http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/obama%e2%80%99s-fourth-war/ To order Daniel Greenfield’s new Freedom Center pamphlet, The Great Betrayal: Obama’s Wars and the War in Iraq, click here. Fresh off three wars, Obama is looking to dive headlong into a fourth war in Syria. Even as Islamists are wreaking havoc across Mali, enforcing Sharia law and committing atrocities using weapons looted from […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-three-great-scams-of-our-time/
“Don’t disturb the order of the world, storyteller.”
– Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller.
Corruption, delusion, and mendacity are nothing new as determinants of both personal and collective life. They are staples of human nature. But with the spread of the print and electronic media and the immediate accessibility of information at any time and any place in the “global village,” the opportunity for mass deception has become the distinguishing factor of our time. Sophistry and subterfuge have gone mainstream. The ability of dominant elites to influence and even control the thought-world of vast populations to an historically unprecedented extent is now an integral part of contemporary life.
There are, to be sure, various ancillary elements involved in the ubiquitous public hospitality to blatant fictions and professional guile, including the critical decay of education at all levels and the growing proneness to parasitical entitlements among Western electorates, accentuating the appetite for passivity and stoking what amounts to a handout mentality. A populace coddled by welfare gratuities will accept packaged ideas and doctored reports as readily as they do food stamps, tax exemptions, and government checks.
As a result, intellectual laziness has never been so widespread in a pampered and ostensibly enlightened cultural realm, providing a soft target for media disinformation and political propaganda to work their injurious will. (It must be admitted that even the dispensers of such concoctions are often under the spell of their own stupefactions.) Nothing else, it would appear, can explain the reflexive acceptance among those who should know better of the three consummate trumperies disfiguring the era in which we live: the Palestinian “narrative,” the climate change shakedown, and the ascent of Barack Obama to the most powerful office in the world. Truth is now at a discount as never before and has been increasingly replaced by promiscuous and sovereign mythologies.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/19/UN-Watch-United-Nations-Fails-to-Call-Deadly-Attack-on-Israelis-in-Bulgaria-Terror
The Geneva-based human rights organization UN Watch has issued a press statement criticizing the UN for failing to describe yesterday’s attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria as “terrorism.” The attack, which Israel blamed on Iran and which claimed seven lives, marked a new escalation in the confrontation between Iran and the rest of the world, as well as the return of international terror to the security forefront. But despite the urgent nature of the issue, and the horrific nature of the attack, the UN could not bring itself to call it “terror.”
UN Watch has the details:
• A U.N. spokesperson said that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms.” In fact, however, the U.N. chief’s choice of terms was weak in comparison to his statement two weeks ago on the bombing of churches in Kenya. In that case, Mr. Ban rightly spoke of “terrorist “attacks, “reprehensible and criminal,” saying the perpetrators “must be held to account.” Yet today he referred only to the deadly “bombing” of Israelis — noticeably declining to describe it as an act of terrorism — and he made no call for holding the perpetrators to account. UN Watch today urged Mr. Ban to clarify his position and to truly use the strongest possible terms to condemn today’s terrorist attack.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-many-appetites-for-cruelty
Daniel Greenfieldwas discussing Hitler and Stalin when he noted that they had an “appetite for cruelty.” That got me thinking about the nature and purpose of cruelty.
Hitler and Stalin (and Mao of China) murdered millions by order or by policies they knew would result in the deaths of millions. Was theirs a passionate cruelty, or a disinterested one? Hitler was certainly passionate in his hatred of Jews. Stalin, however, and his predecessor, Lenin, put their victims in an abstract equation that dehumanized those millions and spared the dictators any personal involvement.
Cruelty comes in two sizes: flaming and disinterested. They can be mixed and matched in a bewildering array of styles. All are facets of nihilism. Nihilism has meaning only if there is a good for it to erase or disfigure. It otherwise does not manifest itself. The good must be seen by a nihilist as a threat or a nemesis. Nihilism is evil. It is an evil in action.
Flaming cruelty, for example, is a Turkish or Pakistani or Somali Muslim raping, beating, maiming, and disfiguring a non-Muslim girl or woman in Europe. This also includes “honor” killings of Muslim women who flout Islamic “traditions” or “mores” or prescribed Islamic social behavior. It is a literal crime of passion, a passion for destroying the good for being the good. The offended “honor” is a self-estimate in the eyes of others. The “passion” is rooted in either a malevolent hatred of the good, or in a desperate fear of what other Muslims will think of one if one does not take “corrective” action – the destruction of a value, such as a wayward Muslim girl by her parents and relatives – to preserve one’s standing in the eyes of those others.
Disinterested cruelty is a government arm-twisting the news media into not reporting the rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings lest Muslims take exception to the fact that Muslims committed the crimes in conformance with Islamic doctrine. The rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings are not crimes in Islam’s eyes. They are expressions of conquest and dominance over an individual deemed an unbeliever or an apostate – of someone outside the collective. Islam has no moral basis. It is nihilistic to the core.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/free-speech-victory-makes-germanys-lawfare-score-11?f=puball
A recent Legal Project article authored by me concerned a German court’s fining (pending appeal) of Michael Mannheimer for his condemnation of Islam as an authoritarian and aggressive belief system. However, on a more positive note, as reported again by the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI), another German court, on June 26, 2012, in the city of Darmstadt, rejected a call to prohibit a book decried by a German Muslim in a civil complaint as an assault upon his freedom of religion.
The story begins with Zahid Khan and his 2009 book Die Verbrechen des Propheten Muhammad or, as the title of the English edition reads, The Criminal Acts of Prophet Muhammad. Khan has excerpted this self-published work along with other writings by him on his website www.khanverlag.de, while the full book in German and English is available for download worldwide on Amazon.com. In the German edition, Khan reveals that his birthplace was Lahore, Pakistan, but makes the vague reference that “at the age of 12 years God gave me the mandate to leave my country, my religion, and my tradition.” Khan states that he has lived in Europe for the last 34 years and has become a German citizen with a family.
Most of Khan’s book, which completely lacks bibliographical references, concerns claimed meetings in the “spiritual world” with such varied individuals as Muhammad, Lucifer, and even “God.” In the book, Khan claims to have “seen God,” whose “love pours itself like rain into my heart” and justifies Khan’s “mission” to spread the “burning love of God.” Khan also contends that he has “written with the deepest wish of Prophet Muhammad, who has lived for 1400 years under the most difficult conditions in the spiritual world.” Amidst discussions of Muhammad’s various lusts, hatreds, and crimes, Khan describes a man who once “behaved more like a dictator,” but “received the possibility to confess what went wrong in Islam and in his own life.” In response to Khan’s inquiries, Muhammad claims direct responsibility for “fanatical Islamic extremism” and also denied that the Koran was holy. Instead, Muhammad explained that he introduced “many of his own ideas” into the Koran in order to control often “extremist” contemporaries, all the while ignoring heavenly pleas for merciful laws.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/subverting-american-education-one-lawsuit-at-a-time There is an old Chinese saying “death from a thousand cuts” and, sad to say, America is now suffering such a death. How, you ask? The answer is seemingly well-intentioned litigation that will only exacerbate an already bad situation while further draining depleted budgets. And rest assured, while we only highlight one of such […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2187/Outing-the-Muslim-Brotherhood.aspx
Be alarmed: The U.S. government continues to be “advised by organizations and individuals that the U.S. government itself has identified in federal courts as fronts for the international Muslim Brotherhood.”
So wrote Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., in a lengthy, heavily footnoted answer to a query last week from Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. He was seeking more information about the reasons Bachmann plus four other House Republicans – Louis Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Lynn Westmoreland (Ga.) and Thomas Rooney (Fla.) – requested Inspector General investigations into “potential Muslim Brotherhood infiltration” of the government. (See all of the letters here.)
Yes, that would be the same Muslim Brotherhood whose leaders are sweeping to power in the Middle East – most recently in Egypt. There, the new president, Mohamed Morsi, fired up voters this spring by declaring: “The Koran is our constitution. The Prophet Muhammad is our leader. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.” That, by the way, is the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto.
Brotherhood-linked groups in the U.S. still take a low-key approach, at least publicly. Thanks to the FBI discovery of a key Muslim Brotherhood document, we know what they’re up to, even who some of them are. The document, entered into evidence during the landmark Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial, presents the Brotherhood plan for “civilization-jihad” against the U.S. It describes the group’s “grand jihad” to destroy “the Western civilization from within … so that it is eliminated and (Islam) is made victorious over all religions.” Further, it declares Brotherhood support for “the global Islamic state wherever it is.” It also lists 29 of “our organization and the organizations of our friends” – i.e., front groups. Among them are such well-known Islamic organizations as the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, both of which remain unindicted co-conspirators.
What is beyond shocking – beyond reason – is that such anti-American Brotherhood-linked groups and individuals have variously engaged, particularly since 9/11, with the U.S. government. Is it a coincidence that U.S. policy has since become receptive to, if not openly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood? This is the serious question these House Republicans want answered.
“Influence” can be an intangible thing, but sometimes there are signs. For example, someone, something, somehow managed to convince Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in 2011 that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular organization” without “an overarching agenda.”
This is a laughable statement – unless spoken in earnest by the DNI. Then the question becomes: Is it possible that in Clapper’s chain of information there is, in fact, disinformation? Other questions Bachmann and her colleagues have concern the Homeland Security Department, where, for example, Mohamed Magid, head of ISNA, the largest Brotherhood front group, according to the U.S. government itself, also serves as a member of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.
Are there national security implications in the influence of Brotherhood front groups on Justice Department and FBI policies on terrorism? Bachmann & Co. want to find out. How about the ongoing relationship between domestic Brotherhood front groups and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC? As Bachmann notes, this foreign bloc of 57 Muslim nations “claims jurisdiction over Muslims in non-Muslim lands, defines human rights as Shariah, and advocates that Muslims not assimilate into the cultures of non-Muslims.” What of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to team up with the OIC to pass a U.N. resolution to restrict free speech deemed to be “defamation” of Islam? Such an effort flouts the First Amendment and also reverses U.S. policy. Could malign influence be a factor?
These five Republicans have also expressed concern over media reports that Clinton’s longtime top aide Huma Abedin has family relations (late father, mother, brother) with ties to Muslim Brotherhood groups. Her mother, for example, reportedly belongs to the Muslim Sisterhood, a group the new first lady of Egypt also reportedly belongs to. Are such reports true? Do they have security implications? These are questions Americans have a right to know.
“For us to raise issues about a highly based U.S. government official with known immediate family connections to foreign extremist organizations is not a question of singling out Ms. Abedin,” Bachmann writes. “In fact, these questions are raised by the U.S. government of anyone seeking a security clearance.”
I’m guessing the bit about Abedin is the only piece of this complex story most readers have heard of. It has come to dominate and distort the response to a rational and patriotic effort to bring more transparency to government decision-making in order to ensure that it remains Muslim Brotherhood-free.
Why would anyone want to stay in the dark about that?
http://politicalmavens.com/
“….a Muslim woman, raised in Saudi Arabia, with family ties to radical Islamic organizations working hand in hand with the American Secretary of State, marrying a Jewish congressman with entree to sensitive material without the public being certain that she has been cleared by security. According to Senator McCain, it’s disgraceful to question this highly unusual fact pattern – is he from France as well?”
Years ago, when Jane Fonda was married to Tom Hayden, she was Phil Donahue’s guest on his talk show. For this performance, the once bulimic daughter of Hollywood royalty who married Roger Vadim and became Barbarella, then an anti-American, North Vietnam afficionado, then the wife of a former hippie SDS activist turned State Senator – wore a white blouse with a peter pan collar and a simple cardigan sweater and claimed to be happy as a California wife who did her own housework. Aw shucks! Flash forward to the dynamic duo of Huma Abedin, 37 year old Muslim fashionista politico who is Hilary Clinton’s right hand man and her husband, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, formerly a nebbishy Jewish boy from Brooklyn who made good in NY politics until the desire to display his private package in semi-public resulted in his resignation from very public office. These two have welcomed People magazine into their home to see their “normal” family raising a baby with hubby doing bath time upstairs and the laundry in the basement. It’s interesting how an alpha woman who wears only designer clothes and handbags and is known for never being seen in the same outfit twice, lives in an apartment without a washer/dryer and apparently without household help. Puhleez.
NO URL
If the Romney campaign thinks they have a chance of beating the current occupant in the White House by playing Mr. politically correct, nice guy, he just has to look back four years and recognize the error of his ways. John McCain, a war hero in every way turned timid at the thought of confronting Obama on a myriad of issues which should have highlighted the absurdity of him running for president, more or less winning.
After months upon months of campaigning, on Oct. 9, 2008 John McCain, badly trailing in the polls, finally gave in and decided to stop being a gentleman, got down into the gutter with Barak Obama and challenged him on his associations with the likes of former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers and his equally despicable wife, Bernadine Dohrn. Speaking of Ayers, McCain stated, “The point is Senator Obama said he was just a guy in the neighborhood. We know that’s just not true. We need to know the full extent of the relationship because of whether Senator Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not. That’s the question.” In light of the present campaign, Obama’s response was quite ironic. He stated that in the midst of a bad economy, McCain’s attack was part of a strategy to “change the subject.” Sounds a bit like Obama 2012 blowing smoke at the American people with Bain Capital, Swiss bank accounts, the former Governor’s tax returns and anything else he can think of to deflect attention from a dismal domestic and foreign relations record in shambles, one which he can not defend.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/10/09/McCain-questions-Obamas-associations/UPI-68521223594984/#ixzz20j0RCNqN
For his part, Romney seems to be falling into the same trap that McCain did 4 years ago. Seemingly hesitant to get down and dirty with a political street fighter like Obama, the presumptive Republican candidate seems content to sit back and defend himself against charges from what’s basically an “emperor without clothes.”
The day after McCain finally built up the courage to confront Obama on his association with William Ayers, famed syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote the following article: Obama’s Associations Keep Character Suspect. He aptly stated, “Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters.” Further into the article Krauthammer mentions, “McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should have begun challenging Obama’s associations months ago, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.” Indeed McCain did miss his opportunity. The question is, is Romney following in his footsteps?
http://sarahhonig.com/2012/07/20/another-tack-the-same-sea/
Another Tack: The same sea
One of US President Barack Obama’s few admitted regrets is his inability to conjure up an instant resolution to our vexing dispute. This seems a tad odd considering that during her recent whirlwind visit to our troublesome midst, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had waxed ecstatic about this being a time of “great change and transformation in the region.”
If things are so upbeat, why are they so intractable?
Both Obama and Clinton would be a lot less frustrated and much wiser had they turned to the late Yitzhak Shamir for clues.
He was endlessly mocked by members of our chattering classes when he stated outright that “the sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs.” He plainly harbored no illusions in a wishy-washy world of wishful-thinking, where reality often becomes a most unwelcome intruder.
Political vogue decrees that disagreeable facts shouldn’t inconsiderately interfere with uplifting fantasy, but Shamir didn’t mind being denigrated as insular, intransigent and above all terminally uncool.
With both his feet solidly on the ground, he had no patience for pipe-dreams about a phenomenal sea change in the Arab mind-set. Continuity appeared more plausible, especially given the depth and duration of virulent Arab enmity toward the Jewish state. Hardhearted hate is unlikely to wondrously dissipate overnight.
Shamir sounded this observation on more than one occasion and in a variety of contexts, most notably on the eve of the 1991 Madrid Conference to which he went unwillingly and in which he had no trace of trust.
Yet his reluctant participation in what he termed as the Madrid charade suffices for many today to misrepresent him as the trailblazer to what eventually culminated in the Oslo folly.
When Shamir took over from Menachem Begin as Israel’s seventh prime minister in 1983, our ever-presumptuous trendsetters and omniscient opinion-molders disdained him and scorned what they determined were his unimaginative orientations and do-nothing proclivities. They couldn’t stand him. He was anathema to them no matter how much they now, after his death, expediently reinvent him, much as they have been dishonestly skewing Begin’s legacy for decades.
But the truth is that Shamir was never cool and never aspired to be popular. He aspired to do the right thing, a fact which in and of itself made him different, an odd bird in a setting obsessed with the façade but leery of the substance. And if the right thing meant keeping mum, Shamir didn’t answer his voluble detractors and didn’t get dragged into verbal bouts.
In an interview years ago, I asked him whether he didn’t think he was thereby losing the battle for public opinion by default. He insisted that “most of the time the least said is best.” It was his “responsibility not to babble needlessly,” even if that cost him support.
