Cindy Simpson @ American Thinker:
Some brave thinkers recognize that beneath the intrigue surrounding the Benghazi tragedy lie the traces of something much larger and far more dangerous.
Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy hosted a panel on November 13, 2012 to discuss “Benghazi: US Foreign Policy and the Threat of Sharia Doctrine.” Guest panelists included Dr. Andrew Bostom,Diana West, and Stephen Coughlin. The event was taped in its entirety and is available here.
The information offered by the experts suggests, to put it very simply, that the Middle East is rapidly unifying and heading toward a strict application of sharia; that sharia is a totalitarian form of government utterly incompatible with American ideas of freedom and liberty; and, as Diana West noted, U.S. policy is “making the world safe for sharia,” as opposed to keeping the world, and specifically America, safe. In Benghazi, that policy proved fatal.
The Center for Security Policy panelists aren’t the only thinkers to question whether this administration has an affinity for sharia. In his article “Obama knew: Did ideological soft spot for Sharia keep US government from protecting Benghazi consulate?,” American Spectator‘s Jeffrey Lord suggests that the highest levels of the Obama administration are “in some fashion simpatico with a totalitarian ideology.”
That “ideological soft spot” may explain why President Obama “can’t,” as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher declared, “utter the words ‘Muslim terror attack.'” And far worse than words, as Frank Gaffney noted: “The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists … [it] has been arming them[.]”
Of course, the identification of the parties responsible for orchestrating the tone and content of the misleading information relayed to the American people in the aftermath of the attack is a serious issue that must be pursued. In addition, the Petraeus-Broadwell affair revealed other important security concerns.
But those very valid points still cloud the most foundational questions — what were our ambassador and the CIA doing in Benghazi, and what was the underlying policy that guided their actions? And further, we must ascertain whether or not our government’s “See No Sharia failure of imagination” renders it unable to competently assess the threat to our security.
Decades earlier, another courageous thinker, Whittaker Chambers, discovered a similar phenomenon to Benghazigate when he dared to reveal the identity of a prominent member of the Communist spy network, Alger Hiss, an official in FDR’s State Department. In his famous autobiography, Witness, Chambers wrote: