The oil revenue for OPEC nations, for example, has grown from $50 billion in 1974, to $200 billion in 1980, to $847 billion in 2011.
The U.S. is the largest importer of oil, much of it from volatile parts of the world. But we cannot blame President Obama alone for an indifference to this dangerous situation. Every American president since Richard Nixon has promised to move us toward energy independence. But despite obvious reasons to do so, our dependency only grows.
In my recently-released book, Blindsided: The Radical Islamic Conquest, I explain the mindset of Islamic radicalism and its aim to spread Islam through conquest. Muslims have historically achieved conquest through war. But in recent times, they’ve viewed oil as a complimentary method.
As it relates to oil, I write in Blindsided:
This represents a staggering flow of wealth from the Western nations to the Arab world. We have created a situation which may prove to be our undoing. We show no signs of lessening our dependence on foreign oil, even though we have enormous undeveloped petroleum reserves within our own borders or just off-shore. We show no inclination to explore them. Yet we know that OPEC nations have the ability to generate an "oil crisis" that can trigger a massive upheaval in our society and our economy.
Muslims regard economic success as a sign of Allah’s blessing. Because of that, even moderate Muslims often won’t disown radical leaders. For example, although the Ayatollah Khomeini’s excesses during the Iranian revolution embarrassed moderate Muslims, many of them saw the economic success under his leadership as proof of God’s pleasure.
Oil is regarded as a material gift for Islam to achieve world superiority. It is a gift—and a weapon.
J.B. Kelly, author of Arabia, the Gulf and the West, has written:
. . . Arabs see the oil weapons as a gift sent by God to redress the balance between Christendom and Islam. It enables them to act as though the might and grandeur of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates has been restored, to lay the Christian West under tribute to the Muslim East, and to fulfill the destiny which God in his infinite wisdom has ordained for those to whom he has chosen to reveal the one true faith.
The use of oil as a weapon is not a mere theory. After the Yom Kippur War, an angry OPEC imposed an oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe as revenge for their support of Israel. Oil prices increased 366 percent. After the Iranian Revolution, prices doubled. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they skyrocketed again.
But that’s not their only leverage. Oil countries invest much of their wealth in Great Britain, Europe, and the U.S., often by hiding their identity through multiple corporate layers. The massive Arab investment in our economy provides a far more effective way of manipulating our foreign policy than we realize, especially now that Islamists control several of those governments.
In Blindsided, I write:
Oil fuels the engine of the Western economy. But oil is also a weapon of jihad. The goal of jihad is to defeat Christianity, to collapse the "Crusader nation," and to bring about the subjugation and surrender of the West—and oil is a potent weapon in that struggle. One of the great ironies of our age is that the very oil that runs our economy may ultimately fund our destruction.
Eventually, we must face our enemy—the one abroad, and the one in the mirror. We cannot keep our heads tucked in Middle Eastern sand forever. We will have to face the reality of Islam. And we will have to face our culpability in emboldening Islamic power.
A moment’s reflection by any intelligent person shows that the West is dumping tons of money into the Arab world because of our oil policy. This nation does many idiotic things but supplying our enemies with money to buy the rope that hangs us is near the top of those actions.
Probably worst than the fact that Obama’s energy policy is causing high energy price, is that much of the money ends up financing our enemy.
I believe not only do we need to drill baby drill, but encourage the use of CNG vehicles and natural gas to liquids conversion since we have large reserves of nature gas that have become available thru horizontal drilling and multiple stage fracking.
[This represents a staggering flow of wealth from the Western nations to the Arab world. We have created a situation which may prove to be our undoing.]
Thus I bought and installed my first Solar panel circa 2003.
Bush’s fault.
And the Good-Ol-SaudiBoy’s riding the Petro-Jackwagon can Kiss My American Arse.
Oil is the least of our problems..
Washington D.C. is invaded by bad people..
Maybe critical mass of them has been achieved..
Without Newt they may never be dislodged from their lairs..
Hard to say but “somebody” nuking D.C. might be good for the country..
Will the muzzies do it?.. Muzzies are right twice a day like a broken clock..
Agreed.
“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.” ~ Ronald Reagan, from his first inaugural speech as governor of California, January 5, 1967
Ronald Reagan’s warning about losing our freedoms echoes down through a generation of lost momentum and squandered opportunity.
We now have the most ignorant electorate in the history of American elections. I believe we have the most corrupt government and media our country has ever seen.
I believe that Newt was the one leader that could have turned our country away from the abyss, intelligently and quickly.
It is abundantly clear that not enough folks shared my beliefs.... and far too many lacked the courage to forgive and look beyond the sins in a mans past and into the promise of a brighter future. That is certainly a free choice and a personal choice.... and as it is with all choices, there will be consequences.
In any case, Americans will get the country it apparently wants and a country it so richly deserves. We will not have lost our country because it was taken from us, we will have lost her because we simply gave it all away.
A storm is coming.... hide or learn to dance in the rain.
I would have voted for Newt.
At this rate (science, U.S. energy resource developments, global energy resource developments, “fossil” and otherwise, and global energy markets), and provided we can send Obama back to Chicago, the Middle East is and has been becoming, and will continue to become less important, not more, in terms of U.S. energy resources.
While still significant, it (the Middle East) no longer represents the majority of U.S. energy imports and the entire western hemisphere, north and south continues to grow as sources of U.S. energy imports, not to mention the growth of U.S. domestic sources themselves.
At the least, the author is behind the times.
A question all RINOs most democrats and a good number of patriots are afraid to ask “IS”...
Q: Do we have a givernment NOW that reflects the American people.?. or are the American people as corrupt generally as the givernment is?..
Occams Razor says.. YES!.. America may be the New Sodom..
Obama (and his minions) may be THE SALT!...
Happily these folks are so backward they use the money to scheme against each other or just to buy shiny things.
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