Monday, October 31, 2011
U.S. cuts off aid to UNESCO Over Admission Of 'Palestine'
The United States has cut off $180 million in aid to UN group UNESCO after the group voted to accept 'Palestine' for membership, 107-14. This triggered existing law that prohibit American support of U.N. agencies that accept 'Palestine' as a member before negotiations between Israel and 'Palestine' are completed between the parties as called for by the Road Map, a treaty that the UN is signatory to but has apparently chosen to ignore.Australia, Canada, Germany and Holland voted against Palestinian membership along with the US. Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa and France voted in favor. Britain and Italy abstained.
The Obama administration had no choice but to go along with the defunding, since support for the law is strongly bi-partisan, led by Reps. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign committee, Tom Cole, a former chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign committee, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen(R-FL)who was instrumental in drafting the legislation.
UNESCO, like a number of other UN organizations has a long and disgraceful history of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias. Any self -respecting nation with a sincere belief in the UN's purported mission should have yanked UNESCO funding a long time ago. And frankly, that's true of almost everything connected with the UN.
The member nations of UNESCO were fully aware of the US law concerned, knew it was wrong and did this anyway. There's always a price tag attached to such actions.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
President Obama's Latest Horror - A Trillion Dollar Timebomb For America's Economy
President Obama has just enacted his latest raid on the American treasury. It's designed to benefit the president by pandering to the student vote at the expense of the American taxpayer.
President Obama has announced that he intends to issue an executive order for the federal government to reduce student loan payments to 10 % of a borrower's income above the poverty line, and for total debt forgiveness after 20 years, regardless of the outstanding balance.
"We're just going to do this by ourselves. We can't wait for Congress, we're just going to act," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan on CNN.
And of course, the president is putting this out there at universities all over the country.
To see how insidious this really is, let's take a look at how this works in the real world. Let's say Jane Jones borrows $150,000 to obtain a liberal arts undergraduate degree at your typical university. Her repayment is based on what she earns, if anything. Let's say Jane gets a job as a community organizer at $30,000 per year. Factor out the $10,800 for a single person under the federal poverty guidelines and her total annual repayment is $1,600 per year, or only $133.33 per month.
Twenty years later, she's only repaid $32,000 on her loan. And the balance? it doesn't 'dissolve' as the Obama Administration's rhetoric suggests. It gets picked up by the rest of us and gets added to the national debt.
Yes, fellow citizens. If some of the people the president and his minions feel are more deserving than you are want to go to academia for a 4-year funfest and pick up an overpriced diploma in ethnic or womyn's studies, you and your children are footing the bill.
The tenured radicals installed in the university system working to destroy America one mind at a time always had their six-figure lifestyles subsidized by the rest of us, but the bill just increased a hundred fold.
This is by no means small change. Americans currently owe over $1 trillion in college debt, and some 1.6 million have subsidized student loans, which Obama had the federal government take over in 2009.
Now that it's essentially going to be a free ride, that $1 trillion is going to look like pocket money.
College costs have increased nearly 600 percent since 1980, far ahead of inflation and price increases on cars, homes, and medical care. But for some strange reason, no one is suggesting cutting tuition, limiting tenure, creating alternative programs like apprenticeships, eliminating programs of dubious value or other steps that could make college more affordable. Instead, this president is inflating yet another bubble, since more money directed at the same commodity means schools can increase their prices, based on the 'bigger fool' theory that worked so well when it came to real estate. Remember how people bought homes at inflated prices they couldn't afford because they were always going to appreciate and they could always flip them for a profit in a few months? Remember how realtors always told people that now was the time to buy, before prices went up again?
President Obama is doing exactly the same thing here. He's deliberately setting another time bomb for the economy and creating another megabucks unfunded entitlement for the sole purpose of trying to slither back into office for another four years.When it explodes, he'll be long gone and away from the scene of the crime.
At least with real estate, the private sector was involved, or at least it was until the Obama Administration essentially took over the mortgage industry. Here, the debt bomb is already going to be absorbed via executive order without benefit of any congressional oversight, and it will increase to toxic levels as universities hyper-inflate their already obscene costs.
Ironically, the entire thing is a Ponzi scheme in reverse. The same students crying 'whoo hoo!' as they listen to President Hope n' Change haven't figured out that the small amount their loan payments are going to be lowered is going to be eclipsed by the increasing amount of taxes they'll have to pay to cover what the federal government eats in debt forgiveness, the increased cost of a college degree for their children, and the diminished employment opportunities as more and more economic activity is swallowed up by yet another unfunded federal mandate.
The idea of a sitting president deliberately doing something like this via executive order simply to benefit his own election prospects at the expense of the nation is something new here. But that's what we have.
Along with all the other episodes of this abysmally failed presidency, this latest horror makes it clear that not only does this president not deserve re-election, but that he was unworthy of his office to begin with.
As the ancient Greeks said, character is destiny.
Jewish UK MP Assaulted By Muslims While Meeting With Constituents
Tory MP Mike Freer was attacked by a mob of Muslims at North Finchley mosque in north London as he met with some of his constituents there after prayers on Friday afternoon.
(Ed. note to avoid confusion about the linked article: a 'constituent surgery' is a Briticism for a meeting between an MP and his constituents and has no medical connotation)
They forced their way into the mosque and attempted to attack him, with with one of them screaming that he was a "Jewish homosexual pig". Freer was spirited into a locked room and was only able to leave after the police arrived.
Freer was apparently targeted by the group Muslims Against Crusades, who posted about the meeting on their website and urged Muslims to assault him, making reference to last years attack on Labour MP Stephen Timms, who represents East Ham and was stabbed during a similar meeting in east London last year. The group's website said that the attack on MP Timms should be a "piercing reminder" to politicians that "their presence is no longer welcome in any Muslim area".
The police, amazingly, didn't make any arrests when they arrived, but merely escorted Freer out of the area. Apparently making violent threats against a member of Parliament and assaulting him is no longer a crime in the UK....if it's done by the right people.
What the BBC isn't telling you but I have from a confidential source is that there was a meeting afterwards at the mosque at which members of Muslims Against Crusades and other hardliners made specific threats against the mosque and its administrators if they ever allowed any similar occurrences.
The goal of these people is to eventually form a 'state within a state' inside Britain where Islam and sharia rule, where Muslims who might want to assimilate and co-exist with their non-Muslim neighbors are silenced and intimidated and where non-Muslims are persona non grata. They've already made significant progress towards that goal.
Friday, October 28, 2011
The Chinese Agree To Bail Out Eurozone..In Exchange For..
China has cleverly agreed to help the EU out of the pit it dug for itself...but with certain conditions.
They obviously want financial guarantees on their investment. What they also want is in essence a silent veto on criticism or opposition to China's policies, like its opposition to sanctions on Iran, any disagreements with the US or China's currency policy, which artificially undervalues the renminbi to support Chinese exports at the expense of western producers.
If they get that, China could be willing to throw substantial amounts into the EFSF, the EU's bailout fund. Another possibility that's being looked at is a new fund set up under China's auspices in collaboration with the IMF.
French President Sarkozy is already prepared to take China's terms. “Our independence would not be put into question by this,” he said in a television interview. “Why would we not accept that the Chinese had confidence in the eurozone and place a part of their surpluses in our funds or our banks? Would you rather they placed it with the US?”
If President Sarkozy seriously thinks the EU's independence won't be compromised by a deal with the Chinese, he's in for a rude awakening.
Moochelle : GOP Would Curb Freedom of Speech, Religion
I think the powers that be might want to send the First Lady on another deluxe,tax payer funded vacay so stuff like this doesn't surface.
Here's what she had to say at a private fundraiser in Tampa, clearly indicating that a Republican president would appoint Supreme Court justices that would curtail First Amendment rights:
Let’s not forget about what it meant when my husband appointed those two brilliant Supreme Court justices — (applause) — and for the first time in history, our daughters — and our sons — watched three women take their seats on our nation’s highest court. (Applause.) But more importantly, let’s not forget the impact those decisions will have on our lives for decades to come — on our privacy and security, on whether we can speak freely, worship openly, and love whomever we choose. That is what’s at stake here. (Applause.)
And of course, the Race Card was not-so-subtly in appearance:
Will we be a country where opportunity is limited to just the few at the top? Who are we? Or will we give every child a chance to succeed no matter where they’re from, or what they look like or how their money parents are — have. Who are we?
We've never had a president or a First Lady before who have so blatantly tried to set America's people against each other in this fashion for their own tawdry political gain.
The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watchers Council Results
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week, engraved on stone tablets in our secret guildhall.
We had a tie this week in the Council category between Joshuapundit's Blood And Sand a piece with some observations on Libyan dictator Moamar Khaddaffi's fate that might not be apparent at first look and Bookworm Room's Is it true that the poor ye always have with you? , an excellent essay on what being 'poor' means in America as opposed to the rest of the world and more importantly, how our culture and educational system have fed the unrealistic sense of entitlement evidenced by the OWS protesters.
In accordance with our by-laws, I put on my Watcher's hat to break the tie, which always gets decided in favor of my fellow Council members in these situations where I'm involved. And so I'm proud to cast my vote and declare Bookworm Room's Is it true that the poor ye always have with you? as this week's very worthy winner! Here's a slice:
But in a peculiar way, those non-starving, non-homeless, non-refugee young people playing at being poor in cities across America have a point. They represent some very specific — and sad — types of poverty.
To begin with, there’s the sense of poverty created by utterly ludicrous expectations. We promised these kids that they were all “good enough, smart enough and, gosh darn it!, that everyone would like them.” We promised them that they were all number one, and that they would never need to make any actual effort to achieve that blue ribbon status. We taught them, through MTV and computer games, that a 3 minute attention span is sufficiently long to be awesomely cool and win the game. And, God help us, we taught them that a Womyn’s Studies, or Africana Studies, or GLBT Studies, or Oppressed People’s degree from some big name university would assure them the kind of job that would enable them to pay off $25,000 or $100,000 or even $250,000 in student loans. We, the older generation, created this wealth of stupidity.
These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty. One of the things that shines through when we interview the people taking to the streets is that so many are woefully ignorant, and that they wallow in a sea of relativism that allows for no morality other than that gained by intense navel gazing. They are the antithesis of the original American revolutionaries, whose leaders were men of exceptional erudition and thoughtfulness, and whose followers knew at the very least their Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Revolutionaries of old were shaped by philosophy, known science, literature, practical life experience, and a deep sense of morality and justice. Today’s little park piddlers are shaped by an aching sense of unfairness, a terrible fear of human-kind (that would be the AGW shtick), and a morality shaped by Oprah and whichever fabulously rich Hollywood Leftist happens to grab the microphone on any given day.
These self-styled 99%-ers are not poor, not by any known standard, either today or in the history of the world. They are intellectually and emotionally bereft, but otherwise awash in material benefits.
The fact that these posers aren’t poor, as poverty has traditionally been understood, does not mean that there aren’t poor people in America. New immigrants are poor, although America quickly absorbs them and propels their children and grandchildren into the working and middle class. Elderly people whose life savings have been destroyed by the Democrat economy are poor, and deserve our help. Those who suffer from profound physical or mentally disabilities, through birth or injury, may experience great poverty, and they too deserve our help. Those are traditional kinds of poverty and, true to Jesus’ word, we will always have these people with us.
Lastly, there is a unique kind of poverty, one that could only occur in America. I know about this poverty because someone close to me dwells among these poor (although she is not quite of them), and reports back faithfully. These are not people who are poor in the old-fashioned way. They were not deprived of opportunities due to class distinctions, because we do not have a European-style class-based society. Although most are profoundly ignorant, all had available to them the basics of an American public school education. Living in the modern age, their lives have not been blighted by epidemic diseases (polio, rheumatic fever, mumps, measles, small pox, etc.), nor have their family structures been decimated by the mortality that ripped through the pre-modern world, leaving large numbers of children as half or full orphans.
We also had a tie this week between two must read entries in our non-Council category, Bruce Thornton's excellent piece in FrontPage Magazine, Obama's Libyan Disaster submitted by The Noisy Room and Andrew Klavan's The Mask Of Fascism submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey.
Tough choice here! Thornton, astute observer that he is picked up as I and a number of others did that the back slapping the president is getting in certain circles over our Libyan adventure is extremely misguided. Thanks to our intervention on behalf of Britain and France's oil contracts, Libya is now an Islamist state under sharia and a likely candidate for a part of the new Caliphate, and Thornton lays out the facts bluntly on the damage done.
Klavan's masterful essay probed the fascist underpinning of the core of OWS movement in his inimitable style, and those of you familiar with his work won't be disappointed.
In the end, after careful consideration, I ended up going with Thornton's Obama's Libyan Disaster, but like I said, tough choice and both are excellent reads.
Here are this week’s full results:
Council Winners
- *First place with 4 votes!Bookworm Room –-Is it true that the poor ye always have with you?
- Second place with 3 votes – Joshuapundit-Blood And Sand
- Third place with 1 2/3 votes – The Razor-Watching the Final Moments of a Dictator's Life
- Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – The Right Planet-The True 'Social Compact'
- Fifth place with 1 vote – The Mellow Jihadi – Warm Afghani Feet, a Barefooted Blogger, and One Bear Footsie
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Noisy Room – Barack Obama and the Enemies Within
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Colossus of Rhodey – M.L.K. Memorial Quote-a-palooza
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Right Truth – Open Letter to Herman Cain - UPDATED
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – VA Right! – Former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke Supports Occupy Wall Street
- Fourth place *t* with 1/3 vote – GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Iraq: The UnAssing
Non-Council Winners
- First place with 3 1/3 votes!FrontPage Magazine– - Obama's Libyan Disaster submitted byThe Noisy Room
- Second place with 2 1/3 votes – Andrew Klavan – The Mask Of Fascism submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
- Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes -Barry Rubin – Obama’s Foreign Policy: Manchurian Candidate or Keystone Kop? submitted by Joshuapundit
- Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes -Pam Geller/American Thinker – Reading The real Qu'ran submitted by The Razor
- Fourth place with 1 1/3 vote - Big Peace – Why I'm Baffled And Troubled About The Alleged Iranian-Terror Plot submitted by The Mellow Jihadi
- Fifth place with 1/3 vote -The Last Refuge – Optical Illusions and Falsehoods From The President…… Ugly Stuff submitted by Right Truth
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Reason Hit And Run – Gaddafi Snuff Footage submitted by Rhymes With Right
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Via Meadia – The Vain And Empty Rituals Of Protest On The Streets submitted by Bookworm Room
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Michael Yon – Golden Seconds submitted by The Watcher
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Kausfiles – Yglesias Blows Graphs, Part II submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote -American Power – Occupy Wall Street and the Jews submitted by The Political Commentator
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote -Iowahawk – Together, I Shall Ride You To Victory submitted by VA Right!
See you next week! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Wall Street Responds With Leaflet Bomb On Occupy Chicago: "We Are Smarter, More Vicious"
The worm may just be turning. The above is one of a whole slew of leaflets dropped from a Chicago office building on the 'Occupy Chicago' encampment, and it ties in with something I said here back when this started.
Full Transcript:
"We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”
Labels:
Chicagoland,
Government,
Protesters,
Smackdown,
The Leftist Agenda
Democrats Running With Media Assistance On The Fable Of 'The Republican Congress'
Yes, once again the Democrats are banking on people's abject stupidity.After all, they haven't much else to run on. And needless to say,the compliant media are doing their very best to help spread The Narrative.
Here's the president, talking to sympathetic ex-Clinton apparatchnik turned talking head George Stephanopoulos:
“I’m the first one to acknowledge that the relations between myself and the Republican Congress have not been good over the last several months, but it’s not for lack of effort,” Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month.
“It has to do with the fact that, you know, they’ve made a decision to follow what is a pretty extreme approach to governance,” he said.
And the beat goes on:
“I think it’s to convey a message and I think it’s great they’re doing it. There’s so much dissatisfaction in Washington. It’s very important for Democrats to label that dissatisfaction. It’s important to say who’s being the obstructionist and who has real plans,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
And here's well known war hero Senator Tom Harkin:
“Democrats aren’t in charge. The House is obviously run by Republicans, and in the Senate, we have 53 Democrats but the system now is set up so that you need 60 votes to do anything,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said in a C-SPAN “Newsmakers” interview that aired Sunday.
Yes, folks, that's the narrative. Control of one half of one third of government equals control.
I wonder if it would be informative to have someone whose job was to ask follow up questions to these people and asked them something like "So when the Democrats had veto-proof control of the Executive both Houses of Congress, why didn't you go ahead and pass a jobs bill that worked or even an actual budget, instead of spending all that time on stimulus bills that provided no jobs and an unpopular health care bill?"
Maybe we could call them...'journalists'. Or how about 'reporters' .You think?
Of course, that would make statements like this one from Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who served as pollster for Obama’s 2008 campaign look even more ridiculous:
“Over 240 days and this Republican Congress has not put forth one jobs plan,” Belcher told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper last month.
240 days as opposed to 720...and lest we forget, the Democrat's insistence on higher taxes - oh pardon,'new revenues'- their control of the Senate and the president's veto threats shot down more than one GOP backed proposal. Remember cut cap and balance?
I don't blame Obama, Lake, Harkin, or the aptly named Belcher for any of this. After all, Harkin and the president are desperately trying to spin this and make excuses for an abysmally failed administration any way they can, and Lake and Belcher get paid to lie to people. But Stephanopoulos, Cooper and whoever 'interviewed' Senator Harkin on C-Span allegedly get paid to present the American people with a balanced view of the matter and even take this sort of nonsense apart instead of nodding sympathetically and aiding and abetting it like hired propagandists.
At least prostitutes provide an actual service...
The EU's Big Fat Greek Bailout
The EU leaders, led by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Nicholas Sarkozy have reached a deal for a second Greek bailout.
The deal involves a new €130 billion bailout of Greece by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (which means American taxpayers are going to take a bite of this particular sandwich), and acceptance by current Greek bond holders of fifty percent of face value and a increase in the EU's bailout fund to over €1 trillion.
As Chancellor Merkel announced with a straight face, the goal of all this manipulation is to get Greece's debt down to - wait for it - a mere 120% of the country's gross domestic product by 2020.
President Sarkozy announced that he would hit up the Chinese to see if they're willing to pony up any cash to help in supporting the fund.
A number of details remain deliberately vague, which was probably the intent to get some kind of consensus and just try to muddle through somehow.
For example, under the terms of the deal, Greece agreed to pay €15 billion back into the EU's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility(EFSF). The money is supposed to come from additional revenues raised by a vast Greek privatization plan, which would see a lot of functions currently run by the government go into private management.Unfortunately, the international monitors have already reported that Greece isn't going to be able to come up with the €50 billion for the EFSF from privatization it already pledged earlier this year, and this new €15 billion is supposed to come on top of the money the Greeks have already been unable to pay back.
The most inadvertently hilarious quote on this particular item came from Yves Leterme, the Prime Minister of Belgium, a country not exactly noted for its sense of humor. When he was asked by reporters whether adding another €15 billion to Greece’s expected pay back to the bailout fund out of expected revenues from privatization was realistic when the Greeks couldn't come up with the €50 billion from privatization they'd already committed to, he replied: “This element was not a necessity for Belgium.”
Another interesting bit that promises future fireworks came from George Osbourne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, the equivalent of America's Secretary of the treasury.He's claiming that Britain (which is already in financial straits) won't pay into the bailout fund out of its its IMF contributions. Moreover, he doubled down and is insisting that the IMF's mandate doesn't allow any cash to go into the bailout fund. Since there's no other place the money can conceivably come from except perhaps the Chinese, this is another of those little details that looks like it's being left to work out later.
Another problem with all this has to do with the internal problems of Greece itself.The EU has apparently realized belatedly that the country is one of the most corrupt in Europe, has a poisonous investment climate, a government fully prepared to cook the books and and little besides tourism as a source of revenue. So Chancellor Merkel is demanded the EU put what she describe as 'monitoring' in place to try and make some kind of order out of this.
"There will be a reinforced monitoring regime in connection with the fulfillment of the Greek obligations," she said.
"That will be anchored in a memorandum of understanding. There will be a permanent presence there. It will be possible to monitor the measures taken by Greece. I think that this is better than when every three months a 'troika' travels there and back, a permanent system of supervision."
Viel glück damit, Madame ReichsKanzler.
If this all seems like simply kicking the can down the road, I couldn't agree more. And that's going to become even more obvious when further bailouts are needed for countries like Spain, Ireland and Portugal, among others.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
US Professor: "Death To Israel"
An interesting confrontation,this... between the Former Deputy Consul General at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco and a tenured jihadi at Kent State in Ohio.
It occurred at an event co-sponsored by the undergraduate student government and entitled “An Evening with Ishmael Khaldi.”
Khaldi is the aforementioned Israeli diplomat, a Bedouin Arab with an impressive career and the author of A Shepherd’s Journey, which details his journey from a small village in the Galilee to the inner-circles of the Israeli Foreign Service.
The tenured radical is one Julio Cesar Pino, an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University on whom more later.
After Khaldi finished his talk, he opened the floor for a Q &A session, and Professor Pino rushed up to be the first in line. Khaldi had mentioned in his talk that Israel provides disaster aid all over the world, even in Muslim countries like Turkey, and Pino's opening remark was how Khaldi could justify speaking of foreign aid given from Israel to countries like Turkey, when that aid was financed by “blood money that came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies.”
As Khaldi attempted to refute Pino's ridiculous statements, the crowd fell into an awkward silence:
It is not respectful to me here,” Khaldi said.
Pino responded by saying “your government killed people” and claimed Khaldi was not being respectful to him.
“I do respect you, but you are wrong,” Khaldi said. “It’s a lie.”
The exchange ended as Pino stormed out of the auditorium shouting “Death to Israel!”
One person in the crowd retaliated by shouting “Shame on you!”
After the altercation with Pino, Khaldi moved on to more questions, but he still referred back to his thoughts on the heckler.
“Let’s respect each other; it starts from there,” Khaldi said. “By the way, this is not respect.”
Khaldi said he thinks people misunderstand what’s happening with Israel, and it may explain some of Pino’s comments.
“Is this what that professor is telling you?” Khaldi said. “It is my responsibility to tell you the truth and build relationships.”
After the speech ended, the remaining students in the auditorium could be heard admonishing the professor’s behavior.
One student in attendance said, “I get it’s freedom of speech and all that, but that guy just makes us [the university] look bad.”
For those of you who don't know, most of Israel's Arabs are pretty well integrated into Israeli society.They serve as judges, Supreme Court Justices, businessmen, Knesset members, journalists, government ministry jobs and in pretty much any other position you could imagine.
This is particularly true of Israel's Druse, Bedouin and Circassian minorities, who insisted on serving in the IDF and being subject to the compulsory military service like everyone else from the beginning of Israel's statehood.
So much for the 'apartheid ' and 'ethnic cleansing' you hear so much about!
Julio Cesar Pino is another matter entirely. He's a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University, specializing in Latin American History. He has always endorsed a Marxist, anti-American point of view and was an agnostic until 2000, when he became a Muslim and quickly integrated a jihadi point of view into his belief system. Pino’s Muslim name is Assad Jibril Pino.
In an April 2002 guest column for the Kent State campus newspaper, Pino penned an effusive tribute to Ayat al-Akras, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had murdered two Israelis at a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. In that piece -- titled “Singing out Prayer for a Youth Martyr” -- Pino insisted that Akras was no terrorist but had “died a martyr’s death … in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.” Pino also derided President Bush as a “numbskull,” and called for boycotts of all Israeli and American products.
In 2005 Pino wrote another lovely letter to the Kent State campus newspaper, this time applauding University of Colorado professor and academic plagiarist Ward Churchill for his “righteous obsession with European and American genocide and terrorism against peoples of color all over the world, from 1492 to 2001.” Pino also wrote that during the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy had planned a “genocide against the Cuban people”; that President Bill Clinton had killed “more than 500,000 Iraqi children” by imposing sanctions against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; and that “cocaine cowboy” George W. Bush had “added an extra 100,000 corpses to the pile of brown colored [Iraqi] corpses.”
Pino has also been very public that he considers his role not that of a teacher but that an indoctrinator, who refers to his students at Kent State as his "little jihadists" and his “beloved Taliban.”
Pino was also a frequent contributor to the now defunct weblog Global War, which described itself as "“jihadist news service” that provided “battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our [Muslim] brothers worldwide.”
In one of his screeds for Global War, was titled “Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors.” This piece was a love letter to a female suicide bomber who had killed 41 people in Iraq.
So his calling for genocide against an entire nation is not exactly new or out of character.
Pino's far from alone in Academia in taking a paycheck from a society he despises and is doing his best to destroy, one poisoned mind at a time. I'm sure the administration at Kent State if asked would mouth a lot of pious homilies about academic freedom, freedom of expression, a university as a home for diverse views...we've heard it all before. Besides, he's got tenure, something the university chose to grant him. So it is endorsing his views by protecting them.
But the fact is that you hear a lot of voices like Pino's and precious few from the other side. Does Kent State support calls for genocide? I have a feeling their reaction might be different if Pino was screaming something like 'death to blacks' or death to an African country. Some opinions ought to be beyond redemption in a free society, let alone given the shield of tenure.
The American university system is in dire need of major reform, and our society's survival may well hinge on it. Mark Steyn is entirely correct in his book,'The End Of America' in referring to this issue as the head of the snake.
-Selah-
( hat tip, Aussie Dave at Israelly Cool for the starting point)
The Watcher's Council Nominations - Fear And Loathing Edition
Welcome to the Watcher's Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the 'sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
This week's contest is dedicated to TOTUS..may he soon return safely, because there's no POTUS without TOTUS.And to our pal Gerard Van Der Leun...get well soon Bro.
Council News:
This week, The Grouch and Liberty's Spirit took advantage of my generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the link and title of the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won't be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It's a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
So, let's see what we have this week....
Council Submissions
- The Noisy Room – Barack Obama and the Enemies Within
- The Mellow Jihadi – Warm Afghani Feet, a Barefooted Blogger, and One Bear Footsie
- Rhymes With Right – What A Difference A Couple Of Years Makes
- The Political Commentator – A 30-year NYPD veteran pays the price for political correctness and government fear of the OWS movement! (Video)
- The Colossus of Rhodey – M.L.K. Memorial Quote-a-palooza
- GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Iraq: The UnAssing
- The Right Planet – The True ‘Social Compact’
- VA Right! - Former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke Supports Occupy Wall Street
- Bookworm Room – Is it true that the poor ye always have with you?
- Joshuapundit-Blood And Sand
- Right Truth – Open Letter to Herman Cain - UPDATED
- The Razor – Watching the Final Moments of a Dictator's Life
- The Glittering Eye -Norman Corwin, 1910-2011
- New Zeal – Treason? Senior Communist Lobbies “Super Committee” for Defense Cuts
- Simply Jews – Plastic bags for bathrooms
Honorable Mentions
- The Grouch - Fun With Looney Facebook Liberals
- Liberty's Spirit - Of Terrorists, Negotiations and Two-Faced Bullcrap
Non-Council Submissions
- FrontPage Magazine – Obama's Libyan Disaster submitted by The Noisy Room
- Big Peace – Why I'm Baffled And Troubled About The Alleged Iranian-Terror Plot submitted by The Mellow Jihadi
- Reason Hit And Run – Gaddafi Snuff Footage submitted by Rhymes with Right
- American Power -Occupy Wall Street and the Jews submitted by The Political Commentator
- Andrew Klavan – The Mask Of Fascism submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
- Pressure Points – Obama and Libya: Hold the Triumphalism, Please submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
- American Thinker – OWS: Easy Prey submitted by The Right Planet
- Iowahawk – Together, I Shall Ride You To Victory submitted by VA Right
- Via Meadia-The Vain And Empty Rituals Of Protest On The Streets submitted by Bookworm Room
- Barry Rubin – Obama’s Foreign Policy: Manchurian Candidate or Keystone Kop? submitted by Joshuapundit
- The Last Refuge -Optical Illusions and Falsehoods From The President…… Ugly Stuff submitted by Right Truth
- Pam Geller/American Thinker –Reading The real Qu'ran submitted by The Razor
- Kausfiles – Yglesias Blows Graphs, Part II submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Michael Yon – Golden Seconds submitted by The Watcher
- Human Events – SunPower: Twice As Bad As Solyndra, Twice As Bad For Obama submitted by The Watcher
Enjoy! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Blood And Sand
By now, the whole world knows that Libyan dictator Moamar Khaddaffi was captured wounded, helpless and alive in Sirte by the rebels.
Instead of being brought in for trial, which is what the rebel leadership claimed they were going to do to him, he was essentially lynched. The snuff videos that the rebels mailed to western journalists show him being beaten and executed while begging for his life, with his corpse being sodomized and mutilated as a last sign of triumph by the mob.
As Mahmoud Shammam, the chief spokesman of the Transitional National Council, said with a smirk, "This is the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems Allah has some other wish."
Khaddaffi's corpse was then left to rot for a couple of days, after which he was buried, but not allowed a Muslim funeral. The Grand Mufti of Libya, Assadiq al-Ghiriani denied him that because, as the Grand Mufti declared, Colonel Gaddafi was an ''infidel'' and for this reason ''prayers should not be spoken over his body''. He was subsequently buried in an unmarked, secret grave, something that has deep symbolic significance is Islam as a sign of disrespect. In many Islamic cultures, unmarked secret graves are reserved for bastards and apostates.
Several Western observers, Michael Totten and Jonathan Foreman among them admitted being moved to pity for a moment as they saw this spectacle, but then reminded themselves what a brutal dictator Khaddaffi was and came to the conclusion that the punishment fit the crime so to speak, and was thus understandable.
With all respect to two writers who are normally extremely astute observers, I think they missed something that's worth pointing out.
Moamar Khaddafi was indeed a monster...but by our standards, not the standards of the world he lived in.
That world was the culture shaped by Islam, and I have never failed to be astounded at how much of it seems to revel in cruelty and domination.
In Khaddaffi's world,just as in Saddam's world or Basher Assad's,torturing and killing political opponents is just how business is done, and terrorism is just another tool of statecraft. And it's no different for Khaddaffi's successors. Ugly stories are already drifting back about the rebel's torture chambers,summary executions and scores being settled. And it's no coincidence that the interim leader of the new Libya announced cheerfully the other day that the country will be governed by sharia law.
The Qu'ran and the sharia law derived from it permeates this world and it allows wife beating and what we in the west would consider gross injustice for those on the wrong end of the pecking order, such as non-Muslims. It mandates horrific punishments and executions designed to inflict maximum physical pain for homosexuals, adulterers, apostates and for those caught committing crimes, even petty theft. It is a culture that produces forced clitorectomies for small girls, honor killings, and yes, torture and painful death for those who end up on the wrong end of the power struggle or who are seen as a threat to the established order.
Moreover, the more Islamic the society is, the more the above seems to apply. The Iranians who overthrew the Shah's relatively secular regime in 1978 made much of the cruelty of the Shah's SAVAK secret police. But the theocratic Islamic Republic that replaced it soon made the Savak look benign, and the few accounts that have leaked out of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison bear witness to the extreme brutality of the regime.
Saudi Arabia's penchant for lashes, decapitations and the amputation of limbs is well known, as is the famous instance of a number of young girls burning to death when their school was on fire and the muwataheen ( religious police) forced them back into the burning building and refused to let them out because they felt they were insufficiently covered . The regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan was characterized by the same kind of brutality.
A quick look around the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East but actually anywhere there are large numbers of Muslims shows this to be fairly common, even in the West where violence like honor killings are frequently covered up by the media. Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew, was lured to an apartment by an attractive girl he didn't realize was a Muslim. He was then tortured slowly to death by a Muslim gang over a period of weeks, with his screams fully audible to the rest of the Muslim residents of the building, some of whom stopped by to participate. And this happened in Paris, not in Tehran, Ramallah or Damascus.
In an earlier essay,I examined whether this was more a case of an existing tribal culture or whether it developed from Islam per se, and came to the conclusion that at this point,the two are so welded together that it ultimately doesn't matter.
The reaction in the West to what happened to Moamar Khaddaffi is important, because it illustrates a very dangerous mindset. We have become so permeated by the poisonous nonsense that all cultures are equal, that we have to be non-judgmental of the 'other' no matter what, that we easily fall into the bigotry of low expectations. That explains why the Western Press prints reams of critique about the supposed injustices done by a relatively benign and humane Israel but ignores the celebration of brutal murder as a holy act and and the holding up of murderers as heroes and role models just over Israel's borders.
It's why the exchange of a large group of convicted killers for one Israeli soldier was commonly referred to as a 'prisoner exchange' instead of what it actually was, a ransom drop to release a kidnap victim who received no trial but was held incognito in brutal captivity for five and a half years.
It's why a mob demonstrating in Tahrir Square in Egypt for freedom and equality could horrendously gang rape a TV reporter while screaming "Jew, Jew" without anyone in the dinosaur media calling for them to be punished or even pointing out the hypocrisy. Even Lara Logan's own network spirited her quickly out of the country without even making a police report or getting her medical attention until she was safely out of Egypt.
If Muslims break into a UN aid office in Afghanistan and decapitate every non-Muslim there because a Florida preacher burned a Qu'ran, we're understanding and don't even insist that anyone be brought to justice. But if American Christians were to kill Muslims in our own country because Muslims burned a church in Pakistan or confiscated and burned bibles in Saudi Arabia, the headlines and tearful apologies would be rampant, and anyone who participated would receive a healthy prison term if not a death sentence.
It's absurdly easy to fall into this trap with someone like Khaddaffi, who admittedly is no great loss to the world. But this kind of cultural cringe is the proverbial slippery slope and shows how poisoned our reactions and expectations are not only of Muslim nations but for Muslims who live in the West among us. If the lynching of Khaddafi had happened in America or if the Israelis had simply dragged Yasser Arafat out of the Muqata one day and strung him up, the media outcry would have been deafening. But we accept such behavior from Muslims with hardly a murmur. In our minds, they're 'supposed to act like that'. So we allow more and more trespasses on our own mores and standards and feel guilty about to defending ourselves against the most egregious assaults on our culture, and even our persons.
Even an Adolf Eichmann in Israel or Timothy McVeigh or a Ted Bundy in America rated a trial, and a judicially mandated execution at the end of it.
Believe it or not, so did Moamar Khaddaffi. And we should be saying so loudly and clearly,instead of shrugging our shoulders at yet another act of barbarity emanating from the Muslim world.
Instead of being brought in for trial, which is what the rebel leadership claimed they were going to do to him, he was essentially lynched. The snuff videos that the rebels mailed to western journalists show him being beaten and executed while begging for his life, with his corpse being sodomized and mutilated as a last sign of triumph by the mob.
As Mahmoud Shammam, the chief spokesman of the Transitional National Council, said with a smirk, "This is the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems Allah has some other wish."
Khaddaffi's corpse was then left to rot for a couple of days, after which he was buried, but not allowed a Muslim funeral. The Grand Mufti of Libya, Assadiq al-Ghiriani denied him that because, as the Grand Mufti declared, Colonel Gaddafi was an ''infidel'' and for this reason ''prayers should not be spoken over his body''. He was subsequently buried in an unmarked, secret grave, something that has deep symbolic significance is Islam as a sign of disrespect. In many Islamic cultures, unmarked secret graves are reserved for bastards and apostates.
Several Western observers, Michael Totten and Jonathan Foreman among them admitted being moved to pity for a moment as they saw this spectacle, but then reminded themselves what a brutal dictator Khaddaffi was and came to the conclusion that the punishment fit the crime so to speak, and was thus understandable.
With all respect to two writers who are normally extremely astute observers, I think they missed something that's worth pointing out.
Moamar Khaddafi was indeed a monster...but by our standards, not the standards of the world he lived in.
That world was the culture shaped by Islam, and I have never failed to be astounded at how much of it seems to revel in cruelty and domination.
In Khaddaffi's world,just as in Saddam's world or Basher Assad's,torturing and killing political opponents is just how business is done, and terrorism is just another tool of statecraft. And it's no different for Khaddaffi's successors. Ugly stories are already drifting back about the rebel's torture chambers,summary executions and scores being settled. And it's no coincidence that the interim leader of the new Libya announced cheerfully the other day that the country will be governed by sharia law.
The Qu'ran and the sharia law derived from it permeates this world and it allows wife beating and what we in the west would consider gross injustice for those on the wrong end of the pecking order, such as non-Muslims. It mandates horrific punishments and executions designed to inflict maximum physical pain for homosexuals, adulterers, apostates and for those caught committing crimes, even petty theft. It is a culture that produces forced clitorectomies for small girls, honor killings, and yes, torture and painful death for those who end up on the wrong end of the power struggle or who are seen as a threat to the established order.
Moreover, the more Islamic the society is, the more the above seems to apply. The Iranians who overthrew the Shah's relatively secular regime in 1978 made much of the cruelty of the Shah's SAVAK secret police. But the theocratic Islamic Republic that replaced it soon made the Savak look benign, and the few accounts that have leaked out of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison bear witness to the extreme brutality of the regime.
Saudi Arabia's penchant for lashes, decapitations and the amputation of limbs is well known, as is the famous instance of a number of young girls burning to death when their school was on fire and the muwataheen ( religious police) forced them back into the burning building and refused to let them out because they felt they were insufficiently covered . The regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan was characterized by the same kind of brutality.
A quick look around the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East but actually anywhere there are large numbers of Muslims shows this to be fairly common, even in the West where violence like honor killings are frequently covered up by the media. Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew, was lured to an apartment by an attractive girl he didn't realize was a Muslim. He was then tortured slowly to death by a Muslim gang over a period of weeks, with his screams fully audible to the rest of the Muslim residents of the building, some of whom stopped by to participate. And this happened in Paris, not in Tehran, Ramallah or Damascus.
In an earlier essay,I examined whether this was more a case of an existing tribal culture or whether it developed from Islam per se, and came to the conclusion that at this point,the two are so welded together that it ultimately doesn't matter.
The reaction in the West to what happened to Moamar Khaddaffi is important, because it illustrates a very dangerous mindset. We have become so permeated by the poisonous nonsense that all cultures are equal, that we have to be non-judgmental of the 'other' no matter what, that we easily fall into the bigotry of low expectations. That explains why the Western Press prints reams of critique about the supposed injustices done by a relatively benign and humane Israel but ignores the celebration of brutal murder as a holy act and and the holding up of murderers as heroes and role models just over Israel's borders.
It's why the exchange of a large group of convicted killers for one Israeli soldier was commonly referred to as a 'prisoner exchange' instead of what it actually was, a ransom drop to release a kidnap victim who received no trial but was held incognito in brutal captivity for five and a half years.
It's why a mob demonstrating in Tahrir Square in Egypt for freedom and equality could horrendously gang rape a TV reporter while screaming "Jew, Jew" without anyone in the dinosaur media calling for them to be punished or even pointing out the hypocrisy. Even Lara Logan's own network spirited her quickly out of the country without even making a police report or getting her medical attention until she was safely out of Egypt.
If Muslims break into a UN aid office in Afghanistan and decapitate every non-Muslim there because a Florida preacher burned a Qu'ran, we're understanding and don't even insist that anyone be brought to justice. But if American Christians were to kill Muslims in our own country because Muslims burned a church in Pakistan or confiscated and burned bibles in Saudi Arabia, the headlines and tearful apologies would be rampant, and anyone who participated would receive a healthy prison term if not a death sentence.
It's absurdly easy to fall into this trap with someone like Khaddaffi, who admittedly is no great loss to the world. But this kind of cultural cringe is the proverbial slippery slope and shows how poisoned our reactions and expectations are not only of Muslim nations but for Muslims who live in the West among us. If the lynching of Khaddafi had happened in America or if the Israelis had simply dragged Yasser Arafat out of the Muqata one day and strung him up, the media outcry would have been deafening. But we accept such behavior from Muslims with hardly a murmur. In our minds, they're 'supposed to act like that'. So we allow more and more trespasses on our own mores and standards and feel guilty about to defending ourselves against the most egregious assaults on our culture, and even our persons.
Even an Adolf Eichmann in Israel or Timothy McVeigh or a Ted Bundy in America rated a trial, and a judicially mandated execution at the end of it.
Believe it or not, so did Moamar Khaddaffi. And we should be saying so loudly and clearly,instead of shrugging our shoulders at yet another act of barbarity emanating from the Muslim world.
Rick Perry's New Tax Plan
GOP Candidate Rick Perry has finally released an actual economic plan,and the policies he's endorsing are not terrible,at least the way they've been outlined so far.
It starts off with a 20% flat tax proposal that includes the key word voluntary,something you rarely hear. In other words, you would be able to have your accountant figure your taxes based onyour current rate and compare it to the flat tax rate of 20% and pick the one most advantageous to your situation.
It's unclear whether Perry's plan would continue to allow you to use itemized deductions if you picked figuring your taxes the old way over the 20% flat tax. If it does, fine, it's workable. If not, that's an error that will stifle a certain amount of economic activity.Either way, it's certainly something a lot better than Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan.
Perry's plan would continue to allow deductions for mortgage interest and charitable deductions for households earning less than $500,000 a year and would increase the standard deduction to $12,500.
Perry's plan calls for a 20 percent corporate tax rate,and calls for capping federal spending at 18 percent of the country's GDP - something I want a lot more details on.
It would be far preferable for me to hear a candidate make specific commitments on what he plans to cut rather than just throwing a figure out there.
Perry's proposal also calls for allowing younger workers the option of privatizing their Social Security accounts, something we also need a lot more concrete details on. Total privatization is likely counter productive and could lead to a situation like we had when the program was first adopted at the height of the depression - substantial numbers of destitute old people with no means of being self-supporting. But intelligent privatization that uses actuarial tables to determine a certain minimum amount as forced savings to prevent that but also allows discretionary invest of the rest is exactly what's needed.
After a number of gaffes and some horrible debate outings,Governor Perry is trying to play catch up and be seen as a serious candidate again. This is at least a step in the right direction.
Monday, October 24, 2011
What They're Not Telling You About The Earthquakes In Turkey
As you may have heard, Southeastern Turkey was rocked yesterday by massive 7.2-magnitude quake that has killed nearly 300 people. Hundreds of buildings are down and there are still many victims buried beneath the rubble.
Israel's president Shimon Peres called Turkey's President Abdullah Gul to offer his condolances and the help of Israel's expert rescue teams, who are only about 90 minutes away from the quake site by air. Gul refused. Instead, Turkey accepted help from Iran and Azerbaijan and refused all international help except from those two countries.
To find out why, we merely need to look at a map. The epicenter and hardest hit area is near Ercis, in the mountainous area inhabited primarily by guess who - the Kurds!
The same people the Erdogan regime has been steadily oppressing for some time.
And that's exactly the area where the Turks want no one seeing anything but the Iranians, who have their own issues with the Kurds! What a coincidence, eh?
Could it be that Turkey doesn't want any international observers getting a look at what's been going on there, or talking to the local people? Are they afraid of what they might find out? Are they worried about the Kurds gathering international attention and sympathy?
And would Turkey be perfectly fine with a few less Kurds around anyway?
Three guesses.
UPDATE: More on this from my pal Greg over at Rhymes With Right .
Obama DOJ Bows To Islamists, Pulls References To Islam From Security Training Manuals
This would be pathetic if it weren't so dangerous. The Obama Department Of Justice is pulling back all training materials used for law enforcement and national security communities in order to eliminate all references to Islam:
“I recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security,” Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole told a panel at the George Washington University law school.The MPAC, like CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood front group.
The move comes after complaints from advocacy organizations including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others identified as Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial.
In a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) president Salam al-Marayati threatened the FBI with a total cutoff of cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement if the agency failed to revise its law enforcement training materials.
Maintaining the training materials in their current state “will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community,” al-Marayati wrote.
Let's chew on this just a second, here we have a supposedly 'moderate' Muslim and someone who purports to be a loyal U.S. citizen threatening the security apparatus of the U.S. government not only with his own non-cooperation but with inciting other Muslims to do the same unless he gets his way.
To those who know about the MPAC and al-Marayati, who has defended Islamist terrorism repeatedly, none of this is any mystery. Al-Marayati has even defended genocidal groups like Hezbollah on occasion, referring to their terrorist attacks as 'legitimate resistance' in an interview on Jim Leher's PBS 'NewsHour
' show. But the fact that he could make this kind of threat and have the Obama Administration cave in so completely is almost unbelievable in it's scope.
Not only was al-Marayati able to get the training manuals pulled, but he wants " a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community” and input into the revised manuals and the people providing the training, and calls for the DOJ and FBI to “establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials.”
Al-Marayati also demanded a new “interagency task force” to review any training materials..which would include representatives of the Islamist organizations the FBI is supposed to be monitoring! And the indications are he'll more than likely get all of that.
Dwight C. Holton, the U.S. Attorney in Oregon told the Soros galley slaves over at Talking Points Memo that he had spoken with Holder directly about the the “egregiously false” training that took place at the FBI’s training headquarters at Quantico and at a U.S. Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania.
“I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” Holton said. “They will not be tolerated.”
This sort of sensitivity even embraces terrorists. Holton boasted that when he made the announcement of the arrest of the “Christmas tree bomber” Mohamed Osman Mohamud in 2010, he never mentioned a thing about The Religion of Peace.
“In the 37-page complaint that laid out the allegations against Mohamed Mohamud, he is never once identified as a Muslim. We were very careful about that. It’s not relevant from our perspective, what’s relevant is the violence,” Holton said.
“Every time I opened my mouth about that case, I said maybe two or three main points and one of them is ‘violence knows no country, no religion, no boundaries’,” Holton said.
Yes, we're simply overwhelmed with Jewish, Buddhist and Christian terrorists. Gotta keep an eye on them.
This is a man in charge of prosecuting terrorist cases in America.You're paying this clueless dhimmi's salary, folks.
Labels:
Department of Justice,
Dhimmitude,
Hezbollah,
Islamists,
Obama's Agenda
Two Quotes On Our Iraq Withdrawal
One frustrated,one abysmally stupid.
First, the frustration, from General John Keane, who was key in persuading President Bush to implement the urge strategy:
“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.
“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”
Sorry, General Keane. It is a disaster, but that mistake was set in stone when the Bush Administration decided to rush Iraq into elections with the idea of massaging his fetish of 'Arab Democracy' and empowered Shi'ite politicians with close ties to Iran instead of putting an interim pro-US government in power. Once that happened, the rest was predictable and just a matter of time.
And now the stupidity, from the same article:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday warned Iran not to miscalculate the U.S. decision to withdraw its troops.
“No one, most particularly Iran, should miscalculate about our continuing commitment to and with the Iraqis going forward,” she said in an interview with CNN from Uzbekistan.
“In addition to a very significant diplomatic presence in Iraq which will carry much of the responsibility for dealing with an independent, sovereign, democratic Iraq, we have bases in neighboring countries, we have our ally in Turkey. We have a lot of presence in that region,” she added.
As if Iran hasn't simply laughed at such pronouncements before? As if Erdogan's Islamist Turkey didn't sabotage our invasion of Iraq in 2003 and hasn't been a conduit for Iran evading the so-called sanctions since then? As if 150 troops guarding an embassy is going to stave off Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian armed and trained Shi'ite militia from Lebanonizing Iraq? As if the Iraqis themselves aren't booting us out in response to pressure from Iran?
Unbelievable. And there are people that still want this clueless woman as president.
First, the frustration, from General John Keane, who was key in persuading President Bush to implement the urge strategy:
“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.
“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”
Sorry, General Keane. It is a disaster, but that mistake was set in stone when the Bush Administration decided to rush Iraq into elections with the idea of massaging his fetish of 'Arab Democracy' and empowered Shi'ite politicians with close ties to Iran instead of putting an interim pro-US government in power. Once that happened, the rest was predictable and just a matter of time.
And now the stupidity, from the same article:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday warned Iran not to miscalculate the U.S. decision to withdraw its troops.
“No one, most particularly Iran, should miscalculate about our continuing commitment to and with the Iraqis going forward,” she said in an interview with CNN from Uzbekistan.
“In addition to a very significant diplomatic presence in Iraq which will carry much of the responsibility for dealing with an independent, sovereign, democratic Iraq, we have bases in neighboring countries, we have our ally in Turkey. We have a lot of presence in that region,” she added.
As if Iran hasn't simply laughed at such pronouncements before? As if Erdogan's Islamist Turkey didn't sabotage our invasion of Iraq in 2003 and hasn't been a conduit for Iran evading the so-called sanctions since then? As if 150 troops guarding an embassy is going to stave off Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian armed and trained Shi'ite militia from Lebanonizing Iraq? As if the Iraqis themselves aren't booting us out in response to pressure from Iran?
Unbelievable. And there are people that still want this clueless woman as president.
The Pope And The Vatican Endorse OWS' Anti-Capitalism
The Vatican has released a new encyclical that specifically endorses the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the OWS protesters and calls for a "global public authority" and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions:
“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.
It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.
The Vatican called for the establishment of "a supranational authority" with worldwide scope and "universal jurisdiction" to guide economic policies and decisions.
Such an authority should start with the United Nations as its reference point but later become independent and be endowed with the power to see to it that developed countries were not allowed to wield "excessive power over the weaker countries".
"Of course, this transformation will be made at the cost of a gradual, balanced transfer of a part of each nation's powers to a world authority and to regional authorities, but this is necessary at a time when the dynamism of human society and the economy and the progress of technology are transcending borders, which are in fact already very eroded in a globalised world."
One would have expected something more intelligent from a pope who saw first hand what such central control did to half of Germany, and from a Church who has seen exactly how Marxist societies treat religion and the Church. And this is not the first time Pope Benedict has indulged in this folly.
Pope Benedict is simply too weak to take a moral stand here, just as he was in his positions on Islam and the relationships with Israel and the Jews. Far easier to react with cringing appeasement instead of moral leadership.
Perhaps this Pope will next appear in a 'kill the banksters' OWS tee shirt, just as he was once happy to done a keffiyah, today's equivalent of a Nazi armband.
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