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Berlin had perfect weather last week, and there was no better place to watch the world go to pieces than Dressler’s open-air terrace on Unter den Linden. Berlin famously is one of the world’s coolest cities, an edgy outlet for young artists. But it is also the face of the economic future. German unemployment is down from 11% in 2006 to 6.8% this April, with barely a bump during the Great Recession of 2008. Back in 2006, by contrast, Spain’s unemployment rate was just 8%. Now it’s at 25%. Spain is likely to go bankrupt, right after Greece, and the Germans don’t really care. All of Germany’s export growth in the past ten years has gone to the east, not the south.

One really can’t talk about a European economy when key indicators are moving in opposite directions in different countries.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/memories_of_my_own_on_memorial_day.html Today, only a small number of Americans have known anyone personally who died fighting for our country, but I have. My war was the Vietnam War, and I was a Vietnam wife, so I knew quite a few. My husband at the time did not die in Vietnam, although he certainly was keenly aware […]

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 20/2012 (May 14, 2012) of DER SPIEGEL.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/germany-based-rapper-fears-for-life-after-fatwa-a-833214-druck.html

Rapper in Germany Fears for Life after Fatwa

Cologne-based rapper Najafi has drawn the wrath of Shiite Muslims after publishing a song that appeared to make fun of the 10th imam. Following a fatwa by an Iranian ayatollah, he has received death threats, and there is a $100,000 bounty on his head. Now he is under police protection but insists he will keep making music. By SPIEGEL Staff

It’s every rapper’s dream: You stick it to the world, not caring what people think or say about you. If they hate you, they should go ahead and diss you, the more the better. No one can tell you what to do. After all, isn’t that what rap is all about?

That dream came true last week for an Iranian rapper living in exile in Cologne. But in the tough reality of life, the dream has turned into a nightmare for Shahin Najafi. Najafi rapped about a man who has been dead 1,143 years: the 10th imam, Ali al-Hadi al-Naqi. He implored the imam to return to modern-day Iran to sort out the regime there. Of course, to a certain extent he also poked fun at the imam — the sort of thing a rapper does in a world that’s becoming more and more difficult to provoke. Najafi also designed an image for YouTube: a dome of a mosque in the shape of a women’s breast, with the nipple at the very top.

He wanted to be provocative. It was rap, after all. The song’s message was hard-hitting and crass.

What he provoked, however, was not the usual outcry on the Internet, but a response from the Grand Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayegani in the Iranian city of Qom. It was a religious opinion, one that Persian newspapers have turned into headlines, albeit with a few weeks’ delay. The ayatollah expressed himself in broad terms, not even mentioning Najafi by name. But anyone who wants to can easily interpret the ayatollah’s opinion as a call to murder. And that is now Najafi’s problem, because there are many who want to read it that way.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-dna-of-the-cia “I would hazard to guess there are more foreign intelligence officers inside the U.S., working against U.S. interests now than even at the height of the Cold War,” said Crumpton.” In June 2010, the arrest of ten members of a Russian spy ring barely caused a ripple of public consternation. One of them, a […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-neuters-war-on-islamic-terrorists

Dr. Sebastian L. Gorka, a member of the faculty of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, said on Tuesday that the Obama Administration is rapidly revising federal counter-terrorism training materials in order to eliminate references to Jihad and Islam.

Government bureaucracies usually take a long time in changing a policy. In this case, he said, “I have never, ever seen such a wide ranging review executed with such alacrity.”

Although he blamed Quintan Wiktorowicz, a member of Obama’s National Security Council, for implementing the Obama Administration’s new overall policy of accommodating radical Islam, including the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, Gorka said Spencer Ackerman of Wired Magazine had helped sparked the review of federal counter-terrorism training materials through a series of controversial articles. One of those articles ran under an inflammatory headline about “Islamophobia” supposedly characterizing the federal government’s response to global Islamic terrorism.

As a result of this kind of coverage and the new policy, Gorka said the Obama Administration today forbids the use of the word “Jihad” to describe the terrorists that target America for destruction, even though they are members of the Muslim religion and openly declare their Islamic aims. What is happening in terms of redefining the threat is “unprecedented” and dangerous, he said.

The battle against radical Islam has been transformed into a concern, under President Obama and his adviser Quintan Wiktorowicz, about “violent extremism,” not Islamic terrorists or Islamists, he said.

Gorka said that the administration believes there are “good” Islamists and “bad” Islamists and the former can be dealt with. He said this policy is apparent in the decision by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to have contact with the Muslim Brotherhood “Supreme Guide” Mohammed Badei.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/cair-official-elected-delegate-to-democrat-convention

The Executive-Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Greater Area of Los Angeles Area chapter, Hussam Ayloush, has been elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. CAIR was labeled as an “unindicted co-conspirator” by the federal government in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a charity shut down for financing Hamas. On July 1, 2009, District Judge Jorge Solis upheld the label, ruling that the government provided “ample” evidence tying CAIR to Hamas.

On April 29, Ayloush announced on his Twitter page that he was elected as a DNC delegate for California’s Congressional District 42. The California Democratic Party’s website has the results of the delegate caucuses, confirming Ayloush’s victory.

Getting Tough on Illegal Immigration — on The Brewster Gang
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/29/getting-tough-on-illegal-immigration-on-the-brewster-gang/On this week’s Glazov Gang, Josh Brewster filled in for Jamie Glazov as host and was joined by Gang members Ben Shapiro, Shari Goodman and Rob Nelson. In this second segment of a three part series, Brewster, the host of “Duck Calls,” the Anaheim Ducks’ postgame radio show on AM830 LA/Orange, CA., nurtured an animated debate between the guests on the Getting Tough on Illegal Immigration. To see Part I, which dealt with Egypt’s Election and Rising Islamists, click here. We will run Part III in tomorrow’s edition.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/28/appeasement-politics/ American intellectual Will Durant’s The Lessons of History—co-written with wife Ariel and published in 1968, when the Soviet Union posed a threat to the United States—still offers insightful lessons, especially concerning American-Muslim relations. In the chapter titled “History and War,” the Durants posit some hypothetical speeches and approaches concerning war. First, an imaginary U.S. […]

Nancy Pelosi Hires Former Terrorist Fundraiser URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/29/nancy-pelosi-hires-former-terrorist-fundraiser/ In 2000, he oversaw a week of events that raised money for Islamic terrorists murdering Jews. From 2005 until the present, he oversaw a left-wing blog whose contributors used language that even he admitted was anti-Semitic. And now Faiz Shakir is about to become a […]