Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Former Federal Prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy Briefs on
Muslim Brotherhood Influence Operations
 
When:  11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m., August 8, 2012
 
Where:  Edward R. Murrow Room, National Press Club
               529 14th Street Northwest, 13th Floor
               Washington, DC 20045
 
Who:  Andrew C. McCarthy: Prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman
 
What: A presentation of new information concerning Muslim Brotherhood influence operations inside and aimed at the Obama administration and their impact on U.S. policy. The briefing will include additional revelations concerning Huma Abedin, Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
 
            Ever since five Members of Congress – Representatives Michele Bachmann (MN) Louie Gohmert (TX), Trent Franks (AZ), Lynn Montgomery (GA) and Tom Rooney (FL) – were attacked by their colleague, Rep. Keith Ellison (MN), for asking the Inspectors General of federal departments to investigate evidence of Muslim Brotherhood influence operations within the U.S. government, there has been much heat and relatively little light on the subject.  The group that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has dubbed “the National Security Five” has been subjected to character assassination, had its motives and integrity impugned and been ridiculed for acting irresponsibly, without any basis for its request to the IGs.  In fact, it has been the five legislators’ critics of both parties who have failed to do their homework.
 
            Fortunately one of the Nation’s most knowledgeable and respected authorities regarding the Muslim Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” - former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy - has done his due diligence. In successive articles at National Review Online and PJMedia, Mr. McCarthy has explored some of the evidence that individuals with ties to the Brotherhood are working inside or advising the Obama administration.  He shares – and, with his characteristic rigor, further validates – the concerns expressed by Mrs. Bachmann et al. that American policy may be influenced by such officials, advisors and “liaisons” to the Muslim-American community.
 
            Mr. McCarthy’s briefing will address several examples of this phenomenon, including additional information developed in recent days concerning Huma Abedin’s associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
            Please RSVP to Adam Savit, savit@securefreedom.org or 202-719-2413.
 
The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public.
 
For more information visit www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org.

Supporters of Ted Cruz and Chick-fil-A Break News

By Michael Barone - August 6, 2012

 

Americans keep behaving in ways that baffle the liberal mainstream media. Two examples figured prominently -- or should have -- in last week's news.

One is the runoff primary for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz thumped incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, 57 to 43 percent.


 
Cruz won even though the Texas Republican establishment, from Gov. Rick Perry on down, endorsed Dewhurst. So did the Austin lobbying community, since Dewhurst as lieutenant governor has run the state Senate for the last 10 years (and, having lost this race, will do so for at least the next two).

Dewhurst has had a generally conservative record and had no problem getting elected and re-elected statewide four times. And he spent liberally from the fortune he made in the private sector.

To be fair, some MSM outlets did run stories on Cruz's rise in the polls since he ran behind Dewhurst by a 45 to 34 percent margin in the May 29 primary. And it's not uncommon for a second-place finisher to overcome the primary winner in a runoff.

But there's a pattern here that the big liberal press has been reluctant to recognize: Candidates from the GOP establishment are getting knocked off by challengers with less name recognition, far less money and the support of the tea party movement. The tea party was supposed to be dead and gone, you know.

There were two such victories in May, when six-term Sen. Richard Lugar was upset by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in Indiana and when state Sen. Deb Fischer beat two well-known contenders for the open seat nomination in Nebraska.

Cruz, who is the odds-on favorite in November, has the credentials and policy positions to be a figure of national importance for many years. At 41, he could represent the second-largest state in the Senate for decades.

And there's a tradition of Texas senators taking the lead in public policy, from the days of Tom Connally and Lyndon Johnson and including John Tower, Lloyd Bentsen and Phil Gramm.

Cruz has a fine legal pedigree. He was a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and argued nine cases (and won five) in the U.S. Supreme Court representing Texas. As a teenager, he memorized and gave lectures on the Constitution, and on the stump he emphasized the founding document's limits on the power of government.

The big media has assumed that tea partiers are potentially violent despite the lack of evidence of any violent behavior. That's why ABC's Brian Ross mentioned on-air an Aurora, Colo., tea partier with the same name as the movie theater murderer, although it's a common name and Aurora has 325,000 people.

In contrast, the MSM has been happy to celebrate the much smaller and often violent Occupy movement and characterize it as "mostly nonviolent."

Texas showed once again that many voters are eager to turn out and vote for tea party-backed candidates. Cruz won by about 2 to 1 in fast-growing exurban counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and metro Houston.

The MSM could hardly avoid reporting Cruz's victory Tuesday. But many news outlets ignored Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day Wednesday.

There were big crowds, long drive-up lines and record sales at the chain's stores, in response to the declarations by the mayors of Chicago, Boston and Washington that they would keep the restaurant out because of its owners' opposition to same-sex marriage.

That's not "Chicago values," said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, although there are many Chicagoans on both sides of this issue, just as many are on both sides, in varying proportions, throughout the country. But even many supporters of same-sex marriage like me were appalled at the spectacle of public officials barring businesses because of the religious or political beliefs of their owners.

In Huntsville, Ala., YouTube celebrity Antoine Dodson, who is openly gay, dined at Chick-fil-A on Wednesday. "That's what freedom is. We don't all have to believe in the same things," he told a Huntsville Times reporter.

"We all have our different beliefs and can still come together and still be friends and be cool with each other," he said. "So I'm here to be in support of the employees, and I'm also coming to get that spicy chicken sandwich."

Dodson presumably is not an expert on the Constitution like Ted Cruz. But he has something to teach the liberal mainstream media about the spirit of the Founders.

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

It's interesting to note that JDN seems to delight in name-calling and ad hominem attacks.  Funny how he never seems to actually engage in a dialogue or actual evidence-based debate.
This forum is populated overwhelmingly by thoughtful, intelligent individuals who are ready and willing to back up their arguments with evidence.  I and many others here choose not to respond to JDN's inanity because, as Mark Twain famously observed:  "Never argue with a fool.  Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."

Curious to hear from Crafty's "pack" here what you think about the serious problem we currently face regarding the "Voluntarily State-Controlled Media" as  Rush Limbaugh calls it.  What is the solution?  We have legions of "journalists" working today who are nothing more than political hacks.  They trade in propaganda and selective reporting of news stories to promote their leftist agenda.  Granted, we have conservative talk radio and Fox News Channel to counter them - but it appears the overwhelming majority of the public still gets their "news" - either directly or indirectly - from this volunteer "Pravda" network of "reporters."  I'm not sure the Framers ever envisioned such a scenario.

What do you folks think?

This was posted today by Chris Logan at his excellent blog - www.loganswarning.com:

“Conservative” Bloggers and Political Commentators Surrendering Their Free Speech to Islam

July 31, 2012
By Chris Logan

The other day I was alerted to an article that my anti-Sharia sister Pamela Geller, had written which mentioned Logan’s Warning. Basically the article was on the issue of some big name bloggers and political commentators who have already surrendered their freedom of speech to Islam. Some of what Pamela stated was a bit surprising. I was not aware how some of the most popular bloggers had run away from her and Robert Spencer. (Please click HERE to see the article on Atlas Shrugs.) Apparently the heat is either too much for them, or the money they bring in by toeing the politically correct line is more important than saving their future generations from Islamic rule. I would just like to add a few things to Pamela’s article. In regards to Weasel Zippers: They used to be on my email list, and approximately a year and a half ago I received an email from them asking me to remove them from my list. I asked why, and was never sent a response. Is it just for money? Is it because of my friendship with Pamela? Or maybe they just run from people who are not afraid to speak about the actual tough answers that are needed to win this war? Either way, this goes for everyone mentioned in her article who has abandoned them. Pamela and Mr. Spencer have had some major victories recently, can you say the same?


This is a war, and in order to win it we are going to have to take some heat. That means we should be supporting Pamela and Mr. Spencer. Not running to make some extra money, or running because of some verbal attacks on you. Big deal, toughen up! This is a war!

Coming up next: I will name some more “conservatives” who have run from this issue.

I think it's vitally important to point out here that Obama is clearly a Marxist/Communist ideologically, and as such, HIS PLAN FOR AMERICA IS UNFOLDING BEFORE OUR EYES.  As Rush Limbaugh famously said (and was viciously attacked for saying) shortly after Obama's election, "I hope he fails."  Limbaugh knew as many of us who had paid attention to Obama's history and writings that he WANTED to fundamentally transform our economy into a socialist/Marxist model, which would mandate the destruction of the existing system.  Obama is not some hapless misguided fool who wants to lower unemployment and government dependence, but simply can't figure out how.  The destruction of this economy and ever-increasing government dependence is DELIBERATE and INTENTIONAL.  It amazes me that so many fail to realize this even now.

Anderson Cooper Crosses the Line

Center for Security Policy | Jul 30, 2012
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

         Anderson Cooper closed one of five segments of his weeknightly CNN show that he recently devoted to attacking principally Rep. Michele Bachmann with a genuflection towards an iconic newsman, Edward R. Murrow.  He deployed against her the gauntlet Murrow threw down to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in March 1954: “The line between investigating and persecuting is a [very] fine one.”  If anyone has stepped over that line, however, it is Cooper himself, rather than the Minnesota congresswoman.

            Night after night during the week of July 16th, the host of “Anderson Cooper 360” failed to meet even the most basic standards of investigative journalism.  The irony is that, in his ill-concealed persecution of Mrs. Bachmann, Cooper has serially engaged in precisely the practices he pillories her and others for allegedly using, by his account, to destroy the reputation of the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Muslim-American woman named Huma Abedin.  Let us count the ways:

Anderson Cooper insists that Michele Bachmann (who he singles out for most of his criticism, despite the fact that she was but one of five Members of Congress to raise concerns not only about Ms. Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but those of a number of others the Obama administration has enlisted as officials, advisors and/or liaisons to “the Muslim community”) failed to do her homework. Yet, Cooper repeatedly showed his ignorance of the extensive evidence cited by the legislators, even as he mentioned the website where some of it resides: the Center for Security Policy’s online video course at www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com.

As he accused Rep. Bachmann of playing fast and loose with the facts, Cooper repeatedly mischaracterized the nature of the legislators’ request for five federal inspectors general to conduct investigations.  He or his echo-chamber of exclusively like-minded guests complained that Ms. Abedin is accused of being a “spy” and engaging in “treason” and that she has been subjected to a groundless, bigoted and McCarthyite witch-hunt. Several of the reporters and interested parties who added color commentary (sometimes repeatedly) further demeaned Congresswoman Bachmann by asserting that she is simply engaging in partisan politics and fund-raising for her reelection campaign.

As with the Congresswoman and to a lesser extent her colleagues, Cooper also made a point of going after this columnist.  If anyone is guilty of “McCarthyism,” though, it is the journalistic poseur who specializes in shooting the messenger and buying into and tendentiously proclaiming that there are “no facts” supporting the unwanted message – rather than rigorously examining and accurately reporting on the vast amount of evidence that inconveniently does exist.

While portraying Huma Abedin as an innocent victim of smears, Cooper engaged in his own smearing – occasionally through his rants on the subject, often by citing others who have indulged in ad hominem attacks against the congresswoman and her team.  He repeatedly showcased such attacks by individuals in her own party, even though they were clearly were unfamiliar with the actual nature of the legislators’ concerns and the abundant grounds for raising them.

One of the prominent figures in this televised persecution of Michele Bachmann was the man who kicked it off:  Her colleague, Rep. Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota and the first Muslim Member of Congress.  As it happens, according to the public record (recently brilliantly distilled by counter-terrorism expert Patrick Poole at PJ Media http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/07/21/rep-keith-ellison-rewrites-history-on-his-muslim-brotherhood-cair-ties/), Mr. Ellison has himself been closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood – a natty problem Rep. Bachmann has noted, to Cooper’s horror.

So, the “360” host had Keith Ellison on to help deflect that charge.  When the congressman blithely denied that he was a Muslim Brother or, for that matter, that he even knew very much about the Brotherhood, well, that was good enough for crack investigative journalist Anderson Cooper.  Back to the persecution of Michele Bachmann, with Cooper egging on Minnesota’s Muslim congressman.

Anderson Cooper further discredited his claim to be an independent, let alone exacting, journalist by taking at face value the FBI’s assurances that it had not dealt with Muslim Brothers or other “extremists” in the recent purge of its training materials and files.  The evidence of that falsehood is readily available.  Yet, the FBI statement was taken – and presented – as though gospel by a credulous host whose only skepticism was reserved for why Michele Bachmann had been charged by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers with investigating the extent of the Brotherhood’s influence operations inside the Bureau.]

Perhaps most distressing was the service Anderson Cooper has provided to the Islamists by promoting the meme that inquiries about specific Muslims with demonstrable ties to the Muslim Brotherhood amount to attacks on all Muslims.  This plays into the victimhood mantra Islamists use to justify their jihadism undertaken ostensibly for the purpose of defending beleaguered co-religionists.

Applying Cooper’s logic, every Muslim – even those whose associations (personal, familial, professional or other) with an organization like the Brotherhood that is sworn to our destruction clearly violate the government’s own guidelines for security clearances, to say nothing of the oath of office to support the Constitution and defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic – are to be given an automatic pass.  That may also be the view of the Obama administration, but it is a formula for disaster for the country.

There is a particular irony to Anderson Cooper’s, well, jihad against those who oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.  For an avowedly gay man, Anderson Cooper is rooting for the wrong team.  If the Islamists have their way here, he will not simply be on the wrong side of the line.  He’ll be toast.

ALL DEATH THREATS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

The Huffington Post has written an entire article on Ground Zero mosque imam Rauf's claim that he got a threat during the mega-mosque controversy at Ground Zero (which we soundly defeated).

"Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Public Face Of 'Ground Zero Mosque,' Says Life Was Threatened"

Really, puff hos?

I have a file of death threats two inches thick. My peers like Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Walid Shoebat, Nonie Darwish, et al have death threats that could fill a library. Just ask Salman Rushdie and Asia Bibi.

Is the Puffington Ho kidding?

The Puff Hos suffer from extreme bigotry and islamophobia, since they obviously expect Muslims to be violent and make death threats; therefore, it's not news. But radical Rauf gets one (and honestly, who believes this serial liar?) and they are all over it like maggots on dead flesh.

Posted by Pamela Geller on Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Actually FMD had extensive documented contacts with the Communist Party USA.  Wikipedia is generally of questionable reliability.  Here is some additional detail about Frank Marshall Davis (see the web site www.obamasrealfather.com for much more detail on the evidence that he is Obama's biological father):


Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) was a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) propagandist in Chicago and Hawaii, as well as a writer and poet. The FBI had Davis under investigation or surveillance for 19 years, compiling a 600-page FBI file. He was on the FBI's 'Security Index A', meaning he would be arrested in the event of national emergency.
In 1930's Chicago, CPUSA recruited journalists to help spread Soviet influence in American public opinion. Frank Marshall Davis was one of them. A graduate of Kansas State Journalism School, Frank Marshall Davis joined the Communist Party and began writing for The Chicago Star. He was a colleague of journalist Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett. Davis also taught at Chicago's Abraham Lincoln School, a Communist run training school run by CPUSA. Davis authored three major volumes of poetry, and later an autobiographical sex novel under a pseudonym.
In 1948, the Kremlin ordered CPUSA to facilitate a US withdrawal from the Hawaii as US naval forces were considered an obstacle to Soviet expansion in Asia. CPUSA assigned Frank Marshall Davis to Honolulu where he began writing for the Communist Newspaper, the Honolulu Record in 1948. In his columns, Davis flawlessly mirrored official Soviet propaganda - he blamed American capitalism for starting World War II, denounced the Marshall Plan, preached wealth redistribution, nationalization of industry and government healthcare, while bashing Wall Street. Davis also helped organize the Communist controlled ILWU (union) in a failed effort to take over the Hawaiian government in 1949. The Hawaii NAACP chapter complained to its national office, "Comrade Frank Marshall Davis suddenly appeared on the scene to propagandize the membership with the purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line." In 1956, Davis was subpoenaed by the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities and pleaded the fifth. Dreams from My Real Father makes the case that on August 4, 1961, Frank Marshall Davis became the father of the future 44th President of the United States and indoctrinated him with a Marxist ideology during his formative years.
 
 

Please send any amount via PayPal to the addresses listed if you agree and can afford to do so:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/07/we-must-run-these-pro-israel-ads-.html

The birth certificate issue is a moot point in my opinion now, and really has been since Obama was elected.  It will be of historical significance if it can be proven he was not born in the U.S.  However, I have to disagree that putting Hillary on the ticket in his place would necessarily translate to a win for the Democrats.  I think the die has been cast, and there are enough people who understand that the current economic disaster is directly tied not only to Obama, but Democrat Party policies in general.  I predict a big win for Romney - but not because there is any real enthusiasm for him per se, rather voters will be voting AGAINST current policies.  We still must fight all the way to the election to get Romney in, and then continue to pressure him and Congress to enact constitutionally conservative policies.  It won't be easy - our work will have only begun if Romney wins.  But - the alternative is the end of America as we know it.

"Former Navy SEAL Launches PAC To Fight Obama"
Politicker, July 17, 2012

Today, Ryan Zinke, an ex-Navy SEAL and Montana State Senator, announced the launch of Special Operations for America, a political action committee dedicated to “the election of Mitt Romney and like-minded candidates.”
“Navy SEAL’s, Special Operations Personnel and Veteran’s across America have been outraged since Barack Obama conveniently took credit for killing Osama Bin Laden for political gain,” a statement announcing the launch of SOFA said. “The active duty military has no voice as they are forbidden to publicly engage in the political campaign process and it is career suicide for senior military leaders to speak out against the President.”

Mr. Zinke, who has frequently slammed the president’s handling of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, reiterated his criticisms of the operation.

“The President has failed and he is jeopardizing the safety of our troops, their families and our National security for political gain. Obama has exposed the identity of special operations units, leaked classified information, and limited the rules of engagement of forces on the ground,” said Mr. Zinke. “For those who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, it is a call of duty to take back America from a Commander-in-Chief that is incapable of understanding the sacrifices that have been made for the values that have made America great.”

Mr. Zinke has served in the Montana State Senate since 2009. According to Afghanistan and Iraq Veterans for Congress, a political action committee dedicated to electing Republican vets, Mr. Zinke was a member of SEAL Team Six, the elite unit that killed Bin Laden, from 1990 until 1993 and from 1996 until 1999. He held several titles including Task Force Commander. In 2004, In 2004, was named “Deputy and acting Commander, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM” in that capacity he “led a force of over 3500 Special Operations personnel in Iraq in the conduct of 360 combat patrols, 48 Direct Action missions, and hundreds of sensitive operations” and “was responsible for killing or capturing 72 known enemy insurgents and terrorists.”

Pamela Geller: Confronting the Huffington Post

Robert Spencer - Jihadwatch.org - July 16, 2012

In PJ Media today I wrote about the mainstream media's eagerness to carry water for Islamic supremacists, and have noted several times recently the tendency of Ahmadi spokesmen in the U.S. to defend those who are persecuting and killing their people in Pakistan and Indonesia. This story combines both: a clearly unscrupulous and dishonest Ahmadi, Harris Zafar, attacking not the persecutors of the Ahmadis, but Pamela Geller and me in the Huffington Post, which of course eagerly gave him space, but when Geller sent in a rebuttal piece, the HuffPo, true to form, dragged its feet about publishing it and finally put it up today only as an addendum to Zafar's dishonest screed, and only after receiving an avalanche of tweets and emails from Atlas Shrugs readers.

The whole incident is typical of the Leftist media's and the Ahmadiyya's odd and ultimately suicidal willingness to front for Islamic supremacists and jihadists.

"Confronting Harris Zafar," by Pamela Geller, Huffington Post (via Atlas Shrugs), July 16:

The Huffington Post received a response to Harris Zafar from Pamela Geller, which was published below in full on July 16, 2012.
Confronting Harris Zafar

By Pamela Geller

Typical of the dishonesty and disingenuousness of Harris Zafar's attack piece on me in the Huffington Post is his opening claim that "Geller takes exception with Islam's acceptance of the prophethood of Abraham, Moses and Jesus Christ." He complains that "paradoxically, her ignorance has no problem granting Christians the right to invoke Moses and Abraham without delegitimizing Judaism." He does not mention that while Christianity acknowledges the Jewishness of Moses, Abraham, and the other Jewish prophets, Islam denies it: "No; Abraham in truth was not a Jew, neither a Christian; but he was a Muslim and one pure of faith; certainly he was never of the idolaters." (Quran 3:67).

Zafar never explains that Islam doesn't just "accept the prophethood of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus Christ," but completely recasts them as Muslim prophets who decisively rejected the basic tenets of Judaism and Christianity: the Quran even depicts Jesus rejecting the core Christian belief of the divinity of Christ (5:116). Islam thereby completely delegitimizes Judaism and Christianity and presents itself as the true religion of the Biblical prophets -- but instead of admitting this, Harris Zafar blames me for noting it.

And in the rest of his piece, he doesn't get any more honest. While affecting a posture of wounded sanctimony, he levies vicious attacks against my work ("mostly outrageous and irrational") and claims to know my motives: "Geller searched for reasons to loathe the Islamic faith." He is no more objective regarding others he identifies as my influences, particularly the world-renowned historian Bat Ye'or, whom he characterizes as "a Jewish-Egyptian French writer who imputes Christian and Jewish suffering to the theological beliefs of Islam," without mentioning that the Muslims who cause Christian and Jewish suffering invoked the theological beliefs of Islam to explain and justify their actions.

Zafar then offers a list of what he calls my "outlandish statements," which he makes outlandish by misrepresenting, distorting, and outright lying about.
"She has falsely claimed that President Obama is a Muslim with the aim of fostering America's submission to Islam": actually, I have never claimed Obama was a Muslim, and just recently published an article in which I pointed out that "the reason why people think Obama is a Muslim is because of how he acts" -- in other words, because of his policies, which have been consistently pro-Islam, not because of his personal faith.
Zafar says I claimed that "Arabic is not a language but 'the spearhead of an ideological project that is deeply opposed to the United States.'" In reality, I have never said that "Arabic is not a language"; Zafar has to resort to outright lies to make his case that my work is "outrageous and irrational." Here is the actual quote: "Arabic is not just another language like French or Italian, it is the spearhead of an ideological project that is deeply opposed to the United States." And who said it? Not I, but Mark Steyn. That's right: so desperate is Zafar to smear me that he is attributing statements by other people to me.
Zafar claims that I say that "Hitler and Nazism were inspired by Islam (therefore 'devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service')." In reality, that quote comes from an article I wrote that touched on the Fort Hood jihad murderer and the devout Muslim faith of jihadists worldwide. Never do I say that devout Muslims should be excluded from the military because of Hitler, but because so many devout Muslims commit violent attacks against infidels without any warning.
And were Hitler and the Nazis inspired by Islam? Don't believe me, believe Eichmann's assistant, Dieter Wisliczeny, who testified at Nuremberg that the Mufti of Jerusalem was a central figure in the planning of the genocide of the Jews: "The Grand Mufti has repeatedly suggested to the Nazi authorities -- including Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Himmler -- the extermination of European Jewry. ... The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan."
Zafar says that I say that "Islam is the most anti-Semitic, genocidal ideology in the world." Maybe Zafar can name another ideology whose founder, leader and guide said something as anti-Semitic and genocidal as this, but I can't top this from Muhammad, Zafar's beloved prophet: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him." (Sahih Muslim 6985).
Zafar says I "called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem," and I stand by that. But once again he doesn't give you all the information: I never said it should be removed by violence, and I said this in response to repeated jihadi attacks on Muslims at the Temple Mount. Zafar never bothers to condemn those attacks or even mention them.
Zafar says I "bought bus ads offering Muslims an opportunity to leave Islam." In reality, my bus ads offered help to ex-Muslims threatened with death for leaving Islam -- help Zafar's group has never offered, despite his claim to reject Islam's death penalty for apostasy.
Zafar says I "called for boycotts of both Campbell's soup and Butterball turkeys for offering a certified halaal food line." In reality, I called for the Campbell's boycott not because of that halal line as such but because Campbell's was using a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) to certify its halal line. Regarding Butterball, my complaint was that all its turkeys are halal, but aren't labelled as such, so consumers can't make informed choices.

After all those distortions, fabrications, and lies about my writings and activities, it's no wonder that Zafar says that my "claims are so bizarre that one struggles to understand whether they are worthy of a response." But only by dishonesty can Zafar get there.

Zafar then goes on to claim that "one common allegation the two [Robert Spencer and I] have advanced together is that Islam prescribes a death penalty for apostasy" -- as if we made this up. Then he claims that "there is nothing contained within the Holy Quran -- the highest authoritative source in Islam -- that sanctions any punishment for apostasy," and that "the Quran contains at least 10 verses about those who leave Islam, none of which sanction death in response." He never mentions that all the schools of Islamic law mandate death for apostasy, and that many Muslims base this on Quran 4:89, which tells Muslims to kill those who "emigrate in the way of God" -- that is, become Muslim and move to a Muslim land -- "if they turn their backs," i.e., leave Islam.

Then Zafar claims that "Muhammad never ordered any person to be killed for apostasy," but ignores that Muhammad said "Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him" (Bukhari 9.84.57). Nor does Zafar mention that in one tradition, a Muslim leader, Muadh Jabal, refused to sit down until an apostate brought before him had been killed "in accordance with the decision of Allah and of His Apostle." He doesn't mention the Tafsir al-Qurtubi, a classic and thoroughly mainstream exegesis of the Quran, which says:

Scholars disagree about whether or not apostates are asked to repent. One group say that they are asked to repent and, if they do not, they are killed. Some say they are given an hour and others a month. Others say that they are asked to repent three times, and that is the view of Malik. Al-Hasan said they are asked a hundred times. It is also said that they are killed without being asked to repent.
Zafar claims that "no punishment exists for apostasy" -- in other words, he thinks that all the schools of Islamic law and all the sects of Islam other than Zafar's own Ahmadi sect, which is violently persecuted as heretical by Muslims in Pakistan and Indonesia, got Islamic teaching on apostasy wrong, and only his group has gotten it right. He claims that the death penalty for apostasy is an example of "radical interpretations of Islam" and implies it originated with the twentieth century Islamic leader Maududi -- but he must know about these traditions of Muhammad and understandings of the Quran, even if he rejects them. Thus this is more evidence of his dishonesty.

By now it is clear that Zafar's words on taqiyya, Islamic religious deception, can't be trusted any more than the rest of what he claims. He again acts as if I have originated the idea that it is "the practice of lying to non-Muslims in order to advance the cause of Islam" and claims that "no verse from the Quran is provided" in my writings or Spencer's "as a clear instruction for this practice." In reality, Spencer has written this:

Qur'an 3:28 warns believers not to take unbelievers as "friends or helpers" (َأَوْلِيَا -- a word that means more than casual friendship, but something like alliance), "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them." This is a foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for "guard" in the Arabic is tuqātan (تُقَاةً), the verbal noun from taqiyyatan -- hence the familiar term taqiyya.

The renowned Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir says that the phrase "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them" means that "believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers" may "show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection." While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi'ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi'ites, "it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Quran 3:28." The Sunnis of Al-Qaeda practice it today.
After that, Zafar's hit piece gets really bizarre: he likens Robert Spencer and me to Abu Lahab and his wife, early foes of Muhammad "driven by their fiery hatred of Islam and its Prophet." Zafar says that "fittingly, Chapter 111 of the Quran (entitled al-Lahab) predicts that the plotting of such nefarious enemies of Islam would appear but ultimately fail miserably, and their wealth will not avail them." Once again, he whitewashes Islam: Zafar doesn't mention that that chapter says that Abu Lahab and his wife are burning in hellfire.

Zafar ends his crudely deceptive and dishonest screed by claiming that I am "practicing deception" and saying he wants to debate me. The worst part about his piece is that Zafar's Ahmadi brethren are being viciously persecuted by Muslims who deem them heretics. I have spoken out in their defense, and instead of thanking me, Zafar sides with his persecutors. He should be debating the mainstream Muslims whom he claims have misunderstood Islam, not me. But clearly he is suffering from a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Posted by Robert on July 16, 2012

Another story that has received virtually zero coverage in the mainstream news media - even on Fox News Channel.  The public needs to know this:

Obama’s Third-Party History

By Stanley Kurtz - National Review Online.
June 7, 2012

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

Knowing that Obama disguised his New Party membership helps make sense of his questionable handling of the 2008 controversy over his ties to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). During his third debate with John McCain, Obama said that the “only” involvement he’d had with ACORN was to represent the group in a lawsuit seeking to compel Illinois to implement the National Voter Registration Act, or motor-voter law. The records of Illinois ACORN and its associated union clearly contradict that assertion, as I show in my political biography of the president, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

Why did Obama deny his ties to ACORN? The group was notorious in 2008 for thug tactics, fraudulent voter registrations, and its role in popularizing risky subprime lending. Admitting that he had helped to fund ACORN’s voter-registration efforts and train some of their organizers would doubtless have been an embarrassment but not likely a crippling blow to his campaign. So why not simply confess the tie and make light of it? The problem for Obama was ACORN’s political arm, the New Party.

The revelation in 2008 that Obama had joined an ACORN-controlled, leftist third party could have been damaging indeed, and coming clean about his broader work with ACORN might easily have exposed these New Party ties. Because the work of ACORN and the New Party often intersected with Obama’s other alliances, honesty about his ties to either could have laid bare the entire network of his leftist political partnerships.

Although Obama is ultimately responsible for deceiving the American people in 2008 about his political background, he got help from his old associates. Each of the two former political allies who helped him to deny his New Party membership during campaign ’08 was in a position to know better.

The Fight the Smears website quoted Carol Harwell, who managed Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois senate: “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995.” Drawing on her testimony, Fight the Smears conceded that the New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama had ever joined, adding that “he was the only candidate on the ballot in his race and never solicited the endorsement.”

We’ve seen that this is false. Obama formally requested New Party endorsement, signed the candidate contract, and joined the party. Is it conceivable that Obama’s own campaign manager could have been unaware of this? The notion is implausible. And the documents make Harwell’s assertion more remarkable still.

The New Party had a front group called Progressive Chicago, whose job was to identify candidates that the New Party and its sympathizers might support. Nearly four years before Obama was endorsed by the New Party, both he and Harwell joined Progressive Chicago and began signing public letters that regularly reported on the group’s meetings. By prominently taking part in Progressive Chicago activities, Obama was effectively soliciting New Party support for his future political career (as was Harwell, on Obama’s behalf). So Harwell’s testimony is doubly false.

When the New Party controversy broke out, just about the only mainstream journalist to cover it was Politico’s Ben Smith, whose evident purpose was to dismiss it out of hand. He contacted Obama’s official spokesman Ben LaBolt, who claimed that his candidate “was never a member” of the New Party. And New Party co-founder and leader Joel Rogers told Smith, “We didn’t really have members.” But a line in the New Party’s official newsletter explicitly identified Obama as a party member. Rogers dismissed that as mere reference to “the fact that the party had endorsed him.”

This is nonsense. I exposed the falsity of Rogers’s absurd claim, and Smith’s credulity in accepting it, in 2008 (here and here). And in Radical-in-Chief I took on Rogers’s continuing attempts to justify it. The recently uncovered New Party records reveal how dramatically far from the truth Rogers’s statement has been all along.

In a memo dated January 29, 1996, Rogers, writing as head of the New Party Interim Executive Council, addressed “standing concerns regarding existing chapter development and activity, the need for visibility as well as new members.” So less than three weeks after Obama joined the New Party, Rogers was fretting about the need for new members. How, then, could Rogers assert in 2008 that his party “didn’t really have members”? Internal documents show that the entire leadership of the New Party, both nationally and in Chicago, was practically obsessed with signing up new members, from its founding moments until it dissolved in the late 1990s.

In 2008, after I called Rogers out on his ridiculous claim that his party had no members, he explained to Ben Smith that “we did have regular supporters whom many called ‘members,’ but it just meant contributing regularly, not getting voting rights or other formal power in NP governance.” This is also flatly contradicted by the newly uncovered records.

At just about the time Obama joined the New Party, the Chicago chapter was embroiled in a bitter internal dispute. A party-membership list is attached to a memo in which the leaders of one faction consider a scheme to disqualify potential voting members from a competing faction, on the grounds that those voters had not renewed their memberships. The factional leaders worried that their opponents would legitimately object to this tactic, since a mailing that called for members to renew hadn’t been properly sent out. At any rate, the memo clearly demonstrates that, contrary to Rogers’s explanation, membership in the New Party entailed the right to vote on matters of party governance. In fact, Obama’s own New Party endorsement, being controversial, was thrown open to a members’ vote on the day he joined the party.

Were Harwell and Rogers deliberately lying in order to protect Obama and deceive the public? Readers can decide for themselves. Yet it is clear that Obama, through his official spokesman, Ben LaBolt, and the Fight the Smears website, was bent on deceiving the American public about a matter whose truth he well knew.

The documents reveal that the New Party’s central aim was to move the United States steadily closer to European social democracy, a goal that Mitt Romney has also attributed to Obama. New Party leaders disdained mainstream Democrats, considering them tools of business, and promised instead to create a partnership between elected officials and local community organizations, with the goal of socializing the American economy to an unprecedented degree.

The party’s official “statement of principles,” which candidates seeking endorsement from the Chicago chapter were asked to support, called for a “peaceful revolution” and included redistributive proposals substantially to the left of the Democratic party.

To get a sense of the ideology at play, consider that the meeting at which Obama joined the party opened with the announcement of a forthcoming event featuring the prominent socialist activist Frances Fox Piven. The Chicago New Party sponsored a luncheon with Michael Moore that same year.

I have more to say on the New Party’s ideology and program, Obama’s ties to the party, and the relevance of all this to the president’s campaign for reelection. See the forthcoming issue of National Review.

In the meantime, let us see whether a press that let candidate Obama off the hook in 2008 — and that in 2012 is obsessed with the president’s youthful love letters  — will now refuse to report that President Obama once joined a leftist third party, and that he hid that truth from the American people in order to win the presidency.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. A longer version of this article appears in the forthcoming June 25 issue of National Review.

Notice how literally ANYTHING is permitted "for the sake of jihad" according to the overwhelming majority of Muslim clerics, and every major school of Islamic jurisprudence:

Sodomy "For the Sake of Islam"

by Raymond Ibrahim
Gatestone Institute
July 12, 2012


Not only did the original "underwear bomber" Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri hide explosives in his rectum to assassinate Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef—they met in 2009 after the 22-year-old Asiri "feigned repentance for his jihadi views"—but this "holy-warrior" apparently had fellow jihadists repeatedly sodomize him to "widen" his anus to fit the explosives—and all in accordance with the fatwas of Islamic clerics.

A 2010 Arabic news video that aired on Fadak TV gives the details. Apparently a cleric, one Abu al-Dema al-Qasab, informed al-Asiri and other jihadis of an "innovative and unprecedented way to execute martyrdom operations: place explosive capsules in your anus. However, to undertake this jihadi approach you must agree to be sodomized for a while to widen your anus so it can hold the explosives."

Others inquired further by asking for formal fatwas. Citing his desire for "martyrdom and the virgins of paradise," one jihadi (possibly al-Asiri himself) asked another sheikh, "Is it permissible for me to let one of the jihadi brothers sodomize me to widen my anus if the intention is good?"

After praising Allah, the sheikh's fatwa began by declaring that sodomy is forbidden in Islam,

However, jihad comes first, for it is the pinnacle of Islam, and if the pinnacle of Islam can only be achieved through sodomy, then there is no wrong in it. For the overarching rule of [Islamic] jurisprudence asserts that 'necessity makes permissible the prohibited.' And if obligatory matters can only be achieved by performing the prohibited, then it becomes obligatory to perform the prohibited, and there is no greater duty than jihad. After he sodomizes you, you must ask Allah for forgiveness and praise him all the more. And know that Allah will reward the jihadis on the Day of Resurrection, according to their intentions—and your intention, Allah willing, is for the victory of Islam, and we ask that Allah accept it of you.

Two important and complementary points emerge from this matter: 1) that jihad is the "pinnacle" of Islam—for it makes Islam supreme (based on a Muhammad hadith); and 2) that "necessity makes permissible the prohibited." These axioms are not limited to modern day fatwas, but in fact, were crystallized centuries ago, agreed to by the ulema, or Islam's leading doctrinaires.

The result is that, because making Islam supreme through jihad is the greatest priority, anything and everything that is otherwise banned becomes permissible. All that comes to matter is one's intention, or niyya.

From here one may understand the many ostensible incongruities of Islamic history: lying is forbidden—but permissible to empower Islam; intentionally killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad; suicide is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad, called "martyrdom."

Indeed, the Five Pillars of Islam—including prayer and fasting—may be ignored during the jihad. (So important was the duty of jihad that the Ottoman sultans, who often spent half their lives on the battlefield, were not permitted to perform the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca.)

More recently, these ideas appeared in different form during Egypt's elections, when Islamic leaders portrayed voting as a form of jihad—leading to the abuse and even killing of those not voting for the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to these two doctrines—which culminate in empowering Islam, no matter how—one may expect anything from would-be jihadis, regardless of how dubious the effort may otherwise seem.

Even so, this uncompromising mentality, which is prevalent throughout the Islamic world, especially along the frontlines of the jihad, is the same mentality that many Western leaders and politicians think can be appeased with just a bit more respect, well-wishing, and concessions from the West.

Such are the great, and disastrous, disconnects of our time.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Placing a large portion of your liquid assets into physical gold and silver has never been more advisable.  Time is growing short.  The writing is on the wall in giant red letters:

Analysis: Euro zone fragmenting faster than EU can act

Mon, Jul 9 2012

By Paul Taylor

PARIS (Reuters) - Signs are growing that Europe's economic and monetary union may be fragmenting faster than policymakers can repair it.
Euro zone leaders agreed in principle on June 29 to establish a joint banking supervisor for the 17-nation single currency area, based on the European Central Bank, although most of the crucial details remain to be worked out.
The proposal was a tentative first step towards a European banking union that could eventually feature a joint deposit guarantee and a bank resolution fund, to prevent bank runs or collapses sending shock waves around the continent.
The leaders agreed that the euro zone's permanent bailout fund, the 500 billion euro ($620 billion) European Stability Mechanism, would be able to inject capital directly into banks on strict conditions once the joint supervisor is established.
But the rush to put first elements of such a system in place by next year may come too late.
Deposit flight from Spanish banks has been gaining pace and it is not clear a euro zone agreement to lend Madrid up to 100 billion euros in rescue funds will reverse the flows if investors fear Spain may face a full sovereign bailout.
Many banks are reorganizing, or being forced to reorganize, along national lines, accentuating a deepening north-south divide within the currency bloc.
An invisible financial wall, potentially as dangerous as the Iron Curtain that once divided eastern and western Europe, is slowly going up inside the euro area.
The interest rate gap between north European creditor countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, whose borrowing costs are at an all-time low, and southern debtor countries like Spain and Italy, where bond yields have risen to near pre-euro levels, threatens to entrench a lasting divergence.
Since government credit ratings and bond yields effectively set a floor for the borrowing costs of banks and businesses in their jurisdiction, the best-managed Spanish or Italian banks or companies have to pay far more for loans, if they can get them, than their worst-managed German or Dutch peers.
POLITICAL BACKLASH
The longer that situation goes on, the less chance there is of a recovery in southern Europe and the bigger will grow the wealth gap between north and south.
With ever-higher unemployment and poverty levels in southern countries, a political backlash, already fierce in Greece and seething in Spain and Italy, seems inexorable.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi acknowledged as he cut interest rates last week that the north-south disconnect was making it more difficult to run a single monetary policy.
Two huge injections of cheap three-year loans into the euro zone banking system this year, amounting to 1 trillion euros, bought only a few months' respite.
"It is not clear that there are measures that can be effective in a highly fragmented area," Draghi told journalists.
Conservative German economists led by Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the Ifo institute, are warning of dire consequences for Germany from ballooning claims via the ECB's system for settling payments among national central banks, known as TARGET2.
If a southern country were to default or leave the euro, they contend, Germany would be left with an astronomical bill, far beyond its theoretical limit of 211 billion euros liability for euro zone bailout funds.
As long as European monetary union is permanent and irreversible, such cross-border claims and capital flows within the currency area should not matter any more than money moving between Texas and California does.
But even the faintest prospect of a Day of Reckoning changes that calculus radically.
In that case, money would flood into German assets considered "safe" and out of securities and deposits in countries seen as at risk of leaving the monetary union. Some pessimists reckon we are already witnessing the early signs of such a process.
OVERWHELMING?
Any event that makes a euro exit by Greece - the most heavily indebted member state, which is off track on its second bailout program and in the fifth year of a recession - look more likely seems bound to accelerate those flows, despite repeated statements by EU leaders that Greece is a unique case.
"If it does occur, a crisis will propagate itself through the TARGET payments system of the European System of Central Banks," U.S. economist Peter Garber, now a global strategist with Deutsche Bank, wrote in a prophetic 1999 research paper.
Either member governments would always be willing to let their national central banks give unlimited credit to each other, in which case a collapse would be impossible, or they might be unwilling to provide boundless credit, "and this will set the parameters for the dynamics of collapse", Garber warned.
"The problem is that at the time of a sovereign debt crisis, large portions of a national balance sheet may suddenly flee to the ECB's books, possibly overwhelming the capacity of a bailout fund to absorb the entire hit," he wrote in 2010, after the start of the Greek crisis, in a report for Deutsche Bank.
European officials tend to roll their eyes at such theories, insisting the euro is forever, so the issue does not arise.
In practice, national regulators in some EU countries are moving quietly to try to reduce their home banks' exposure to such an eventuality. The ECB itself last week set a limit on the amount of state-backed bank bonds that banks could use as collateral in its lending operations.
In one high-profile case, Germany's financial regulator Bafin ordered HypoVereinsbank (HVB), the German subsidiary of UniCredit (CRDI.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), to curb transfers to its parent bank in Italy last year, people familiar with the case said.
Such restrictions are legal, since bank supervision is at national level, but they run counter to the principle of the free movement of capital in the European Union's single market and to an integrated currency union.
Whether a single euro zone banking supervisor would be able to overrule those curbs is one of the many uncertainties left by the summit deal. In any case, common supervision without joint deposit insurance may be insufficient to reverse capital flight.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, keen to shield her grumpy taxpayers, has so far rejected any sharing of liability for guaranteeing bank deposits or winding up failed banks.
Veteran EU watchers say political determination to make the single currency irreversible will drive euro zone leaders to give birth to a full banking union, and the decision to create a joint supervisor effectively got them pregnant.
But for now, Europe's financial disintegration seems to be moving faster than the forces of financial integration.
(Editing by David Holmes)
© Thomson Reuters 2011. All rights reserved.

Here is my brief review of the book written shortly after its publication:

Brilliant, Concise and Cogent...

June 18, 2008

In this thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted book, Horowitz and Johnson set forth and explicate with exacting precision the relentless campaign the American Left and the Democratic Party have pursued to discredit George W. Bush and the War on Islamic Fascism. Unfortunately many, if not most Americans have forgotten the details of how the Democrats and the Left have undermined our country's response to Islamic radicals beginning with the Carter administration.

The authors clearly organize their thesis into 5 sections: The Path to 9-11, The Response to 9-11, Why America Went to War, The War Against the War, and Conclusion. They demonstrate with unassailable factual narrative how Presidents Carter and Clinton, in concert with an anti-war leftist establishment and willing accomplices both in the mainstream media and the Democratic Party refused to confront our enemies, leading inexorably to the 9-11 attacks.

This was itself inexcusable, but it was unfortunately only a prelude to the shocking and unprecedented betrayal of our forces in the field - first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. The Democrats first voted to authorize military action in Iraq using the same intelligence information the President had at his disposal, and then not only rescinded their support of our military while they were actively engaged in battle, but launched a full-scale political attack on their commander-in-chief, branding him a liar and a war criminal. This despicable and treasonous behavior has fractured America's resolve, damaged our troops' morale, and weakened the President's ability to prosecute the war. Top-ranking Democratic leaders have demonstrated by their statements and actions that they fail utterly to understand the nature of this war and its implications.

Every American owes it to themselves to become familiar with this material so that they can combat the misinformation campaign being waged internally - if unwittingly by some - on behalf of our enemies. Horowitz and Johnson have produced a tour de force analysis of what is quite possibly the most serious political betrayal in American history.

Yasir Arafat Is Still Dead and We Know Who Really Did Him In

Posted By Barry Rubin On July 6, 2012

Yasir Arafat is still dead. True, he was once alive. I sat across from him in his Gaza office, for example. And he even had a copy of my history of the PLO on his bookshelf so he must have been of sound mind at the time. It’s not my fault. I told him to start jogging and cut down on sweets. But he didn’t listen. On November 4, 2004, he died, a fate he previously delivered to thousands of far more innocent people.

The effort now by various Palestinian factions to imply Israel killed him is the funniest thing in the Middle East since the U.S. director of national intelligence’s congressional briefing when he said the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular democratic organization. What’s dismaying is how much play Western media are giving this charge as if it should be taken seriously. When the West behaves in this way it signals at the least a dangerously naive credulousness and at worst a profound anti-Jewish and anti-Israel complex. The New York Times and Washington Post take this nonsense seriously.

But there’s something else in this story, something very chilling indeed. Revolutionary Islamists especially, but many Muslims otherwise, believe that Jews tried to murder Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and even if they failed that the poison shortened his life. The accusation that Jews are the murderer of prophets — with Muslims throwing in the founder of Christianity also — is a phrase that derives from this story. It is frequently heard from Hamas and others. This is a blood libel, an alleged crime that then leads to the view that Jews are absolutely evil and should be wiped out. In short, it is a rationale for genocide. When Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood say that Israel should be wiped off the map and Jews generally should be murdered that incitement is the inevitable consequence of this line of thinking.

That Western observers are unaware of all of this history — repeated daily in inciteful sermons found in Middle East mosques — is quite evident. Such a lack of knowledge leads them to believe that the conflicts they say are easily resolvable, quickly settled by more Israeli concessions or still continuing because of Israeli actions when the causes are much deeper and the solutions far more remote. Western societies today are obsessed with searching everywhere for racism and hate speech. Well, the idea that the Jews murdered Arafat (rather than that Arafat spent most of his career murdering Jews) falls into that category.

As for the specific claims in the Arafat case, they are easily disposed of:

First of all, anyone who saw Arafat during the last year of his life knew he was seriously ill and steadily worsening. His lips trembled, he looked disoriented, and he wasn’t as articulate as usual. Even on television you couldn’t possibly miss his distress. Parkinson’s disease was a likely diagnosis though Crohn’s disease was said to be another probable medical problem for the dictator.

His doctors obviously knew that he was in bad shape. But, and this is what’s most important, they didn’t do anything about it. The prospect of Arafat’s death was so traumatic for the movement — which had known no other leader during 43 years for Fatah, 36 years for the PLO, and its entire ten year life for the Palestinian Authority. By not taking serious action and giving him better treatment, the key to the mystery is this: His own doctors and movement killed Arafat. So if Israel killed Arafat then his own doctors and the entire PLO, Fatah, and PA leadership were in on the conspiracy. Indeed, Arafat himself, by not more actively seeking medical help or speaking about his problems was also in on the conspiracy. This is unlikely.

Second, the doctors were shut up and the report of his death was kept secret by Arafat’s widow Suha Arafat. Since his colleagues had access to a lot of this information they also kept quiet. In other words, we are supposed to believe that those in the world who most hated Israel had evidence that Israel had something to do with his death but they kept it secret?

Third, suddenly, almost eight years later Suha and other Arafat loyalists are making claims. But there is no new evidence whatsoever. Obviously, this is a publicity stunt. Let them release the huge medical report on his death. Let them permit the French doctors to have a press conference. Let them dig up Arafat. Until one of those things happens why should the Western media fall for this trick? So again, if there was the slightest suspicion that Arafat was being murdered, Arafat’s wife, doctors, and all of the Palestinian leadership were helping the conspiracy. This is also unlikely.

Fourth, the claims that Arafat was poisoned by Israel using some exotic radioactive means has been made from the day Arafat was planted but have always faded away, at least internationally, because no evidence was offered. Old fables are being treated like new revelations. Such claims of Zionist conspiracies are always promoted in order to slander and discredit Israel when just about anyone significant dies in the Arab world.

Fifth, if Arafat had been poisoned by radioactive substances his symptoms would have been extreme and evident. They include nausea, hair loss, throat swelling and paleness. Moreover, Arafat would have died really fast, but he lingered for a long time.

The history of this myth shows that it is the Palestinian leadership, not Israel, that has something to hide, that has kept everything secret. I suspect the secret is the incompetence of his own doctors.

So did Arafat die of AIDs? After my own serious research on this matter I could find no evidence for this assertion. And I know that both Israeli and U.S. intelligence had no evidence that Arafat was homosexual either on the basis of in-depth discussions over many years. Sources like Ahmad Jibril — a life-long enemy of Arafat — and other unreliable sources cited are not impressive. If there is evidence to the contrary I will certainly revise my view. But you should know that the Israeli government and intelligence position–privately as well as publicly–is that they have no evidence of Arafat being a homosexual or suffering from AIDs.

The rumor began with an article by Oriana Fallaci whose only evidence was that his bodyguards at the time were extremely handsome young men. (By the time I was seeing him in the 1990s that was certainly not true at all.)

Of course, Arafat was a weird person and in our biography, Arafat: A Political Biography, Judith Colp Rubin and myself explain his psychology and personality. One of my favorite Palestinian jokes about Arafat recounts that he is patting the head of a little girl and asks her, “Whose daughter are you?”

She answers, “Yours.” Arafat was considered by his countrymen to be so cold that he didn’t recognize his own begotten daughter. The story is almost plausible.

But I repeat: there is no reason to think Arafat was a homosexual or died of AIDs or poisoning. He was overweight, ate an unhealthy diet, worked long hours, didn’t take care of himself (he believed eating honey would keep him healthy), and had very bad doctors despite their local reputations.

So we know who killed Arafat: his doctors, entourage, movement, and of course his own body. Yet when I go to Yahoo what do I see but Arafat’s “mysterious” death as the lead story in the entire world, as if any accusation made against Israel must be true.

Note: Here’s a history of the Israel-killed-Arafat tale in Palestinian Media Watch. For more analysis of why the claims are absurd see here and here. Note: Here’s a history of the Israel-killed-Arafat tale in Palestinian Media Watch. For more analysis of why the claims are absurd see here and here. Here’s some more information about the Israeli decision to let Arafat go to Paris. One interesting point is that it implies the French doctors took some action which might have been correct but could also imply that they are at fault for Arafat’s turn for the worse, giving them a motive for not revealing details of his treatment.

Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/07/06/yasir-arafat-is-still-dead-and-we-know-who-really-did-him-in/

Marc is correct, and I share both his outrage and his opinion that treason was committed by the political opposition during this period.  For the full, disgusting story of the Democrat Party's transgressions in the lead-up to the Iraq War, read David Horowitz's excellent book "Party of Defeat."  It chronicles the entire sordid affair, and will enrage anyone who loves this nation and its founding principles.  Unfortunately, and as usual, neither the press nor the impotent Republican "leadership" will bring these facts up and remind the American people (as they ought to be - and OFTEN) of these despicable actions.  Another example of just why we need more individuals like Allen West in Congress.  If the public were reminded of these damning facts, Obama would lose lose in a landslide, and Mitt Romney would not be the Republican nominee.  I strongly encourage freedom-loving people to read Horowitz's book - (or review it again if you've read it.)  It will remind you of just what we are up against - the enemy within.

THE AMERICANS WHO RISKED EVERYTHING

"Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor"

It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining and the wind was from the southeast. Up especially early, a tall bony, redheaded young Virginian found time to buy a new thermometer, for which he paid three pounds, fifteen shillings. He also bought gloves for Martha, his wife, who was ill at home.

Thomas Jefferson arrived early at the statehouse. The temperature was 72.5 degrees and the horseflies weren't nearly so bad at that hour. It was a lovely room, very large, with gleaming white walls. The chairs were comfortable. Facing the single door were two brass fireplaces, but they would not be used today.

The moment the door was shut, and it was always kept locked, the room became an oven. The tall windows were shut, so that loud quarreling voices could not be heard by passersby. Small openings atop the windows allowed a slight stir of air, and also a large number of horseflies. Jefferson records that "the horseflies were dexterous in finding necks, and the silk of stockings was nothing to them." All discussing was punctuated by the slap of hands on necks.

On the wall at the back, facing the president's desk, was a panoply -- consisting of a drum, swords, and banners seized from Fort Ticonderoga the previous year. Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured the place, shouting that they were taking it "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!"

Now Congress got to work, promptly taking up an emergency measure about which there was discussion but no dissension. "Resolved: That an application be made to the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania for a supply of flints for the troops at New York."

Then Congress transformed itself into a committee of the whole. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud once more, and debate resumed. Though Jefferson was the best writer of all of them, he had been somewhat verbose. Congress hacked the excess away. They did a good job, as a side-by-side comparison of the rough draft and the final text shows. They cut the phrase "by a self-assumed power." "Climb" was replaced by "must read," then "must" was eliminated, then the whole sentence, and soon the whole paragraph was cut. Jefferson groaned as they continued what he later called "their depredations." "Inherent and inalienable rights" came out "certain unalienable rights," and to this day no one knows who suggested the elegant change.

A total of 86 alterations were made. Almost 500 words were eliminated, leaving 1,337. At last, after three days of wrangling, the document was put to a vote.

Here in this hall Patrick Henry had once thundered: "I am no longer a Virginian, sir, but an American." But today the loud, sometimes bitter argument stilled, and without fanfare the vote was taken from north to south by colonies, as was the custom. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

There were no trumpets blown. No one stood on his chair and cheered. The afternoon was waning and Congress had no thought of delaying the full calendar of routine business on its hands. For several hours they worked on many other problems before adjourning for the day.

Much To Lose

What kind of men were the 56 signers who adopted the Declaration of Independence and who, by their signing, committed an act of treason against the crown? To each of you, the names Franklin, Adams, Hancock and Jefferson are almost as familiar as household words. Most of us, however, know nothing of the other signers. Who were they? What happened to them?

I imagine that many of you are somewhat surprised at the names not there: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry. All were elsewhere.

Ben Franklin was the only really old man. Eighteen were under 40; three were in their 20s. Of the 56 almost half - 24 - were judges and lawyers. Eleven were merchants, nine were landowners and farmers, and the remaining 12 were doctors, ministers, and politicians.

With only a few exceptions, such as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, these were men of substantial property. All but two had families. The vast majority were men of education and standing in their communities. They had economic security as few men had in the 18th Century.

Each had more to lose from revolution than he had to gain by it. John Hancock, one of the richest men in America, already had a price of 500 pounds on his head. He signed in enormous letters so that his Majesty could now read his name without glasses and could now double the reward. Ben Franklin wryly noted: "Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia told tiny Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: "With me it will all be over in a minute, but you, you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone."

These men knew what they risked. The penalty for treason was death by hanging. And remember, a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.

They were sober men. There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here. They were far from hot-eyed fanatics yammering for an explosion. They simply asked for the status quo. It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.

It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Two of them became presidents of the United States. Seven of them became state governors. One died in office as vice president of the United States. Several would go on to be U.S. Senators. One, the richest man in America, in 1828 founded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One, a delegate from Philadelphia, was the only real poet, musician and philosopher of the signers. (It was he, Francis Hopkinson not Betsy Ross who designed the United States flag.)

Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, had introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. He was prophetic in his concluding remarks: "Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law.

"The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repost.

"If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American Legislatures of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens."

Though the resolution was formally adopted July 4, it was not until July 8 that two of the states authorized their delegates to sign, and it was not until August 2 that the signers met at Philadelphia to actually put their names to the Declaration.

William Ellery, delegate from Rhode Island, was curious to see the signers' faces as they committed this supreme act of personal courage. He saw some men sign quickly, "but in no face was he able to discern real fear." Stephan Hopkins, Ellery's colleague from Rhode Island, was a man past 60. As he signed with a shaking pen, he declared: "My hand trembles, but my heart does not."

"Most Glorious Service"

Even before the list was published, the British marked down every member of Congress suspected of having put his name to treason. All of them became the objects of vicious manhunts. Some were taken. Some, like Jefferson, had narrow escapes. All who had property or families near British strongholds suffered.

·   Francis Lewis, New York delegate saw his home plundered -- and his estates in what is now Harlem -- completely destroyed by British Soldiers. Mrs. Lewis was captured and treated with great brutality. Though she was later exchanged for two British prisoners through the efforts of Congress, she died from the effects of her abuse.

·   William Floyd, another New York delegate, was able to escape with his wife and children across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where they lived as refugees without income for seven years. When they came home they found a devastated ruin.

· Philips Livingstone had all his great holdings in New York confiscated and his family driven out of their home. Livingstone died in 1778 still working in Congress for the cause.

·   Louis Morris, the fourth New York delegate, saw all his timber, crops, and livestock taken. For seven years he was barred from his home and family.

·   John Hart of Trenton, New Jersey, risked his life to return home to see his dying wife. Hessian soldiers rode after him, and he escaped in the woods. While his wife lay on her deathbed, the soldiers ruined his farm and wrecked his homestead. Hart, 65, slept in caves and woods as he was hunted across the countryside. When at long last, emaciated by hardship, he was able to sneak home, he found his wife had already been buried, and his 13 children taken away. He never saw them again. He died a broken man in 1779, without ever finding his family.

· Dr. John Witherspoon, signer, was president of the College of New Jersey, later called Princeton. The British occupied the town of Princeton, and billeted troops in the college. They trampled and burned the finest college library in the country.

· Judge Richard Stockton, another New Jersey delegate signer, had rushed back to his estate in an effort to evacuate his wife and children. The family found refuge with friends, but a Tory sympathizer betrayed them. Judge Stockton was pulled from bed in the night and brutally beaten by the arresting soldiers. Thrown into a common jail, he was deliberately starved. Congress finally arranged for Stockton's parole, but his health was ruined. The judge was released as an invalid, when he could no longer harm the British cause. He returned home to find his estate looted and did not live to see the triumph of the Revolution. His family was forced to live off charity.

· Robert Morris, merchant prince of Philadelphia, delegate and signer, met Washington's appeals and pleas for money year after year. He made and raised arms and provisions which made it possible for Washington to cross the Delaware at Trenton. In the process he lost 150 ships at sea, bleeding his own fortune and credit almost dry.

· George Clymer, Pennsylvania signer, escaped with his family from their home, but their property was completely destroyed by the British in the Germantown and Brandywine campaigns.

· Dr. Benjamin Rush, also from Pennsylvania, was forced to flee to Maryland. As a heroic surgeon with the army, Rush had several narrow escapes.

· John Martin, a Tory in his views previous to the debate, lived in a strongly loyalist area of Pennsylvania. When he came out for independence, most of his neighbors and even some of his relatives ostracized him. He was a sensitive and troubled man, and many believed this action killed him. When he died in 1777, his last words to his tormentors were: "Tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it [the signing] to have been the most glorious service that I have ever rendered to my country."

·   William Ellery, Rhode Island delegate, saw his property and home burned to the ground.

· Thomas Lynch, Jr., South Carolina delegate, had his health broken from privation and exposures while serving as a company commander in the military. His doctors ordered him to seek a cure in the West Indies and on the voyage, he and his young bride were drowned at sea.

· Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, and Thomas Heyward, Jr., the other three South Carolina signers, were taken by the British in the siege of Charleston. They were carried as prisoners of war to St. Augustine, Florida, where they were singled out for indignities. They were exchanged at the end of the war, the British in the meantime having completely devastated their large landholdings and estates.

· Thomas Nelson, signer of Virginia, was at the front in command of the Virginia military forces. With British General Charles Cornwallis in Yorktown, fire from 70 heavy American guns began to destroy Yorktown piece by piece. Lord Cornwallis and his staff moved their headquarters into Nelson's palatial home. While American cannonballs were making a shambles of the town, the house of Governor Nelson remained untouched. Nelson turned in rage to the American gunners and asked, "Why do you spare my home?" They replied, "Sir, out of respect to you." Nelson cried, "Give me the cannon!" and fired on his magnificent home himself, smashing it to bits. But Nelson's sacrifice was not quite over. He had raised $2 million for the Revolutionary cause by pledging his own estates. When the loans came due, a newer peacetime Congress refused to honor them, and Nelson's property was forfeited. He was never reimbursed. He died, impoverished, a few years later at the age of 50.

Lives, Fortunes, Honor

Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.

And, finally, there is the New Jersey signer, Abraham Clark.

He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York Harbor known as the hell ship Jersey, where 11,000 American captives were to die. The younger Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food. With the end almost in sight, with the war almost won, no one could have blamed Abraham Clark for acceding to the British request when they offered him his sons' lives if he would recant and come out for the King and Parliament. The utter despair in this man's heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through 200 years with his answer: "No."

The 56 signers of the Declaration Of Independence proved by their every deed that they made no idle boast when they composed the most magnificent curtain line in history. "And for the support of this Declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr. - (Father of the famous talk radio host)

From Townhall Magazine's July feature, "How to Celebrate the Fourth of July," by Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College:
 
Two hundred thirty-six years ago this Fourth of July, 57 men signed the document that created the American republic. They represented a people of about 3 million grouped in a series of 13 colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They were all wanted men, sought by the commander of the British forces in North America for sedition and treason. He had behind him the resources of the greatest military power on earth. They had behind them the bare beginnings of a government, hardly anything of an army, but something mighty in the way of an idea.

This nation had therefore a desperate beginning. Who but the boldest could believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were laying the foundation of the greatest constitutional republic in history? Now that republic has spread across the continent, and its influence reaches around the world. Its population has increased a hundredfold. Its Constitution has provided government to a free people constantly growing in size and territory, each new state joining the union as an equal, its citizens never subjects, its people ever free. There is no story close to it in the history of man.

Statesmen and thinkers have attributed the strength and goodness of the nation to the principles in the Declaration. Many others have denied this. Statesmen and thinkers have proclaimed the Constitution a just and beautiful implementation of the principles of the Declaration. Many others have denied this. These denials are more common in times of crisis in our country. They are very common now.

It is a sign of our time that the sitting chief executive of our country eschews the permanent meaning of the Declaration and the idea of fixity in the Constitution. In the “Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama writes: “Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course. …”

Obama has stuck to this theme during his presidency. This May at Barnard College, he proclaimed the great virtue of the Constitution to be its openness to change: “It allowed for protests, movements, and the assimilation of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world—a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” There is neither form nor firmness. All is fluid, according to Obama, and this liberates us to do whatever we will.

America has gone very far down the trail that Obama is blazing. Right now, the expenditures of all government—state, local and federal—exceed 40 percent of the gross domestic product. If trends continue, the public sector will soon grow larger than the private sector, and then the government will have more resources than those it governs.
Moreover, it governs increasingly without authority from the branches that are elected by the people. The new Dodd- Frank finance law creates something called a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This agency does not get its budget from Congress. Rather, its money comes from a guaranteed percentage of the budget of the Federal Reserve, which gets its money from its operations as a bank. Congress is even specifically forbidden in the law to hold hearings into the budget of the new CPFB. And it has wide examining power over every form of consumer finance in the nation. In unfettered scope of authority, and in near perfect separation from popular control, it is different from anything before it in America.
Because we have come so far from the founding institutions, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves what they are. This anniversary of the Declaration of Independence provides a splendid occasion, because both the principles of the nation and its institutions are summarized beautifully in its 1,300 words. Let us then read it for a moment.
Notice first of all how remarkable it is that the document should begin universally. The authors were obviously mindful of the fact they were wanted men. They conclude the Declaration with a solemn promise, made to each other in the mood of soldiers facing battle: “In support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” (emphasis added). The particularity of this commitment, each man speaking for himself in promise to the others in the room, is what one might expect of legislation passed on the eve of a war, legislation that is itself a written act of treason.
If these men were in a situation urgent unto death, how can we account for the abstract and universal nature of the beginning of the Declaration? It begins with an “absolute truth” (to use the president’s term) expressed in words that have rung around the world: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which theLaws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …” (emphasis added).
Notice that this quotation refers to no particular time, but to any time in the course of human events. Notice that it refers not to the American people, but to “one people,” meaning any people. It is a very absolute and universal way of talking. It issues immediately a proclamation of truth: “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Just as the Founders did, so may anyone look for his rights under these “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Anyone whose rights are denied will feel their weight. The Jew rounded up by the Nazis, the black slave held in Mississippi in 1840, may both look to this document as the charter by which he can advance. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was aware of this and wrote that indeed, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” These principles place every man and woman deprived of their rights in the same place that the Founders occupied on July 4, 1776: they may appeal to an absolute truth, written in the nature of man and in the nature of things, against any power that will offend their rights. Perhaps they cannot find the strength to overcome their oppression. Never mind: their cause is still the just one. They will see, and even in moments of clarity their oppressors will see, that the great self-evident truth that all men are created equal means nothing more nor less than that all men are men. It means nothing less than that no one may rightly govern another except by his consent. It means that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
These are the principles of the United States. The fact that they were announced at the onset of its revolution, and the fact that the revolution proceeded in their name, seals them in the blood and the history of this land.
The Declaration is not only about principles; it also describes institutions, the kind of institutions best adapted to protect the rights of a people. These institutions are expressed in the middle section of the document, the section in which the specific crimes and injustices of the king of England are described. The three broad constitutional principles that he violated form the backbone of the later Constitution of the United States. The first step in understanding that Constitution is not to learn its details, although they are relatively few. The first step is to understand the grand arrangements of government necessary to constitutional rule.
The first of these three principles is representation. The king is said to have interfered with the representatives of the people in their attempt to pass laws “most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The Declaration recognizes that human beings are made to live under law, and they have a right for those laws to be passed by people who represent them. This right is not to be interfered with by any force. Any force doing so interferes with the consent of the governed and cannot rightfully claim obedience. Violation of the representative principle is, by itself, cause for revolution.
The second of these principles is separation of powers. At the outset of the American Revolution, the king and his governors were the executive branch. By interfering with the legislature, the king violated not only the right of the people to representative government but also the necessity for separation of powers. He violated this necessity also by making “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” God is named four times in the Declaration, once as each of the three branches of government, and once as a founder. The lesson is simple: God may well be the maker of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and He may well be at the same time the Supreme Judge of the world, and He may also be Divine Providence. But no man or small group of men may rightly combine in their own hands all the powers of government. That is for God alone.
Finally, the Declaration calls for a limited government. The king was taxing America’s forefathers without their consent, and he was using the money, among other things, to pay for a hired army to oppress them. He sent many officials to make sure that his will was followed on all occasions, whatever the commoners may wish. The Declaration charges him with erecting “a multitude of new offices, and [sending] hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In other words, the king offended against the principle of limited government. He was building a structure too strong for the people to manage.
The modern bureaucratic state reproduces many of the features that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and that gave shape to the Constitution of the United States, which follows these three basic principles in its entire structure. Go before the bureaucracy and see that it is arranged both to make and enforce its own rules, and if one objects he must appear first before a judge who is employed by that same bureaucracy. And now a bureaucracy has been created that operates on a budget outside the control of the Congress.
This Fourth of July, we might well remind ourselves of the beauty, the greatness and the long serviceability of our constitutional institutions and of the principles from which they flow. This Fourth of July is a great time to recall these things, because the Declaration gives the Constitution its cause and also its basic form and function. We Americans may choose to discard this legacy and give up our birthright. Let us at least know what we are doing.
Celebrate the Declaration, and also remember its meaning. It is what a citizen does on the Fourth of July.

OBAMACARE, THE COMMERCE CLAUSE, AND SUPREME COURT DECISION

by Mark Levin on Friday, June 29, 2012 at 11:15am

This may seem a little technical, but it is necessary.  So follow along with me.  A number of politicians and commentators are claiming that the Supreme Court in the Obamacare case "limited" the reach of the commerce clause, i.e., five justices held that individuals cannot be mandated to buy insurance under the commerce clause.  Actually, the five justices did not limit anything.  They simply did not accept the Obama administration's ridiculous argument that inactivity is commerce.  The status quo stands.  However, the bigger point is this.
 
When a court issues an opinion, it is said to be the "Opinion of the Court."  The Opinion of the Court is the controlling precedent.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the Opinion of the Court for Parts I (background on the Obamacare law), II (the Anti-Injunction Act is not a bar to the lawsuit proceeding and being decided) and III-C (Obamacare is valid under the tax power).
 
But respecting Parts III- A, the commerce clause and necessary and proper section,  Roberts is writing for himself, not for a majority.
 
Furthermore, the Dissent is labeled as: “Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito, dissenting.” It is Not labeled as “dissenting in the judgment, concurring in part” or some permutation.
 
You can’t say it was the “opinion of the court” that the mandate violated the commerce clause. You have to cobble together sections where Roberts is writing for himself and the dissent (which isn’t formally joined Robert’s writing), is writing for itself.
Justice Thomas, in his separate dissenting opinion, wrote:
 “The joint dissent and THE CHIEF JUSTICE cor­rectly apply our precedents to conclude that the Individual Mandate is beyond the power granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.”
 
Notably, this does not explicitly state that the dissenters joined with the Chief’s opinion respecting the commerce clause (or necessary and proper clause).
If five justices had intended for their view of the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause) to be controlling as the majority view, they would have said so by joining or concurring in each others' parts.  They didn't.  So, while we can cobble them together, as a formal legal matter, it is a troubling issue.  While the status quo stands re the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause), there was no formal majority on those issues.
 

Here is a story from The Blaze on this incident:

www.theblaze.com/stories/allahu-akbar-shock-video-shows-muslims-allegedly-stoning-christian-protesters-in-michigan/

I will add that JDN's characterization of www.jihadwatch.org and http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/ as "garbage" is laughable.  He cites no "evidence" for this other than a quote by a Jewish woman criticizing Pamela Geller.  Well now, it hardly needs pointing out - though I will for JDN's benefit - that anyone can characterize anyone else as "bigoted," "racist," "a hatemonger" or use any other ad hominem attack one wishes to cite.  Stating it doesn't make it so. Both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer deal in truth.  That many apologists for Islam hate them both and regularly attack them using such epithets has no relevance regarding the truth or accuracy of what either of them report on their respective sites.  As Pamela Geller has rightly stated on many occasions: "Truth has become the new hate speech when it comes to Islam."

Fascinating discussion.  Contrasts the financial resources of leftist vs. conservative organizations:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=78NQRDNlUsQ&feature=youtu.be

JDN:

Evidently it's YOU who need to learn about Islam, as I have already stated.  The information on the sites I cited in my previous post are backed by solid evidence and are 100% reliable sources of information.  You choose to ignore and/or dismiss them as "silly" at your peril.  Again I stand in amazement as someone who admits he has not read, and has no interest in investigating the holy books of Islam wants to argue with me out of his admitted ignorance.  Until you can specifically address the factual statements I have made about Islam with facts and evidence, I have no interest in continuing this dialogue with you.  If you're not interested, that is your choice - but then keep your mouth shut and don't attempt to argue with someone who IS interested and has done his research.