What’s disturbing about this picture?-You Decide:
Posted on FrontPage Magazine-By Joseph Klein-On October 17, 2012:
“The Obama administration has a habit of helping our enemies obtain weapons, with lethal consequences. The Fast & Furious operation resulted in guns going to Mexican drug lords. The Libyan “lead from behind” operation allowed weapons to get loose and ultimately into the hands of Islamist jihadists. The latest episode involves arms flowing from Islamic countries, who claim to be in our camp, to Islamist jihadists, some with ties or affiliations with al Qaeda.
While the United States has not been directly arming the Syrian rebels itself – at least not openly – the Obama administration has effectively outsourced this task to our allies in the region, principally Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They have done so in part through the Free Syrian Army, which operates from bases in Turkey.
As the New York Times reported on October 15th, most of the arms shipped are “going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
Qatar is reportedly the largest source of shipments going to the jihadists fighting in Syria. According to the Times, “American officials have been trying to understand why hardline Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.”
Vice President Joe Biden curiously omitted to mention Qatar at last week’s vice presidential debate when he discussed the countries supplying aid to “the free forces inside of Syria.” He listed only Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan. Was this simply an oversight or an intentional omission to cover up the fact that an Islamic country in the Gulf region with whom we have close military and economic ties is in fact actively helping our enemies? Does Biden want us to forget how President Obama publicly praised the emir of Qatar in April 2011 during the emir’s visit to the Oval Office for his country’s role in supporting democracy in the Middle East, as a hedge just in case more evidence becomes known of Qatar’s complicity with the Islamist jihadists in Syria?
Here is what President Obama said publicly according to the White House transcript on April 14, 2011:
Well, I want to welcome the Emir of Qatar, and we have just completed a very useful conversation. I expressed to him my appreciation of the leadership that the Emir has shown when it comes to democracy in the Middle East… In addition to our efforts in Libya, we have a strong relationship between our two countries. It is an economic relationship. It is a military relationship. It is a cultural relationship. And obviously, Qatar has done very well under His Highness’s leadership, but his influence extends beyond his borders. And so we’ve had discussions about how we can continue to promote democracy, human rights, increased fr