RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/che-guevara-idolator-%e2%80%9cfeels-pain%e2%80%9d-of-pinochet%e2%80%99s-victims/

In the Robert Redford production The Motorcycle Diaries, Mexican-born actor Gael Garcia Bernal reveled in the role of Ernesto Guevara. “I cannot remember when I didn’t know about Che,” he sighed during an interview in 2004:

“Che has so much to do with your ideals as a young man. His mythification, Che the icon, is not three-dimensional. To have the T-shirt doesn’t mean much. With the film, we wanted to bring that character closer to ourselves.”

Now, in the movie “No,” Bernal is playing the role of Rene Saavedra, a Chilean PR man mounting a press campaign against Chilean President Augusto Pinochet during a 1988 referendum. The movie’s title “No” refers to how the Bernal character wants Chileans to vote regarding Pinochet’s continuation as Chilean President.

“This made me realize the profound pain caused by the (Pinochet) dictatorship and it hit me hard,” he told The Associated Press this week in Santiago Chile. “The director wanted to make a movie about the history of what went on in 1988, as well as an introspection and reflection on democracy.”

While prepping for his role as Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, Bernal admits to often visiting Cuba for coaching by the Stalinist regime’s KGB-founded propaganda ministry. The regime co-founded by Che Guevara has banned voting under penalty of firing squad and prison for half a century.

After 14 years in power, Pinochet allowed a vote that ousted him. After 53 years, the regime co-founded by Che Guevara still outlaws it.

But we search in utter vain for any expression of “pain” felt by Bernal on behalf of Cubans, or any “reflection” by him (on the extinction of) Cuban democracy for a period over three times as long as its absence in Chile.

But why pick on Gael Garcia Bernal?

Back in 2006, Fidel Castro got sick and seemed on his deathbed shortly before Augusto Pinochet passed away. So both names were much in the news. This provided a controlled setting, a veritable laboratory, for testing media bias.

The terms “human rights abuses,” along with “murders and tortures” appeared consistently in the articles on one Latin American leader, while being almost completely absent from stories about the other.

One leader jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin—and for three times as long. Modern history’s longest-suffering political prisoners languished in the prisons and forced-labor camps established by his regime. According to the Harvard-published “Black Book of Communism,” he executed 16,000 subjects by firing squad. These ranged in age from 16 to 68 and included women, at least one of them pregnant. According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, his regime’s total death toll—from torture, prison beatings, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.—comes to more than 100,000. According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans have suffered in his gulag and torture chambers. Today, 53 years after the establishment of the totalitarian police state, political prisoners still languish in his regime’s prisons for quoting Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

He is the one where the news articles omitted the terms “human rights abuses, torture and murders” and where “gains in health care and literacy” predominated

One led a coup to oust a Marxist regime that had been declared unconstitutional by his nation’s legislature and Supreme Court. In the “dirty war” immediately following the coup, 3,000 people were killed and 30,000 arrested. Within a few years, all had been released or exiled.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/

Some are concerned that voting machines will alter the results of the 2012 election. A new book by John Fund and PJ Media’s Hans von Spakovsky demonstrates that all of us should be concerned about the machinery of American elections, not the machines themselves.

Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter Books, 2012) is essential to understanding the electoral mechanisms that will decide the November elections. The authors debunk voter fraud deniers with case after case of fraud, and explain how the fraud affects public policy.

Consider the clown who went to Congress, Al Franken. Who’s Counting asks and answers the question “Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?” The answer, according to the authors, is no.
Advertisement

They document how felons like Sabrina Ruth Hall illegally voted for Franken. When she was asked on camera if her vote might have helped Franken, she unashamedly replied, “I don’t know, but I hope it did.” Naturally, Eric Holder has failed to prosecute Hall under 42 U.S.C. § 1973gg-10(2), a statute which criminalizes casting an illegitimate ballot in a federal election.

But Holder isn’t alone in failing to uphold the rule of law. The authors also call out John Kingrey, the head of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association. Minnesota actually makes it a crime for a prosecutor to fail to investigate when presented with sworn evidence of voter fraud. Why didn’t Kingrey advocate investigations into the rampant election fraud in 2008? According to Kingrey, that course of action “diverted resources from the job that we want to do.” Kingrey was more interested in engagement on legislation related to bong water.

Von Spakovsky and Fund document how the left is outgunning conservatives on election process weaponry. While the Minnesota recount was occurring, GOP lawyers were armed with clipboards and pens. In contrast, for Franken’s “scanners, laptops, and other mobile devices were used to keep track of every single disputed ballot in every county in Minnesota. Decisions made by local election boards were immediately uploaded to a cloud database set up by the campaign so that [Franken’s team] knew exactly what vote totals were for each candidate … at every point in time.”

The authors also describe the vast and well-funded apparatus of vote fraud deniers and their litigation counterparts like the NAACP LDF, Brennan Center for Justice, and the wholly partisan League of Women Voters.

Sometimes the activities of the partisans take comic turns, as happened to the League of Women Voters in a challenge to the Indiana voter ID law. The LWV had produced a “victim” who could not vote because she purportedly lacked photo ID. It turns out that she couldn’t vote in Indiana because she had produced a Florida driver’s license, was registered to vote in Florida, and declared a Florida homestead exemption. Such is the stuff that partisans like the League of Women Voters will use to attack election integrity measures, as documented in Who’s Counting.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-worldwide-rise-of-islamic-anti-semitism/

FOR A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM….A MUST READ IS ANDREW BOSTOM’S MAGNIFICENT BOOK:
Product Details
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (Jun 5, 2008

“Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the way for world justice and freedom.” So said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [1] to an audience of ambassadors from Muslim countries last Thursday. The ambassadors had convened in Tehran for Quds Day — Jerusalem Day — an annual airing of Islamic supremacist Jew-hatred and Zionist conspiracy-mongering begun by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

The world has grown used to the spectacle of a head of government, Ahmadinejad, calling for the destruction of a nation-state that poses no threat to his regime — after all, he has done it so many times before. But Islamic anti-Semitism is also on the rise around the world. Indeed, so many Muslim leaders around the world so routinely call for the destruction of Israel and a new genocide of the Jews (which would almost certainly go hand-in-hand with that destruction, if it ever actually came about), that such calls are becoming as dull with familiarity as Ahmadinejad’s repeated predictions of Israel’s imminent demise.

Last June, a Pakistani Muslim cleric named Pirzada Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai said [2] the following in a YouTube video titled “Jews Are the Real Enemy of Islam and Peace”: “And all the troubles that exist around the world are because of the Jews. When the Jews are wiped out, then the world would be purified and the sun of peace would begin to rise on the entire world.”

Such clerics are not obscure eccentrics enunciating a twisted, hijacked version of Islam. In January 2009, the most popular Islamic preacher in the world, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said on al-Jazeera [3]: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers….”

Qaradawi continued: “I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.”

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/08/07/when-does-religion-become-illegal/

Is it illegal to be a Catholic in the United States? That’s kind of a grey area, after Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services Department issued an Aug. 1 order requiring all employers offering medical insurance to cover “reproductive services,” including contraception as well as abortion drugs (hat tip: www.politicaloutcast.com). Under the “required health plan coverage guidelines,” HHS lists:

All Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.

That includes abortion-inducing drugs. If you manage a Catholic institution, you either violate your most basic religious principles or fail to comply. The correct answer, evidently, is that you can be a Catholic at home with closed shutters, but you can’t have Catholic institutions.

It’s still legal to be a Jew in the United States, but not in some parts of Europe. After a June 26 ruling by a Cologne court defining infant circumcision as “inflicting grievous bodily harm,” you can go to jail (at least in theory) for performing Jewish ritual circumcision. Although German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other political leaders have promised to find a legislative way around the court and uphold religious freedom for Jews and Muslims, policies against circumcisions are proliferating. Two Swiss hospitals have stopped circumcisions (although they continue to offer euthanasia). One Austrian province banned circumcision before the Justice Ministry intervened. Now Norway’s ombudsman for children’s rights demands that circumcision be replaced with a “symbolic ritual.”

While a ban on kosher slaughter was narrowly averted in the Netherlands, European rabbis warn that a new wave of attacks on this basic Jewish practice is in the offing. Jews who stand by while America’s largest religious community, the Catholic Church, is persecuted should remember that we’re next. The Catholic Church is the only European institution that has consistently defended Jewish religious freedom in Europe. It would be hypocritical as well as self-damaging if we Jews failed to do everything in our power to support Catholics against this new persecution.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/to_vet_or_not_to_vet_huma_abedin.html

In light of Rabbi David Saperstein’s recent condemnation of Michele Bachmann’s concerns about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, it is important to offer proof that Bachmann’s concerns both are appropriate and are not emblematic of a witch hunt.

This proof is offered in the very detailed-oriented work of Andrew Bostom. His recent 9,000-word article offers a comprehensive overview of the interlocking ties among Muslim Brotherhood operatives and proves that the Abedin family has very close and personal ties to the Brotherhood. Thus, an investigation that would include “subpoena power and access to classified materials” is very much in order.

Can the “sins” of a father be visited upon a child? This seems to be an implicit question swirling around the controversy. In the case of an individual who will have access to the national security of the United States, it is, indeed, a very salient and critical question. Furthermore, is there proof that Huma herself was involved in any activity associated with the Muslim Brotherhood? Has Huma Abedin ever publicly renounced the Muslim Brotherhood or its aims? Is she prepared to break ties with her very Muslim Brotherhood-connected family members?

Bostom analyzes how for the “past 33 years, Huma Abedin’s family has been responsible for the editorial production of a number of journals from the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA)[.]” All members of the Abedin family have been involved in this enterprise. In fact, from 1996 to 2008, Huma was on the editorial board! Recall that since then she has been at the side of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But who are the individuals connected with the IMMA? Bostom reminds the reader that Dr. Abdullah Omar Nasseef, chairman of the IMMA, is “the President of the Muslim World Congress and the Secretary-General of the International Islamic Council for Da’wa and Relief (IICDR).” This includes a “large number of affiliated organizations, many of which are associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas fundraising, or support for Al Qaeda.”

IMMA’s executive director, Dr. Ahmad Bahafzallah, served as secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL). The Muslim World League as well as the Muslim Brotherhood both espouse the strict Wahhabi form of Islam. One of the senior Muslim Brotherhood figures, Kermal el-Helbawy, has “demanded the release of the terrorist Omar Abd Al-Rahman a.k.a. the Blind Sheik[,]” who was instrumental in the 1993 World Trade bombing. El Helbawy’s virulently anti-American remarks can be read here.

Andrew McCarthy explains that “[i]n the pantheon of Islamic supremacism, there are few positions more critical than secretary general of the Muslim World League. In fact, one of the MWL’s founders was Sa’id Ramadan, the right-hand and son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s legendary founder.”

Huma’s mother, Saleha, has been very involved in the IMMA since its founding in 1979 by her husband Syed Abedin. She is currently the director and editor-in-chief of the Institute’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA). In addition, as chairperson of the IICWC or International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, she is a fierce proponent of sharia law. She advocates child marriage and female genital mutilation.

Other board members of the JMMA include Zafar Ishaq Ansari and John Esposito. Esposito has long been an “academic apologist for jihadism” and has said that Yusuf al-Qaradawi “embodied a reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.” Qaradawi has denounced the United States and supported suicide bombing. To those unfamiliar with sharia law, see here, and note that democracy and sharia can never be mutually inclusive. Yet, Saleha Abedin concurs with Esposito’s ideology.

Bostom’s new source material, drawn from the most current issue of the IMMA journal, now known as the JMMA, highlights the deception and ongoing strategies that Muslim Brotherhood operatives employ in addressing the West. In the section entitled “Islam Uber Alles and the JMMA Today — Melding Tendentious ‘Victimology’ With Sharia Supremacism,” Bostom focuses on the following:

* Jihadists conveniently ignore the entire legacy of aggressive Islamic jihad.
* Jihadists twist and deliberately misrepresent the ideas of objective analyses of Islam by such pundits as Bernard Lewis and the late Samuel Huntington.
* Jihadists play upon ignorant Western guilt and call genuine concerns about Muslim terrorism “irrational reactions.”
* Muslim leaders such as Atif S. Siddiqui undermine the objective work of Dutch Orientalist C. Snouck Hurgronje and create “warped critiques” that evade the true character of Islamic terror tactics and global caliphate designs.

Particularly important for Westerners to understand is the linguistic convolutions concerning the concept of freedom in Islam and that of American democracy. Without knowing this crucial difference, the West continues to make excuses for a sharia-based doctrine that “rejects basic freedom of conscience and expression.” For example, “Hurriyya, Arabic for freedom, and the uniquely Western concept of freedom are completely at odds.” Hurriyya means “being perfect slavery.”

Thus, a Muslim must subordinate “his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior.” Western concepts of freedom, liberty, and equality cannot exist in a sharia-dominated society which insists — in fact, demands — total compliance to a set of laws that run counter to any independence of thought or action.

Earlier in his paper, Bostom had enumerated the odious punishments for any infraction of sharia law. Anyone who spurns the absolute truth of Islam can never have equality in the Muslim world. Dhimmitude status is to be conferred upon them. One need only read Soeren Kern’s dispatches to see how Islam has adversely changed the judicial and religious landscape of Europe.

Bostom warns his reader not to fall for the notion that Muslims are an oppressed minority. This concept known as “Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat or Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities” is really a methodology of aggressively overtaking the non-Muslim societies whose systems “are antithetical” to Islamic law.

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has asked “[w]hat is wrong with raising the question [concerning Huma Abedin’s vetting.] Why isn’t even asking whether we’re living up to our standards a legitimate level of congressional oversight?”

It is a particularly apt remark in light of Louay Safi, a Syrian-American Islamic leader who has been actively engaged with groups close to the Obama White House. Safi has been involved in the Pentagon’s Muslim military chaplain program as director of leadership development for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Safi was also responsible for teaching about Islam to American troops deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet ISNA has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, which was the largest terrorism financing trial in American history.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/08/08/live-presser-today-sheikh-mccarthy-sheikh-al-banna-and-the-national-security-five/ Live Presser Today: “Sheikh” McCarthy, Sheikh Al-Banna, and the National Security Five Andrew C. McCarthy is an accomplished former federal prosecutor who convicted the infamous jihadist “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and planning other acts of jihad terror. McCarthy recounted this prosecution in […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The Muslim Middle East has three types of governments. Military, Tribal and Ideological. A military government is formed when senior officers take power. A tribal government is based around a group of prominent families. An ideological government is based around a party, whether secular or Islamist. All these governments are tyrannies, though they may occasionally hold elections, they never open up the system. The elections serve as a means for passing from one tyranny to the next.
While these types of governments are different in some ways, they are not exclusive. Most overlap in a number of ways.

Military and ideological governments will become tribal as a few officers, leaders or Ayatollahs use their control of the economy to enrich themselves and their families. That is what happened in Egypt and in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood differs from Mubarak in any number of political ways, but on a personal level, its leaders share his goal of enriching their families.

Whether a new government starts out as Islamist, Fascist or Socialist; these facades inevitably revert to the tribal. That is the fate of all governments in the Muslim Middle East, which do not evolve, but devolve.

Every Muslim leader, beginning with Mohammed borrowed ideas brought in from outside to form a new system that became identical with the old. Mohammed borrowed from Judaism and Christianity to create the religious structure for yet another tribal government controlled by his father-in-law. In the 20th Century the Muslim Middle-East borrowed from the British Empire, France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and the United States, to create hybrid systems that were either overthrown or devolved into tribalism with an ideological facade. Like Mohammed, the bright new ideology ends up with a bunch of relatives in charge of the loot.

Muslim countries are forever at war with themselves. Military governments fear popular protests organized by ideological movements to seize power. And the ideological governments fear military coups. Tribal governments fear everyone and cripple their own military and bribe their own people to avoid being overthrown by officers or ideologues.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443792604577574910276629448.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

As he escalates his class war re-election campaign, President Obama has taken to calling Mitt Romney’s economic plan “Robin Hood in reverse” or “Romney Hood.” The charge is that even though Mr. Romney is proposing to cut

tax rates for everybody across the board, Mr. Romney will finance this by imposing a tax increase on the middle class. His evidence is a single study by the Tax Policy Center, a liberal think tank that has long opposed cutting income tax rates.

The political left always says Daddy Warbucks gets all the tax-cut money. So this is hardly news, except that the media are treating this joint Brookings Institution and Urban Institute analysis as if it’s nonpartisan gospel. In fact, it’s a highly ideological tract based on false assumptions, incomplete data and dishonest analysis. In other words, it is custom made for the Obama campaign.

By the way, even the Tax Policy Center admits that “we do not score Governor Romney’s plan directly as certain components of his plan are not specified in sufficient detail.” But no matter, the study plows ahead to analyze features of the Romney plan that aren’t even in it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444860104577558723207171952.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion ObamaCare’s Phony Deficit Reduction Lost in the fuzzy budgetary math is a simple truth: Repealing the law means lower taxes and spending. Defenders of President Obama’s health law are flaunting a Congressional Budget Office claim that overturning the law would worsen the federal deficit. Repeal, said a CBO report late last month, would cancel […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444405804577561123857056872.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Congress might be on recess and business slow, but this month always has its disproportionate share of world-historical events.

What is it about the month of August? Why should we still persist in regarding it as a quiet time—with Congress in recess, business slowed down, and people on holiday—when so many world-historical events take place in this month? You can ignore the Ides of March, but history shows that it’s in the dog days of August that great events take place.

Ever since the Roman Senate proclaimed in A.D. 8 that the eighth month of every year be named after the Emperor Augustus (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), nephew and adopted heir of Julius Caesar, the month has seen a disproportionate share of cataclysmic events.

In the last century alone, World War I broke out on Aug. 4, 1914, and Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on the night of Aug. 31, 1939. World War II was only won with the dropping of two atomic bombs in August 1945. Other 20th-century conflicts sparked in August: the Vietnam War, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964; the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; and the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

August was also the month when German President Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, paving the way for Hitler to become fuhrer; when the U.S. passed the Social Security Act in 1935; when Germany mobilized during the Sudetenland crisis of 1938; when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed the next year; when British rule in India ended in 1947; when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1948; when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961; when Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962; and when China’s Cultural Revolution began in 1966.

Across the 1970s, this supposedly quiet month saw Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency (1974), the signing of the Helsinki Final Act by the Soviet Union and Western nations (1975), and the beginning of South Africa’s Soweto Riots (1976). Over the next decade, August saw fascist terrorists kill 82 people at Bologna railways (1980), the founding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland (also 1980), the assassination of Filipino opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (1983), and the beginning of the Iran-Contra scandal (1985).

Might there be a reason why this month keeps cropping up when great men and great events collide? In Europe and America, August is usually the hottest month of the year.