Sympathy from the Devil

by William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: 'Damned from Memory': When the Drug War Turns on Its Own

"They had their entire lives ahead of them – birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own," intoned the murderer of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as he began the liturgy of official mourning for the victims of the Newtown massacre. 

Every time children die in an outbreak of violence, "I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent," continued the head of a regime that will not explain to Nasser al-Awlaki why his son Anwar and grandson Abdulrahman – both of the U.S. citizens – were murdered by presidential decree. 

"We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years," insisted the official who has presided over dozens of lethal drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries with whom the U.S. is not formally at war. 

Obama wiped away a non-existent tear as he pronounced the familiar, facile phrases of selective sympathy. After ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff for a week, Obama said that he and his wife would hug their children a little closer tonight as he empathizes with the parents whose children were murdered in Newtown. 

It’s doubtful that he was moved to similar thoughts of vicarious bereavement as he contemplated the parents in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan who have been left childless because of his actions.

Shortly after the police had arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School to offer the service they always provide in such circumstances – that is, drawing chalk outlines and stringing up crime-scene tape – Mr. Obama was informed of the massacre. The minion who conveyed that news to the Child Killer-in-Chief was National Security Adviser John Brennan, who is the official Keeper of the "Kill List" – the roster of people, including U.S. citizens, who have been targeted for summary execution by a secretive executive branch committee. 

Last April, in response to modest but growing public outrage over the Obama Regime’s use of killer drones, Brennan gave an opaque and self-congratulatory speech insisting that the program was legal because those who preside over it consider it to be. 

Killing distant, unarmed people by way of robot-delivered missiles is "legal, ethical, and wise," he declared. The targeted execution of individuals deemed to be terrorists –without the benefit of trial or any simulacrum of due process – is the result of careful "deliberation," and conducted in a way that discriminates between combatants and bystanders.

This must mean that Barack Obama and the people who are sufficiently foolish and depraved to obey his orders intended to kill 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki while he was enjoying a backyard barbecue at the home of a family friend in Yemen. 

The Regime has never explained why it murdered that child, let alone apologized to the family for doing so. The closest it has come to an explanation was offered last September by former White House spokesliar (and campaign functionary) Robert Gibbs, who actually claimed that the teenager’s death was his own fault because he had somehow made a poor choice of fathers: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children."

By default, this is the Obama Regime’s official rationale for murdering an innocent 16-year-old U.S. citizen. How does the logic – such as it is – of Gibbs’s answer differ from whatever rationale drove a maniac to open fire on a kindergarten class in Connecticut? Assuming that the shooter was deranged, he at least had the excuse of insanity. 

Obama, Brennan, Gibbs and their allies, by way of contrast, all profess to be entirely sane. The same is true of Time magazine contributor – and prominent Obama supporter – Joe Klein. Late in the last campaign Klein used an MSNBC panel discussion to offer a stout defense of Obama’s drone strikes, even as he admitted that innocent bystanders – including 4-year-olds – are frequently killed by them. The only concern, Klein insisted, was the possibility that the power to conduct remote killings may find itself in the hands of someone less enlightened than Obama.

For the Obama Regime, child-killing is an instrument of policy. This was made clear in a recent story reported by the Military Times describing how U.S. troops in Afghanistan, fearful over the actions of a group of young men nearby called in an airstrike that killed all of the suspected guerillas – only to find out later that three of them were children, aged 8, 10, and 12. The families of the dead children said that they had been gathering dried animal leavings, which are used as fuel.

The International Security Assistance Force in Kabul issued a statement acknowledging that the airstrike "accidentally killed three innocent Afghan children." That statement prompted Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington to tell the Military Times that the children may not have been innocent.

According to Carrington, whose unit is training Afghan police, "In addition to looking for military-age males, [we are] looking for children with potential hostile intent." Since hostility is the natural, and entirely commendable, reaction to foreign occupiers, Carrington is saying that any Afghan child with sufficient awareness to resent the occupation is a legitimate military target.

What Adam Lanza did once in a fit of murderous irrationality, the Regime over which Obama presides does practically every day – and the killing is carried out by people who act with clear-eyed, clinical indifference to the suffering they inflict. 

Admittedly, that comparison is unfair, since Lanza didn’t have the means to carry out an Obama-style "double-tap" strike: It is the established practice of the CIA to follow up a drone-launched missile attack with a second volley intended to target first responders. In Pakistan, this procedure has resulted in a ratio of fifty innocent victims for every "suspected militant" taken out in a drone strike.

The killer who slaughtered the innocent at Sandy Hook is dead. The Child-Killing Apparatus over which Obama presides continues merrily along. Americans understandably shaken and saddened to the depth of their souls by the horrors in Newtown should consider this: The government that impudently presumes to rule us has made Sandy Hook-style massacres routine for residents of Pakistan. 

December 17, 2012

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

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