RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a hysterical article charging the New York Police Department with trampling Muslim civil rights by trying to recruit Muslims who had been arrested on other charges to be informants. The headline screamed “New York Police Recruit Muslims as Informants on Terrorism” and proceeded to “expose” the “profiling of Muslims” by the NYPD to serve as potential informants from within their communities. Reporter Joseph Goldstein interviewed people who had been questioned by police and found the exercise “coercive.”

NYPD records show “that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city’s holding cells and lockup facilities,” the story said. Police reports noted which mosque a suspect attended or whether he “had made a pilgrimage to Mecca.” The story did not say why this is inherently problematic and how this differs from policing on everything from drug peddling to organized crime. But its appearance on Sunday’s front page — on the right column above the fold — tells readers that this is a big deal.

The article implied that Muslims were being singled out by law-enforcement officials because of their religion, and that they were asked invasive and improper questions about their religion.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own it, H.L. Mencken once said, an axiom that The Times has demonstrated repeatedly by routinely deprecating the threat of “Islamic terrorism” in the United States. For years, The Times has blindly pursued an agenda that coincides with the same agenda of radical Islamic groups masquerading as “civil rights” groups in trying to prove that Islamic terrorists were unfairly convicted and framed.

Ignoring the facts about U.S. law enforcement techniques that apply to all members of divergent ethnic and religious groups to collect intelligence, Goldstein reported on what he presented as the improper questioning of Muslims held in jails. Amazingly, the paper did not question at all the credibility of the allegations perpetrated by those he interviewed, all of whom had been arrested and jailed for violating laws, including an NYPD sergeant convicted of perjury in the fabricated hunt for scoundrels in the NYPD.

As part of the paranoid Times narrative, the reporter portrayed as unethical and racist the tried and proven law-enforcement technique of recruiting informants among different ethnic population pools. The same tactic is applied in the fight against illegal gangs, druggies, and criminal organizations: street gangs, Mexican drug cartels, Japanese yakuza gangs, Italian mafia, etc. Recruiting members of different ethnic and racial groups to infiltrate gangs and criminals has been a successful, legal and proven technique of collecting vital intelligence by law-enforcement officials across the country.

For The New York Times to claim that recruiting jailed Muslims as informants in their own communities is somehow racist is manifestly disingenuous and dishonest. Pat Dunleavy should know. He served as deputy inspector-general of the New York State Department of Corrections.

In Part One of this review of James W. Ely, Jr.’s book, The Guardian of Every Other Right, I began:
At the end of Ayn Rand’s prophetic 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, a judge who is on strike with other producers against a future, nightmarish state of America (echoes of Obama) and has disappeared with them into a Rocky Mountain sanctuary, is at work. Before him is a “copy of an ancient document [the Constitution]. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…'”
At the end of Part One, I concluded:
…[T]he absence of a distinction between “personal” and “property” rights in the premises of the framers underscores Rand’s dictum about the integration of political, economic and intellectual freedoms. Only the framers never quite put it so succinctly. One almost wishes she had attended the Convention to instruct them on that point.
James Ely wrote that James Madison, a champion of property rights, wanted to ensure the protection of property rights, and drafted a proposed statement to be attached to the Constitution.
That government is instituted, and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Perhaps thinking that the purposes of government were self-evident, Congress did not accept this declaration. (p. 54)
But outside the enumerated powers granted to Congress, many men did not think it was so self-evident what the purposes of the government were. Thus the fierce debate for and against a bill of rights in the ratification period. Ely provides further evidence of Madison’s linking liberties with property rights when the Founder drafted the Fifth Amendment:
The amendment provides in part that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without just compensation.” Madison’s decision to place this language next to criminal justice protections, such as the prohibitions against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, underscored the close association of property rights with personal liberty….Like all of the Bill of Rights, however, these safeguards for property were binding only on the federal government. (p. 54)
No sooner had the Constitution with the appended Bill of Rights been ratified in November 1791, and circulated among the states, than lawsuits were filed citing the “takings” (or compensation) and contract clauses in the Constitution relating to state legislative powers.
In Part One of this review, I noted that Ely reveals that the chief violator of property rights was not the young federal government, but the states. In his chapter, “The Development of Property Rights in the Antebellum Era, 1791-1861,” Ely documents the persisting conflicts between the federal government and states. The federal government was largely barred from interfering with “states’ rights” to regulate the states’ internal business and economic activity:
Indeed, state governments were the primary source of economic regulation throughout the nineteenth century. The authority of the states to regulate the use of property was derived from both common law principles and the police power. The common law doctrine of public necessity and nuisance both subordinated the rights of property owners to the interests of the general community. Under the public necessity doctrine, for instance, it was lawful to destroy buildings to prevent the spread of fire or pestilence. (pp. 59-60)
The states still retain such discretionary “police power” to this day. For example, gambling, alcohol sales and/or consumption, the advertising of certain professional services, and prostitution are the subjects of restrictions or outright bans. Today, state “police powers” more or less follow federal and national trends. For example, outgoing Virginia governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat (and now a U.S. senator), signed a state law that banned smoking in all Virginia restaurants and private business establishments, including private clubs and bars, at the behest of a tenacious anti-smoking lobby. Violation of the law carries heavy financial penalties for both establishments and individuals, and not to the exclusion of arrest. The banning of smoking in private venues such as restaurants, bars, parks, and clubs represented a “taking” without compensation to property owners.
Many states, notably Kansas, are technically “dry” states, but allow “local jurisdictions” or counties to permit the sale and/or consumption of alcohol as long as they establish liquor boards and issue licenses to sell liquor “by the glass,” in bulk, or to manufacture and sell alcohol, or to serve it in restaurants or bars. Such laws also provide for state or local inspections of premises or production. Many states also have granted themselves exclusive monopolies to sell “hard” liquor; in Virginia, on the other hand, “soft” liquor, such as beer and wines, is regularly sold in supermarkets with the only restriction being sales to state-defined minors (many also contain age restrictions on sales of tobacco to minors).

Many Moroccan youths in the Netherlands have “no education, no prospects and are barely supervised. They are a ticking time bomb.” Mustapha Abbou, former Labor Party councilor in the city of Eindhoven.

The age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the number of women in this group is growing.

More than 100 Dutch Muslims travelled to Syria in 2013 with the intention of taking part in jihadist activities there, and at least 20 battle-hardened jihadists have since returned to the Netherlands, posing a significant threat to national security, according to a new report published by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD.

The AIVD annual report for 2013 was presented by Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk and AIVD head Rob Bertholee in The Hague on April 23. In contrast to previous years, when the main security threat was deemed to be a cyber-attack, the principal concern in this year’s report is the mounting threats posed by the returning jihadists, as well as by Muslim hate preachers who are using the Internet to radicalize young Dutch Muslims and incite them to violence.

The report warns that the presence of European fighters in Syria provides the jihadist groups active there with an “excellent opportunity to recruit individuals familiar with our region to commit acts of terrorism here.” In addition, returnees could “exploit their status as veterans to radicalize others in the Netherlands.” Overall, AIVD’s primary concern is about the radicalizing influence that Dutch jihadists will exert on Muslim communities in the Netherlands.

AIVD says the age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the number of women in this group is growing. Most of the fighters are of Moroccan descent, although some are from Bosnia, Somalia and Turkey. Many of the Dutch jihadists are second-generation immigrants who were born in the Netherlands. They mostly come from the Dutch cities of Delft, Rotterdam, Zeist and The Hague.

The vast majority of Dutch jihadists in Syria have joined one of two rebel groups, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] or Jabhat al-Nusra [JaN]. AIVD believes that at least ten individuals from the Netherlands were killed in 2013, including two Dutch jihadists who blew themselves up in suicide attacks (one in Syria and one in Iraq).

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/an-american-bride-in-kabul-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Phyllis Chesler, an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at City University of New York, best-selling author, legendary feminist leader, Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the author of 15 books. She is the author of her new memoir, An American Bride in Kabul.

Dr. Chesler discussed The Burqa: A Sensory Deprivation-Isolation Chamber, emphasizing why the West must ban the burqa for the sake of women’s rights and health (starts at the 8:40 mark). The discussion occurred within the context of a focus on her memoir and all of its ingredients, including being trapped in Afghanistan as a young bride, her terrifying experiences under Islamic Gender Apartheid, how the feminist Left has betrayed Muslim women, and much, much more:

The outrage over the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls by the Nigerian jihadist gang Boko Haram reeks of Western hypocrisy and moral idiocy. Boko Haram has for years been slaughtering Christians – up to 2500 this year alone – and burning churches in a classic Islamic jihad against infidels. These depredations apparently weren’t enough to get the group designated a terrorist organization by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. But this indifference to what under international law is a genocide has been indulged as well by our celebrities and the mainstream media, who rarely mention that the group is specifically targeting Christians, and before the girls were kidnapped displayed little interest in the suffering of those Christians. So why this sudden attention?

The recent burst of self-indulgent selfies tweeted by millions, including celebrities and the First Lady, and the sentimental news coverage all reflect the fashionable and selective obsessions of our political and cultural elite and those who ape their fashions. First there is the need to display what Alan Bloom called “conspicuous compassion” for distant misery and suffering. Especially fashionable are compassion and pity for people in the Third World, the display of what Pascal Bruckner called the “tears of the white man” shed for all those victims of Western crimes like colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. Like Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, photogenic public displays of compassion, “outrage,” and “concern” for global suffering function like a designer label, indicating one’s moral superiority and finely calibrated sensitivity to oppression and suffering. Of course, ignored in all this emotional bluster and self-indulgence is any understanding of why this atrocity is happening, or the motives and aims of the perpetrators, information that would be important if we were really serious about doing something about it other than morally preen for the cameras.

Next is the despicable selectivity about which victims deserve our outrage. Why haven’t the thousands of Nigerian Christians already slaughtered by Boko Haram been worthy of this same uproar as the kidnapped schoolgirls? Of course suffering children are always triggers of easy sentiment and emotion – “I want to reach out and save those kids,” Obama said at Steven Spielberg’s house, at the same time he pretty much implied he wasn’t about to actually do anything. But plenty of children have already been raped and killed by Boko Haram, and many more are dying in Syria, Sudan, Egypt, and numerous other venues. Maybe the fact that the Nigerian girls are destined to be slave-wives – as Robert Spencer points out, a practice legitimate under Islamic doctrine and law – fires up leftists, who are always ready to decry a “war on women” and privilege the travails of females over every other kind of oppression and suffering. People who think that a sorority girl who gets drunk at a party and has sex with an equally drunk fraternity brother has been the victim of “sexual assault” are not going to miss this opportunity to highlight the sexist “patriarchy” and the universal rottenness of men.

NEVER AGAIN, AGAIN

Steven Spielberg threw a Holocaust party and everyone, from Samuel L. Jackson to Kim Kardashian, was invited.

The gala evening for his Shoah Foundation began with a few jokes. Conan O’Brien’s, “I called all my Jewish writers into my office and asked them for some Shoah jokes” really killed. Bruce Springsteen played “Dancing in the Dark” whose lyrics “you can’t start a fire without a spark” couldn’t possibly have been more appropriate considering that the literal meaning of Holocaust is “Sacrifice by fire.”

Obama slipped in after his DNC fundraiser with Barbara Streisand and Jeffrey Katzenberg to shake hands with a bunch of studio heads, Jewish and non-Jewish, and accept an award as Ambassador for Humanity. There was no explanation as to what an Ambassador for Humanity does. Maybe he reaches out to space aliens. Or tries to commune with fish.

Last summer, Obama had forced Israel to release the murderer of Isaac Rotenburg, an elderly Holocaust survivor who had escaped a death camp and reached Israel, only to be killed by a member of Palestinian Authority leader Abbas’ Fatah party.

Flanked by Spielberg and Springsteen, Obama told an audience of notables such as Kim Kardashian, Tyler Perry, Tom Cruise, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. about the importance of Holocaust survivors and how he would like to help the Nigerian girls kidnapped by an Islamic terrorist group that his administration fought to keep off the terrorist list, but he just can’t.

It’s hard to find the time to fight Nigerian Islamic terrorists when you’re so busy forcing Israel to free Islamic terrorists.

Cruise had delivered the introduction to the 2005 event at which Steven Spielberg appointed Bill Clinton as Ambassador for Humanity. Last year George Clooney, currently marrying a woman eager to defend every Muslim thug and terrorist, became Ambassador for Humanity. Before that it was the CEO of Walt Disney, the CEO of Comcast and Spielberg’s pal Jeffrey Katzenberg.

To be appointed Ambassador for Humanity you have to run a Hollywood studio or be a top Democrat. If Hillary Clinton isn’t named Ambassador for Humanity next year, it will only be because the world ended.

There was no word on whether Tony Kushner was in attendance. Kushner, Spielberg’s longtime collaborator, had called the rebirth of Israel a “mistake” and accused Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, of a “Zionist agenda”.

Spielberg had handed over the story of the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes to Kushner who turned it into an indictment of Israel and a defense of the terrorists. Munich was a work of historical revisionism justifying the murder of Jews and demonizing those Jews who fought back from a filmmaker who had built the “serious” phase of his career on exploiting the Holocaust.

Responding to the backlash, Spielberg called critics “right-wing fundamentalists” and said that, “people who are important to me” see the movie correctly, including, “Liberal American Jews.”

Now Spielberg is working on yet another Jewish themed project with Kushner.

Dear Ed,

May I call you Ed? You can certainly call me Roger.

I know you’ve been taking a lot of flak for that Tweet you made the other day — “Gay people were really the ones being persecuted in Hitler’s Germany [1]” — some calling you about as sensitive as Attila the Hun and wondering why NBC Universal would allow such a bizarre personality to represent them in public, sort of like asking Donald Sterling to host their morning show.

And I realize too that you quickly deleted the Tweet after a deluge of responses from normal human beings.

But, even with all that, I just wanted to say thank you, sir, for my family and for myself!

You see you have solved the mystery of why my grandmother’s Uncle Lennie, “the bachelor,” was incinerated at Auschwitz. Unfortunately, his sexual preference did not appear on ancestor.com [2]. But now we know.

It’s clear from your writing that Lennie’s Jewish identity would not have been enough, even though, as I’m sure you are aware as a prestigious political commentator at MSNBC, some recent investigators, including a French priest [3], have asserted that the stratospheric number of Jewish dead could actually be revised upwards.

And then, as you also must know, there are many groups besides Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, among them Poles, Slavs, Serbs, gypsies, Soviet POWs, some leftists (although the Nazis began as a left-wing party), the mentally and physically disabled and, of course, gays. Hitler was, in his way, an equal opportunity genocidal maniac.

Here’s everything you need to know about immigration reform: last year the Obama administration released 36,000 criminal aliens into the United States population. The jailbreak was deliberate and included 193 murderers.

The Center for Immigration Studies obtained the information and released a report documenting the number and nature of the crimes committed by the aliens.

If 36,000 criminal aliens walking around your community wasn’t enough, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is aiming to make it even easier for aliens to be released from detention. That’s what the groups agitating for immigration reform are demanding. That’s what the groups are likely to get.

The 2013 jailbreak included rapists, kidnappers, arsonists, burglars, sex offenders, and car thieves. That’s merely for 2013.

The criminals that Obama administration policies set free are unlikely ever to be deported. Detained aliens facing deportation are highly unlikely to ever be deported once they are set free into the general American population. They don’t show up for their deportation hearings, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have the manpower or money to hunt down tens of thousands of criminal aliens.

That’s a heaping helping of criminality the Obama administration just introduced into America.

After five years of Obama, it’s clear and undeniable that his presidency repeatedly takes the side of lawless criminals over law-abiding Americans. This is a common philosophy that runs through multiple Obama policies, ranging from attacks on the police, to nominating Debo Adegbile for a top Justice Department post, to failing to prosecute election criminals who supported President Obama, sometimes six times in one election.

Releasing 36,007 alien criminals into America is just the latest example of this philosophy. Never before has America suffered under a president so aligned with the depraved and malignant.

Boko Haram is a violent Salafist group that emerged in predominantly Muslim northeast Nigeria in the early 2000s. (Salafism is a Sunni Muslim reform movement that seeks return to the mores of the first generations of Muslims — the Salafiyya or the companions of Mohammed.)

There are reports that it got seed money from Osama bin Laden, and it has long been known to have al Qaeda ties, but how closely it actually works with al Qaeda — as opposed to loud displays of ideological support — is the subject of some debate in the U.S. government. This debate is reflective of general confusion and incoherence in American counterterrorism policy.

The ideological glue that holds Islamist groups together is Islamic supremacism, which is directly derived from a strict, literal interpretation of Muslim scripture, coupled with a belief that the “golden age” of Islam was the time of the first generations — Mohammed and his immediate companions and descendants — to which Muslims must return if they are ever to overcome the corrupting influence of the West. (Boko Haram actually means “Western education is ‘haram’ or forbidden.”)

Nevertheless, our government adamantly refuses to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal underpinnings of Islamic supremacism. Consequently, the disconnect: Boko Haram is quite clear that its goal is to impose sharia law and join al Qaeda’s global jihad. Its targets include churches and Western symbols, and its current leader, Abubakar Shekau, is quoted threatening the United States in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Yet, the Obama administration long refused to designate it as a terrorist organization — at the insistence of the State Department under Hillary Clinton, over the objections of other government agencies. (The State Department finally listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organization after John Kerry took over for Mrs. Clinton.)

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985.

Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that the Iranians even want a nuclear arsenal. He accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of cynically exaggerating the threat from Iran in order to strengthen himself politically.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Eilam’s interview was his absolute certainty in his judgment.

Eilam, who hasn’t had any inside knowledge of nuclear issues since 1985, would have us believe that he knows better than active duty Israeli intelligence chiefs and US intelligence directors about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He even thinks he knows better than the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Israel assesses that Iran already has sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to produce five atomic bombs. As Netanyahu has said, the interim nuclear deal the US and its allies signed with Iran last November only delays Iran’s bomb making capacity by six weeks.

In January, James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, agreed with Israel’s assessment. In testimony before the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence Clapper said that Iran is already a nuclear breakout state. In his words, “Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas – including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors and ballistic missiles – from which it could draw if it decided to build missile- deliverable nuclear weapons.”

Clapper argued that this doesn’t matter because the US’s monitoring capabilities are so trustworthy and advanced that Iran wouldn’t be able to put nuclear weapons together without the US noticing.

Unfortunately there is no reason to believe Clapper is right. Indeed, Netanyahu said as much to US National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she repeated Clapper’s claim during her visit to Israel last week.