http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10928/pub_detail.asp Anti-Israel and Muslim-American advocacy groups in the United States are capitalizing on the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) to promote their own agendas. The Occupy movement started in New York’s Zuccotti Park Sept. 17, and spread to more than 100 cities, according to the movement’s “unofficial” website. “The movement is inspired by popular uprisings […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1966/Penguin-Yanks-Mortenson-from-38K-Appearance-at-Senior-Center.aspx
NPR reported on October 3 that legal action against Mortenson continues to grind ahead in both a class action suit brought on behalf of the four to five million people who bought Three Cups of Tea or Stones into Schools, and a fraud investigation by the Montana Attorney General’s office. As a reporter for the Missoulian newspaper noted, “Greg Mortenson has been silent on this. He did not come to the court hearing two weeks ago in Missoula. His schedule on his website has been unavailable for appearances. He has been recovering from heart surgery he had back in June. So he’s just a no-show.”
But it turns out he almost made a scheduled November 12 appearance at a senior center in Southern California where he would have collected a cool $38,000 just for showing up. And he would have collected $19,000 if the seniors had cancelled him — even after 60 Minutes exposed his work as fraudulent in April. Penguin “yanked the author,” according to the Daily Pilot via OCWeekly.com, so no one owes anyone anything.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/29/love-and-terror-in-the-desert/
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Habibi’By Craig Thompson
Craig Thompson’s “Habibi” was one of two major graphic novel releases this fall inspired by the West’s recent, disastrous interactions with the Islamic world. The other was “Holy Terror” by Frank Miller, a thinly veiled Batman story that pitted the caped crusader against al Qaeda.
Both projects are intensely personal efforts that took years for the creators to knock into shape, and there the similarities very much depart. Mr. Miller hates and fears Islamoterrorism, and he roots that terrorism in the black heart of Muhammad. Mr. Thompson is much more concerned with the Western reaction to terrorism. In an interview, he told the A.V. Club arts review that the novel is “post-9/11 in a sense, because I was responding to this huge surge of Islamophobia in the United States.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/29/a-climate-of-fraud/
New emails shed light on the global warming racket
The latest release of 5,000 emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) reconfirms what the 2009’s “Climategate” files established: Global warming is more fiction than science.
The basic problem with climate research is that it is at best soft science, and this leaked correspondence demonstrate just how unsettled it is. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others,” one scientist wrote. “This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.” Nonsense, another concluded: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” But what if the whole warming phenomenon is “mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?” one scientists muses. “They’ll kill us probably.”
The fact that different climate studies reach widely different conclusions is not surprising. Much of the global warming debate centers on the output of highly questionable computer models that conjure figures from scarcely understood variables, dubious raw data and gaping holes filled with assumptions that usually confirm the researchers’ biases. No wonder that even as reliable temperature measurements show global temperatures have flatlined or been falling for the past decade, claims of imminent catastrophe have grown more shrill. Garbage in, warming out.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/284393/andrew-napolitano-s-mistake-andrew-c-mccarthy
Andrew Napolitano’s Mistake
The McCain-Levin amendment does not authorize civil-liberties violations.
I really hope tea-party groups resist taking legal counsel from hysterions such as Fox News’s resident constitutional “expert,” Andrew Napolitano. On Tuesday morning, “the Judge” could be heard on the news railing about the McCain-Levin amendment to the defense-authorization bill (an amendment strongly supported by Senators Lieberman, Graham, Ayotte, and others). Napolitano contended that Congress is proposing to turn the entire globe into a battlefield and give President Obama the authority to have the U.S. armed forces swoop down on American cities and towns, arbitrarily detaining U.S. citizens on the mere say-so that they are enemies of the state. These contentions are absurd.
The only real question about the McCain-Levin amendment is whether it is necessary at all. It does not change existing law in any meaningful way. Essentially, it reaffirms the authority Congress conferred on the commander-in-chief in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was enacted days after the 9/11 attacks.
Most Americans will recall that those attacks killed nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens in the course of suicide-hijacking strikes on the financial district in New York City and the U.S.-military headquarters in Virginia, as well as an attempted decapitation strike against U.S. political leadership in Washington. Most Americans will recall that, from coast to coast, cities and towns have been targets of numerous attempted enemy attacks in the ensuing decade. We’ll also remember that these plots against our country have occurred against a backdrop of al-Qaeda attacks in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
That is to say, no act of Congress turned the United States and the globe into a battlefield. Al-Qaeda did that. The terror network declared war against America, threatening our interests and citizens throughout the world. Its tactic of choice is terrorist atrocities — carried out at any time in any place against any target, civilian or military.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/284398
Springtime in November: Islamist Group Hosts Tunisia’s Muslim Brotherhood Leader on Capitol Hill
Yes, you read that correctly: Somehow, the Muslim Public Affairs Council has been given space in the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill this evening to welcome Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda, the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate that recently won the election in Tunisia.
MPAC is an Islamist group whose founders included disciples of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna as well as admirers of Hezbollah — some of whom referred to the Shiite terrorist organization that is an arm of Iran as a “liberation movement,” rationalizing its 1983 bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut as a “military operation” rather than a terrorist attack. After 9/11, MPAC’s current director, Salam al-Marayati, immediately pronounced that Israel should be on top of the list of suspects. (More background on MPAC from the Investigative Project on Terrorism, here.)
Rachid Ghannouchi is a longtime Islamist who was actually banned from the U.S. during the nineties — when he was invited here by Sami al-Arian, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative who has since been convicted on a terrorism charge. Consistent with the Brotherhood’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing marketing makeover, which is a perfect strategy for winning over Westerners desperate to be convinced, he and Ennahda are putting on their moderate airs. They purport to have committed to refrain from implanting sharia, to protect women’s rights, etc.
But Islamists have trouble maintaining this charade, especially when they think credulous English ears are not listening. As the Investigative Project on Terrorism reports in its story about tonight’s festivities, only a few months ago, in an interview with an Arab-language website, Ghannouchi called for the destruction of Israel and expressed optimism that the Jewish state would soon disappear:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Western columnists eager to bestow their blessing on the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring are troubled by its darker side, the bigotry, the sexual violence and religious fanaticism. Rather than admit that they may have gotten the Arab Spring wrong, they look at its dark side as an external factor, rather than an internal one.
Case in point, Jeffrey Goldberg’s recitation of Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring leads to the same baffled attempts to understand. “On the surface this makes no sense: Arabs are rising up against Arabs, so what does this have to do with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”?” he asks.
The question isn’t all that baffling if you look back at the historical context of the Protocols which emerged from the poison pens of two secret police agents of two different countries seeking ways to stifle reform by associating their opponents with a vast Jewish conspiracy. It took place in a century where the left and the right spent a good deal of time accusing each other of working for the Jews. That century gave way to the next one where they stopped writing essays and began running death camps.
http://melaniephillips.com/another-journalistic-scandal-so-wheres-the-outrage
Another journalistic scandal — so where’s the outrage?
A particularly egregious claim by proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory is that ‘the science is settled’ and that there is a consensus amongst scientists that the atmosphere is catastrophically heating up because of man’s ever-heavier carbon footprint. Egregious because, in a classic bit of circular reasoning, scientists sceptical of AGW have been systematically denied a voice in the press and on the airwaves, their exclusion thus ‘proving’ the alleged ‘consensus’ through their absence.
Until recently, it might have been assumed that the cause of such exclusion by the BBC was simple ideological bias. For the past two weekends, however, David Rose in the Mail on Sunday has been showing that something far worse has been going on. Yesterday, Rose revealed that the BBC was so deeply in the pocket of AGW scientists that its reporting of AGW was utterly compromised.
Trawling through the second tranche of leaked emails from the nerve centre of AGW theory at East Anglia university in ‘Climategate 2’, Rose discovered, for example, that the leading UK research unit on global warming, the UEA’s Tyndall Centre, had spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves. Last week, Rose wrote a related story about the involvement of the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’ Roger Harrabin in those Tyndall Centre-funded seminars. Yesterday, Rose wrote:
‘The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.
http://www.steynonline.com/4647/treadmarks
Whenever I write in these pages about the corrosive effect of Big Government upon the citizenry in Britain, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere and note that this republic is fairly well advanced upon the same grim trajectory, I get a fair few letters on the lines of: “You still don’t get it, Steyn. Americans aren’t Europeans. Or Canadians. We’re not gonna take it.”
I would like to believe it. It’s certainly the case that Americans have more attitude than anybody else — or, at any rate, attitudinal slogans. I saw a fellow in a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia, and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt is certainly one of them.
Don’t get me wrong. I like “Don’t Tread on Me.” Also, “Don’t Mess with Texas” — although the fact that 70 percent of births in Dallas’s largest hospital are Hispanic suggests that someone has certainly messed with Texas in recent decades, and fairly comprehensively.
The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian “parliament” voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity. The attack—complete with an invasion of the grounds, looting, and a brief hostage-taking—is an always useful reminder of the nature of the regime in Tehran. These are thugs, whatever their religious titles.
As every nation will condemn this assault on an embassy (the Russians were very quick to do so, for example) we should take advantage of the event. Just a week ago, President Sarkozy of France said, “as Iran steps up its nuclear program, refuses negotiation and condemns its people to isolation, France advocates new sanctions on an unprecedented scale to convince Iran that it must negotiate….France therefore proposes to the European Union and its member states, the United States, Japan and Canada and other willing countries to take the decision to immediately freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank [and] stop purchases of Iranian oil.”
The French proposal is practical. Iran exports about 2.2 million barrels a day. If one assumes that half of it will still be delivered (mostly to Asia), the world oil market can easily absorb the loss of roughly a million barrels a day. It did so easily enough when Libya’s exports went from 1.3 million barrels a day in January to almost zero. With Libya returning to the market (exporting 350,000 barrels per day now) and spare Saudi capacity available, exclusion of Iranian exports would not create a crisis.
