As Tunisia was exploding with texts and Tweets, Tunisian cab driver picked up the lady I love in Chicago's Gold Coast. The cabbie remarked, "This is Historic! I came to America because I could not make a living in Tunis and now with technology thousands of my people are making a change."
Thousands of people have Tweeted the call for change across the Middle East. Egypt, long an American ally is broiling. Yeman, where Islamist terrorists launched the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and established training camps for Al Quaeda, is bursting with protest. Among the thousands of people - not the first wave of protestors - the enemies of man lurk to pounce on power.
Power is what this is all about: political power for the Marxist Islamists. Once the wave of protests begin the cobweb creatures of control scurry out and toss bombs and bricks and bullets. The subsequent crackdowns ensure that the Whole World Watches.
This is Tehran 1979 all over again. President Obama is of the very same intellectual mind-set as Jimmy Carter -empty platitudes eclipse policy and statesmanship.
Thus it is all about The First Person in Chief, "When I was in Cairo, shortly after I was elected President, I said that all governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion," Obama added. "That is the single standard by which the people of Egypt will achieve the future they deserve." Always.
Last evening, President Obama all but tossed Hosni Mubarak to the Muslim Brotherhood - a clique of anti-Western fanatics that has assassinated with impunity and carefully managed a public relations enterprise that British Petroleum could have used in the recent Gulf Oil Spill. Since 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has employed Fascism in its pre-WWII anti-British Campaigns and morphed Soviet Communism under Gamal Naser to wrest the Suez Canal in 1956 and melded Islam with International Marxism and Terrorism from the constant warfare with Israel and the West into this terrible and bloody Millennium.
In 1979, I watched the over throw of the Shah of Iran via the old timey Network News (CBS,NBC,ABC) and saw President Carter, for whom I worked to become President, dither and mouse the wave of events that brought a Theocratic Despotism and all of the slaughter of the democratic demonstrators who actually toppled the Shah - a louse of the first order. Dr. Carter's Advisers were Ramsey Clark types* - American Navel Gazers who wallow in collective guilt and flagellate scorn on every aspect of the American and Western way of life. These are the tweedy mopes who actually find poignancy in the deconstructive and divisive yowlings of Noam Chomsky and dimmer bulbs like Bill Ayers ( who has made frequent visits to Cairo on behalf of Hamas with his odious life partner Bernardine Dohrn - imagine that) and Ward Churchill. Policy in Education trumped scholarship and esoteric Marxist rhetoric ended discourse in the last thirty years.
Trendy DeConstructionists and semiotic totalitarians* ( homage to Gary Saul Morson NU Tolstoy scholar and Slavic languages expert)replaced serious humanists and the canon became as watered down as Miller Beer.
However, the dangerous coffee-table scribes are academics with genuine talents like Edward Said. I studied Said in graduate school at Loyola of Chicago in the 1980's under Dr. Alan Frantzen. Frantzen was respectfully dismissive of literary text critiques that deconstruct meaning in a book in order to control dialog among people. Northwestern University Tolstoy expert, Gary Saul Morson, calls such clever and fashionable charlatans 'semiotic totalitarians.'
Semiotic Totalitarians emgage in preemptive censorship. They reduce language to signifiers ( Bill Clinton's "That depends upon what 'IS' is.") Thus langauge means anything and nothing. Most recently, President Obama's address on Egypt last night - “We urge the Egyptian authorities not to prevent peaceful protests nor block communications, including on social media sites. . . ."continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people and work with their government in pursuit of a future that is more just, more free and more hopeful."
No matter what Mubarak does, says, or even thinks this White House, which harkened back to President Obama's Muslim lecture in Cairo a couple of years ago will favor "the rights of the Egyptian people and work with their government in pursuit of a future that is more just, more free and more hopeful." The Muslim Brotherhood and the viziers around President Obama ( Hamas friendly, anti-American Exceptionist, and semiotic totalitarian thick) will see to that, I am afraid.
If President Obama is President Carter ( even Vice President Biden refused to call Mubarak a dictator) we may witness the fall of Mubarak, a deconstructed Egypt and solid base of power for some very bad people - the Muslim Brotherhood.
Only last week, a prominent voice of Obama thought, Jim Wall - leftist secularist religion writer ( how's that for deconstruction) called upon the Obama Administration to get more Islmaist and anti Israel.
Obama and Khalidi were close enough so that when Khalidi was being honored before he left Chicago for New York, State Senator Barack Obama was the main speaker at Khalidi’s going away dinner.
That dinner later emerged as a campaign issue during Obama’s primary struggle with Hillary Clinton, when Obama’s relationships at the University of Chicago were first used to paint him as a political radical. Khalidi was linked in that “radical attack” on Obama with Professor Bill Ayers, a former Weatherman, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s outspoken United Church of Christ Chicago pastor.
When Obama became president of the United States. he unfortunately did not turn to his colleague Rashid Khalidi for counsel on the Middle East. Instead, he continued the practice of his two presidential predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and surrounded himself not with viziers, but with courtiers.
Nizámu’l Mulk gives a definition in that same Medieval Sourcebook on the subject, On the Courtiers and Familars of Kings which includes this 11th century definition of a courtier:
*to·tal·i·tar·i·an, adj.
of or relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state
sem·i·o·tics, n.
the study of signs and symbols, how meaning is constructed and understood
