The “investigation” of Benghazi

The man selected to head the “investigation” of the Benghazi attack is retired veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering, whose positions, writes Diana West, “place him squarely inside the Obama foreign policy mainstream.” As an example of where Pickering is coming from, at a panel in Washington on “The Muslim Experience in America,” Pickering matter-of-factly agreed with the frenetically anti-American, pro-Muslim activist James Zogby that the “racist” and “Islamophobic” U.S. armed forces are “the enemy.”

Of course the very idea of an “investigation” is a transparent fraud. Obama’s reply to every question about the Benghazi attack and cover-up has been that he has ordered an “investigation” to find out what happened. Obama needs an investigation to find out what he himself told his administration to do and say? That such a transparent lie is allowed to stand unchallenged is proof that we are no longer living in a free society.

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Mark Eugenikos writes:

You referred to “the frenetically anti-American Muslim activist James Zogby.” The Muslim part seemed incorrect to me, since his name is James. Wikipedia doesn’t list religion for James but a page on his brother John says that he is Catholic, which makes sense given their Christian names.

I have learned that first names can often be useful in figuring out if an Arab is Christian or Muslim. Not always, but many names are exclusively one or the other. I was told by Arabs, for example, that if a man’s first name is Hanna, or if a male in the family is named Hanna (which is Arabic for John), it’s certain that the family is Christian.

This of course doesn’t change the fact that for many Arabs their ethnic solidarity trumps their religious affiliation. And I think that it only goes one way, as in Arab Christians feel ethnic solidarity with Arab Muslims, but I somehow doubt that the inverse is true in general or as often. My impression is that even Christian Arabs, especially Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Jordanians (i.e. the neighbors) generally dislike Israel, and by extension the U.S., which they view as the enabler of Israel. So in the end those Christian Arabs resent the U.S. and Israel more than they dislike or distrust their Muslim co-ethnics. I don’t quite understand why Arab Christians act this way, since to me this seems suicidal; it would take an expert on this topic to explain this, which I’m not.

LA replies:

You’re right. I’ll change my description of Zogby from “Muslim” to “pro-Muslim.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 05, 2012 12:18 PM | Send