Displaying posts published in

2014

ANDREW BOSTOM:The 9/11 Museum Controversy and Sheikh Gameia: Recalling How Al-Azhar’s Then U.S. Emissary Reacted to the Jihad Carnage

The 9/11 Museum Controversy and Sheikh Gameia: Recalling How Al-Azhar’s Then U.S. Emissary Reacted to the Jihad Carnage

Controversy has erupted just weeks before the May 21, 2014 formal opening of the 9/11 Museum beneath the World Trade Center Plaza. The source of this imbroglio is a brief documentary film, “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” which apparently confirms that the mass murderous September 11, 2001 attacks were motivated by the ideology of jihad. As the New York Times’ Sharon Offerman observed on 4/23/14:

The documentary is not even seven minutes long, the exhibit just a small part of the museum. But it has over the last few weeks suddenly become a flash point in what has long been one of the most highly charged issues at the museum: how it should talk about Islam and Muslims.

What Offerman alludes to as a “flash point” is actually a threadbare effort—linking the irrefragably jihadist organization Al-Qaeda, and Islam’s institution of jihad war—to push back against the relentless campaign of doctrinal and historical negationism waged by Muslim and non-Muslim apologists for Islam.

Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, who was interviewed by Offerman for her story, epitomizes this negationist trend in all its brazen hypocrisy. Ahmed opined,

The terrorists need to be condemned and remembered for what they did. But when you associate their religion with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions and who ultimately the U.S. would not want to unnecessarily alienate.

(Moderate )Palestinian Minister Says Israel Conducts Medical Experiments on Prisoners

On April 24 and 25, 2014 the UN “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” organized a “United Nations Roundtable on Legal Aspects of the Question of Palestine” at the UN Office in Geneva.

The Committee was created by the U.N. General Assembly back in 1975 to implement the infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution. The resolution was rescinded 16 years later but the Committee is still in place, and operating year-round with 49 U.N. states and observers as members.

The UN Press release claimed the meeting was supposed to “discuss the legal status of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees” and “to consider the issue of Palestine’s admission to the United Nations as a non-Member Observer State.”

The opening session of the roundtable held on April 24 offered an insight into the main objective of this gathering: unmitigated demonization of the UN member state of Israel.

UN staff was only to happy to oblige. Michael Moller, Acting Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, said: “we are here today to build on numerous previous events” and he was “privileged to host again such gathering”. Moller read the statement on behalf of UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon who was “pleased to send greeting to all participants” and “thanked” the Committee for organizing the meeting. The Secretary-General was also “deeply troubled” by Israel’s continued house construction. Anders Kompass, who was representing the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner for Human Rights, was “delighted” to be there and extended “thanks” to the Committee for organizing the meeting.

Abdou Salam Diallo, the Senegalese Chairman of the Committee, put the blame for the failure of the peace process entirely on Israel.

Issa Qaraqe, Palestinian Minister for Prisoners’ Affairs represented the Palestinian Authority. His slanderous comments accused Israel of torturing and raping little children and subjecting Palestinian detainees to medical experiments. Violence, he declared, was the Palestinian right and intention. Here are some of his words (UN translator, original in Arabic):

ANNE BAYEFSKY:Secretary Kerry’s Willful Ignorance of the Lessons of the Holocaust

What do the allegation of “apartheid Israel” and Yom Hashoah, the annual commemoration of the Holocaust, have in common?

The former is the modern face of anti-Semitism. The latter is the reminder that anti-Semitism begets violence, horrible violence – crimes against humanity.

So when Secretary of State John Kerry suggested on April 25, 2014 just prior to Yom Hashoah, that Israel is on the verge of becoming an “apartheid state,” it was more than a libel. It was dangerous.

The effort to demonize the Jew before the Holocaust, and the effort to demonize Israel by those who seek to eradicate the Jewish state, are inextricably connected.

It makes no difference to the anti-Semite how preposterous the charge is. One-fifth of Israel’s citizens are Arab, enjoying more democratic rights and freedoms than in any Arab state. With Israeli Arabs elected to the Israeli parliament, appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court, and senior members of Israel’s foreign service, the charge is patently false.

The claim also stands in marked contrast to Palestinian insistence that no Jews will be allowed to settle in “Palestine.” The very idea of a Jew inhabiting Arab-claimed territories has been labeled the crime of “Judaization,” now a familiar term in U.N. parlance. Palestinian children’s textbooks, media, and public events of all kinds, are notoriously anti-Semitic.

The apartheid shoe fits in the Arab-Israeli conflict – on Judenrein Palestine.

“NILI” THE DRAMATIC TALE OF A JEWISH SPY RING IN PALESTINE DURING WORLD WAR ONE-

“NILI” is now available. You can see it directly via the following link:

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“NILI” relates the dramatic tale of a Jewish spy ring in Palestine during World War I. Led by world-famous scientist Aaron Aaronsohn, this small group of men and women put their lives at risk to provide vital information to the British, which ultimately helped in the defeat of the Turks. As the deputy military secretary to Field Marshal Edmund Allenby said:

“It was very largely the daring work of young spies, most of them natives of Palestine, which enabled the brilliant Field Marshal to accomplish this undertaking so effectively.”

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IN DEFENSE OF DIANA WEST: J.R. NYQUIST ****

There is great confusion in our political discourse today. “Former” Communists in Russia are sounding more and more like conservatives. The same might be said of “former” Communists in the United States. Everyone talks a good anti-Communist line. After all, Communism is dead, and only exists (we are told) as an artifact of college life. Most people are focused on Global Warming, multiculturalism or homosexual rights. Nobody seems to notice that Global Warming, multiculturalism and homosexual rights are artifacts of the supposedly “dead” religion (some of whose acolytes have become “conservatives”). Well, there are a few of us – a small minority – who see what is happening. As a member of this minority I feel as if a cold wilderness has swallowed me up. I do not feel represented by the big foundations, or the conservative “smart set.” And so, when Diana West’s American Betrayal was published, and received favorable attention, I was excited and hopeful. But then, predictably, the celebrity pundits of the alternative Left (i.e., the Republican Right) began to attack Wests book, starting with David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh. There had to be, in the greater scheme of things, an attempt to kill the book. It was getting too much attention, and God knows what would have happened if somebody had not intervened.

It all began when Mr. Horowitz removed a positive review of West’s book from his Frontpage website, replacing it with a negative review by Ronald Radosh, titled McCarthy On Steroids. Baring his fangs, Radosh proved to be the Alternative Left’s junkyard dog. He alleged that West’s book was full of “yellow journalism conspiracy theories.” He described Mrs. West as Joseph McCarthy’s “heiress” and attacked her scholarship. It was, in fact, no review at all. It was a dishonest, poorly devised, hit-piece. Little wonder that Radosh was rhetorically impaled by historian M. Stanton Evans, who commented on Radosh’s “extensive” lack of knowledge “made the worse by the strange inventions with which the discourse [was] salted.” Evans wondered how such an egregious poseur could set up shop as an “Olympian arbiter” when he knew so little about the topic. Evans mused, “It is quite a puzzle.”

Here, indeed, we approach a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Here we have, from the website of a famous “conservative” (and former Marxist) pundit, a studied misrepresentation of a tremendously important book – a book that can open people’s eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise. Although the snarling poseur has been exposed as a drooling incompetent, there has been no apology or backtracking on the part of Mr. Horowitz. When offered a chance to moderate his position, Horowitz dug himself into a deeper hole. During a question and answer session at the Heritage Foundation, Horowitz was challenged on this issue by Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Below is a brief transcript of the exchange:

Sebastian Gorka: I’m with the FDD Foundation for Defense of Democracies. My father was put in prison for life by the Communists … and I like this idea that they [the Communists] lost in the 1960s but they won by stealth since then. From your presentation it seems clear that we are in a very small minority in terms of understanding the deep story. Maybe people are disturbed getting thrown off their health care … but to understand the backstory to where we are today, there are very few of us. Given your reputation in what you’ve accomplished, and the ten volumes of articles, it would seem very lacking in strategy to attack those on your own side. Can you talk about why you’ve taken somebody whose written what I think, as a Ph.D. who teaches at university, a historically important book such as [American Betrayal] and divided the Right yet again. If you have issues with Diana West’s technical expertise, then take her to task on that; but ad hominem attacks that destroy the unity of our camp will not make us stronger in 2016.

David Horowitz: … I am a very busy person … so I don’t monitor Frontpage…. An article appeared that was a review of Diana West’s book American Betrayal. It was an endorsement. I knew it was going to be read … as an endorsement from me. I looked at the book, actually Ron Radosh called me and alerted me … so I got the book off Kindle and I began reading it, and in my judgment it is a very very bad book and I see it as a threat to everything I have done, and Radosh has done, and … all the conservatives who have dredged up the information from the archives about Communist influence. But I don’t attack people on the Right. [So] I removed the review…. This book is a complete reinterpretation of the Second World War based on the presence of Soviet agents and Communists … and sympathizers, fellow travelers in the Roosevelt administration. And to inform Diana that I removed the review, because I didn’t want to be seen endorsing it, that if she needed to reply she could have as much space as she wanted. I actually had in mind … to have her debate Radosh. I’m a great believer in intellectual debate and dialogue. She rejected the offer and went on the attack. She called me a totalitarian, a commissar and a book-burner. So if you have a problem with this so-called ‘war,’ the war is all coming from her end….

If you remember anything from this controversy, at least remember Horowitz’s words: “But I don’t attack people on the Right.” How, then, does he explain publishing an all-out assault on Mrs. West’s reputation. He has personally said that Mrs. West’s scholarship is sloppy, that her book should never have been written. He called it “a very very bad book.” Everyone recognizes, as a matter of necessity, that people are obliged to defend themselves. And why, then, should Mrs. West be obliged – according to Mr. Horowitz’s insinuation – to defend her reputation on his website, on his terms? What egomaniac attacks a person’s integrity, blackens their reputation, dismisses their work, and expects them to produce a reply which will bring more readers and publicity to themselves? Naturally she could not accept Horowitz’s invitation to reply on frontpage. Furthermore, we have eyes to read the ungallant review of Mr. Radosh, the unscholarly poseur who fired the first shot in the so-called “war.” (In my view, this “war” was nothing but a bungled mugging in which the mugger was seriously injured by blows from the victim’s purse.) Even more egregious, the Radosh review was not written in the style of a gentleman; rather, it was a parade of gratuitous insults peppered with more than twenty falsehoods (as documented in Mrs. West’s reply, available on Amazon as The Rebuttal: Defending ‘American Betrayal’ From the Book-Burners). As for Diana West’s alleged ad hominem reply to Mr. Horowitz – if it has a snout and it oinks, the cognomen “pig” is not an ad hominem. It was perfectly reasonable for Mrs. West to satirize her assailants as metaphorical book-burners and totalitarians; for they used Communist rhetorical techniques to cover the tracks of Communist subversives – and to cover their own tracks. It doesn’t matter if Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Radosh are anti-Communists. It doesn’t matter what kind of Communists they are. It is strategy that counts, and strategy is how we should judge them. In the above-quoted exchange, Dr. Sebastian Gorka suggested that Horowitz was lacking in strategy because he was obstinately dividing an already attenuated anti-Left minority by attacking Mrs. West. We all know that Mr. Horowitz is not an idiot. If he did not intend to divide the enfeebled cadre, then why did he attack the lady’s book? Well, we can go back to the idea that he is an idiot, but let’s play the Devil’s Advocate for a few paragraphs. If the attack on West was done innocently, without any intention to divide the conservative Right, why was it done with so little regard for the truth? Aha! There is the telling point. The words of M. Stanton Evans, and the rebuttal of Mrs. West, reveal one invention after another by Professor Radosh, one blatant falsification after another endorsed by Mr. Horowitz. Anyone can click on the links above, go to the source material, and read.

ALAN CARUBA: COMMON CORE AND COMMUNISM

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” said Vladimir Lenin who led the revolution that imposed Communism on Russia.

When he wrote, ‘Mein Kampf’, Adolf Hitler said “whoever has the youth has the future.” In his vision for the Nazi Party, education would be the key that ensured that he had ‘the youth’ of Germany fully indoctrinated.

All dictators and authoritarian regimes know that what is taught in their schools offers the greatest opportunity to maintain control over their societies.

That is what has been occurring since the introduction of the Common Core standards that the Obama regime has imposed on our national education system and the good news is that protests against it from concerned parents and others are beginning to increase and gain momentum.

Teachers will tell you that “one size fits all” does not apply in the classroom and never has. Children learn at a different pace with some doing so rapidly while others need extra help and attention. Learning that is entirely dependent on ceaseless testing puts stress on every child and that is the most common complaint about Common Core.

Education in America has been in decline since the 1960s when the teachers unions gained control over the process, putting themselves between the local boards of education and parents. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter who signed it into law in 1979? It began operation on May 4, 1980. You will find no reference, no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution and it should not be a function of the federal government.

In a recent commentary by Joy Pullmann in The Daily Caller, she said, “The latest scheme is the field testing of Common Core assessments. This spring more than four million kids will be required to spend hours on tests that have little connection to what they learned in class this year and will provide their teachers and schools no information about what the kids know.”

BRUCE THORNTON: ONE CHEER FOR THE SCHUETTE DECISION

Many conservatives are applauding the recent Supreme Court Schuette decision upholding the right of the citizens of Michigan to ban racial preferences. As Charles Krauthammer writes, the 2003 Grutter decision, which like Schuette did not ban racial preferences altogether, was correct: “The people should decide. The people responded accordingly. Three years later, they crafted a referendum to abolish race consciousness in government action. It passed overwhelmingly, 58 percent to 42 percent. Schuette completes the circle by respecting the constitutionality of that democratic decision.”

This approval of Schuette, however, ignores 2 problems. The first is that a state’s ban on racial preferences doesn’t end racial preferences; it just spurs universities to find more creative and subtle ways to take race into account. Second, it leaves in place the duplicitous, ideological, and incoherent doctrine of “diversity” that ever since the 1978 Bakke decision has been the “compelling state interest” justifying taking race or sex into account.

In November of 1996 the voters of California passed Proposition 209, the Civil Rights Initiative, which amended the state constitution to forbid the state from “discriminat[ing] against or grant[ing] preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Yet despite the clear-cut legal prohibition, race-based preferences and policies live on in California higher education.

Take, for example, the process of hiring faculty in the California State University system. Despite the “end of affirmative action,” every hiring committee still must have an “affirmative action” representative, which after Proposition 209 was renamed the “Equal Employment Opportunity designee.” Despite the name change, the EEO designee performs the same function based on the same assumptions the voters supposedly rejected. The purpose of this representative is not to make sure the most qualified and suitable person is chosen for the position regardless of race, sex, or any factor forbidden by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The EEO designee can be from any department on campus, and so in most cases will not have much awareness of the qualifications required for the position. Yet despite this lack of knowledge, no hire can go forward without the EEO representative’s approving signature at every step of the process, in order to make sure no qualified minority candidate has been unjustly passed over. But by definition the only “qualification” that matters to the EEO designee will be race or sex.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: HOW BLAMING BUSH LED TO THE UKRAINE CRISIS

For the Democratic Party, history began and ended with the election of George W. Bush. Nothing had happened before him. Every world crisis began with him and would only come to an end when the Democratic Party finally squeezed one of its own into the White House.

If there was a problem, Bush had caused it. If another country hated America, it was Bush’s fault. Bush alienated Europe, Russia, Asia, the Middle East and even parts of Antarctica.

It was all his fault, the media, academia and angry Trotskyite grandmothers marching for peace and tyranny in San Francisco agreed. Books were written and movies were made. Cartoons were scrawled and songs were written.

It was all Bush’s fault.

It never occurred to the Democrats, even as they were making excuses for every tyrant from Saddam to Putin to Ahmadinejad, that the sum of all evil might not be George W. Bush.

When Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a misspelled Reset Button, it wasn’t the Russian end of the arrangement that was being reset.

Putin had been running the country through various offices all along. Despite his change of title, nothing significant was going to change in Moscow. It was the United States that was being reset.

The Obama campaign was a giant reset button. Among all its other resets, resetting the economy, resetting welfare, resetting the ocean levels and resetting the military, it was also going to reset America’s relationship with the world. Obama promised to “rebuild” American alliances in keeping with the leftist theme that everything wrong with the world could be blamed on President Bush’s alienation of the international community by riding through Baghdad like a unilateral cowboy on a pale horse.

TOM ROGAN: TYRANNY WITH A SMILE

Tyranny with a Smile

How Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran sell their message to the world

George Galloway, the far-left British parliamentarian, is an expert politician. When one district gets sick of him, he simply stirs up hatred and runs again someplace else.

But Galloway isn’t just a politician. He’s a Western puppet for tyranny’s propagandists.

Today, Galloway has three TV news shows: Comment on Press TV (the Western propaganda arm of the Iranian government), Sputnik on RT (the Western propaganda arm of the Russian government), and A Free Word on Al Mayadeen (a propaganda arm of Hezbollah and Iran).

These shows claim to provide original, objective explorations (hence the name “Sputnik”) of important issues. The reality is a little different.

Consider Galloway’s standard fare.

For RT, Galloway portrays Putin’s invasions as self-defense. For Press TV, he offers ludicrous anti-Israeli theories about Ukraine. For Al Mayadeen, Galloway hosts fanatics who take cheer from U.S. hesitancy and assert Putin’s conquests as acts of moral generosity. Regardless of the rank hypocrisy — Al Mayadeen’s sponsor, Hezbollah, self-identifies as a resistance against foreign occupations — these channels must not be underestimated.

These are powerful agents of anti-Americanism.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar on the “Good Koran” vs. the “Radical Koran” — on The Glazov Gang

Dr. Mordechai Kedar on the “Good Koran” vs. the “Radical Koran” — on The Glazov Gang
A leading scholar analyzes the phenomenon of Jihad-Denial and the reluctance to recognize the true threat we face.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/dr-mordechai-kedar-on-the-good-koran-vs-the-radical-koran-on-the-glazov-gang/