Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Washington Times - Friday, September 7, 2012

Robert Spencer

Eleven years have passed since the jihad terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and terrorism appears to many to be yesterday's issue. There hasn't been a catastrophic jihad attack on American soil since that fateful day, and neither presidential campaign has done much more than pay lip service to national security issues regarding jihad terrorism. Yet there are numerous indications that the Islamic jihad against the United States is far from over.

President Obama's response to that jihad, however, has been to support the Arab Spring uprisings that have installed Islamic supremacist pro-Shariah regimes in North Africa and to dedicate his Justice Department to gaining special accommodation for Muslims in American businesses and educational institutions.

Osama bin Laden said in his October 2002 letter to the American people that "the first thing that we are calling you to is Islam." He could look with satisfaction at how Islamic law is rapidly becoming the sole law of the land in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia and at how the American political establishment is so warmly disposed toward even Islam's political and supremacist elements that a call simply to investigate Muslim Brotherhood influence in the government met with scorn and charges of McCarthyism.

So pervasive is the unreality about the jihad threat, in fact, that the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, has attributed the rapid rise in attacks by Afghan troops on their American trainers to a lack of affection on the Americans' part. He explained that on one occasion, "one of our battalion commanders publicly and openly hugged his Afghan battalion counterpart. And that solved the problem right on the spot."

In fact, these "green-on-blue" murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway because it would suggest that Islam is not a religion of peace. So ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has just expressed his enthusiasm for Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood regime by forgiving $1 billion in Egyptian debt despite the fact that that regime has moved with startling rapidity to dismantle what there was of Egyptian democracy and secure its place in power for decades to come. Egypt's Arab Spring has ushered into power a regime that clearly is dedicated to ramping up the country's already virulent persecution of Christians, imposing principles of Islamic law that will subject women and non-Muslims to institutionalized discrimination and setting Egypt on a path toward open war with Israel.

Mr. Obama is set to repeat the same mistake in Syria, where a post-Assad government is almost certain to contain significant Muslim Brotherhood elements. Yet numerous analysts and pundits want the United States to rush into military action against President Bashar Assad, with no consideration of the likely nature of the regime that would replace him. Mr. Assad is terrible, to be sure. His successors are almost certain to be worse.

Meanwhile, domestically, Mr. Obama's Justice Department has joined lawsuits by Muslims demanding special accommodation in the workplace, forcing American businesses to change their long-standing practices and reinforcing the Islamic supremacist principle that wherever Islamic law and practice conflict with American law and practice, it is the latter that must give way. The Obama administration has not only shown no interest in Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that are advancing the Brotherhood's stated goal (according to a captured internal document) of "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house," but even has partnered with several of those organizations on numerous occasions.

While all this is happening, however, jihad plots and attacks against the United States continue, even as the fog of denial and appeasement grows thicker than ever. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of murdering 13 Americans at Fort Hood in 2009 in the name of Islam, but the government classified his jihad attack as "workplace violence." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted recently: "The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land . A new Middle East will definitely be formed. With the grace of God and help of the nations, in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists." In response, the United States hastened to assure the Iranians that it would not support an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Eleven years after Sept. 11, the U.S. government is thoroughly compromised and naively trying to appease the Islamic jihadists who have vowed to destroy us. Bin Laden, though dead, appears to be emerging as the victor.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of "Did Muhammad Exist?" (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012).

Reflections of a Diaspora Jew on Zionism, America and the Fate of the Jews

Posted By David Horowitz On September 7, 2012

Editors’ note: In the following speech accepting the Ben Hecht Award for Outstanding Journalism from the Zionist Organization of America, David Horowitz notes that he wants everything that the Zionists want–a muscular Israel willing and able to defy the growing Jew hatred in the world; a Jewish State “armed to the teeth” and ready to use its military; an Israel augmented by the addition of its historical birthright of Judea and Samaria. Yet the paradox is that until now, Horowitz notes, he has never considered himself a Zionist in the sense that Theodor Herzl and other founders used that term. Herzl’s dream was that a Jewish homeland would “normalize” the Jewish people in the eyes of an historically hostile world, end their persecution, and “solve” the “Jewish problem.” Horowitz states that he always considered this possibility to be a “fairy tale” because of his understanding of the way envy and hatred operate on the international scene, especially with the advent of “Third Worldism.”  In addition to becoming a refuge, Israel also became a magnet for homocidal intentions. The events of 9/11 changed everything. Because of the rise of Islamism in the U.S.–especially influencing those who were once Israel’s strong defenders–as well as in the Middle East, Horowitz says that “supporters of freedom are all Zionists now.” Below is the text of the speech that Horowitz gave last night, Thursday, Sept. 6, 2012, in Philadelphia.

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to be invited to this podium by the Zionist Organization of America and Mort Klein, its courageous leader.  For decades Mort Klein and the ZOA have stood on the frontline defending the state of Israel and American Jews, and they are doing it now in what is certainly one of the darker periods for the Jewish people – darker all over the world – in our 5,000-year history. I applaud you for supporting Mort Klein and his team. I am touched by the recognition of an organization like this for the modest work I have done in behalf of Israel and the Jewish people.

Still, there is a paradox at the heart of this honor awarded me by the Zionist Organization of America, which will take me a moment to explain. It is true that I am widely attacked by anti-Semites and Jew-haters and the enemies of Israel as a Zionist — and an arch Zionist at that. I have been called variously a Zionist Jew, an “Israel Firster Zionist Jew,” “a rabid Zionist” (by Julian Assange no less), a “radical right-wing Zionist,” an “extreme Zionist,” an “extremist Zionist stalwart,” an “unrepentant Zionist,” an “ultra Zionist” and a “Zio-Nazi.”

Today, anti-Zionism is the cause of Jew-haters and anti-Semites the world over, and for Jews embarrassed by the fact that they are Jews and that others fear and despise them for that reason. Even the rare Jewish magazine of the left that is actually a supporter of Israel, is uncomfortable with the connotations of the Zionist label, and with what it means for Jews to defend themselves. In a recent unflattering profile, the Tablet magazine described me as touring the country “making the case for a muscular Zionism.”

I plead guilty to this charge. I plead guilty though I have never actually been a Zionist, or made a case for Zionism in the sense that Herzl and traditional Zionists understand it. Yes, I want muscular Jews and a muscular Israel. I want Jews proud of the extraordinary nation-state Jews created in 1948 out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. I want Jews who are armed, and Jews who will defend themselves with arms if necessary. Muscular in every way. Yes.

I want more than just individual Jews armed. I want a Jewish nation-state possessing in its arsenal the most advanced modern weapons available, a state that can be counted on to defend Jews from their global enemies, and particularly their enemies in the Muslim world who are legion and who have sworn our destruction, and who are openly planning to complete the job that Hitler started. I want a Jewish state, armed to the teeth, because Islamic Nazis, who are the storm troopers of a second Holocaust, are already mobilized, and because — as we discovered during the first Holocaust — there are not enough non-Jews in the world who are willing and prepared to defend us.

I am glad that Israel exists. I am glad that there is a country that will preserve Jewish culture, and be a model to the world of what Jews can do when they are given the chance. Today Israel is per capita the world’s leading scientific and technological innovator and contributor to human advancement. As a Jew I am proud of that.

I am also thrilled that in the creation of Israel Jews have regained their birthright. After 2,000 years of exile, the oldest surviving indigenous people in the world has won the right to some of its stolen homeland. I look forward to the day when Judea and Samaria, the historic centers of Judaism, become part of the Jewish homeland as well.

That homeland is now occupied by Palestinian Arabs who are at war with Israel, who have proclaimed their Jew-hatred to the world, and who have forfeited any right to the territories by conducting five unprovoked, armed aggressions against the Jewish state. The official policy of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is to make Jerusalem and the entire region of Palestine Judenrein. No other country in the world is expected to suffer such genocidal assaults without securing borders that are defensible, and Israel should not be expected to either.

Nonetheless, there is a paradox in this honor given to me, a Jew who has never been to Israel and who has never considered himself a Zionist in the sense that its founders intended. Theodor Herzl and his followers embraced the Zionist idea because they believed that the creation of a Jewish nation would provide a solution to the “Jewish Question” – the fact that Jews had been a homeless people for nearly two thousand years and were ghettoized and persecuted in the alien lands to which they were driven.

Herzl’s Zionist idea was grounded in the belief that the establishment of a Jewish state on Jewish land would finally “normalize” the Jewish people and end their persecution. The Zionist idea was that by including Jews among the nations, Jews would become ordinary, and like other peoples — that their inclusion would finally “solve” the Jewish problem. That was the meaning of Zionism as Herzl understood it, and indeed as it was understood until the Holocaust and the actual creation of the Jewish state.

But Herzl’s dream proved to be a fairy tale, as delusional in its way as the dreams of socialism, communism and progressivism, whose believers hoped would provide solutions to the conflicts and sufferings that blight our human state. All these isms took hold in the 19th Century, and became forms of modern faith. The traditional religions they supplanted had trusted in a Divinity for such a solution, but were forced into retreat before the advance of Darwinian theory and modern scientific developments. All the messianic visions of the modern age were driven by the desire for an earthly redemption that would resolve our human dilemmas and achieve what the heavenly redemption could no longer convincingly offer.[1]

Among these fantasies of a better world than the one we inherited, Zionism was the most conservative, and the most practical. The quests for a socially just future are based on no human reality but on the expectation of a human miracle, a transformation of who we are and what we have been into something wonderfully different. Zionism by contrast was based on the experience of actual peoples who had already taken their place among the nations. It was a quest for normality. Not for a world transformation but for an integration into the existing world of others.

But even this modest hope of the Jews has proved an impossible dream. It is true that half of Herzl’s goal has been realized, and in an astounding way. Yet its very realization has proved the hope that inspired it to be a folly. By all standards of civilization and modernity Israel should be admired and emulated by the rest of the world. Instead, the Jewish state is hated and is a pariah among the nations, just as Jews themselves are pariahs in most of the world outside America today.

Far from creating a refuge, Israel has become the focal point of all the genocidal intentions against the Jews, which have never been more overt or more global. Today Israel is the site of a Holocaust for which the Islamic world openly yearns, and which the rest of the world – with the possible exceptions of America and Canada — will not lift a finger to prevent.  This sobering reality has changed the meaning of Zionism, and has made it a more comfortable fit for me. Call it the Zionism of Survival.

In the household I grew up in, I was not brought up to be a Zionist because my parents were Marxist progressives who looked to a socialist future to provide an earthly salvation, and an end to the persecution of the Jews. My parents and their comrades believed that mankind’s conflicts would be resolved by a universal class whose revolution would abolish all nations and unite all peoples, and thus remove the distinctions that made them Jews.

My realization that this was not going to happen occurred through my relationship with a Marxist mentor named Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher had written a book called The Non-Jewish Jew, by which he meant Marxists like us – Jews who were of Judaism but not in it. By the time I came under his influence in the 1960s, he had become a defender of Israel and had been one since the Second World War. Deutscher viewed Israel as a “raft” state – a refuge that Jews could cling to after they had been shipwrecked in the storms that periodically engulfed them. The particular storm he was referring to was Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

During the interwar years, a debate had raged in Europe’s leftwing circles, which carried momentous consequences for those who participated in it. The debate was about how Jews should respond to the looming fascist threat. The Zionists were urging Jews to flee the continent and take refuge in the Palestine Mandate. Marxists like Deutscher argued that the Jews should stay in Europe and fight for the socialist revolution. But as Deutscher ruefully acknowledged later, the Jews who listened to the Zionists were still alive, while those who listened to Marxists like him were dead.

Under Deutscher’s influence, I became a quasi-Zionist, a believer in the raft state. Israel should exist and be defended until the socialist transformation abolished nation-states and solved the problem of the Jews once and for all.

Don’t think for a moment that this is some quaint Marxist delusion now consigned to the historical dustbin. The idea of a world without borders is alive and well in the international left and among liberals and progressives in America. It is the idea that animates the Democratic Party’s attacks on American sovereignty, and it is a vision whose intellectual leaders are Jews.

One of its canonical articles is called “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” — for the latter and against the former. It was written by Harvard philosopher Martha Nussbaum.  According to Nussbaum, the cosmopolitan ideal which progressive people should aspire to is “the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.” This attitude – that we are not Jews or Americans – but “citizens of the world” — explains why people on the left are so uncomfortable with — or simply hostile to — issues of national security and patriotism. It explains why progressive Jews can be indifferent to the survival of the Jewish state.

Even as I absorbed Deutscher’s lesson about the raft state, my belief in the progressive fantasy was rapidly eroding. I had begun to doubt the possibility of a redeemed future, a future fundamentally different from those with which we were historically familiar. As these doubts grew, they were changing my view of the unredeemed present. By the middle of the next decade I no longer believed in a new world order. This had immediate and profound consequences for my attitude towards Israel and my identity as a Jew, and as an American as well.

There was not going to be a future in which there were no longer nations or peoples in conflict; there was not going to be a future in which Jews would cease to be the objects of envy and resentment, and virulent hatred. There was not going to be a future in which a refuge – a raft state — was no longer useful.

Then came 9/11 and the Islamic attack on the World Trade Center. It was an event that made millions of people aware of the Islamist movement in the Muslim world and the fact that they were conducting a holy war against infidels in general, and Jews in particular. The incubator and leading force of this holy war is the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by an admirer of Hitler and a godfather of the call to push the Jews of Palestine into the sea. Today, the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood is the Egyptian imam, Yusef al-Qaradawi, who has publicly prayed that the Muslim believers will finish the job that Hitler started.

Millions of Jews are in denial when it comes to the determination of Islamists to kill them. In part, this denial is psychological and familiar as when people face a prospect that is too terrible to contemplate. There are a billion and a half Muslims in the world today who worship a prophet who has told them that “the day of redemption will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, when the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and the trees cry out, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.’” For a billion and a half Muslims that is the word of God. Denial is one convenient way of dealing with this fact.

This particular death warrant for the Jews can be found on the official website of the University of Southern California, where it was placed by the Muslim Students Union, which is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. When I asked a leader at the Wiesenthal Center to demand that this genocidal incitement be removed, his initial response was, “But it’s a religious statement.” Well, yes, but it is also a summons to kill the Jews. Such is the force of denial.

One of the chief instruments of the Muslim Brotherhood is the Muslim Students Association, which sponsors “Israeli Apartheid weeks” at universities across America and throughout the Western world calling for Israel’s destruction. Muslim Students Association members chant “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” – that is from the eastern boundary of Israel to the western one. It is a call for the liquidation of the Jewish state because it is Jewish. Yet all across America, campus rabbis hold ecumenical dialogues with the Muslim Students Association, and defend it against its critics.

I have traveled to many universities to oppose these Jew-haters, and everywhere I go I am protested against and defamed by the Muslim Students Association and by their Jewish enablers. I have met with numerous campus rabbis and asked them to set conditions for their ecumenical outreach: first, that their Muslim counterparts desist from sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Weeks, and denounce those who conduct them; and second, that they only hold dialogues with people who publicly support the right of a Jewish state to exist in the Middle East.

For these efforts I have been attacked by Hillel rabbis at Yale, the University of North Carolina, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Florida, and by Hillel student leaders at the University of Pennsylvania and other schools. For voicing these concerns, they have called me a bigot, a racist and an “Islamophobe,” which is a smear invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence its critics.

Last year I published a full-page ad in the Yale Daily News whose headline read: “The Palestinian Case Against Israel Is Based On A Genocidal Lie.” The genocidal lie is the claim that all of Israel – or any of Israel — is occupied Arab land. It is a claim used to justify all of the murderous acts committed against the Jews of Israel. In fact, Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire, as were Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The Turks are not Arabs, and Israel does not occupy any Arab land.

The Middle East conflict is not about land or a Palestinian state. It is a sixty-year war of aggression first by the Arab League and then by Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims to destroy the Jewish state and push the Jews into the sea. This war is now a religious war, an expression of Islamic Nazism.

To be perfectly clear, I am not referring to all Muslims as Nazis. I am referring to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic forces now ascendant in Egypt and the Middle East who are actively promoting a second genocide of the Jews, along with their supporters in America and their secular allies on the political left.

When my ad about the Palestinian lie appeared in the Yale paper, the Slifka Center, the focus of Jewish life on campus, was outraged. They were not outraged by the Palestinian lie but by my ad, which told the truth. They were outraged because the truth offended the Muslim Students Association with whom they wished to be friends. To counter my ad the Slifka Center published its own full- page statement. It affirmed the Slifka Center’s “respect” – and I quote their words – “for the Muslim Students Association, which does not spread hateful lies about Israel.”

The Slifka statement then attacked my ad as the purveyor of “hateful ideas,” which it said would “lead to tragic rifts between the Jewish and Muslim communities,” as though campuses across the country were not already reverberating to the chants of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” or as though Muslim masses were not already chanting “death to the Israel” at the call of Hizbollah and Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having made its commitments clear, the Slifka ad then invited students to an evening with the Ground Zero Mosque Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, hosted by Slifka Center director James Ponet, the celebrity rabbi who officiated at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.

The suicidal tendencies of the intended victims of Islamic supremacy are tragically familiar. They recall the sad delusions of members of the Judenrate – the Jewish Councils in the Nazi ghettos – who organized the Jews for Hitler’s death camps, while pretending to themselves that the Germans were too civilized to kill them.

Delusions about Islamic Nazis are hardly confined to Jews, however. In the eyes of the Islamic fanatics, Israel may be the “Little Satan,” but America is “The Great Satan,” the arch demon that must be destroyed in the name of Allah. In his fatwas Osama Bin Laden identified Islam’s enemies as “Jews and Crusaders,” America being Christian and therefore the “Crusader Nation.” Every Islamist leader and organization from Ahmadinejad to Qaradawi, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hizbollah and Hamas has promised death to Israel and America as the necessary means to their malignant ends.

Meanwhile, the Crusaders – like the Jews — are asleep. It is an old story. Just before the Second World War, Whittaker Chambers, a Communist defector, attempted to warn Roosevelt that a White House advisor named Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent and that his administration had been penetrated by Communist operatives. When Roosevelt was informed of Chambers’ charges he laughed and dismissed them. Hiss then accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta where he helped conclude the deal that delivered Eastern Europe to the Soviet Empire and triggered the Cold War.

Here is a story that may prove worse than that of Alger Hiss. In a series of foreign policy disasters the Obama Administration has assisted the Muslim Brotherhood in transforming the Arab Spring in the Middle East into an Islamist winter, beginning with the toppling of an allied regime in Egypt and the accession to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its expansion throughout the region. In August, the new Egyptian president sacked his military commanders, abrogated the Constitution, and assumed dictatorial powers greater than those possessed by his predecessor, and transforming Egypt into an Islamist state. Opponents of the dictatorship were crucified – literally nailed to crosses – in front of the government headquarters. It was the Brotherhood’s way of dramatizing its intentions to turn Egypt into a Medieval totalitarian state.

This was exactly what the American State Department had assured the world the Muslim Brotherhood would not do as it paved the way for the Brotherhood’s accession to power. The intelligence chief of the Obama White House had officially described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” and “secular” organization, which had embraced democratic and constitutional government.

The betrayal of these promises, and the violation of every principle the American government claimed to be supporting in the Middle East’s most important state, took place without a word of protest from the American government or the American Secretary of State.

As it happens the chief adviser on Muslim affairs to the American Secretary of State is Huma Abedin, one of whose mentors was the Nazi imam, Yusef Qaradawi. Abedin is an operative for the Muslim Brotherhood and a lifelong servant of its agendas. In the twelve years directly proceeding her hiring by the U.S. Government, where she became deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, Abedin worked for Abdullah Omar Naseef, one of the principal financiers of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and a Muslim Brotherhood eminence. Huma Abedin’s mother and brother are Muslim Brotherhood leaders, as was her father before them.

In their work for the Brotherhood, the Abedin family was specifically tasked with running Abdullah Omar Naseef’s jihad operation, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. The title sounds innocuous enough until you understand that the express goal of the Institute is to transform the Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries into Muslim majorities as part of the Islamic jihad, with the express intent of creating Islamic states — in short, to conquer those countries for totalitarian Islam. To accomplish this goal Muslim minorities must be prevented from assimilating into non-Muslim societies and also be indoctrinated in Islamic supremacist ideas. That was and is the mission of the Abedin family. In addition to the network of Saudi-funded mosques in target countries like the United States, the chief organizations for accomplishing this goal are the Muslim Students Association, on whose Executive Board Huma Abedin served, and its offshoot, the Islamic Society of North America, which is now the principal source of advice on Muslim affairs for the Obama administration.

In other words, at the right hand of the American Secretary of State and the center of American foreign policy, is a woman whose family are leaders of what the Muslim Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad” — its plan to infiltrate non-Muslim societies, and “destroy the Western civilization from within” — in those exact words. And what people do these jihadists regard as the chief obstacle to their sinister designs? The Jews.

In the words of their own manifesto:

“The greatest challenge that faces Muslims in America and Canada are the Jews, who take advantage of their material ability and their media to distort the image of Islam and Muslims thereby spreading lies in the minds of the people of these countries.” The Jews also “serve Zionist interests in the Arab regions.”

In the hands of the Islamists and their allies, Zionism has become the name of all the opponents of Islamist supremacy and its holy war against infidels, against Jews and Christians, Israel and the United States. Americans and Israelis, Jews and Christians have their backs to the same wall. One cannot be defended without defending the other. Supporters of freedom are all Zionists now. And that includes myself. That is the way this war of the civilizations, or — as I prefer it – this war between Islamist barbarism and civilization, will continue until it is finally concluded, and the next conflict begins.

I say this, because as a conservative I understand that conflicts are endless, and these battles are without end. To be a conservative is first to understand that there is no solution to the dilemmas of the human condition. Second, it is to understand that to escape these dilemmas, human beings will inevitably embark on desperate quests for redemptions in this life. These redemptions, in turn, will require holy wars to purge the world of demons – of those who do not share their faith, and who stand in their way. In this regard, totalitarian Islam is really no different in its heart from totalitarian socialism or progressivism, even though the latter are secular and the former is pursued in the name of a vengeful and malignant God. Both seek to cleanse mankind of its irreparable imperfections.

To remain free beings, we are continually forced to defend ourselves and our breathing space, against the efforts of the redeemers to perfect us — against the armies of the saints who are determined to make the world a better place than it can ever be. That is how I see the political wars we face, and why they will never end.

On a personal level, and to answer the question I raised at the beginning of this talk about my identity: I am comfortable being a Diaspora Jew, both in this present struggle with the enemies of America and Israel, and beyond. Diaspora is the name of our Jewish exile, but exile is also the name of our human condition. We are thrust into this life, and remain here for awhile, and then we are gone. If there is a home for us that is truly permanent, it is not of this time or of this place.

My country, America, and the country of my people, Israel, share a common destiny. They are the gathering places of exiles, of those who understand better than others that we have no permanent abode in this world. It is because of this that we cherish the freedoms and the homes we do have, and we are not afraid to fight for them.

Notes:

[1] This is the subject of my book, A Point In Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next, 2011.

Siding with Savages

Posted By Mark Tapson On September 6, 2012 @ www.frontpagemag.com

Atlas Shrugs blogger Pamela Geller, lightning rod for the hateful fury of the unholy alliance of Islamists and the radical left, is under attack again for daring to run a pro-Israel advertising campaign in New York and San Francisco.

Ms. Geller is executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), in addition to being the author of Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance and The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (with Robert Spencer). For Islamists and the multiculturalist progressives who have bought into the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of demonizing its opposition as “Muslim-hating,” Geller is the most public face of the mythical “Islamophobia” in America.

Geller’s AFDI advertisements in San Francisco read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” In New York, the ads read, “19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.”

Some public officials in both cities are taking unprecedented steps to denounce and distance themselves from the ads. As Ms. Geller related in a FrontPage Magazine interview, Greenburgh, New York Town Supervisor Paul Feiner announced that he wanted Metro-North to warn passengers that the ads could be upsetting and don’t represent Metro-North’s views or that of the community. Muslims, he said, “should not be discriminated against. The posters encourage hatred, discrimination and do not help the efforts to fight hate crimes.” Peter Swiderski, the mayor of Hastings-on-Hudson, and the Board of Trustees sent out a letter to the village asking residents to write to the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) expressing dismay that the ad was not deemed hate speech. The letter also read,

While the Board respects everyone’s right to free speech, we categorically condemn the bigotry and innuendo expressed by this billboard message. To tar a faith and its followers because of the actions of a few is deplorable, hateful and morally repugnant.

Except that the ad doesn’t refer to all Muslims. It doesn’t even “tar” Islam, which jihadists themselves already do a spectacularly good job of tarring. The ad merely notes the 19,250 deadly attacks (a number that has since risen dramatically) since 9/11/01 carried out in the name of Islam. It underscores the “Islamorealism” that people like Feiner and Swiderski, in their politically correct bubble, prefer to deny and ascribe instead to “Islamophobia.” It refers to jihadists, who have no compunction about killing less fanatical Muslims. Apparently Feiner and Swiderski are more outraged that the ad “could be upsetting” to jihadists than they are about the Muslim victims of their co-religionists. How tolerant of them.

Geller countered by responding to Swiderski and asking why no such mailing went out concerning recent anti-Israel ads run by the MTA. “This speaks to a systemic, institutionalized anti-Semitism prevalent in your administration and among the Board. Care to comment?” Geller posed a rhetorical question to FrontPage Mag interviewer Jamie Glazov, “Why didn’t he react as viscerally when the same kiosks had vicious blood libels posted about Israel?

San Francisco, the city that proudly champions every America- and Israel-hating radical nutball or movement you can name, was of course horrified by what it deemed to be racist hate speech from “notorious anti-Muslim hate blogger” Geller and AFDI (the AFDI has been stamped as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose mission is to designate as such everyone who disagrees with the well-funded progressive agenda).

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, reluctant to open itself up to an AFDI lawsuit for suppressing its free speech, did not refuse Geller’s ad but added a disclaimer: “SFMTA Policy Prohibits Discrimination Based On National Origin, Religion and Other Characteristics and Condemns Statements That Describe Any Group As Savages.”

Not content with posting the disclaimer alongside the ad itself, SFMTA Board of Directors chairman Tom Nolan felt compelled to announce publicly that “the recent ad has no value in facilitating constructive dialogue or advancing the cause of peace and justice.”

Actually, the ad concisely offers the only possible support for “the cause of peace and justice” – siding with civilization over barbarism. There can be no “constructive dialogue” with, for example, a fundamentalist regime whose most fanatical desire is to wipe you from the face of the earth. Nothing has been less constructive in terms of derailing the Iranian Ayatollahs and their lust for nuclear weapons than the West’s decades-long effort to engage them in “constructive dialogue.” Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs have merely used that as a delaying tactic to string us along while they steamroll ahead with their genocidal plans.

The only people who would find the AFDI ads offensive are those who don’t think twice about disparaging Israel as a genocidal apartheid state propped up by the racist, imperialist United States of AmeriKKKa. These willfully blind hypocrites believe Israel and America are the greatest threat to world peace and that jihad is nothing more than “inner struggle.” Funny how Western multiculturalists leap to the defense of a culture they don’t understand and whose supremacist atrocities they whitewash, while readily denouncing their own culture as the fount of all evil.

Let me be perfectly clear, as our President is fond of saying: Islamic fundamentalists are savages. Israel celebrates life; Islamists love death. Israel gives medical care even to Palestinian failed suicide bombers, sends emergency relief teams worldwide, and makes life-giving scientific advancements. Jihadists behead captive soldiers, partygoers, and children; frame mentally challenged Christian children for blasphemy, the punishment for which is death; hang homosexuals from cranes; crucify suspected spies in Yemen and dissidents in Egypt; wage genocide against Christianity minority communities in the wake of the “Arab Spring”; and celebrate the murderers of children. If that doesn’t validate Ms. Geller’s framing of this conflict as a Clash of Civilization and Savagery, I don’t know what does.

Watch and decide if you think Geller is being unreasonable in her arguments here (3.5 minutes):

www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Fv9LxyhZ7pY

What Is Right About Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

Posted By Eric Allen Bell On March 1, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at  the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang. Visit his Facebook page: http://www.Facebook.com/EricAllenBell.]

I write this mainly for the benefit of so many of my Liberal friends.  I know you have good hearts, but have been badly deceived by your peers and leaders when it comes to the threat of Jihad, and the character of those few brave individuals, who have had the courage to risk everything, to stand up for liberty and human rights…

BACKGROUND:

In the summer of 2010 I was invited to write an article for Michael Moore.  I was in production on a documentary I was calling “Not Welcome” regarding the backlash against construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in the middle of the American Bible Belt.  His endorsement gave me a huge boost with the Hollywood crowd.  Having worked in the entertainment industry for years, this was not my first film, but it was to be my first documentary.  So when I went on to write a few more articles for MichaelMoore.com the wheels were greased for me to get into a room with the right people, and secure the finishing funds I needed to complete post production.  And if there is one thing Hollywood loves (almost as much as congratulating itself), it’s the story of an innocent minority group being wrongly persecuted, preferably in the South, especially if the antagonist happens to be the Religious Right.  And as my editor and I assembled the first 25 minutes, of the 300 hours of footage shot, this film promised to deliver just that.  “Wow, I really wasn’t expecting this.  I would like to thank the members of the Academy, Michael Moore and the Prophet Mohammed for making all of this possible…”

But then the winds changed direction.  It seems that fate had issued a Fatwa against my perfect plan.  The Arab Spring sprang into action and ruined everything, as it degenerated disappointingly into the Islamist Winter.  It was as if I had been slapped upside the head by reality, thus knocking off my blinders and causing me to ask a lot of inconvenient questions.  I was left wondering if there was perhaps more to the story of so-called “revolution” than what had been portrayed on Al Jazeera and “Democracy Now with Amy Goodman”.  You can read more about this in an article I wrote for Front Page Magazine here: “The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam”.

I took a second and more critical look inside Islamic scripture, comparing and contrasting the countless acts of Islamic terrorism, with specific commands to carry out these violent and barbaric attacks on innocent infidels as ordered in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah.  And after much difficult soul searching I had realized I was making more than just a documentary.  I was making a terrible mistake.   So I went back to my backers and told them how I had changed the outline of the documentary, to include a critical examination of the violent dimension that informed so much of the Islamic world today, and throughout history, and how desperately this story needed to be told, and I consequently lost the backing to my film.

As a writer who had written over a hundred articles for The Daily Kos, a liberal blog which receives about a million visitors a day, I wrote 3 articles outlining what I had learned about Islam, it’s execution of homosexuals and how hundreds of millions of women around the world were living under Islamic gender apartheid.  I called attention to this as a human rights issue, human rights being in theory a big concern among Liberal audiences.  The warm reception that followed included being labeled a “bigot” a “right winger” and an “Islamophobe” in the hundreds of subsequent reader comments, demanding that my “hate speech” be banned.  And after that the Islamophobia watchdog site, Loonwatch.com created a link for readers to write directly to the editors of DKOS, demanding my voice be silenced.  And I was immediately banned from ever writing for The Daily Kos.

In the weeks that passed I received many “goodbye” texts and emails from friends letting me know that we were no longer friends.  I saw my name get smeared in print – lies, misquotes, distortions, character assassination.  Loonwatch.com named me the “Loon At Large”

(UPDATE: Since appearing on the Michael Coren show and telling my story about how Loonwatch put my name out on the street in the Islamic world, Loonwatch has since pulled that article from their site.  Thank you very much Michael Coren!).

My friend count on Facebook took a hit.  My blog, which has had over 23 million visitors and  usually receives at least a million visitors per month, got hacked over and over for weeks before my traffic rebounded.   And, many of my subscribers left the site, telling me that I was “spreading intolerance and ignorance”.  On donations and ad revenue I took a massive financial hit.  For so many who had known me for so long, I had become nothing more than an “intolerant hate monger”

PAMELA GELLER:

In the process of defending myself from all of these accusations, in a desperate attempt to distance myself from those names that had become synonymous with “Islamophobia” at least in my circle, I made critical remarks about Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller – comments meant to distinguish myself from the real “hate mongers” but comments that turned out to be uninformed and just simply just not true.  I thought they were true at the time.  But having only recently sipped from the well of knowledge, I had not yet flushed all of the Kool Aid out of my system.

For example, in a Daily Kos piece (before my excommunication for blasphemy) I wrongly lumped Pamela Geller in with Pastor Terry Jones, a religious zealot who preaches burning the Koran.  A simple YouTube search will yield no shortage of remarks made by Geller, stating she opposes the burning of books, all books, and that furthermore she is not anti-Muslim, does not advocate persecution or hatred of Muslims, and even goes so far as to point out that it is in fact Muslims themselves, who are the biggest victims of Islamic violence.  The number of times she has spoken out for the hundreds of millions of Muslim women, who suffer under gender apartheid alone, is evidence that Pamela Geller is not a hate monger, but rather a fearless advocate for human rights – including the rights of Muslims.

It is amazing, the human capacity for seeing only what we want to see.  And it is especially humbling, I can tell you, when one identifies that unattractive quality within oneself.  But the freedom that comes with trading in your cozy conclusions for difficult questions is well worth the cost.  Everything is up for grabs.  You evolve.

In taking the time to really get to know who Pamela Geller is and what she has done to earn this sensational media status, as some sort of evil hate monger, this intolerant fanatic who opposes religious freedom, I finally did some long overdue research of my own.  And soon after simply scratching the surface, it was immediately clear that the bold stance Pamela Geller took publicly against the Ground Zero Mosque was absolutely right.  Spot on, in fact damned near clairvoyant.

This shameless shrine, this 13 story Islamic gloating tower was to be financed with $100 million from the “Cordoba Initiative” an organization with very questionable ties to Jihadi interests – to be ran by Imam Raouf and promoted by his wife Daisy Khan (pronounced “Con”).

Cordoba, by the way was at one time the capital of an Islamic Caliphate and the city where Muslims had converted a Cordoba church into the third largest mosque in the world – an inconvenient truth that those of us in the Liberal world were told was simply misunderstood.  But when the spin doctors at CAIR failed to convince the skeptics, this mysterious $100 million Islamic fund rebranded the name of the victory mosque, to simply “Park 51”.  It kind of sounds like an exclusive night club from the seventies, except without the liquor or cocaine, and where the women must throw a sheet over their heads and keep their mouths shut.

No matter how the Cordoba Initiative tried to spin this story, Pamela Geller kept on insisting this was a mosque.  According to press releases parroted by left leaning media outlets, “Park 51” was more like a YMCA, where old people could play bingo or shuffle board or whatever they do.  There would be Mommy and Me classes and the center just happened to have a prayer room on the top two floors for Muslims to pray.  (also known as a mosque).  Never mind that this mosque would overlook the site of the collapsed World Trade Center, where thousands of innocent people lost their lives after Islamic terrorists struck on 9/11.  And never mind that construction of a mosque this close to Ground Zero was perfectly consistent with 1,400 years of Islamic conquest.  This was to be a victory mosque the whole family could enjoy.  And if you don’t like it, then you’re a racist and a bigot and a right wing Islamophobe.  Did I mention that the new facility was designed to “bring the whole community together”?

As an advocate for cultural sensitivity for the American people (we could use more of those), Pamela Geller gave numerous television interviews.  She was hammered and grilled mercilessly as an intolerant fanatic by a highly biased media, but she did not back down.  She kept her cool and she stuck to the facts.  For instance, fragments of a hijacked airliner had reportedly landed on the Burlington Coat Factory (the piece of Ground Zero real estate which was swooped up using questionable sources, to become the Victory Mosque).  She asserted that the proposed site was in fact sacred ground, a war memorial, and not at all an appropriate place to build a $100 million “shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11”.

I used to think that this was too broad a statement to make.  I used to think that connecting Islam to 9/11 was somehow unfair.  I used to not think, and think that I was thinking.  And it seems for many of us Gen X’ers “educated” in government run schools, this type of not thinking was how we were taught to think.  And the institutions of “education” told us that this type of not thinking was called “tolerance”.  Applied evenly, one could learn to tolerate Communism, Nazism or even the President of Iran.   See Oliver Stone’s son and recent convert to Shia Islam as Exhibit “A”.

So why did Pamela Geller call Islam an “Ideology” and not a religion?  Perhaps this was because Islam is only a small part religion.  In large part Islam is a tyrannical political system, and very much a barbaric legal system (the Sharia) practiced by hundreds of millions of Muslims in Islamic countries around the world and growing.  And all three components go together to form what is known as “Islam” the so-called “religion of peace”.   And yet so many in the mainstream media twisted Ms. Geller’s words to make it sound as if she were a crackpot, who actually thought that a mosque was going to be built on the site of the actual Twin Towers, while ignoring her valid points, or else cutting her off before she could finish making a valid point.  And this is what so many of us wanted to believe, what we needed to believe – because the alternative meant that maybe she was right, and this went against a culture that raised us to believe all belief systems are of equal value and must be respected equally because anything less was unfair.

A huge portion of American culture is dominated by a naïve and usually well-intentioned view – that one must always side with the perceived victim in any conflict.  And terrorist-linked organizations such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have done a masterful job of manipulating this predisposition in painting a picture of Islam in America as the victim.  Never mind the fact that Islam itself is perhaps the greatest victimizer in the world today.  The perception that Islam is the underdog in America has allowed CAIR to bully and infiltrate the media, either by calling them out whenever they feel that Islam has been slighted or, more recently, creating an atmosphere where media outlets such as the New York Times are voluntarily censoring themselves.

For a religion that is so easily offended by the simplest slight, such as drawing a cartoon or burning a book, one would hope that a Muslim cleric with a hundred million dollars behind him could find another location – one that does not offend millions of Americans.  And this was a point that Pamela Geller never backed down from, even though she knew that she could be risking her life.

ROBERT SPENCER:

There were two defining incidents that caused me to eventually do a full 180 on my views concerning Islam as a mostly peaceful religion with a few bad apples.  The first one I have already mentioned in “The High Cost of Telling the Truth About Islam”.  Briefly:

“I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt.  I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned.  Concerned?  Wasn’t this good news?  The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home.  “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters.  I’m scared for them right now”.  After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East. Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.”

Also, I read a book by Robert Spencer called “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion”.  I knew his reputation for being an “Islamophobe” as I had been a reader of Loonwatch.com for over a year – a site which is obsessed with Robert Spencer, and is aligned with another site called SpencerWatch.com – both of which go to great lengths to depict him as the worst human being in the world.

When I picked up “The Truth About Mohammed” I kept waiting for that moment when he would reveal himself to be the “Loon” they said he was and I could stop reading.  But that moment never came.  As it turns out, all of these horrible things I was reading about Mohammed could not possibly be “Islamophobic” because they were all coming directly from Islamic scripture.  Everything he said was based on what Islamic sources, the Koran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, were saying about Mohammed.  There was very little editorializing.  Spencer was merely reporting in a very non-sensational way, what Muslims are taught about the life of their prophet.

I checked this out for myself.  Not only did I want to disbelieve what I was reading, but I needed to disbelieve it.  If what Robert Spencer was saying about Mohammed was true, then I had to rework my entire documentary, rethink my entire worldview, possibly lose backing (that hurt) and even have to go back and admit to my readers that I had it all wrong.  I really, really wanted Robert Spencer to turn out to be a “Loon”.  But he simply is not.

In fact, Robert Spencer is one of the only people out there telling the truth about Mohammed and successfully getting through to a significant number of people.  And although I had seen him appear on news shows that I don’t like, being interviewed by people that I don’t agree with, there was absolutely nothing in his book that promoted his religion or promoted a partisan political point of view.  He was simply stating the facts.  And if I could detect any kind of agenda from this at all, any hint of this being in any way personal for him, it was pretty clear that his concerns had to do with protecting human rights.

From there I watched a documentary that Robert Spencer was featured prominently in (which I very highly recommend) called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know”.  Again, I did my homework and it all checks out.  From that point I watched nearly everything I could find on YouTube with Robert Spencer in it.  Then I read “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran”.

Since first sharing my change in perspective on Daily Kos and later on Front Page Magazine, I had the honor of speaking with Robert Spencer on a number of occasions.  In fact it was he who reached out to me when my articles on Daily Kos got me banned.   We have since been on radio programs together and I receive his JihadWatch.com email regularly.  In keeping with the style of his books, Jihad Watch merely reports the facts concerning all the many acts of Jihad that have happened that day or week, with plenty of links to independent news sources from around the world, to substantiate what is being said.  JihadWatch.com more than anything has been, and continues to be, incredibly eye-opening and an excellent source of reference material, for anyone who is serious about understanding the very real threat of Jihad – including Stealth Jihad, both here at home and around the world.

Countless millions of people fall victim to Jihadists every single day.  This is perhaps the worst human rights nightmare facing the world in our time.  And, there are tragically so very few people out there who are risking their neck, quite literally, to bring us accurate information concerning this.  Quite frankly I find most (but certainly not all) of the sites that are critical of Islam to be either hateful or else too religiously motivated for me.  And my sense is that this has a lot to do with maintaining the false perception that the Counter Jihad movement is partisan or religiously motivated.  JihadWatch.com is the best, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to getting the facts in a reliable, non-partisan, non-proselytizing format.

SUMMARY:

So why would I have had such a wrong perception about Spencer and Geller?  In the Liberal world, the world I now mostly just see in my rear view mirror when it comes to many issues I am reconsidering, there is not much tolerance for a diversity of opinion – something which was made abundantly clear when I was 86’d from Daily Kos, as punishment for not singing off the same sheet of music, when it comes to Islamic Supremacy.  So I wrongly and naively thought that the Conservative world must work the same way.   Huge mistake.   The truth is, not only are there a wide range of views within the Conservative world, but even in the subculture of Counter Jihad there are many points of view as to what exactly the threat is and what to do about it.

This simply does not exist so much on the Left.  And that is unfortunate, because I believe that America could benefit from having a healthy dialogue between those who are more cautious, respectful of traditional values and those who question whether the way we have always done things is the best way to move forward.

Perhaps no Americans understand better the threat of Jihad more than our brave men and women in uniform.  Today as I write this article, in places such as Afghanistan, our troops face the very real threat of being shot in the back by a Muslim ally in uniform who is willing to murder them in cold blood because someone, somewhere burned a book.  A book!

What we are seeing is an escalating battle between the civilized world and uncivilized fanatical masses, shaking their fists yelling “Death to America!  Death Israel” burning our flags, storming our embassies, beheading our journalists, developing nuclear bombs to point at our ally, Israel and blowing themselves up yelling “Allahu Akbar!” while killing innocent children because they are Jewish.

I often wonder if there are more Islamic Supremacists in the Middle East today who want to see the Jewish race exterminated than there were Germans who wanted the same thing during World War II.  This is how serious the threat is from Orthodox Islam.  And it is only getting worse.

A new holocaust is brewing and it’s coming from Hamas, Hezbollah, state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran and it finds its roots in the history and the teachings of Orthodox Islam.  And this is being taught in the Islamic schools of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories – but even more disconcerting is that the hatred of Jews is found in literature sent over to far too many American mosques, from Egypt and Saudi Arabia and published by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Anyone who is not concerned about this, anyone who is saying nothing, doing nothing – anyone who thinks this whole thing is an overreaction, ask yourself, “How did Hitler pull off the Holocaust?” and then look in the mirror.

My fellow infidels, you are right to be concerned. No, you are not a bigot or an “Islamophobe” if you speak out. Yes, there are lots of peaceful Muslims all over the world who share our concerns – who are our partners in this effort, who tell their stories and love their children and love America just like we do.   You do not need to hate or fear Muslims. Information is the number one enemy of Islamic Supremacy. Spread it!

Whatever I’ve lost, whatever I’ve endured is nothing at all compared to what Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer courageously endure, day after day, year after year, nonstop as they are pummeled by the media, their words distorted, their characters assassinated, portrayed as hate mongers, fear mongers, bigots and fanatics – their pictures pasted onto Islamic websites all over the world, constantly, with the very clear message that these people are the “enemies of Allah” and have “insulted Islam”.

Whether protecting the rights of people abroad – their right to free speech, their right to leave their religion without facing the penalty of execution, the right not to be falsely imprisoned, the right to report if you have been raped and not be punished for it, by being stoned to death or forced to marry your rapist – make no mistake about it – these two courageous truth tellers are risking everything to protect what we all hold dear.

They will most likely have to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders, given the amount of violence so far that has been perpetrated on those who have been murdered in the past for simply speaking out against “the religion of peace”.  And they risk their lives for you and for me, and for the liberty and the protection of human rights for billions of people around the world, every single day, year after year.

And although there are many people who are fighting this fight every day, many unsung heroes, when it comes to speaking out in the media, no one has lead the charge more effectively, with moral clarity and courage than Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

What is right About Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer – is what is right about America.

Peace,

Eric Allen Bell
Eric@BellMedia.org

www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/31/us-usa-arizona-sheriff-idUSBRE87U15O20120831

Once again, JDN refuses to cite any of the assertions made in Geller's piece, and instead chooses to portray her as non-credible.  After repeated attempts by me, Crafty and others to persuade him to actually take issue with specific assertions in the articles posted here, he falls back on the tired, leftist tactic of smearing the messenger.  It's really quite tiresome, childish and frankly pathetic.  I submit that it is JDN who is generally not taken seriously here, because this character assassination and reference to others who condemn the messenger he happens to despise is apparently all he is capable of.

Henceforth (and I've broken this rule too many times already with regard to him) I will not waste any time responding to "arguments" - from JDN or others - which amount to nothing but ad hominem attacks and/or compurgation.  I have MUCH better things to do with my time than respond to dullards who are by definition incapable of independent thought and argumentation.  I consider it rather self-evident that the majority of the readers of this forum are able to distinguish between an honest attempt at a discussion and the tactics of what is commonly known as an "Internet troll."

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/08/obama-honored-fallen-seals-by-sending-their-parents-a-form-letter-signed-by-electric-pen/

I posted here (on August 16, 2012 - Reply #531 in this thread) an article which raised questions regarding how Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin can afford to pay the rent for their new $3.3 million Manhattan residence.  It posited that the source of the funds might be the Muslim Brotherhood.  The article goes on to list the reasons for this concern, which are several, and include Abedin's documented connections to Muslim Brotherhood front organizations.  JDN chooses nevertheless to ignore the remainder of the article and all of these points, attempting an intellectual sleight-of-hand by pretending they don't exist, and then asserting:

"reality, as I posted, is a Jewish man, a friend of the Clinton's, owns the house and is giving it to them either free or at a reduced rate.  Further, everyone knows that these matters are carefully reviewed by government.  If I had to guess the disclosure form is over 50 pages long.  Of course she notified her superiors of her pending move; given the FACTS, there was no problem." - JDN

Hmmmm - let's examine this assertion.  JDN's "evidence" to support this claim as to how Weiner and Abedin can afford to live in the aforementioned apartment is contained in an article he linked to from the New York Press (an online publication).  It is reproduced verbatim below:

Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin moved into a $3.3 million Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue owned by a wealthy Democratic donor Jack Rosen, according to NY Post reports.

After leaving the congressional seat that earned Weiner $174,000 a year due to his notorious sexting scandal, the couple made the drastic upgrade from their 875-square foot two-bedroom condo in Forest Hills worth $430,000 to their new 2,210 square-foot, four-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom home.

Weiner is jobless and Abedin makes about $155,000 a year as a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so many are surprised that the couple can afford the rent on the place located at 254 Park Avenue South at East 20th Street. Real-estate experts say that the couple pays at least $12,000 to $14,000 per month while a Democratic fund-raising source speculates to the NY Post that the couple may be living there gratis, as Rosen is a close friend of the Clintons. Rosen has given money into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s election campaigns for years, even flying the Clintons in his private plane. He has also contributed thousands of dollars to Weiner’s financial reserves.

Abedin’s job forces her to face restrictions on receiving gifts and must disclose any financial dealings so her decision-making is not swayed by private interests. But an official who knows the couple denies the notion that Rosen would try to affect Abedin who could then influence Clinton. (emphasis mine)

So - JDN asserts that I am ignoring reality by posting an article which explicitly states that A DEMOCRATIC FUND-RAISING SOURCE IS MERELY SPECULATING THAT THE COUPLE IS LIVING THERE RENT-FREE.  To repeat - this doesn't even address the issue of Abedin's documented connections to Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and the obvious concern that this ought to raise.

JDN further fatuously states: "everyone knows that these matters are carefully reviewed by government."  I dare say that few of the posters or readers of this forum share JDN's evident confidence that this administration's vetting process is sound.  Exhibit A to the contrary might be Van Jones.  I could cite several others, but it's rather late, and frankly I don't much relish wasting time rebutting frivolous arguments which seem to always boil down to ad hominem attacks, compurgation, refusal to acknowledge relevant evidence, and obfuscation.

JDN once again demonstrates his complete ignorance (or intentional misrepresentation) of the facts by posting Nathan Lean's Los Angeles Times diatribe against Spencer and Geller.

Read this response to Lean's piece by his two targets and judge for yourself:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/08/-los-angeles-times-calls-for-restrictions-on-freedom-of-speech-of-counter-jihadists-traffics-in-smea.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSez25yb_g0&feature=player_embedded#!

A Disturbing Event: The American Conservative Union Embraces an Islamist

Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On August 27, 2012

The conservative movement appears to be at a crossroads in its approach to the threat of Islamic supremacism—not only abroad but at home. Does the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood as the dominant force of the “Arab Spring” bode ill for America? Or is the Brotherhood merely another “political actor” as the Obama administration would have us believe? Is Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, a potential security risk worth investigating, as Representative Michele Bachmann and four conservative congressmen have suggested? Or is the mere raising of this question a witch-hunt, as Senator John McCain and Speaker John Boehner and numerous Democrats maintain?

A few months ago, these questions reached another flashpoint in an unlikely setting. The incident took place at an irregular board meeting of the American Conservative Union, an organization usually intent on keeping wobbly Republicans honest. The rump group in attendance — several key board members told Frontpage they were not even aware the meeting had been called – voted “unanimously” to dismiss long-standing accusations against two ACU board members. The accusations had been made by Center for Security Policy head, Frank Gaffney. Their focus was on the activities of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, two prominent ACU board members, whom Gaffney claims are influential agents of Islamist agendas. The ACU’s dismissal of Gaffney’s claims was contained in a memo written by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who called them “reprehensible” — terms no less damning than McCain’s slap down of Michele Bachmann.

Frank Gaffney is a former defense official in the Reagan administration and first made these claims public in 2003 in an article, “A Troubling Influence,” which was published on this site. In introducing the article, Frontpage editor David Horowitz acknowledged that Norquist had played an important role in the conservative movement, but also described Gaffney’s claims as “the most disturbing that we at frontpagemag.com have ever published.” He further characterized them as “the most complete documentation extant of Grover Norquist’s activities in behalf of the Islamist Fifth Column.”

The Frontpage article documented Norquist’s links to supporters of Hamas and other Islamist organizations dedicated to “destroying the American civilization from within” in the words of a Muslim Brotherhood document, and its Israeli ally. These figures included Abdurahman Alamoudi—who is currently serving a lengthy sentence for his involvement in a terrorist plot—and Sami Al-Arian, who was the finance head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a terrorist organization responsible for over a hundred suicide bombings in the Middle East. Before Alamoudi and Al-Arian were arrested, Norquist and Khan served as key facilitators between them and the Bush White House. Now that both have been convicted of terrorist activities, there can no longer be any doubt that they were working on behalf of America’s terrorist enemies.

Among the Norquist-sponsored initiatives furthering the Islamist agenda, according to Gaffney, was his effort to abolish the use of classified national defense intelligence evidence in terrorism cases. Islamist organizations and Norquist himself typically refer to this as “secret” evidence and suggest that the use of it offends the Constitution. But as former U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy explains, the cases in which it is normally used are immigration proceedings, not criminal prosecutions. Unlike American citizens, aliens do not have the right to be in the United States in the first place, and should not be able to force disclosure of the nation’s defense secrets as the price tag for demanding that they leave. Sami Al-Arian was the prime-mover of the “secret evidence” campaign, which he launched to protect his brother-in-law, a member of his terror network, from a pending deportation.

In addition, Gaffney charges, Norquist used his own organization, Americans for Tax Reform, to circulate and promote a letter from Republican Muslims attacking conservatives opposed to the controversial “Ground Zero Mosque.” He also campaigned to protect the Iranian regime from sanctions, from its domestic opposition, and from military action against its nuclear program – all the while demanding draconian cuts in U.S. defense spending.

The other subject of Gaffney’s concerns is Suhail Khan, a Norquist protégé with longstanding personal and professional ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders, in the 1960s, of the Muslim Students Association, the cornerstone of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. As Daniel Greenfield documents in his pamphlet, Muslim Hate Groups on Campus, the Muslim Students Association has been instrumental in indoctrinating young Muslims in Islamist ideology, and has an alarming legacy of senior members – Anwar Awlaki most prominent among them – graduating to positions of prominence in al Qaeda and other terrorist networks. In the 1980s, Mahboob Khan was instrumental in creating an MSA spinoff, the Islamic Society of North America or ISNA. ISNA became so deeply enmeshed in the funding of Hamas that it was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation. [For more information on how the Muslim Brotherhood has targeted the United States for subversion, see Robert Spencer’s pamphlet, Muslim Brotherhood in America.]

Suhail Khan’s mother, Malika Khan, was a close partner in her late husband’s work, and is a long-time leader of another Brotherhood front, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was created out of the Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network. Its parent organization was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Malika Khan currently serves on the Executive Committee of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, which distinguished itself in 2011 by promoting a conference that urged Muslims not to co-operate with FBI investigations.

These familial activities are not incidental because Suhail has publicly embraced his parents’ “legacy,” and done so before Brotherhood audiences. Despite this background and thanks to Grover Norquist’s patronage, Suhail was able to gain access to the Bush 2000 campaign, and was then appointed to a position in the Bush administration. According to Gaffney, while working at the White House, Khan helped craft and disseminate deceptive notions such as “Islam means peace,” al Qaeda “hijacked” Islam, and jihad is only a “personal struggle,” never a holy war against infidels.

In 2001, Khan appeared on a platform with about-to-be-convicted terrorist and top Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abdurahman Alamoudi. The setting was an American Muslim Council conference in Washington. Alamoudi is the founder of the Council, and once explained to a Brotherhood audience: “I think, if we are outside this country, we can say ‘O Allah, destroy America.” But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it….”

A video tape of the 2001 event shows Alamoudi heaping praise on Suhail and his father (see here from 5:38 on).  At the time, Khan was serving as the Muslim gatekeeper in the White House Office of Public Liaison, a role he used to afford access to Muslim Brotherhood guests. Introducing him, Alamoudi expressed the hope that Khan was preparing for higher office:

We have with us a dear brother, a pioneer, somebody who really started political activism in the Muslim community …. When it was a taboo for the Muslim community, no doubt about it. When Suhail Khan started not too many people were aware that we had to do something….Some of you saw him today in the White House, but inshallah soon you will see him in better places in the White House, inshallah. Maybe sometime as vicepresident soon, inshallah. Allahu Akbar!

The terrorist, Alamoudi, also had praise for Suhail’s father:

Suhail Khan is the son of a dear, dear brother who was a pioneer of Islam work himself. Many of you know his late father … who was part of all kinds of work … Suhail inherited from his father not only being a Muslim and a Muslim activist, but also being a Muslim political activist. [emphasis added]

After effusively thanking Alamoudi for these words, Suhail said: “Many of you, of course, knew my father. He was someone who dedicated his life to the community and I’ve always felt that I have to work in the same – those footsteps.”

The footsteps of Mahboob Khan have been traced to some un-reassuring places. Shortly after 9/11, the Washington Post reported that Mahboob Khan had played host to Ayman Zawahiri, second in command to Osama bin Laden, who had entered the U.S. in the mid-nineties to obtain funds and recruits for al Qaeda. One of his stops was at the al-Noor Mosque in California, a mosque founded by Mahboob Khan.

After 9/11, Suhail Khan had to give up his role at the White House as a result of the fallout from his Brotherhood associations. Yet with the support of Norquist, he managed to land on his feet and was given a political appointment in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation.

Aside from Khan’s multiple Islamist connections, Gaffney charges he has also been actively engaged in agendas championed by the Brotherhood, including trying to undo the statute making material support for terror a crime. That law was put into place in part because large sums of zakat—Islamic “charity” monies – were regularly going to fund the terrorist activities of Hamas and al Qaeda.

Is there validity, then, to Gaffney’s charges? In discussing Gaffney’s original article, David Horowitz told me:

What disturbed me most—and ultimately persuaded me that Frank was on to something—was the fact that Grover didn’t respond to Gaffney’s charges although I invited him to do so in Frontpage. Then when I caught up with Grover at a CPAC conference, and said he really needed to answer the charges, he brushed me off saying he didn’t have time – he was ‘too busy with the revolution,’ were the words he used, a reference to his conservative crusades. Then I spoke to Suhail, who had called me to complain about the claims Frank had made about his father. In this conversation, Suhail flat out denied them, saying his father was only a member of the mosque rather than its founder, and that he couldn’t remember an event with Zawahiri. When I asked Frank for his sources for these claims, he sent me the Washington Post article, which described Mahboob Khan’s role in founding the mosque and hosting Zawahiri. I sent this to Suhail for a reply, but never heard from him again. That made me realize there was something to be concerned about.

Khan was not so reticent – or in such denial — about his father’s Muslim Brotherhood activities when he appeared before audiences of the faithful, however. At a 1999 conference of the Islamic Society of North America, Suhail told those in attendance:

It is a special honor for me to be here before you today because I am always reminded of the legacy of my father, Dr. Mahboob Khan, an early founder of the Muslim Students Association in the mid-nineties and an active member of the organization through its growth and development in the Islamic Society of North America.

Despite these disturbing manifestations of Khan’s allegiances, Norquist sponsored Suhail to become a member of the board of the American Conservative Union in 2010. At this point, Gaffney’s concerns intensified. With Grover’s help, the Muslim Brotherhood was infiltrating the very heart of the conservative movement. By this time, however, Gaffney’s access to the ACU’s audiences was restricted. Because of his charges against Norquist, a very powerful member of the ACU Board, Gaffney had long since been barred from speaking at its annual CPAC gathering. But Horowitz, who was not a Washington insider like Gaffney, was a different story, and he was invited to keynote the 2011 CPAC conference. Horowitz used the occasion to address the issues raised by Norquist’s activities and Khan’s presence on the ACU Board, and to put them in historical context:

Over the last ten years, the influence of the Brotherhood has spread throughout our government. There is nothing new in this sad reality. In 1938, Whittaker Chambers attempted to warn President Roosevelt that one of his White House advisers, Alger Hiss, was a Soviet agent. When Roosevelt was given Chambers’ information, he laughed and disregarded it. Alger Hiss remained as the president’s adviser until the House Un-American Activities Committee flushed him out….

Frank Gaffney has been the courageous bringer of the bad news about Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the board of the American Conservative Union. Many good conservatives on the board have refused to believe the evidence of Suhail Khan’s Brotherhood allegiances and agendas. They are of the opinion that Suhail’s public appearances with Alamoudi and the Muslim Brotherhood fronts took place a decade ago, and that he doesn’t promote violent agendas. I understand this. My parents were Communists in the heyday of Stalin. The Party’s slogan was not “Bring on the dictatorship of the Proletariat” or “Revolution Now.” But that is what they believed. The slogan of the Communist Party was “Peace, Jobs and Democracy.”

The ACU’s response to Horowitz’s remarks was to withdraw his invitation to speak at CPAC events, although he had been a regular speaker over many years.

Earlier this year, Gaffney and his organization put together a ten-part video course called “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within.” Featured in the course were the roles played by Norquist (Parts 3-7) and Khan (Part 4) in promoting and enabling Brotherhood influence operations. The Khan segment includes a clip (starting at 4:28) from the speech that Khan gave at a 1999 ISNA conference. In the speech, Khan embraces the well-known Muslim Brotherhood ethos:

The earliest defenders of Islam would defend [against] their more numerous and better equipped oppressors, because the early Muslims loved death—dying for the sake of Allah Almighty—more than the oppressors of Muslims love life.   This must be the case when we are fighting life’s other battles [i.e., politics].  What are our oppressors going to do with people like us? We are prepared to give our lives for the cause of Islam.  I have pledged my life’s work, inspired by my dear father’s shining legacy, and inspired further by my mother’s loving protection and support, to work for the ummah.

This is classic jihadist rhetoric. (“We love death, the U.S. loves life; that is the big difference between us,” explained Osama bin Laden in one of his fatwas.) In effect, Khan praised history’s earliest jihadists, portraying them as “defenders” and their victims as “oppressors,” just as al Qaeda does in its present-day fatwas. Khan used the same language that glorifies “martyrdom” (or suicide-attacks) on behalf of Islam. (“Death in the service of Allah is our highest aspiration” is part of the Muslim Brotherhood motto.) Khan then praised his father’s Muslim Brotherhood “legacy,” and pledged his life’s work to the Muslim umma, which translated means the “Islamic nation.”

Are these remarks merely a “youthful” indiscretion? Horowitz, whose biography makes him something of an authority on second thoughts, answered the question during his keynote address at the 2011 CPAC event:

As for the question of whether Suhail Khan believes now what he openly said then, my answer is this: When an honest person has been a member of a destructive movement and leaves it, he will feel compelled to repudiate it publicly and to warn others of the dangers it poses. This is a sure test of whether someone has left the Muslim Brotherhood or not.

Suhail Khan has never repudiated his father’s Muslim Brotherhood legacy or the patronage of the convicted terrorist, Abdurahman Alamoudi. Nor has he disavowed his praise for Islamic martyrdom, nor has he taken steps to warn his fellow Americans of the Islamist threat posed by his past and present associates (part 4 of Gaffney’s videos documents Khan’s continuing involvement with Mohamed Magid, Muzammil Siddiqi, Nihad Awad and other top Muslim Brotherhood figures and organizations.) Instead, he has denied that the Muslim Brotherhood even operates in America.

On September 21, 2011, the ACU finally took up the issue of Frank’s charges. The occasion was an unusual meeting of the ACU board, which normally meets only twice a year – in Washington and via teleconference. This particular meeting took place in Orlando, Florida, where an ACU event was being held. Because of the unusual venue, far away from ACU headquarters, most of the ACU board members did not attend, including several whom Frontpage talked to who had not been informed of the meeting and who were not in sympathy with its result. When the rump board met, they voted unanimously to adopt a resolution that dismissed Gaffney’s charges out of hand, and declared their “complete confidence in the loyalty of Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist to the United States,” and “welcome[d] their continued participation in the work of ACU and of the American conservative movement.” In adopting this resolution, the board members also declared that they “profoundly regret and reject as unwarranted the past and on-going attacks upon their patriotism and character.”

In making its decision, the board appears to have relied entirely on a memorandum provided by one of its members, Cleta Mitchell, a well-known and widely admired conservative lawyer. In her memorandum, and despite its sweeping conclusions, Mitchell addressed the specifics of only one of Gaffney’s many findings, while categorically dismissing them all: “There is absolutely nothing contained in any of the materials” presented by Gaffney, she wrote, “that in any way linked Suhail (or Grover) to such [‘Muslim extremist’] organizations or their activities.”

The one specific that Mitchell took issue with was an unlikely one given her categorical statement there was absolutely nothing that in any way linked Suhail to Islamist organizations or their activities. This was the video of Khan’s 1999 address to the Islamic Society of North America featured in Gaffney’s video course. ISNA is the principal Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States; it was founded by Suhail Khan’s own parents; and before this audience Khan spoke in the ritualistic language of the Muslim Brotherhood about how Muslim warriors love death more than their opponents love life, about his devotion to the Muslim nation, and his readiness to die for Allah. Mitchell dismissed his comments in these words: “Yet, even in that speech, there is nothing that suggests Suhail is unpatriotic or subversive.  The clip from the speech is simply (in my view) rhetoric that is, quite frankly, meaningless in terms of substantiating any of Mr. Gaffney’s allegations.” But is it meaningless to paraphrase the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood to a meeting of the most important Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States, and embrace it as one’s own aspiration?

Mitchell rests her case against Gaffney and in behalf of Khan on a single point: “Suhail was subject to FBI background checks and cleared to work directly for the President and Vice-President? How would the FBI have ‘missed’ ties to such groups if those ties existed?”

In fact, as Gaffney observes — under the right circumstances, and with the right sponsors — it would have overlooked them quite easily. “The fact that Suhail Khan received a security clearance during his time in government is an indictment of the clearance process, not evidence that his background is problem-free: Ali Mohammad—Osama bin Laden’s ‘first trainer’ and longtime al Qaeda operative—also went through a background check and received a security clearance to work with the federal government. Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood killer, not only obtained a clearance, he was even promoted from captain to major despite his monitored communications with al Qaeda leader Anwar Awlaki, and the fact that in the course of his military education, he announced during a lecture that it was the duty of Muslims under shariah to kill infidels preparing to attack other Muslims (i.e., U.S. soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan).

Horowitz agrees. He points to the fact that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, has a top security clearance, notwithstanding the undisputed fact that her closest family members have been Muslim Brotherhood leaders and that for twelve years prior to being hired by the State Department, she worked for an Islamist organization founded and run by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a top funder of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network, and a Muslim Brotherhood eminence.

Given these well-known facts, Khan’s security clearance seems a pretty thin reed on which to base so sweeping a dismissal of Gaffney’s concerns, let alone refer to them as “reprehensible.” To understand her position better, I tried to interview Mitchell, but she declined to comment, saying by email “I am precluded from talking to anyone about this because of the confidentiality provisions of the boards on which I serve which have been dealing with Frank Gaffney issues.”

That confidentiality, however, had been already breached when someone on the ACU board leaked the details of its Orlando meeting and the contents of Mitchell’s letter – and leaked them not to conservatives but to the left-wing organization “ThinkProgress.” One of the things I wanted to ask Mitchell was how she thought this letter might have been leaked and by whom (Norquist? Khan?). Accompanying ThinkProgress’s release of the Mitchell letter was this summary on its website of what had transpired:

Gaffney … was unanimously condemned by the one of the most powerful conservative organizations in America, as two documents obtained exclusively by ThinkProgress this week show.  Last September, the board of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which puts on CPAC and includes top leaders of various factions of the conservative movement, unanimously passed a resolution (read it here) condemning the “false and unfounded” attacks Gaffney had made against Norquist and Khan, both board members, after having another board member, Cleta Mitchell, look into Gaffney’s serious charges of sedition and abetting an enemy.  In a letter to the ACU board (read it here), Mitchell, a prominent and very conservative attorney, said that after reviewing the “evidence” Gaffney presented (including a lengthy PowerPoint presentation and DVDs video laying out the case against Norquist and Khan), she found his “ceaseless war” to be “reprehensible.”

Another issue I wanted to ask Mitchell about was what she thought of the fact that her sweeping memo along with the leak had given powerful ammunition to the Brotherhood and its agents in their campaign to silence critics of Islamism. ThinkProgress had previously published a “report” on “Islamophobia” (following an earlier one by CAIR on the same subject). As David Horowitz and Robert Spencer demonstrate in their pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, Islamophobia is a term actually invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence its critics. The ThinkProgress report on Islamophobia attacked a dozen leading conservative critics of the Islamic jihad (also singled out by CAIR), including Frank Gaffney, as “bigots” and “racists.” Future editions of the report and future left-wing attacks will undoubtedly draw on the testimony of ACU board.

When asked about these events, Gaffney noted the irregular nature of the board meeting that condemned him, and deplored its lack of due-diligence that led to its categorical dismissal of the readily available evidence. He stated:

By acting solely on the basis of Mitchell’s defamatory and superficial memorandum, and then through the deliberate leak to a Soros-funded leftwing organization, the leadership of the American Conservative Union has discredited itself and given ammunition to those who want to prevent legitimate inquiries into Islamist influences in Washington.

This seems a more than reasonable concern. Since many prominent ACU board members were not present to conduct this auto-da-fé, there appears to be ample basis for it to seek a second opinion in regard to the case of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan.  Should it fail to do so, the ACU board will simply reinforce suspicions that it has been successfully infiltrated and subjected to an influence operation by those opposed to everything for which the conservative movement stands.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Note well how JDN conveniently fails to address any of the allegations presented IN GREAT DETAIL by these sources in the posts below.  The best defense he can evidently muster for his rather mindless and drone-like repetition of the term "witch-hunt" is to attack the sources themselves.  Nothing to see here - the sources are all lunatics - let's move on, shall we? 

Furthermore, JDN presents no evidence in support of these ad-hominem attacks other than hearsay, or third-party condemnations.

Rather pathetic and transparent attempts to avoid an actual substantive discussion, if you ask me.

Jihad At the DNC

Posted By Robert Spencer On August 22, 2012

It is no surprise, after four years of Obama Administration pandering, Muslim groups have a prominent role at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. The Charlotte Observer reports that organizers expect as many as 20,000 Muslims to attend the “Jumah at the DNC” series of events being organized by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA). Among these events is an all-day “Islamic Cultural & Fun Fest,” which will include a “TownHall Issues Conference” that will address “issues such as Islamaphobia, Anti-Shariah, Middle Eastern Crisis, Patriot Act, National Defense Authorization Act and more.”

There is no doubt whatsoever that this “TownHall Issues Conference” will not include any discussion of Islamic jihad terror plotting in the U.S., or of how Muslim groups have tried to exaggerate the problem of “Islamophobia” by faking hate crimes. It is likewise certain that the “Anti-Shariah” issue will be portrayed as an attempt by bigoted Americans to restrict Muslim religious freedom, when in reality it is solely an attempt to prevent the political and supremacist aspects of Islamic law that are at variance with constitutional freedoms from gaining a foothold here. Certain also is that the discussions of the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act will focus on how these measures are supposedly excessive and unfairly target Muslims.

The overall thrust of the entire “TownHall Issues Conference,” as is clear from its stated agenda, is to portray Muslims as the innocent victims of a bigoted, racist and “Islamophobic” government and law enforcement establishment that is unfairly scapegoating Muslims as a whole for the misguided deeds of a few on September 11, 2001. It will include no discussion of the many attempted jihad attacks against the U.S. since then, or of the successful ones, such as Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad’s murders outside a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Any and all scrutiny of the Muslim community in the U.S. will be portrayed as gratuitous and unwarranted. The assembled Democrats, meanwhile, will be falling all over themselves to promise that whatever domestic counter-terror apparatus the Obama administration has failed to dismantle during its first term will go under the knife during its second.

But the most disturbing aspect of the entire “Jumah at the DNC” is not the obvious victimhood-mongering of its agenda, but the people involved. The Democrats are playing host to an unsavory gang of Islamic supremacists with numerous ties to jihad groups. Even this is not surprising, but it should be a matter of concern to any Americans who are more aware of the jihad threat than the average politically correct Democrat pol.

Take, for example, BIMA spokesman Jibril Hough. Hough’s mosque, the Islamic Center of Charlotte, is owned by a Muslim Brotherhood group, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case. When confronted about this on a radio show, Hough first professed not to be aware of the charges against NAIT, and then refused to disavow the organization, saying only that he himself was “not necessarily” a member of NAIT and: “I was not involved in the decision to allow NAIT to be the [title] holder.”

Meanwhile, the “Grand Imam” for Jumah at the DNC is none other than Siraj Wahhaj. Wahhaj is one of the most sought-after speakers on the Muslim circuit, and has addressed audiences all over the country; in 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. After 9/11, his renown as a moderate Muslim grew when he declared: “I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad against extremism.” But as with so many other Muslim leaders in the U.S., Siraj Wahhaj is not as moderate as he may appear at first glance.

Wahhaj was several years ago designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He himself has denounced this designation as essentially meaningless, but he didn’t earn it by doing nothing. In the early 1990s he squired the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, all around New York City and New Jersey, sponsoring talks by him in area mosques. The Blind Sheikh, of course, is now serving a life sentence for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, as well as in jihad plots to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

When Wahhaj was traveling around with the Blind Sheikh, was Rahman “moderate,” and then became “radicalized”  later? Or did Rahman and Wahhaj share a supremacist and violent view of Islam, but Wahhaj is going about his jihad in a way that is less likely than Rahman’s to draw law enforcement scrutiny? No one ever asks Wahhaj such questions – least of all Democrat Party politicians.

Nor is Wahhaj’s association with the Blind Sheikh the only blot on his reputation as a “moderate.” He has warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has also asserted that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”

So why is such a man acting as the “Grand Imam” at “Jumah at the DNC”? The Democrats are so in thrall to multiculturalism that it is likely that few, if any, DNC organizers know or care about Wahhaj’s Islamic supremacist statements and ties. To raise any concerns about such a speaker would be “Islamophobic,” violating every rule of the anti-American, anti-Western ethos that prevails among so many Democrats today.

The worst thing about Siraj Wahhaj’s appearance at “Jumah at the DNC” is that it is so thoroughly unsurprising. What would be genuinely shocking would be if the DNC anywhere, at anytime, featured a speaker who spoke realistically about the jihad threat. But there is about as much chance of that as there is of the Democrats ditching Obama and nominating David Horowitz as their candidate for President of the United States.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Hatred's Strange Bedfellows

Washington Times | Aug 20, 2012
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Last week’s near-massacre at the Family Research Council (FRC) put into sharp relief a curious fact:  The people most aggressively denouncing others for their “hatemongering” sure are engaging in a lot of it themselves – with dangerous, and potentially lethal, repercussions.

Take, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).  Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the SPLC helped counter the Ku Klux Klan and other racists and anti-Semites.  At the moment, though, the SPLC is hanging out with today’s counterpart to the KKK and the preeminent threat to civil rights – especially those of women – in America: Islamists bent on insinuating here their anti-constitutional, misogynistic and supremacist doctrine known as shariah.

A case in point occurred last Wednesday night, just hours after a gunman named Floyd Lee Corkins entered the headquarters of the FRC. Corkins apparently was bent on killing as many of the Center’s employees as possible, perhaps because of the social conservative group’s listing (along with this columnist and a number of others) earlier this year by the SPLC as among the worst hate groups and bigots in America. 

It turns out that, as with the Family Research Council, what seems to qualify one for smearing by the Southern Poverty Law Center is disagreement with its political agenda.  If you lawfully object to, say, the erosion of traditional marriage or open borders, you stand to be condemned by the SPLC as a hater.  It seems that if you are militantly in favor of the radical homosexual agenda or racist groups like La Raza, however, you get a pass from that organization.

Particularly striking in this regard is the utter blindness of the SPLC to the hatemongering in which Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist organizations in this country regularly engage.  If you warn, on the basis of abundant evidence – including such Islamist groups’ own statements – that they are seeking to subvert our freedoms and form of government by insinuating shariah into this country then, boom, the self-appointed arbiters of hate will brand you a monger of it.  But those whose Islamic creed promotes hatred of other religions, man-made laws and people who embrace them are never mentioned as a problem.

On Wednesday, August 15th, the director of the SPLC’s “intelligence project,” Heidi Beirich, participated in an open conference call organized by one such Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council.  She used the occasion to inveigh against anti-Muslim hate groups and to declare that her group was “very, very concerned” about their proliferation.

What makes this performance absolutely bizarre is the fact that MPAC is not simply a Muslim Brotherhood-associated organization that, by definition, is in the business of promoting shariah’s virulently intolerant code.  The organization also has a documented history of anti-Semitism, including such hatemongering as: the contention on 9/11 by its executive director, Salam Al- Marayati, that the Jews should be viewed as possible perpetrators of the attacks of that day; repeated claims that Zionists and Jews “own” the Congress, its staff and the American media; and vitriolic support for the designated terrorist organization, Hamas, whose explicit goal is destroying Israel.

So egregious is Muslim Public Affairs Council’s record of hatemongering that an ecumenical group of seven leaders of national faith-based and civil rights organizations wrote the leadership of the Southern Poverty Law Center last week urging the SPLC not to associate with those Islamists.  An attachment noted that  an MPAC-sponsored event in December 2000 featured an exhortation from Imam Mohammed Al-Asi, a supporter of the quintessential Islamist hate group, Hezbollah, and director of the Islamic Education Center in Potomac.  He declared on that occasion:

“Now, all our khatibs (speakers), our imams, our public speakers, should be concentrating on militarizing the Muslim public.…Rhetoric is not going to liberate Al-Quds [Jerusalem] and Al-Aqsa [the mosque on the Temple Mount]. Only carrying arms will do this task. And it’s not going to be someone else who is going to carry arms for you and for me.  It is you and me who are going to have to carry these arms.”

It is deeply regrettable that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been reduced to a propaganda arm of enemies of freedom.  It should be embarrassed about its evident refusal to hold accountable any of the myriad Islamist entities that are authentic promoters of hatred – apart from Louis Farakhan’s Nation of Islam, a group so racist, so anti-Semitic, so hateful that even the SPLC evidently could not overlook its record.  And the SPLC should abandon its odious practice of listing as hate groups those – like the Family Research Council – with whom it simply disagrees politically, and seeks to silence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is quick to allege ties between people it calls haters and people who use violence against the object of the purported hatred.  If the SPLC is genuinely interested in preventing such behavior, then the organization and its leaders should stop what amounts to encouragement of it.

Norquist Repudiates Romney-Ryan on Defense

Posted By Frank Gaffney On August 17, 2012

On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, were sharply criticized over their commitment to reverse massive budget cuts Team Obama is making at the expense of our military capabilities and national security.

What made this attack notable – and potentially very damaging to the GOP standard-bearers – is that it came, not from the Democrats, but from a prominent Republican political operative, Grover Norquist.  It is hard to see how his contention that Messrs. Romney and Ryan can’t be trusted to spend wisely on defense will help anybody but their opponents.

In remarks to the bipartisan Center for the National Interest, Norquist threw down the gauntlet to the Republican ticket. He declared he would fight defense spending increases, or even relief from the next, debilitating round of cuts.  These amount to a further half-a-trillion dollars in across-the-board cuts over ten years under what has been called a “doomsday mechanism” known on Capitol Hill as “sequestration.” What makes matters much worse is that these cuts come on top of nearly $800 billion in Pentagon budget reductions already in the pipeline – a fact the anti-tax activist studiously ignores.

For a guy whose ostensible expertise is domestic economic matters, it is doubly surprising that Grover Norquist fails to recognize another disastrous effect these enormous reductions in defense spending will have – on employment and communities all over the country.  Estimates run as high as 1 million jobs lost and $59 billion in direct lost earnings and $86.4 billion in gross state product in the first year alone.  (For a detailed analysis of the impact by congressional district, see the Defense Breakdown Reports at www.FortheCommonDefense.org/reports.)

What Norquist did do, however, is directly take on the GOP ticket by opining that “Other people need to lead the argument on how can conservatives lead a fight to have a serious national defense without wasting money,” Norquist said. “I wouldn’t ask Ryan to be the reformer of the defense establishment.”

The question occurs:  Just who does Grover Norquist think would be better suited to be stewards of the “defense establishment” and the national security it is charged with providing?  Having no expertise on these matters himself, in whom does he have more confidence than the people the Republican Party hopes will lead this nation for the next four years?

Based on Grover Norquist’s past history advising the last Republican administration (see www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com), several candidates come to mind, as noted in this CSPAN interview with moderate Muslim Stephen Suleyman Schwartz:

Abdurahman Alamoudi:  Alamoudi is a top Muslim Brotherhood operative and al Qaeda financier with whom Grover Norquist joined forces in 1998 to launch a Brotherhood front called the Islamic Free Market Institute.  Alamoudi’s purpose was, with Norquist’s considerable help, to run influence operations inside the conservative movement and Republican circles, including notably the George W. Bush 2000 presidential campaign.  Alamoudi should be available to help reorder our defenses as he is currently serving hard time in Supermax on terrorism-related charges.

Sami al-Arian:  Al-Arian also went to federal prison, in his case for running a designated terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, from his professor’s office at the University of South Florida.  But not before Grover Norquist helped him meet with Candidate Bush in March 2000 and subsequently extract from Mr. Bush a public commitment that, if elected, he would work to eliminate a key counter-terrorism tool: the confidential use of classified information in deportation proceedings against illegal aliens (like al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar) so as to protect such intelligence from compromise.

Nihad Awad:  The co-founder of an aggressive Muslim Brotherhood front and Hamas fund-raising vehicle, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) also benefitted from Norquist’s help in gaining access to and running influence operations against the Bush ’43 team.  CAIR was listed in 2008 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation on charges of providing material for terrorism.

Muzammil Siddiqi:  To conclude this partial listing, Grover Norquist could surely also call for assistance on Siddiqi, yet another top Muslim Brotherhood leader and an influential Islamist cleric.  After all, Siddiqi owes him: Norquist aided in securing for him the role of representative of the Muslim faith at the national ecumenical 9/11 memorial service on September 14, 2001.  The Norquist-Alamoudi team also arranged later that month for Siddiqi to present President Bush with a Quran on the occasion of a private meeting at the White House. Such legitimation advanced considerably the subversive agenda Siddiqi and his comrades pursued as part of what they call “civilization jihad” against America.

Or perhaps Grover Norquist would turn to people like Trita Parsi, who even the state-controlled Iranian media have depicted as part of the “Iran Lobby” in America.  He certainly did before:  In 2007, Norquist created with the help of his Palestinian-American wife, Samah, an anti-defense group called the American Conservative Defense Alliance (ACDA). (Samah served on ACDA’s board of directors and as its corporate secretary).  And ACDA, in turn, was a founder of the Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran (CNAPI). ACDA’s address was that of Norquist’s ATR group, where CNAPI meetings were also held.

By 2008, CNAPI’s coalition was made up of more than 40 groups including: Parsi’s National Iranian American Council (NIAC), CAIR and other Islamists; many George Soros-funded radical leftist groups; and the Norquists’ vehicle for undermining the conservative stance on national security, ACDA.  Their common goals: to eliminate U.S. support for  the democracy activists opposed to the Tehran regime, to block  economic sanctions and to prevent any military action.

All these Norquist allies could, of course, be relied upon to back him in pressing for substantial cuts in U.S. defense expenditures.  They would presumably be happy, as Norquist put it Monday night, to join him in getting “the Republican Party…[to] reexamine the actual defense needs and then work from there to determine how much to spend.”

To be sure, a reexamination of those requirements as defined by Barack Obama is in order.  And our defense needs should indeed determine the resources applied to meet them.  But the nation – and most especially the Romney-Ryan campaign – can ill-afford to take advice from Grover Norquist and his friends, especially as it would obviously be predicated on dramatically reducing such military requirements.  It would also have the practical effect of making Obama’s ravaging of the nation’s defenses seem responsible.

At issue is not so much whether this Islamist-tied libertarian trusts Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to manage the nation’s national security needs.  What we need to know is whether the GOP candidates trust Grover Norquist – and will they henceforth open their doors to him and the bad company he keeps?

The Grand Deflection

Center for Security Policy | Aug 13, 2012
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

A magician typically succeeds when the attention of the audience is diverted from his main activity onto some distraction.  President Obama has raised this sort of deflection into a political art form.

Take, for example, the matter of revelations by five Members of Congress and the Center for Security Policy that there appear to be a number individuals working for or with the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.   The possibility that their influence may be helping to shape U.S. policy in ways that increasingly align it with the demands, ambitions and goals of the Brotherhood and other Islamists is a national security problem of the first order.  That is especially true at a moment when Muslim Brothers are consolidating their hold on power in Egypt with the cashiering of two top generals at the hands of the Brotherhood's newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Yet, Team Obama and its allies in the elite media have aggressively worked to deflect the focus away from these realities.  At first, they did so by viciously attacking Congresswoman Michele Bachmann - even though she was just one of five legislators who asked for investigations into these seeming influence operations by inspectors general of five federal agencies.

Then, they sought to portray as a victim of racism and bigotry just one of those about whom the Members of Congress raised legitimate questions: Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Journalists like CNN's Anderson Cooper repeated uncritically - and unprofessionally -  assurances that there was no factual basis for linking Ms. Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Where compelled to acknowledge that members of her family do have ties to Brotherhood-connected organizations, the administration and its allies denounced such concerns as "guilt by association" and "McCarthyism."

Then, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, former Muslim Brother Walid Shoebat and other researchers established a direct tie between Huma Abedin and a Muslim Brotherhood front, the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA).  IMMA was established essentially as an Abedin family business by Abdullah Omar Naseef, an officially designated al Qaeda financier. 

Shortly after IMMA was founded under his chairmanship, Naseef became the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL) which Mr. McCarthy described in an August 8th speech in Washington sponsored by the Center for Security Policy as: "the Saudi-financed global propagation enterprise by which the Muslim Brotherhood's virulently anti-Western brand of Islamist ideology is seeded throughout the world, very much including in the United States."

It happens that Huma Abedin was listed for twelve years on the masthead of the IMMA's journal as an associate editor.  For at least seven of those years, Omar Naseef was also listed as a member of the editorial advisory board.

In his remarks last week, former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney McCarthy directly spoke to charges that Huma Abedin was being unfairly challenged by virtue of these various ties to the Muslim Brotherhood: "‘Guilt by association' has nothing to do with fitness for high public office. High public office is a privilege, not a right. Access to classified information is a privilege, not a right. You need not have done anything wrong to be deemed unfit for these privileges."

Andrew McCarthy added pointedly:  "It is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests of the United States."

Nonetheless, two days later, the Deflector-in-Chief used the occasion of remarks at his fourth annual White House Iftar dinner - a ceremony marking the breaking of the Ramadan fast - to provide a shout-out to one of his guests, Huma Abedin.  Mr. Obama pronounced: "Huma is an American patriot, and an example of what we need in this country - more public servants with her sense of decency, her grace and her generosity of spirit. So, on behalf of all Americans, we thank you so much."  Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Not only does Ms. Abedin's relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood and involvement in policies favorable to its interests warrant close official scrutiny. There are at least six other individuals with Brotherhood ties whose involvement in Obama administration "Muslim outreach" and/or related policy-making also deserve investigation by the IGs and the Congress:

Rashad Hussain, Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation;
Dalia Mogahed, an advisor to President Obama;
Mohamed Elibiary, a member of Homeland Security Department's Advisory Council;
Mohamed Magid, a member of the Homeland Security Department's Countering-Violent Extremism Working Group;
Louay Safi, until recently the credentialing authority for Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military and now a leader of the Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council; and
Kifah Mustapha, a Hamas-fundraiser and graduate of the FBI's ‘Citizens Academy'
The American people are entitled to know who is shaping the policies that are increasingly empowering, enriching and emboldening the Muslim Brotherhood - an organization sworn to our destruction.  Under no circumstances should legitimate and well-grounded congressional requests for formal investigations be deflected, let alone suppressed.

And the results of those investigations must be available to inform the critical choice American voters have to make this November.  It just might make all the difference in the outcome - which is presumably why the grand deflection is being pursued with such determination.

The Elephant in the Room: Is Muslim Brotherhood Paying Huma and Weiner Rent for $3.3M Apartment?

August 14, 2012

www.maggiesnotebook.com


Former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin have moved into a $3.3 MILLION apartment in New York City. How are they paying for this tony piece of real estate when Weiner still doesn’t have a real job that anyone knows about – maybe some consulting and such, but that’s about it. Or maybe he had a re-election war chest when he resigned? His wife’s income is reportedly $155,000 annually. Let’s cut to the chase – give the elephant a glance: is the Muslim Brotherhood paying for Huma Abedin’s convenient access to Hillary Clinton’s brain, computer and power?

The residence is a 2,120-square-foot, four-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom apartment, according to the Post, and the paper notes the property curiously came off the market at the same time Weiner sold his residence last year.  Source: Breitbart

Weiner resigned his US Congressional seat for New York…in disgrace, after tweeting lewd photos of himself, while his wife was pregnant with their first child. A Clinton spokesperson told Breitbart.com that Weiner and wife are a “two-income” family, so maybe he’s tapping his 401K or Government pension, or whatever, but it sounds like he’s a stay-at-home Dad. Huma is Hillary Clinton’s close personal friend and her Deputy Chief of Staff. They met in Saudia Arabia and Abedin’s parents are well-documented Muslim Brotherhood supporters:

1. Huma Abedin’s mother, Dr. Saleha S. Mahmood Abedin (hereafter, Saleha Abedin), is an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s division for women, the  Muslim Sisterhood. She is also a zealous advocate of sharia law’s oppression of women — which McCain himself condemned in a 2011 interview with Der Spiegel.

2. Not only that: Saleha Abedin is a board member of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief. The IICDR has been long banned in Israel for supporting Hamas. It is also part of the Union for Good, which is a formally designated international terrorist organization under federal law. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the chief sharia jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, and has issued fatwas endorsing suicide bombings against Israel and terrorist attacks against American forces in Iraq.

3. Moreover, it turns out that Huma Abedin herself was, until late 2008, a member of another of her mother’s Islamist organizations, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Read more at PJ Media

If that’s not enough, remember the hammer dropped on Rep. Michele Bachmann for bringing attention to Abedin’s background? Walid Shoebat is ready to tell more:

That news concerns Huma’s alleged ties to Abdullah Omar Nasseef, a “financier” of terrorism with whom Huma was associated when she was part of his organization, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), until taking her position with Sec. of State Clinton.

Shoebat is also prepared to show the alleged ties between the Abedin family and Yusuf Qaradawi, “the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Shoebat’s focus on Qaradawi is critical, because many that have dismissed Bachmann’s concerns about Huma have done so based on the fact that Huma’s husband, former Rep. Anthony Wiener, is Jewish. Source: Breitbart

The apartment, which is owned by a Clinton supporter, is judged to rent for $12,000 – $14,000 per month. If family income is only $12,916 gross monthly, the verboten question: how much is it worth to have an operative at the highest levels of the U.S. State Department? Read much more on Huma Abedin at The Camp of the Saints.

AskMarion links and has much more background and current news on Abedin, including a White House Iftar dinner and her place at the table.

Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception

Posted By Mark Tapson On August 14, 2012 - Frontpagemag.com

Barack Obama the man is more of a mystery to Americans than any president in modern history, thanks to suppressed documents and unexplained gaps in his personal and intellectual life. Now a new documentary seeks to answer the question, “Was the multicultural tale of Obama’s goat-herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda irreconcilable with American values?”

Based on two years of research, interviews, newly unearthed footage and photos, and the writings of Communist Party organizer and propagandist Frank Marshall Davis, Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception is an alternate theory to Obama’s autobiography. The 95-minute video from Highway 61 Entertainment weaves together the facts with re-creations and “reasoned speculation” in an effort to solve the mystery of Obama’s origin. As director/writer/producer Joel Gilbert puts it, the conclusion is that “the ‘Birthers’ have been on a fool’s errand. To understand Obama’s plans for America, the question is not ‘Where’s the birth certificate,’ but ‘Who’s the real father?’”

The film makes the case that Davis is Obama’s real father, both biologically and ideologically, and that he indoctrinated Obama during the latter’s formative years with a political grounding in Marxism and an anti-white world view. It asserts, as Gilbert says in an interview, that Obama’s election “was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the US economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Dreams from My Real Father is narrated over meandering violin-and-piano music by Obama impersonator and voiceover actor Ed Law, who chronicles the president’s life journey from birth to the present as if Obama himself is speaking. Some dialogue is taken directly from Davis and Obama’s writings, while some is “approximated.”

The documentary includes Obama’s indoctrination in Marxism by Davis, his college years, his work as a Saul Alinsky-style community organizer, his close association with the Bill Ayers family and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, even his little-known role in the subprime mortgage crisis, all the way through his campaigns and into the presidency. “My mission in life,” says the Obama narrator, “is to fulfill the dreams of my ‘ideological father’ – to replace capitalism with Communism.”

The film begins with a comparison of the startling physical similarities between Obama and Frank Marshall Davis: facial features, stature and build, even their voices and laughs. It moves on to a description of Davis’ involvement with the Communist Party of the USA, which was founded in Chicago. The CPUSA targeted useful American journalists like Davis, who was deeply involved an astounding number of Communist front groups and wrote for all their publications. He was assigned to recruit blacks into the party – the goal was to target them, rub salt in their wounds, stir up class resentment, and mobilize their discontent to take power. In addition to being a poet and propagandist, Davis started a camera club and specialized in nude photography.

Enter Obama’s “Gramps,” grandfather Stanley Dunham on his mother Ann’s side, who was a “company man” for the CIA, tasked with recruiting black students against Communism. One of those students was Obama’s purported father, Barack Hussein Obama, who arrived from Kenya and was greeted by Gramps himself. The Dunhams later moved to Hawaii, where a very unhappy Ann began hanging out with poet/photographer Davis, who had moved there to recruit blacks for the CPUSA. He ultimately got her to pose nude for him – and eventually, according to the documentary, also got her pregnant.

After his initial shock and anger over the illicit affair, Stanley Dunham realized he would lose his CIA security clearance if it was discovered that his daughter was pregnant by Communist Davis. Abortion, illegal in Hawaii, wasn’t an option. Dunham decided to carry out an elaborate deception. He needed a black man to marry Ann and legitimize the birth, so he turned to Kenyan student Obama, who needed the money. But Obama was already a married man and father, so he agreed to go along with the plan only if the birth certificate stated “Father unknown.”

Months later Ann was granted an uncontested divorce, married Indonesian Barry Soetero and moved to Jakarta. Young Barry grew up there, eventually was told the truth about his real father, and spent some time with “Uncle Frank” Davis in Hawaii during his formative years. By the time Obama went to Occidental College on a full affirmative-action scholarship, he was already a committed Marxist.

Going to school later in Chicago, Obama was influenced by professors like Richard Cloward with his “crisis strategy” of economic sabotage to collapse capitalism. He met terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who realized Obama’s value to their movement, and learned the strategies of “community organization” – or more precisely, “community agitation.”

Thanks to his connections, Ayers’ wealthy father Thomas and black nationalist patron Khalid al-Mansour, Obama was accepted at Harvard Law School and became president of the Harvard Law Review without actually having written a single law review. He moved on to become a training director for the Alinskyite group ACORN.

The documentary goes on to detail Obama’s political life, his involvement with Project Vote and the subprime mortgage crisis, his shady backing from slumlord patron Tony Rezko, and his support from another red-diaper baby, David Axelrod, who ultimately helped him shape his presidential campaign message. Once in office, Obama began carrying out the socialist blueprint – centralizing power in the government

When asked in an interview why it matters who Barak Obama’s father really is, filmmaker Joel Gilbert replied,

Obama sold himself to America as the multi-cultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. His father was a goat herder from Kenya, he would bring people together, so it went… [P]romoting a false family background to hide an agenda irreconcilable with American values is a totally unacceptable manipulation of the electorate.

The closing image of the film is a waving Communist flag, suggesting that Obama’s agenda – to make America socialist without ever realizing how it happened – is flourishing. “These are my dreams,” the Obama impersonator finishes, “the dreams from my real father.”

Christie Hosts Hamas-linked radical Imam

Radicalislam.org - Sunday, July 29, 2012


New Jersey Governor Chris Christie hasn’t commented on the case of Imam Mohammed Qatanani since the issue started getting attention, leaving open the question of whether he still stands by the radical imam that the Department of Homeland Security wants to deport. We now know the answer. On July 24, Christie invited Qatanani to a Ramadan dinner at the Governor’s Mansion and he reaffirmed his support for the cleric, calling him a “friend.”

“In all my interactions with the imam, he has attempted to be a force for good in his community, in our state with law enforcement, with those of us who have gotten to know him for the years,” Christie said at the event in Princeton.  He continued:

“I hope that what you see is a constant strain of conduct for me. I will judge people based upon their relationships with me and the way I observe them conduct themselves, and while there may be other issues at play and I will certainly consider those if other facts come in, I will tell you the folks who are my friends will continue to be my friends as long as they continue to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty and faith in common value and the things that make our state a better place.”

This development isn’t terribly surprising, especially since RadicalIslam.org reported that when Christie’s Attorney General met with Qatanani, Mohamed el-Filali, the executive director of Qatanani’s mosque and an official from the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ N.J. chapter.

A July 29, 2008 court filing said Qatanani was guilty of “material misrepresentation,” “has engaged in terrorist activity” and “engaging in unauthorized employment…by allowing an out-of-status alien to reside with him.”

“It is certainly suspicious when a person who has been convicted of being a member of, and providing services, to Hamas, who has personal ties to a Hamas militant leader, and a Hamas fundraiser also sends undisclosed cash to the West Bank,” the document reads.

Qatanani’s next hearing is scheduled for November 26.

For more background information on Imam Qatanani and his relationship with Governor Christie, read RadicalIslam.org’s previous reports by clicking here, here and here.

Paul Ryan's Plan Can Be Effectively Defended

From The Heritage Foundation - August 13, 2012

Quick quiz: Who said this about Medicare? "With an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don't gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won't be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it."

It wasn't Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney's new running mate, who has been vocal about the need for Medicare reform. It was President Barack Obama, just last year.

As the debate reignites over the government's health care plan for seniors, which has a long-term unfunded liability of nearly $37 trillion, two things are important to remember:

1. Obamacare has already "ended Medicare as we know it."

2. There is bipartisan consensus for moving Medicare toward a premium support model, meaning that the government would make a fixed contribution toward each enrollee's plan, but the enrollee would have the freedom to choose which health care plan he or she wants.

Medicare has been unsustainable for some time. The continued "plan" to deal with the entitlement's runaway growth has been to cut payments to health care providers—but because that would harm patients by reducing the number of doctors available, Congress keeps putting it off. As Heritage expert Bob Moffit explains:
Physicians, under current law, also face Medicare payment cuts that are so draconian—31 percent in 2013—that Congress once again will likely stop them from going into effect. Yet the prospects remain profoundly unfavorable for physicians. More seniors plus fewer providers does not—and cannot—equal "guaranteed" benefits.

The President and other supporters have claimed that Obamacare would help protect seniors. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office just updated its estimate of the amount Obamacare steals from Medicare to fund itself—a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.

As Heritage's Alyene Senger wrote, "With a raid on Medicare of this magnitude, President Obama's assertion that his new law is protecting seniors and Medicare is astonishing. The truth is that Obamacare does the opposite."

If anyone starts talking about "ending Medicare as we know it," you can easily tell him that Obamacare already did that. In addition to robbing Medicare of its funding, Obamacare contains more than 160 provisions affecting Medicare.

The good news is that there are several strong plans for Medicare reform that could salvage the program for the next generation of retirees.

The Heritage Foundation has developed a Medicare premium support plan as part of its comprehensive budget reform, Saving the American Dream. With premium support, the government makes a fixed payment to a health plan chosen by an enrollee. If an enrollee wants to purchase a plan that is more expensive than the government payment, the enrollee may do so, paying the additional cost. If an enrollee wants to buy a less expensive plan, the enrollee may also do so, and keep the savings.

Under this model, health plans would compete directly with each other. Their ability to retain or expand their enrollment would depend solely on their ability to provide the best package of benefits and the highest quality of care at the most competitive price. The American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Progressive Policy Institute have all endorsed this general approach to comprehensive Medicare reform.

Some Members of Congress also have been forging a powerful consensus on reforming Medicare. Senators Richard Burr (R–NC) and Tom Coburn (R–OK), and Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Ron Wyden (D–OR) have put forth plans that would improve on the experience of defined-contribution ("premium support") financing that today characterizes the competitive private plan program in Medicare Part C and the Medicare drug program in Medicare Part D.

Without reform, Medicare is headed toward a crash landing, leaving America's seniors in the lurch. Heritage's Moffit asserts:
Medicare premium support, long a bipartisan proposal, is the best alternative to this unhappy scenario. It would improve the environment for medical practice, guarantee retirees better choices and broader access to quality care, encourage faster innovation in care delivery, and discourage waste and fraud in medical transactions. It would also deliver superior cost control. For the next generation of taxpayers and retirees alike, there is no better future.

AFDI/SIOA Islamorealism ads up in New York!

See here: www.jihadwatch.org/2012/08/afdisioa-islamorealism-ads-up-in-new-york.html#comments

I am very pleased to report that for once the freedom of speech and the truth have triumphed over political correctness and submission to the Islamic supremacist agenda. Our AFDI/SIOA Islamorealism ads are up in New York Metropolitan Transit Authority stations from White Plains to the Bronx. I'm particularly proud of this as "Islamorealism" is a word I coined.

All kudos go to Pamela Geller, who originated this ad and all our brilliant AFDI/SIOA Islamic supremacist awareness ads, and who keeps pushing the politically correct establishment to grant us our free speech rights.

Posted by Robert on August 10, 2012 5:17 AM

Also worth noting is that JDN makes absolutely NO attempt to refute anything contained in the Andrew McCarthy piece I posted earlier in this thread, which effectively destroys his laughable claim that this is simply a "witch hunt."  There are plenty of FACTS in that piece.  JDN evidently isn't interested in facts - only in character assassination.

Occupy Unmasked

Posted By Ben Shapiro On August 9, 2012

This week, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s Magnet Releasing revealed that they had purchased the rights to Occupy Unmasked, a Citizens United production, also produced by Andrew Breitbart, and created by Stephen K. Bannon. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to pre-screen the film along with the attendees of the Right Online conference.

Full disclosure: I’m editor-at-large of Breitbart News; I was a close friend of Andrew’s; I’m a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the Freedom Center. Leaving all that aside, Occupy Unmasked is a thought-provoking and powerful piece of work that will make you worry for your country.

The film itself explores the deep, dark crevices of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Where did it come from? What are its ideological and philosophical roots? And what was the goal of the movement?

Occupy Unmasked uncovers the answers through exclusive footage of the Occupy movement – footage that will leave your skin crawling and your stomach writhing. This was not a peaceful, hippie movement of the 1960s, with thousands of grassroots turning out for drug-induced love-ins. This was a top-down, insidiously planned movement with a set of very real goals: chaos, political pressure, undermining the existing constitutional order. Occupy was dangerous, and it was purposefully designed to be dangerous.

Through all of this, Andrew Breitbart acts as guide. Andrew was a larger-than-life figure – a passionate advocate for what he believed, and a deep believer in the great hope that is America. And you can see the fire in his eyes when he describes the shameful dreams and tactics of Occupy. The rapes, the assaults, the property damage; the smear campaigns; the media complicity. It’s all there.

When we get to the ideological roots of the movement, David Horowitz takes the fore. As a former leftist radical, Horowitz understands the motives of the thwarted ‘60s radicals standing behind the Occupy movement. He understands the underpinnings of an astroturfed operation, and he details how Occupy stole the Marxist philosophy of the 1930s radicals, combined them with the sit-in politics of the 1960s radicals, and then added a patina of legitimacy provided by a compliant mainstream media. There is a history to Occupy. It did not spring from the mind of Zeus, full-blown. It sprang from a hundred-year history of class and race discontent; it was fruit of the poisonous tree. Horowitz explains all that, and he also explains how so many Americans were duped into believing that Occupy was simply an innocent movement frustrated with the workings of the political machinery.

The film isn’t just commentary. It features undercover work by video journalists including Brandon Darby, Lee Stranahan, Pam Keys, and Mandy Nagy. It allows viewers to enter deep into the heart of a movement that wasn’t a joke, no matter how much it may seem so in retrospect.

And today, that is the true danger of Occupy: that we will take it too lightly, pretend that it meant nothing. In truth, it meant everything to the left. That’s why the Obama administration defended it. This week, Judicial Watch announced that it had obtained access to Obama administration Department of Homeland Security documents showing that the General Services Administration told law enforcement to “stand down” and allow Occupy Portland protesters to violate the law. As Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said, “These documents clearly show that federal agencies colluded with the Obama White House to allow the Occupy Wall Street protestors to violate the law with impunity. These documents tell us that the GSA and DHS can’t be relied upon to protect federal workers or property.”

Occupy may not be the first radical movement to seize the imaginations of millions of Americans. And it won’t be the last. But it may have been the first fully produced mass movement in American history – a movement created in back rooms, to specific ends. Occupy Unmasked documents the evolution of the Occupy movement in all its horrific detail.

And you can guarantee that we haven’t seen the last of Occupy. Not yet.

Watch the trailer of Occupy Unmasked here: www.occupyunmasked.com

Suicide as a Jewish Value

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On August 8, 2012

A month ago, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sat down with the host of a Jewish television channel and could not name any reason for Jews to vote for Obama except for his support for abortion. Which is to say that the favorite muppet of the Democratic Party could not think of any reason to support B.O. except a mutual commitment that fewer Jews be born.

It is a little-known fact that Margaret Sanger, that pioneer of eugenic solutions to “racial, political, and social problems,” began by targeting Jews, opening her first center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, complete with Yiddish and Italian flyers, aiming for the two immigrant groups whose high reproduction rates were considered a social problem.

Abortion as a liberal Jewish value has been a stunning success. In New York City, where Sanger first set up shop, 74 percent of all Jewish children are members of the traditionalist Orthodox religious group. Liberal Jews are already panicking over the prospect of a future Jewish population in New York City that is staunchly conservative and religious.

A recent survey of New York City Jews also shows a nearly even split between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. 46 percent of New York Jews are planning to vote against Obama, and a majority of New York City Jews think that Romney would be better at fixing the economy than B.O. But it is only to be expected that the group for whom abortion isn’t a Jewish value would come to outnumber the group for whom abortion is a Jewish value.

The problem with values is that you have to live with their consequences. When your values dictate that terrorists deserve all the protections of the civilian justice system, then you have to be ready to live with the explosions. If your values dictate minimal population growth, then you have to accept the consequences of extinction. Values that are contrary to survival carry their own natural cost. And when your values are at odds with your interests, then your values might as well be an open window, a loaded revolver or a dose of strychnine.

Liberal Jews like to talk about Jewish values rather than Jewish interests, because their values are incompatible with Jewish interests — even as a matter of simple survival. The usual liberal grab bag of values that are represented by the Jewish hand puppets of liberalism, like Wasserman-Schultz, aren’t just alien, they threaten the basic survival of the Jewish People.

When asked to justify what interests the Democratic Party and American Jews have in common, the Jewish liberal dives into a copy of the New York Times and comes up with illegal immigration, abortion, gay rights and support for peace in the Middle East.

That list of liberal Jewish values not only fails to align with a single Jewish interest, but each of them threatens Jewish interests… that is if survival is to be considered a Jewish interest.

Peace in the Middle East means aborting Israel, dissecting it into small pieces and repeating the process until there is no country left. It’s another case of liberal Jews trying to do to Israel what they have already done to themselves. To believe that pressuring Israel into making a non-stop roll of concessions to Muslim terrorists is a Jewish value is to believe that suicide is a Jewish value.

Illegal immigration, a cause that virtually every major Jewish organization has signed on to, means the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States. The ADL’s own survey shows that nearly half of foreign-born Latinos rate as strongly anti-Semitic, over three times the rate of white Americans. (Bad news for the glorious civil rights alliance; the ADL’s strongly anti-Semitic ratings are 12 percent for white Americans, 35 percent for African-Americans and 44 percent for foreign-born Latinos.) The only way to make sense of this is that liberal Jewish groups believe that increasing anti-Semitism in America is actually a Jewish value.

But liberals of all creeds need more Mexican illegal aliens and immigrants from all across the Third World to compensate for the good work of Sanger. Liberal Christians fear the reproduction rates of Conservative Christians as liberal Jews fear the reproduction rates of Orthodox Jews. The only way out of the demographic race is to import “ringers” who will have the children that they won’t. The new eugenics is political eugenics. Birth control is no longer for the people that Sanger considered the “unfit”; they’re valued now for their reproductive rates which help the “fit” stay in power.

Growing anti-Semitism is a small price to pay for the liberal values of having people like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sitting in Congress instead of selling tie-dyed t-shirts and hand-painted seashell bongs in a flea market. And like all the wages of liberalism, the price for it isn’t paid by the people on top, but by those at the bottom: Those Jews living next to the 44 percent in New York City or on farms in the West Bank within firing range of their Palestinian Muslim peace partners. The Jews whom Sanger and Schultz consider “unfit.”

There is a fundamental gap between the interests of those Jews and those of a liberal elite who claim that their liberal values are our Jewish values. The values of the elite are linked to power while those of the population are linked to survival. The power of liberal Jewish elites is inextricably linked to the decimation of Jewish populations, whether in the United States, Europe or Israel.

Jews who have grown up within the bubble of liberal Jewish values are repeatedly asked to choose between their own interests, their physical, social and economic welfare, and the values that have been presented to them as Jewish values. They are encouraged to believe that betraying their own interests is a noble act of self-sacrifice for the greater good.

This is the same false choice between interests and values, between the low ground of survival and the high ground of moral superiority, that the left subjects all Americans and Europeans to on a regular basis. What all the lecturers on the theme of the moral high ground and the new value system have forgotten to mention is that a value system that is incapable of perpetuating itself is of very little use to anyone. It isn’t even any good as an act of martyrdom because martyrs are remembered by the people who share their beliefs.

Martyrs that live on die for a faith, not for the extinction of a faith. And that is what liberal Jewish values are. The extinction of a faith and a people in the name of a better faith in liberalism and a better people in the form of a multicultural rainbow of other people who have children, but still vote Democratic, because their religious values have not yet been submerged within a liberal identity.

The paradox of the multicultural alliance is that the political survival of the narrow wedge of liberals at the top depends on a larger wedge of non-liberals who vote for them but don’t share their values. If the minority communities adopted the full panoply of liberal values, they would be on the same path to extinction as the people for whom they have been taught to pull the lever on Election Day.

That is what makes the multicultural alliance into a frighteningly unstable beast which is always at risk of either breaking left or breaking right and must be constantly replenished through fresh supplies of immigrants who are still economically liberal and socially conservative enough to keep the system going.

Jewish liberals are stuck in a particularly hellish version of this paradox preaching an extinction-based value system that is doomed to lose the race to traditionalists. And the only way out is to try and suborn and break down the values of Jewish traditionalists more aggressively in order to gain fresh recruits for their zombie army of the living dead.

Margaret Sanger at least understood that “the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ … can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes.” Birth control teaching without eugenics would never be enough, but the age when the government can mandate a One Child Policy is not yet here. And even if it did arrive, it would still lead to a higher birth rate for couples in traditional marriages.

The race between traditional Jewish values and liberal Jewish values must always end in the same way over and over again. Suicide can never become a Jewish value unless it is universalized and it can never be universalized until every traditional group is broken down. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has already lost and she probably knows it. If she doesn’t, the Jewish Federations who are busy typing up the survey results certainly do. And while that will lead them to redirect more money to groups such as Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Uri L’Tzedek which act as leftist outposts of the war on traditional Judaism — that too is another race they cannot win.

In Israel and America, the proponents of Jewish suicide are successfully wiping themselves out, while the proponents of Jewish survival are filling up cradles. The race between the Jewish values of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and their values is already being won.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: