Atlas Shrugs

OBAMA ATTACKS FREE SPEECH - FREEDOM LOVERS WAKE UP!

Is America going to take this laying down? This is a coup. Smooth, slick and Obamafied, but America is most certainly under attack from within. We need an insurrection. We must fight this, but the pussified Republicans are stuck in some impotent inertia. We need Washington! Jefferson! Paine! Calling all Americans!

Mark Tapscott here: (hat tip Costin)

A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus projects has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It's a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process running up against civil liberty.

Check out this passage from a post on the White House blog by Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform (emphasis added):

"First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.

UPDATE: Robert Spencer said:

With the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) making an all-out international effort to restrict free speech about Islam, including speech designed to alert non-Muslims to the motives and goals of the global jihad movement, and Obama making conciliatory gestures toward the OIC, it is not at all difficult to look down the path and see the day coming when it will Sharia provisions restricting speech about Islam will be in place in the United States of America, and it will be illegal to speak about the Islamic supremacist agenda.

Most, of course, will dismiss such concerns the way they always dismiss them: with a wave of the hand and an invocation of the First Amendment -- as if the First Amendment were some kind of inviolate shield that cannot itself ever in any way be impeached or impugned. Would that it were so. But the Obama Administration is already showing how little it cares for free speech and open dissent. And with an Obama-compliant Supreme Court judging cases that challenge their actions and interpreting the First Amendment for us, what's to stop the Administration from playing ball with the OIC and building wonderful new bridges with the Islamic world in this way?

NASHVILLE LOEW'S HOTEL CAVES TO MUSLIMS AND CANCELS WILDERS EVENT

Last month, Muslim groups threatened and intimidated the Marriott in Del Ray into canceling our Freedom of Speech Summit featuring Geert Wilders. Organizers scrambled and we held an enormously successful summit despite Muslim oppression. Further, CAIR called for Representative Adam Hasner's resignation just because he attended a dinner with Wilders.

Once again, Muslim groups have taken a club to our first amendment, freedom of speech, and succeeded in threatening and bullying the Loew's in Nashville.

Nashville is a gateway city where the State department drops whole communities of Somali Muslims. This is the same city that refused to investigate the horrific allegations made by a Muslim child of abuse suffered in shariah classes at the Al Farooq mosque.

Once again the Muslims use freedom of speech to kill freedom of speech. They invoke democracy to impose Islamic supremacism on our basic freedoms - speech and freedom of assembly.

Shame on Loew's for not standing up for America and our basic inalienable human rights. This is dhimmitude. Period.

MUSLIM GROUP SHUTS DOWN CONSERVATIVE CONFERENCE Newsmax

The manager of a prominent Nashville hotel cancelled a contract with a conservative foundation to hold a conference this weekend on radical Islam, apparently after learning that the group would feature a keynote address by controversial Dutch parliamentarian and filmmaker, Geert Wilders.

Muslim groups succeeded in preventing Wilders from screening “Fitna,” his 15-minute movie on radical Islam, in the House of Lords this February, on claims it was insulting to Muslims, and dogged him during a recent U.S. tour as well.

Thomas A. Negri, managing director of Loew’s Vanderbilt Hotel and Office complex in Nashville, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had taken the extraordinary step of cancelling the conference at the last minute “for the health, safety and well-being of our guests and employees.”

Negri refused to say why he felt the conference would adversely affect the “health, safety and well-being” of the hotel’s guests and employees, except to refer to the website of the New English Review, the group organizing the conference.

The website features articles that warn about radical Islam written by activists, journalists and scholars, including former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, and former Muslim scholar, Ibn Warraq.

One article, written by a retired U.S. army intelligence officer, Jerome Gordon, warns of the growing problems caused by the recent influence of several thousand Somali Muslim refugees who have come to work for a nearby Tysons Food plant to replace illegal Hispanic meat packers.

Negri appeared at a 2003 pro-immigration event on the same dias with a well-known Somali warlord, Gordon told Newsmax.

In a written statement to the conference organizers, Negri said that the hotel had “not received any information related to a specific security threat concerning this event,” and declined to provide any justification for cancelling it at the last minute.

One of the conference organizers told Newsmax on Wednesday that the group was considering a lawsuit against Negri and the Loew’s hotel chain for “unlawful breach of contract.”

UPDATE: Kafir Harby!

OIC FREE SPEECH ALERT: Islamic Supremacism on the Net?

Jihad finds Andy Hardy.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference will doubtless demand the suppression of websites that "insult Islam" or "encourage hatred," and a number of European countries may well go along.

Atlas readers are well aware and sagaciously wary of the goals of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). I have, many times, outlined their nefarious goals and sinister objectives.

It was only a matter of time before Islam went after the internet and sought to impose its domination on the web. The OIC  (the global voice of the ummah - the universal Muslim community) have set their sights on suppression of free speech on the net. The OIC has already gotten passed a proposal in the UN, backed by Muslims nations, urging the passage of laws around the world protecting religion from criticism. Islam is the only religion specifically named as deserving protection.

Websites like mine are the ones that dare speak of the truth of Islam and report on the terrible human rights abuses, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu etc persecution, suppression of women and children, the murder of non-believers, brutal imposition of shariah law, Islamic supremacism, academic jihad, social  jihad, cultural jihad, shariah finance, stealth jihad and the galloping global jihad. The corrupt media are already subdued and auto-censor themselves. The net is all there is.

Expect a fierce fight. And don't expect the left to fight - despite the fact that it is a fundamental "liberal" value". The fascists on the left would like to silence the rational, the reasoned, the logical. They won't be targeted ............ not at first (but certainly at last).

Here's the latest attack on the West by the global jihad. File this move under "stealth jihad" or quiet jihad or soft jihad, though its anything but.

WHO CONTROLS THE NET Ariel Rabkin, Weekly Standard

In order to please our European allies and our Third World critics, the Obama administration may be tempted to surrender one particular manifestation of American "dominance": central management of key aspects of the Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Other countries are pushing for more control. Early this year, British cabinet member Andy Burnham told the Daily Telegraph that he was "planning to negotiate with Barack Obama's incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites." It would be a mistake for the administration to go along. America's special role in managing the Internet is good for America and good for the world.

Internet domain names (such as www.google.com) are managed hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy is an entity called IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, operated on behalf of the Commerce Department. The U.S. government therefore has the ultimate authority to review or revoke any decision, or even to transfer control of IANA to a different operator.

Until now, the management of the Domain Name System has been largely apolitical, and most of the disputes that have arisen have been of interest only to insiders and the technology industry. IANA has concerned itself with fairly narrow questions like "Should we allow names ending in .info?" Commercial questions about ownership of names, like other property disputes, are settled in national courts. Political questions like "Who is the rightful government of Pakistan, and therefore the rightful owner of the .pk domain?" are settled by the U.S. Department of State

The State Department? Great.

There are persistent proposals to break the connection between IANA and the U.S. government. In these schemes, IANA would be directed by some international body, such as the United Nations or the International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates international phone networks. It is unclear what problem such proposals attempt to solve. There have been no serious complaints about American stewardship of the Internet, no actual abuses perpetrated by American overseers. But were we to abdicate this stewardship, a number of difficulties could arise.

Domain names sometimes present political questions. Which side in a civil war should control Pakistan's Internet domain? Should Israel's .il be suspended as punishment for its being an "Apartheid state"? What about Taiwan's .tw if China announces an attempt to "reabsorb its wayward province"?

Perhaps most serious, control of Internet names could become a lever to impose restrictions on Internet content. Many governments already attempt to control speech on the Internet. Some years ago, Yahoo! was subject to criminal proceedings in France for allowing Nazi memorabilia to be auctioned on its website. Britain, Canada, and Australia all have mandatory nationwide blacklists of banned sites, managed by nongovernmental regulators with minimal political oversight. Such blacklists can have unpredictable consequences: Wikipedia was badly degraded to British users for some hours because of a poorly designed censorship system targeting child pornography.

If we give control of the Internet naming infrastructure to an international organization, we must expect attempts to censor the Internet. The Organization of the Islamic Conference will doubtless demand the suppression of websites that "insult Islam" or "encourage hatred," and a number of European countries may well go along. 

Most countries lack our First Amendment tradition, and if we wish to protect the free speech rights of Americans online, we should not allow Internet domain names to be hostage to foreign standards. Many other First World countries already have government-imposed restrictions on Internet speech that we would not contemplate here. Even if Internet governance were shared only with First World democracies, they might urge and ultimately demand that domain operators impose restrictions on content.

There's much more. Go.

This must be vigorously fought. It is every American's patriotic duty to stand for our basic inalienable human rights. I know which side Obama is on -- and it's not ours.

Bat Ye'or wrote here of the OIC:

The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world
. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body.

The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable.

The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate.

The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in “Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,” and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control.

In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia” and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.

ADL Stabs Israel's Staunchest Ally, Geert Wilders, and Jews Along with him Again

Righteous Gentile Geert Wilders, speaking this past weekend in a synagogue.

The ADL does not speak for Jews. The jewicidal, irresponsible leftopathic "Jews" over at the ADL have once again stabbed us in the back and come out against the staunchest Israel supporter and leader of the world counter jihad movement, Geert Wilders.

This is a mental disorder of the highest order. Atlas readers write me all the time asking how Jews can be Democrats or leftists. What must be understood is their "religion" is their dogma. These are not Jews, they worship at the church of human secularism. They define self-hating Jew (neo-kapo is apt here too).

Abe Foxman, the proverbial fox in the hen-house, has categorically denied the Armenian genocide and fired those at the ADL that did not go along. Imagine that, a Jew denying genocide. That's a  vile sin. These Jews in name only are traitors.

The ADL came out in support of the Islamic school in Brooklyn whose principal was forced to resign because of her involvement in Intifada NYC tee shirts (here).

I STRONGLY URGE any Jewish or Gentile readers who donate to this cause to STOP and urge your family members and friends to not give one dime to this Brutus. This is the same "Stephen Wise" Jewish mentality that sold us out and delivered us into the hands of the Third Reich during WWII. It was Wise who prevailed, not Peter Bergson.

Will the American diaspora repeat the same ghastly mistake again while Shoah victims still walk the earth? Foxman leadership and American Jewish lay leadership who align with the terror force must be vanquished.

The ADL has a notorious reputation of being loyal to their leftist, liberal dogma before the survival of the Jewish people. See Kapo. Self hating bastards.

ADL Condemns Anti-Islam Remarks Made by Dutch Parliamentarian During Appearances in S. Florida

Date: April 28, 2009

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) strongly condemns remarks made over the last few days at various appearances throughout South Florida by Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders.  In his speeches, he claimed that "Islam is not a religion" and "the right to religious freedom should not apply to this totalitarian ideology called Islam."  Mr. Wilders also stated that the Koran is a book of hatred, and that Mohammed was both "a pedophile and a warlord."

Israel has no greater friend on the International stage than the Honorable Geert Wilders. Here is what Wilders said in Florida about Israel:

Ladies and Gentlemen, there is one country in our Western Civilization that has been forced to fight the forces of Jihad for its values since the very day of its existence: Israel the Canary in the Coal Mine. Let me say a few words about that wonderful country.

I had the privilege myself to live in Israel for a few years and since then I have visited that country many many times.. Why? Because I love it, I do love Israel.

However, in Europe, being Pro-American, being Pro-Israel makes you an endangered species. Israel is a Beacon of Light in an area, the Middle East, that is pitch black everywhere else.

Israel is a Western Democracy, whilst Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all the other countries in the region are medieval dictatorships. And the so -called Middle East conflict, as you all know it, is not about land at all. It's a conflict about, once again, about ideologies. It's a conflict and a battle between Islam and Freedom. It's not about some land in Gaza or Judea or Samaria, it's about Jihad.

To Islam the whole of Israel is occupied territory. They see Tel Aviv and Haifa as settlements as well, and I am very much in favor of a two state settlement solution but then the two state solution from Winston Churchill in 1921, when Palestine was partitioned into a Jewish and an Arab part, Arab Palestine, Ladies and Gentlemen, is now called Jordan and I think that Jordan is the Palestinian State.

Islam forces Israel to fight. Israel is not just fighting for itself, Israel is fighting for all of us, for the entire West, just like those brave American soldiers who landed in Sicily in 1943 and stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944.

Young Israeli men today, young Israeli Women today, are fighting for our freedom, are fighting for our civilization, and like Bosnia, like Kosovo, like Nigeria, like Sudan, like the Caucasus, like Kashmir, like Southern Thailand, like Western China and the South of the Philippines, Israel is situated exactly on the dividing line between Dar al -Islam, the Islamic World and Da al-Harb the non-Islamic World. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this dividing line, where blood is flowing and war is raging in many many areas.

And, we have to get rid of that politically correct fallacy that it is all about separate conflicts, it's not. Let us please allow ourselves at least to see the big picture, which is, that all those conflicts, have to do with Jihad, Jihad in the spirit of Mohammed. Ladies and Gentlemen, Europe ought to fully back Israel to the hilt and (???help) us fight against those that threaten it, whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's Hamas, or Nuclear Iran. Also, because of it's history, Europe has certainly the moral duty and obligation to prevent at all cost, another Holocaust against the Jewish people.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: TEXT OF GEERT WILDERS SPEECH

UPDATE: SHOCKA! the Muslim Brotherhood to do a Kevorkian:

CAIR Commends Fla. Jewish Group for Condemning Hate Speech

To: STATE EDITORS Contact: Altaf Ali, South Florida Executive Director, +1-954-..., +1-954-298-8214, aali@cair.com; Ramzy Kilic, Tampa Executive Director, +1-813-514-1414, +1-813-486-2529, rkilic@cair.com; Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director, +1-202-488-8787, +1-202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com; or Amina Rubin, Communications Coordinator, +1-202-488-8787, +1-202-341-4171, arubin@cair.com, all of CAIR

ADL 'strongly condemns Geert Wilders' message of hate against Islam'

WASHINGTON, April 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today commended the Florida office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for condemning the anti-Islam hate of a speaker who was recently given a standing ovation at a synagogue in that state.

Earlier this week, CAIR called on members of the Jewish community to condemn "Nazi-like" statements by Dutch extremist politician Geert Wilders made recently at a Palm Beach, Fla., synagogue. In the speech, Wilders claimed that "Islam is not a religion" and "the right to religious freedom should not apply to this totalitarian ideology called Islam," all to the applause of the audience.

SEE: CAIR: Hate Speech Applauded at Florida Synagogue In a statement, ADL Florida Regional Director Andrew Rosenkranz said:

"The ADL strongly condemns Geert Wilders' message of hate against Islam as inflammatory, divisive and antithetical to American democratic ideals. This rhetoric is dangerous and incendiary, and wrongly focuses on Islam as a religion, as opposed to the very real threat of extremist, radical Islamists."

CAIR touting American democratic ideals? Now that's rich. They invoke freedom of speech to kill freedom of speech.

SEE: ADL Condemns Anti-Islam Remarks Made by Dutch Parliamentarian During Appearances in S. Florida

"We commend the ADL for its repudiation of Geert Wilders' Islamophobic views and ask all those who promoted his message of hate to recognize the negative impact such intolerance has on our society," said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper.

SEE: Fla. House GOP Leader Hosts Event Denying Religious Freedom

UPDATE: Dr. Andrew Bostom has more on the dhimmi assclown  Fox-moron who gave the Jew hating Maskomya Erdogan an award in 2005:

Anti-Semitism has no place in Turkey.  It is alien to our culture," Mr. Erdogan said in accepting the League's Courage to Care Award, which pays tribute to those who risked their lives to save thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.  Mr. Erdogan accepted the honor at ADL's National Headquarters in New York City at a ceremony attended by various high-level Turkish government ministers, U.N. diplomats and leaders of the Turkish and American Jewish communities.

"The Turkish nation has been living for centuries with the Jewish people and will continue its close and friendly relations with them in the future and will struggle together with them against any racism with determination," Mr. Erdogan said.  "It is the task of leaders around the world to join me in condemning the spread of hatred, whether through publications or otherwise.  Our consistent policy towards anti-Semitic diatribes can be nothing short of zero tolerance."

Over at Front Page.com

Current Prime Minister Erdogan, in 1974, while serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of his mentor Erbakan's National Salvation Party, wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for "Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]", and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

And recently, when the wildly popular, most expensive film ever made in Turkey Valley of the Wolves (released February, 2006) included a "cinematic motif" which featured an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis supposedly murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets, Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity.

More at Front Page magazine

The Armenian genocide denial “strategy” of Mr. Foxman and the ADL has succeeded, perversely, in further isolating Jews, while failing, abysmally, to alter a virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular culture—the latter perhaps best exemplified by the wildly popular, and most expensive film ever made in Turkey, “Valley of the Wolves” (released February, 2006) which features an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis supposedly murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity. This is the same Mr. Erdogan who in 1974, then serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of the Islamic fundamentalist National Salvation Party wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]”, and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

Yet ADL ignores the plight of Turkish Jews, defends Erdogan, and apparently still believes Erdogan’s “moderate Islamic” regime remains a committed ally of Israel. Is this silence on Turkish Antisemitism, and the immoral denial of the Armenian genocide Foxman’s Faustian bargain for Turkey’s dubious “support” of Israel?

As a Jew, I find the ongoing efforts by Mr. Foxman and the ADL to deny recognition of the Armenian genocide morally repugnant, ignorant, and particularly inappropriate for an organization geared to reducing, as opposed to abetting and fomenting Antisemitism, and other forms of irrational hatred.

UPDATE: Yid with lid: The ADL Becomes Tool of a Terrorist Organization

SHOCKING NEW REPORT! OBAMA'S REAL TERRORISTS: TARGETING PATRIOTS AND THE RIGHT

Have you seen this?  It is the fascist blueprint to create a police state and legalize gulags. This is not a spoof. This is Obama's "civilian army's" MOB. (hat tip the Rockman)

(U) Key Findings (U//LES) The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing* terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.

Translation: There is no threat. Give us time, we'll create one.

— (U//LES) Threats from white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts. Nevertheless, the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.

Translation: There is no threat. Give us time, we'll create one.

(U//FOUO) The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

American sovereignty is a radical position now?

— (U//FOUO) During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks, and infrastructure sectors.

Sounds like they are describing Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Obama's great friends and terrorist patriots!~

— (U//FOUO) Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to increased government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the continued U.S. standing as the preeminent world power.

Here they go again, pulling that 15 year old canard out of their ass (while neglecting to point out McVeigh's Middle Eastern connections. [Tom has more on the al qaeda connection too]. Their evidence is one terror attack 15 years ago -- but fail to mention the 13,000 Islamic attacks since 9/11. Got that?

(U//FOUO) The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.

Ah, there it is. take their guns away. Jail'em if they disagree.

— (U//FOUO) Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of rightwing extremist groups, as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for violence against the government. The high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by rightwing extremists in anticipation of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary concern to law enforcement. —

Ban? What ban? This is a staging. Fake staging to seize weapons.

(U//FOUO) Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

Radicalize the nation's greatest patriots. Are you seeing this? The only radicalization happening on a national/global scale is Islamic jihad. Our vets????

(U) Current Economic and Political Climate

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that a number of economic and political factors are driving a resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity. Despite similarities to the climate of the 1990s, the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years. In addition, the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization. —

There he goes again. Playing the race card again. Racism was dead in this country. It is Obama's objective to create a divisive schism in this country. The country ain't buying it. We, as a nation, elected him. Racism charge dead.

(U) A recent example of the potential violence associated with a rise in rightwing extremism may be found in the shooting deaths of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 4 April 2009. The alleged gunman’s reaction reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in antigovernment conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a Jewish-controlled “one world government.” 

One friggin nut and they will try to change the constitution. Thousands of Islamic attacks, honor killings, clitorectomies, shariah law, child marriage, child slavery, human slavery, lashings -- deduce nothing! And should you mention any of these things -- you are a racist and Islamophobe. 

As a Jew, this nut does not worry me. There will always be nuts - exceptions make bad law.

Where does this report address the thousands of acts of lone jihad syndrome, here and abroad? Suicide or otherwise?

(U) Exploiting Economic Downturn

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics are employed to draw new recruits into rightwing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen.

They are using the Jews. Most if not all of the recent spate of anti-semitic attacks here and abroad were committed by Muslims. FACT.

(U//FOUO) Perceptions on Poverty and Radicalization

(U//FOUO) Scholars and experts disagree over poverty’s role in motivating violent radicalization or terrorist activity. High unemployment, however, has the potential to lead to alienation, thus increasing an individual’s susceptibility to extremist ideas. According to a 2007 study from the German Institute for Economic Research, there appears to be a strong association between a parent’s unemployment status and the formation of rightwing extremist beliefs in their children—specifically xenophobia and antidemocratic ideals. ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers. —

Translation: Anyone who believes in immigration control and reform is an extremist. This is the club to the head of any resistance to shamnesty. 

The German Institute? WTF? Who the hell are they and why should we care?

(U//LES) Most statements by rightwing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action. In two instances in the run-up to the election, extremists appeared to be in the early planning stages of some threatening activity targeting the Democratic nominee, but law enforcement interceded.

Never happened. Look at history. Recent assassination attempts have been by leftopaths (Squeaky), commies  (Oswald) and nuts (Hinckley).

(U) Revisiting the 1990s

(U//FOUO) Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility and recruit new members. Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage.

Abortion, gay marriage and racism -- the inane drone of the left. I have been to these rallies and let me tell you - the proponents of gay marriage, abortion and "racism canards" are the violent ones. Every time.

(U) Economic Hardship and Extremism

(U//FOUO) Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and extremist members of the militia movement

Obama has set about to bankrupt this nation with a nine trillion rip off of the national treasury. The bankrupting of the hardworking to pay off his thug political machine and his thug army. Any great American (think tea parties) who dissents will be targeted.

Page 5 of 9 (U) Illegal Immigration

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremists were concerned during the 1990s with the perception that illegal immigrants were taking away American jobs through their willingness to work at significantly lower wages. They also opposed free trade agreements, arguing that these arrangements resulted in Americans losing jobs to countries such as Mexico.

(U//FOUO) Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent. 

Obama wants shamnesty. Obama wants to open up the flood gates, have ACORN register them to vote - overwhelm the electorate with entitlement voters. The end the will of the American people - the end of fair elections.

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremist groups’ frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence. If such violence were to occur, it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets. —

Check out the word "perceived" - the fact that the government is doing nothing is beside the point, right?  The reference "directed at specific immigration-related targets" refers to Binghamton -- and my sources tell me, Binghamton was not a lone gunman -- was not a guy who was pissed because he lost his job. My sources tell me  there were supposed to me more. It was retaliation in that Muslim enclave. 

[...]

Page 6 of 9 — (U//FOUO) On the current front, legislation has been proposed this year requiring mandatory registration of all firearms in the United States. Similar legislation was introduced in 2008 in several states proposing mandatory tagging and registration of ammunition. It is unclear if either bill will be passed into law; nonetheless, a correlation may exist between the potential passage of gun control legislation and increased hoarding of ammunition, weapons stockpiling, and paramilitary training activities among rightwing extremists.

Gun control. Period.

(U) Perceived Threat from Rise of Other Countries

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist paranoia of foreign regimes could escalate or be magnified in the event of an economic crisis or military confrontation, harkening back to the “New World Order” conspiracy theories of the 1990s. The dissolution of Communist countries in Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led some rightwing extremists to believe that a “New World Order” would bring about a world government that would usurp the sovereignty of the United States and its Constitution, thus infringing upon their liberty. The dynamics in 2009 are somewhat similar, as other countries, including China, India, and Russia, as well as some smaller, oil-producing states, are experiencing a rise in economic power and influence. —

Soros got his ............

(U//FOUO) Lone Wolves and Small Terrorist Cells

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Information from law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations indicates lone wolves and small terrorist cells have shown intent—and, in some cases, the capability—to commit violent acts. —

"Lone wolves and "terror cells"  embracing rightwing  ideology are the most "dangerous domestic terrorism threat to the United States"?

This document poses the most dangerous threat to these great United States.

(U//LES) DHS/I&A has concluded that white supremacist lone wolves pose the most significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy—separate from any formalized group—which hampers warning efforts. —

(U//FOUO) Similarly, recent state and municipal law enforcement reporting has warned of the dangers of rightwing extremists embracing the tactics of “leaderless resistance” and of lone wolves carrying out acts of violence. —

(U//FOUO) Arrests in the past several years of radical militia members in Alabama, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania on firearms, explosives, and other related violations indicates the emergence of small, well-armed extremist groups in some rural areas. ordnance that they planned to use in attacks on nearby military and federal facilities and infrastructure targets. —

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist views bemoan the decline of U.S. stature and have recently focused on themes such as the loss of U.S. manufacturing capability to China and India, Russia’s control of energy resources and use of these to pressure other countries, and China’s investment in U.S. real estate and corporations as a part of subversion strategy.

Rightwing extremist views bemoan the decline of U.S. stature? LIE. Obama fallaciously preaches about the decline of US stature us right wing Patriots know better.

Obama and his minions cannot demoralize Americans who love this country. Not possible. His Alinsky rules for radicals will not work on thinking, rational men and women.

(U) Disgruntled Military Veterans

The only disgruntled military are the ones that were forced to applaud the traitor in the White House.

(U) After Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, some returning military veterans—including Timothy McVeigh—joined or associated with rightwing extremist groups. —

He hates the military.

[...]

(U//FOUO) Unlike the earlier period, the advent of the Internet and other informationage technologies since the 1990s has given domestic extremists greater access to information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe. New technologies also permit domestic extremists to send and receive encrypted communications and to network with other extremists throughout the country and abroad, making it much more difficult for law enforcement to deter, prevent, or preempt a violent extremist attack.

(U//FOUO) A number of law enforcement actions and external factors were effective in limiting the militia movement during the 1990s and could be utilized in today’s climate. —

(U//FOUO) Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, the militia movement declined in total membership and in the number of organized groups because many members distanced themselves from the movement as a result of the intense scrutiny militias received after the bombing. —

They have one bombing -- one (with Middle Eastern connections that were suppressed) - and this is the basis of their takeover and coup on the Constitution.

Free men are under siege. Read this document - Department of [undermining] Homeland Security.

(U//FOUO) Militia membership continued to decline after the turn of the millennium as a result of law enforcement disruptions of multiple terrorist plots linked to violent rightwing extremists, new legislation banning paramilitary training, and militia frustration that the “revolution” never materialized. —

(U//FOUO) Although the U.S. economy experienced a significant recovery and many perceived a concomitant rise in U.S. standing in the world, white supremacist groups continued to experience slight growth.

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization.

UPDATE: The war against teh American People has Begun Liberty Boys

WELCOME TO OBAMERICA: HOMELAND SECURITY BANS ATLAS

An officer over at the Dept. Homeland Security - Customs and Border Protection sent me this screenshot when he tried to access Atlas. He is the third reader (who shall remain anonymous) who works at Homeland Security who cannot log onto Atlas. They had been able to access my site continually up until this week. "It went from to access to no access overnight".

 
The reader works for the Dept. Homeland Security - Customs and Border Protection. They all have Internet access through the national mainframe (somewhere in Virginia I think). All Internet connectivity runs through one central computer center. One 'click' and the Dept can turn off anyone.

In Obama's Amerabia - Atlas is banned. That's beautiful. ACORN, Blago, Reverend Wright, Farrakhan, Ayers, the scum of the earth welcomed into his lair - Atlas is banned. And is the tea bag terror!

I am flattered that he is shattered.

ATLAS BLOCKED: TRUTH IS THE NEW HATE SPEECH UPDATE: GOVERNMENT BAN TOO

Who is the tiny pencil neck schmeckle behind the curtain making these decisions?

Atlas reader Max wrote,

Dear Pamela,

 I love your site. I usually scan through the Conservative news fist thing in the morning when I get to work. Today, while having a cup of coffee, I tried to load your site I got:

I found other conservative sites were also blocked. Of course Moveon.org & DailyKos were not blocked.

What was most disturbing was the reason your site was blocked. The notice said Hate/Discrimination.

I thought you should know about this even though I'm not sure what can be done about it.

Thanks for the screenshot, Max. What's to be done?

 

Frank too, wrote that I was banned - and HE WORKS AT A GOVERNMENT JOB:

Hey Pam,
Not that you should care (PLEASE don't go changing!), but I tried to access your web site during my 15 minutes of allowed web surfing at my govt job today, and you site came back as "blocked" reason given was "Hate Speech"

Is this new? I thought I had been able to access at work earlier this week (when researching "someone's" birth certificate)

Thought you should know,

Frank

UPDATE March 22: From ON

Dear Pamela,

I read your blog every day. When I saw the news that your site was blocked for "Hate Speech" at a reader's place of work, I was astounded. I thought to myself, "Surely the company we use for URL blocking isn't this stupid". Sadly, I was wrong. Attached is a screen shot of my browser when visiting your site from work. My visit was blocked for hate speech. Just another dead canary in the mine.

In am a Network Analyst by trade. Work with many different types of network related hardware and software. Part of my job is working with the hardware/software that our company uses to block "inappropriate" web content. 

Robert Tracinski: The Free Man's Rebellion

Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist is one of our nation's clearest and brightest thinkers. His website is one the world cannot live without. We were fortunate to have Mr. Tracinski attend our evening with Geert Wilders last Friday night. I had not met him before, but I have long admired his sagacious, brilliant work.
He has penned an op-ed on what he saw that day in DC and that night at the OMNI Shoreham. Read it all and check out The TIA Daily site - worth the price of admission (subscribe here).
Tracinski nails the problem dead on right: "America used to have politicians like this. We call them the Founding Fathers. And one of the things I love about politics is that occasionally we see a leader who rises to that level again." —RWT

The Free Man's Rebellion Robert Tracinski

I went up to Washington, DC, Friday to see the local "tea party" protest against big government. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a fizzle. It was not so much the small size of the turnout—the best estimate I could get was that it drew at most 100 people—but the fact that those who attended were "the usual suspects." They were the kind of right-leaning, small-government firebrands who would come out for an event like this on the slightest provocation. They were not members of the general public driven to outrage by the Obama administration's push toward socialism.

So I guess I learned what I was hoping to learn by going to the event: whether or not there is a broad, popular surge of anger against rising statism. The answer: not yet. It confirms my expectation that the general public is still giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. They will not turn against him until his policies clearly have failed.

I should acknowledge, though, that Washington may not have been typical. After all, it is a town where the local growth industry is government. My friend Shrikant has been reporting to me that the general mood on the streets of Manhattan is raw fear. From what I can tell, the general mood on the streets of Washington is smug complacency. And why not? The financial center of the United States has just been forcibly removed from the one city to the other.

Other "tea party" events in other cities seem to have gone a good deal better; Michelle Malkin has a very extensive round-up on the protests in various cities. Note particularly the prevalence of signs with references to "Atlas" or to John Galt, which indicates the "Ayn Rand factor" at work here (my piece on which went up at RealClearMarkets on Friday).

But it is early days yet. The "tea party" idea was first broached less than two weeks ago by Rick Santelli. We will have a lot of time to plan and prepare and to help move the general public to the point where it is ready to say "enough."

But assessing the tepid local tea was not by any means the most interesting thing I did in Washington. What really made the trip worthwhile was seeing Geert Wilders speak there in the evening. If I was looking for a free man's rebellion against tyranny, this was it.

Wilders is the Dutch member of parliament who was recently denied entry to Britain after being invited by the House of Lords to screen his short film Fitna which demonstrates that the Koran preaches violent repression of non-believers. In response to Britain's betrayal of freedom of speech, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl invited Wilders to give a short talk and screen his film at the US Capitol on Friday.

Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog—there's the Ayn Rand factor at work again—decided on her own initiative to organize a second showing of the film and a talk by Wilders at the same Washington hotel that was hosting the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a giant yearly gathering of conservative political activists.

Interestingly, while the event was held alongside CPAC, it was not really part of CPAC. Geller describes how this year's CPAC has virtually ignored Islam and terrorism as an issue and generally refused to cooperate with the planning of the Wilders event. Geller had to organize the whole thing herself and find the funding for it.

The response of the CPAC attendees—the rank and file of the right, as opposed to its leadership establishment—was quite different. There was a large and enthusiastic audience, who lined up in a queue that stretched from the meeting room out through the lobby of the hotel. Geller describes the event in her blog, and one detail in particular jibes with my memory and give you a feel for it: hearing the wave of cheers and applause as Wilders came down the hallway to the meeting room, stopping to shake hands with the people waiting in line to see him. The event had a standing room only crowd estimated at more than 500, and people had to be turned away because the room was at capacity.

Geller accurately describes the enthusiasm of the audience. I am not sure I can adequately describe the enthusiasm of Geller herself, a brash New Yorker and an irrepressible firebrand. You'll have to see the video of the event (which also briefly shows yours truly chatting with Pamela—who I have known for a while as a fan of TIA Daily—before the event begins). She was followed by Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer—both of them uncompromising experts on Islam who have warned against its threats. Geller's report on the event has transcripts of their brief remarks, which are well worth reading.

But of course what we all came to see was Wilders himself and his film. Fitna is a 15-minute documentary that primarily consists of a series of quotes from the Koran calling for the killing of unbelievers, combined with quotes from speeches by various Muslim religious leaders advocating violence and religious dictatorship—all juxtaposed against images of terrorist attacks and assassinations committed by Muslims against us Western infidels. The most interesting thing about Wilders's film is that it includes so little commentary or interpretation of his own. It consists of quotes from the Koran, statements by Muslims, and actions taken by Muslims. He lets the enemy speak for himself, and the film has aptly been described as holding a mirror up to radical Islam.

For holding a mirror up to reality, Wilders has been vilified and attacked; he is currently being prosecuted in the Netherlands under that nation's "hate speech" laws. Yet if these same laws were applied to Islam, he points out, they would require Dutch authorities to ban the Koran.

And of course he has been threatened with death. This is the usual self-refuting Muslim response: don't say we're violent or we'll cut your head off. And this threat is very real for a European intellectual or politician, especially after the murder of Theo van Gogh, who was killed for making another short film critical of Islam. If you watch the video of Friday's event, you may notice that Wilders was flanked throughout the speech by two tall, well-muscled gentlemen. The fact that he needs this kind of protection says everything you need to know about the current threat to freedom of speech and where it comes from.

When I met Wilders before the event, I told him that a writer in the US can say the most controversial things with no real fear. (I've called Islam "The Killers' Creed" and put Kurt Westergaard's cartoon of Mohammed on the cover of TIA, and I've never had reason to think I was in serious danger.) So we appreciate all the more those who speak up when they are taking a real risk.

Wilders's speech—which I understand is essentially the same speech he gave at the Capitol—named in bold, straightforward terms all of the essential issues. Here are the best excerpts:

Today, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack all throughout Europe. Free speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural element of our existence, our birth right, is now something we once again have to battle for….

The real question is: will free speech be put behind bars? And the larger question for the West is: will we leave Europe's children the values of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, or the values of Mecca, Teheran, and Gaza?...

Cultural relativism is the worst disease in Europe today. Most of our politicians believe that all cultures are equal. Well let me tell you they are not.

Our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism, and humanism is in every aspect better than the Islamic culture. Like the brave apostate Wafa Sultan said: it's a comparison between a culture of reason and a culture of barbarism….

I propose the withdrawal of all hate speech legislation in Europe. I propose a European First Amendment. In Europe, we should defend freedom of speech like you Americans do….

Ladies and gentlemen, our enemies should know: we will never apologize for being free men, we will never give in. We will never surrender. There is no stronger power than the force of free men fighting for the great cause of liberty. Because freedom is the birthright of all man. Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.

Beyond that, I can give you my sense of Wilders as a person. He is usually portrayed sneeringly in the press as an angry reactionary rabble-rouser or as some kind of opportunistic publicity hound. What struck me most about him was precisely the opposite: there was no element in him of pretense or posturing, no trace of the self-conscious display of courage that you usually see in the leftist activist who shouts out bromides for which he knows he will never be punished. Rather, Wilders projected the most profound sense of dignity I have ever experienced from a speaker. In person, meeting members of the audience before the event, he was quiet, mild-mannered, and unfailingly polite. At the podium, he was calm and focused, maintaining his composure even in the face of the energetic and at times raucous response he got from his audience. I got the sense that he would have been equally composed if the audience had been just as energetic, but hostile. He was not really concerned with the audience and its reaction. He gave the sense that his only mission was to convey clearly the important message he had to deliver.

When Wilders first came walking to the event and shook hands with the people in line, I thought that he looked just like a politician at a campaign event shaking the hands of his constituents. And of course, he is a politician, holding a seat in the Dutch Parliament as a member of what is now his country's largest political party. But he is also much more: a man of courage and principle taking a stand on an issue that is crucial to the survival of our civilization.

America used to have politicians like this. We call them the Founding Fathers. And one of the things I love about politics is that occasionally we see a leader who rises to that level again.—RWT

A great American's take.

Iranian dissident Amil Imani writes a glorious tribute to Wilders: A Salute to Champions of Liberty

Steyn Testifies: "Free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion"

Committee Transcripts: Standing Committee on Government Agencies - February 09, 2009 - Agency review: Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. This is amazing. One for the history books, I tell ya.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): I'd first like to ask Mr. Mark Steyn to come forward and join us. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable. Good afternoon, Mr. Steyn. I would just explain to you that we have 30 minutes set aside that you may use as you wish in making comments. Time that is left over then will be divided amongst the caucuses. So please begin if you're ready.

Mr. Mark Steyn: I'd just like to make a brief statement, and then I'm happy to answer any questions.

The present Ontario human rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today, and in the course of such pseudo human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else's property or the human right to a transsexual labioplasty, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

Far from reducing racism or sexism, the Ontario human rights regime explicitly institutionalizes racism and sexism through its inability to view any dispute except through the narrow prism of identity politics. It's at odds not just with eight centuries of this province's legal inheritance, but with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Canada likes that one so much, it sticks it on the back of the $50 bill, even though Ontario's human rights regime is in sustained systemic breach of article 6, article 7, articles 8 to 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21 and 27 of the UN declaration. The good news is that Ontario is not in violation of as many articles as Sudan or North Korea.

All are equal before the law and are entitled, without any discrimination, to equal protection of the law. That's article 7. It's not true in Ontario. Last year, the Ontario Human Rights Commission effectively gave Maclean's and myself a drive-by verdict. They couldn't be bothered taking us to trial, but they decided to pronounce us guilty anyway. That neglects the most basic principle of justice: Audi alteram partem; hear the other side. Chief commissar Barbara Hall didn't bother hearing the other side; she simply declared us guilty. That is the very defining act of a police state: an apparatchik announcing that a citizen is guilty of dissent from state orthodoxy.

But here's the point: Maclean's and I have no fear of Barbara Hall, the commission or the tribunal. You're welcome to try and do your worst to us. We have deep pockets. We pushed back and we filled the newspapers with stories about all these wacky cases that Barbara Hall and others are so obsessed about. Like all tinpot bullies, the commission couldn't take the heat and backed down. But if you're just a fellow who happens to own a restaurant in Burlington, the Ontario human rights regime will destroy your savings, your business and your life for no good reason. The verdict is irrelevant; the process is the punishment.

I would like to say one further thing: When Mohamed Elmasry announced his suits against Maclean's, he was supported by Terry Downey of the Ontario Federation of Labour, and Ms. Downey, explaining her support for Dr. Elmasry, said, "There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow." Sorry; I pass on that one. For one thing, there is no "proper conduct" in the wacky world of pseudo human rights in this province. The rules are made up as they go along, so even if you wanted to follow them, you can't. In John Locke's words, they "dispose of the Estates of the Subject arbitrarily."

Secondly, it's all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day primly telling a homosexual 50 years ago that there's proper conduct that everyone has to follow, or a Jew 70 years ago that there's proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That's why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you subordinate legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril, and that' s the state in Ontario today.

Thank you.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. We will begin with the official opposition, Ms. MacLeod.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Welcome to our committee, Mr. Steyn. During the summer, this committee convened to interview and review the 22 vice-chairs and the 22 members of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Throughout that process, your case, Maclean's versus the Ontario Human Rights Commission, as well as what happened in British Columbia to you as well as what happened federally to you, was front and centre on our minds. Consistently throughout that process I asked questions of the deputants, those seeking to be appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, if they believed the free press trumped discrimination or vice versa. One of the deputants actually responded. Today, earlier, I asked the same question to the chair of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. He responded and said that neither trumps either. I would like your view on that, because it follows a logical set of questions that I have which are next with respect to freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

Mr. Mark Steyn: With respect to the witness this morning, that has become a standard equivocation at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Whenever tribunal judges take away individual human rights, they do so under the guise of what they call balancing competing rights. So for example, going back to the Scott Brockie case, they claim to be balancing his right to freedom of religion with the right of the gay people seeking printed materials to be free from discrimination. In practice they almost never balance those rights. They always defer to collective rights, group rights, in favour of individual rights. I'm an absolutist on this. I agree with the view that the ultimate minority is the individual and classically, historically, common law has been entirely antipathetic to group rights, because who can speak for a group? The notion of group rights should be an abomination to a settled democracy as old as this province.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Has the experience that you and Maclean's faced, do you believe-in your opinion, has that chilled coverage of other controversial events in this province?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes, I would say that's undoubtedly the case. Essentially, Maclean's and I-Maclean's in the corporate sense decided the amount of money it was willing to spend to see off these assaults on freedom, and I made a personal calculation of the amount of money that I was willing to spend on that. I'm fortunate, unlike most people caught in the human rights trap, to have that amount of money that I can spend.

But the reality is that most editors and most publishers don't want to get caught in this business. What you see progressively is the shrivelling of the bounds of public discourse. People say to me, "Don't worry; you'll be acquitted eventually." That happened to that guy in Saskatchewan, in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the fellow who took out the ad, not even quoting the Biblical passages but just citing the chapter and verse. It appeared as an ad in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. Four years later, that was overturned at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. But in reality, nobody can place that ad today. You couldn't take that ad to the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and expect them to run it. So, in that sense, the public space, the space for public discourse, shrivels remorselessly under this regime.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: You spoke earlier about the drive-by verdict of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Could you inform us of other aspects of natural justice that were lacking in your experience before the Ontario Human Rights Commission?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. There's a reason why-but let's start with the basic thing. For example, truth is no defence. No one was disputing the truth of what I wrote, nobody was arguing that it was libellous or seditious or false, for all of which there would be appropriate legal remedy. In essence, the plaintiffs were arguing that they'd been offended. Well, offensiveness is in the eye of the offended. I have no way of commenting on that one way or another. It's not possible in a legal sense to mount a defence to the accusation that you've offended somebody, which is why the human right not to be offended should not exist in free societies. That's the first and most basic thing that this system fails in.

1340

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: It's interesting that you bring that up. Murray Campbell, who's one of your colleagues here at Queen's Park-he works for the Globe and Mail-wrote a column on August 28 about this committee and the probe that we put forward with the appointees. He writes that: "Ms. MacLeod is right to explore the grey area between free speech and responsibility and to wonder how the tribunal will operate when it is handed allegations of discrimination from people who don't believe press councils or hate laws protect them." He specifically cites you. He says that it' s time "for Attorney General Chris Bentley to get it going"-and that's more public debate-"before Mr. Steyn writes another book."< /p>

I say this because the defence of you and your freedom to express yourself and the freedom of your opinions-the support ranged from many different groups across Canada, from Egale to PEN to the Canadian Association of Journalists, as well as other journalists that work in the field, in addition to media ranging from the Toronto Star to Eye Weekly to, now, the Globe and Mail. Have you called for the censorship provisions of the Human Rights Commission to be appealed, and did it surprise you that you had so much support?

Mr. Mark Steyn: No, because I think it should be obvious. If anything, I was rather alarmed by the number of Canadian journalists who are quite happy to serve, in effect, as eunuchs of the politically correct state. I can't understand why anybody would want to do that.

It took a while. The organizations you mentioned were late getting on the bandwagon. In a sense, if you want to make this a right-wing, left-wing thing, the international left in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia-people who loathe me personally-got the essence of this far quicker than the Canadian left did: that if you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you don't believe in free speech at all.

Every time you have someone like Haroon Siddiqui at the Toronto Star saying, "Oh, it's all about striking a balance," and all the rest of it-every time someone tiptoes down that primrose path, it leads only to tyranny. If you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you hate, you revile, you don't believe in free speech at all.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Thank you very much. I know my colleague Christine Elliott has a few questions for you-or my colleague Randy Hillier has a few questions for you.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Okay. I just will warn you that we have about two minutes left for your caucus.

Mr. Randy Hillier: Thank you very much for being here. It is an absolute pleasure to hear people speaking forthrightly, such as yourself today.

The process, you've talked about. The process is the trap. The objective is not important in this whole process. Do you have any comments on if this human rights tribunal ought to be here at all, or how you might offer suggestions or recommendations to improve it?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I believe in the abolition of the commission, because I believe the commission is nothing but ideological activists. I have no objection to that; I've been accused of that myself, but I do it on my own dime and I don't see why commissar Hall and her colleagues shouldn't also do it on their own dime.

The tribunal, I think, needs to be brought within the codes and conventions of this country's legal system. At the moment, it upends them. The burden of proof ought to be on the accuser. The accuser should not be allowed unlimited funds to frivolously torment people for no reason, beggaring them for something that serves no public purpose.

Whatever you think of the marijuana thing, it seems initially to arise from a defectively written law. But that great issue, the issue of where you can smoke medicinal marijuana-the burden of that should not be on Gator Ted. The transsexual labioplasty is perfect nonsense. Any sane person understands exactly what was going on when that doctor said that he was not willing to operate on these two transsexual women.

The idea that people should be essentially punished by a system that does not allow them equality with their accuser is a mark of great shame to this province. If there has to be a tribunal, it should be brought within the bounds of normal legal practice and this province's 800-year legal tradition.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. I'll move on to Ms. DiNovo.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: Mr. Steyn, if somebody puts a sign up in their store that says, "No Jews Need Apply," would that be considered okay in your-

Mr. Mark Steyn: We're not talking about "No Jews Need Apply." It's very interesting to me. Even at the time, for example, the famous No Irish Need Apply song, which became a famous hit song in the 19th century that Irish-Americans took up enthusiastically and made one of the biggest hit songs of the mid-19th century-when they actually went looking for "No Irish Need Apply" ads, in the whole of the United States, they found exactly two. It's easy to do. You can go now and search the entire archives of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, all the rest of it: There were only two. So even in its day, the "No Irish Need Apply," "No Jews Need Apply," "No Muslims Need Apply" was a very rare activity. Today, it's almost entirely vanished. That's not what we're talking about. If you look at the tribunal-

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: But why not, if I might interrupt? If freedom of speech is absolute, your freedom of speech to put in your store window "No Jews Need Apply" or "No Muslims Will Be Served" or "Coloureds Sit at the End of the Counter" is surely covered by freedom of speech.

Mr. Mark Steyn: I think that's to do with basic equality before the law. I recognize laws of public accommodation. I recognize, for example, that if you have a restaurant, you can't say that the Jews sit at this table and the Muslims sit at that table.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: Why not? It's your freedom, as an individual freedom of speech, to be able to do so.

Mr. Mark Steyn: No, because I think that once you get into the business, as I said, of public accommodation, where you're offering a service to the public-and again, I think there are exceptions to this. There's the famous case in Mississauga, the latest to make this system a laughingstock, about the woman who claims she was dismissed as a stripper on age grounds. I've never been to this strip club in Mississauga, but it sounds like the top-of-the-line strip joint in town, and obviously they pay better than other strip clubs in that area. Why shouldn't I go along and say, "Hey, you know something? I'd like to work as a stripper here and you're discriminating against me on grounds of"-

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: To bring you back to point, though, the point of the Ontario Human Rights Code and of human rights codes generally is to prevent the "No Jews Need Apply" action. Without the Ontario Human Rights Code, without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of speech, in its absolute and ultimate form, would rule the day. Clearly, hateful words lead to hateful actions.

Mr. Mark Steyn: No. I would say-this is the classic human rights dodge, by the way, to identify a non-problem that you claim to be solving. Nobody is putting up "No Jews Need Apply" signs. As I said, historically-

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: They are paying women 71 cents for every dollar that men earn, however.

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: That is going on. And in fact, they are still spreading a great many hateful words on the Internet-

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes, exactly.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: -and they are still denying transsexuals and transgendered folk employment or housing, quite legally.

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. Let me just talk about this " hateful words" business. This is again the sham of this Human Rights Tribunal, in that it does not treat all hate equally.

You claim, for example, to be interested in women's rights. We have honour killings; we have arranged marriages against the wishes of the brides in this province. The Human Rights Tribunal is silent about that. The Human Rights Tribunal accepts implicitly the two-tier sisterhood whereby if you are a western woman and you're fired from the strip joint in Mississauga and you want to kick up a big fuss, they'll take up your case because you're tormenting some hapless white, male strip joint owner. But if you're 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez and you get killed in an honour killing, they accept implicitly that that's a two-tier sisterhood with multicultural sensitivities.

1350

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: No, that's simply not true.

Mr. Mark Steyn: No, no. You brought this up, madam. At the time my case came into the news, there was a fellow in Toronto who went on the Internet and explicitly urged the killing of a minister of the crown and Canadian troops, and nobody bothers to investigate him for hate speech.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: No more questions.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you. Mr. Zimmer.

Mr. David Zimmer: Mr. Steyn, there was a well-known, indeed famous, American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made a statement in which he expressed his view of the limit on free speech in a case in the 1930s, and I'm wondering if you agree or disagree with this statement. He said that nobody is free to yell "Fire" in a crowded movie theatre.

Mr. Mark Steyn: It wasn't the 1930s; it was 1919 that Oliver Wendell Holmes made that statement. It's interesting, that case. He was an American-

Mr. David Zimmer: I know, but do you agree with that statement or not?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Let me say this for a start: He was upholding espionage charges against an anti-war protester. So by his measure, thousands of Canadian liberals would have been rounded up for protesting the war in Afghanistan.

Mr. David Zimmer: But don't duck the question.

Mr. Mark Steyn: I'm not ducking the question.

Mr. David Zimmer: Do you disagree with that statement or agree with it?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Let me come at it one other way, in which it's not relevant to our discussion-

Mr. David Zimmer: No, no, but then answer the statement.

Mr. Mark Steyn: Because Oliver-

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Excuse me. Could I just have one speaker at a time?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely-falsely-shouting "Fire" in a theatre. The problem with the Human Rights Tribunal is that falsely shouting "Fire" is not at issue. It doesn't matter whether the theatre actually is on fire, because under the Human Rights Tribunal, truth is not a defence.

In my own particular case, no one has ever pointed to a single fact in the Maclean's article, an excerpt from my book, that is inaccurate. So essentially-

Mr. David Zimmer: But back to Holmes's statement, is that a fair limitation on freedom of speech: You can't yell " Fire" in a movie theatre, just as a general proposition?

Mr. Mark Steyn: As I've tried to answer you, I think if the theatre is on fire, you're certainly entitled to point that out. By the way, that, as a metaphor, is simply a ludicrous metaphor. He was talking about gaslight, 19th century theatres. By 1919, the Winter Garden on Broadway-I don't assume you were there for Hitchy-Koo of 1917; I wasn't either-was an electrified theatre, and it wasn't in danger of burning down. The metaphor is lazy and irrelevant.

Mr. David Zimmer: What about this, just paraphrasing Holmes: Nobody is free to yell provocative racial epithets in a multiracial society like Toronto or New York. Would you agree with that?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I think society should have a bias that makes it unacceptable to use, for example, the N-word, as they say down south-

Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce that?

Mr. Mark Steyn: -in public, but I think-well, that' s the point.

Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce that?

Mr. Mark Steyn: A man, a member of the British Foreign-

Mr. David Zimmer: I agree with that. How would you enforce it?

Mr. Mark Steyn: A member of the British Foreign Office was arrested over the weekend for yelling, "Effing Jews. Kill the effing Jews."

Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce it?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I don't think he should have been arrested. I think he should be publicly shamed. This is not a hateful province. This is not a jurisdiction where people openly insult and use racist epithets. But what happens when you accord your tribunal the power to regulate speech is that you replace a social ill, people using racial epithets, with a worse ill. It's far worse to allow government the sole power to arbitrate what is acceptable speech or not. If a guy uses the N-word in a bar, I would rather somebody slugged him on the chin rather than him being dragged up before your tribunal.

Mr. David Zimmer: Let me ask just one last question. I understood your point. Your feeling is that an individual right should trump a group right, that you're an absolutist on that point, and I understand that. Now, supposing we have not a group right versus an individual right or individual freedom, but we have an individual right that's in conflict with an individual right of free speech. How would you settle that one? I understand you're saying that in a group right versus an individual right of free speech, the individual right should trump it. Let's take an individual right versus an individual right of free speech. How would you balance that?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I don't understand that question without something more specific. For example, my right to free speech: If I say that you like to dress in women's clothing and go out and pick up truckers on the QEW and that is not true, you have the right to sue me for libel. But if I say, in a more general sense, that I happen to disagree with your political views or whatever, then that's simply a matter of opinion.

Free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion. When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't start a newspaper and print what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up.

I think, actually, we don't need sensitivity training in this jurisdiction; we need insensitivity training. We need to learn to rub along in a much more agreeable, rough-and-tumble fashion.

Mr. David Zimmer: Just my last thought, then, back to this paraphrasing of Holmes: Nobody is free to yell provocative racial epithets on a busy intersection in Toronto or New York.

Mr. Mark Steyn: I disagree-

Mr. David Zimmer: Would you let that person yell a racial epithet or not?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I think that if someone wants to yell things about Jews, obviously, in this town, they're free to do so. They were yelling explicitly eliminationist, genocidal rhetoric about Jews just a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Toronto, and neither the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal nor the Ontario Human Rights Commission seems in the least bit interested in it. So you are identifying essentially something that is not the business-the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is not in the business of people shouting explicitly eliminationist, genocidal rhetoric on the streets of Toronto. That's not what this tribunal or its commission does. They couldn't care less about that.

Mr. David Zimmer: Thank you. I think that's it.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): One minute left.

Mrs. Liz Sandals: I just wondered if we could get a bit of clarification. Is it your understanding that one of the prohibited grounds that the tribunal is dealing with is freedom of speech? It was my understanding that that's strictly a federal issue.

Mr. Mark Steyn: No. I was caught-

Mrs. Liz Sandals: Not the commission; the tribunal.

Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. I was caught, obviously, in the changeover. Essentially, Barbara Hall, I think, issued her press release about me-

Mrs. Liz Sandals: But you would agree with me that the tribunal has not entered into this area?

Mr. Mark Steyn: Ah. No, no, no. But this is the interesting thing about her press release: She thinks these are exactly the kinds of issues that the commission ought to be bringing before the tribunal, as it does-

Mrs. Liz Sandals: And is it in the Ontario Human Rights Code that this is a prohibited ground-freedom of speech?

Mr. Mark Steyn: I would not read it there as such, but given the expansion-

Mrs. Liz Sandals: So you would agree that this is not terribly relevant to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal?

Mr. Mark Steyn: No, no, no. Given the expansion of the definition that has occurred in the years since the Taylor decision, and given the commission's own words on the kinds of cases it hopes to bring to the tribunal, I think it's clear that the tribunal will be dealing with essentially freedom-of-expression cases, whatever the Ontario code says, in the years ahead.

The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. That concludes the time that we have available. Thank you, Mr. Steyn, for being here.

Mr. Mark Steyn: Thank you.

CHARLES JOHNSON, LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS THROWS ANN COULTER AND SEAN HANNITY UNDER THE BUS!

It seems Ann Coulter is now one of the bad guys --  can you say nookin futz!?!

Hey KGS, you left out Sean Hannity. Sean and Ann in a 24-hour period! Sweetness and Light takes down Charles's smear of Ann here. And now Johnson is after Hannity too -- there is no homegrown jihad? WTF is this?

And he belched:

 the “anti-jihad movement,” it is well and truly dead.

Uh, no. No it's not. Although 'No Johnson' has done everything in his greatly diminished power to kill it. Picking off every member of the resistance one by one.

LGF is truly dead.

Related stooopidty here and here and  ........... fuggeduhbouddit!

FREEDOM OF SPEECH VS JIHAD: ISLAM'S NEXT VICTIM, SUSANNE WINTER, AUSTRIAN POLITICIAN CONVICTED!

It is with stunning speed that the house of Western civilization falls.

Austrian politician convicted of "anti-Muslim incitement" Jihadwatch (hat tip Randall)

Free Speech Death Watch Update -- more on this story: "Austrian far-right legislator convicted of anti-Muslim incitement," from DPA, January 22 (thanks to Gudrun):

Vienna - Austrian far-right parliamentarian Susanne Winter was convicted Thursday of incitement because of her anti-Muslim statements, including the claim that Islam's prophet Mohammed was a paedophile.

Is truth no defense? Of course, the whole concept of pedophilia did not exist in Muhammad's day, but when he is taken as the supreme example of human conduct and imitated today, what results is...pedophilia. Muhammad's consummation of his marriage with Aisha when she was nine is in the hadith collection Muslims consider most reliable, Bukhari, several times: 5.48.234; 5.58.236; 7.62.64; 7.62.65; and 7.62.88.

What's more, it is clear that Muslims take this seriously and imitate Muhammad in this. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.”(read the rest here)

Winter was indicted last April - at Brussels Journal here:

Dispatch from the Eurabian Front: Austria, European Parliament, the Netherlands, Belgium ]From the desk of Thomas Landen (hat tip Randall)

The Austrian authorities have indicted politician Susanne Winter on charges of incitement and degradation of religious symbols and religious agitation. This offence carries a maximum sentence of two years. Last January, Ms Winter said that the prophet Muhammad was “a child molester” because he had married a six-year-old girl. She also said he was “a warlord” who had written the Koran during “epileptic fits.”

The politician, a member of the Austrian Freedom Party FPÖ, an anti-immigration party which is in opposition, added that Islam is “a totalitarian system of domination that should be cast back to its birthplace on the other side of the Mediterranean.” She also warned for “a Muslim immigration tsunami,” saying that “in 20 or 30 years, half the population of Austria will be Muslim” if the present immigration policies continue.

Following her remarks, Muslim extremists threatened to kill Susanne Winter and she was placed under police protection. Today, the Justice Department in Vienna announced that Ms Winter will be charged with “incitement and degradation of religious symbols” (Verhetzung und Herabwürdigung religiöser Symbole). If convicted she may have to serve up to two years in jail for her opinions.

However, Alfred Hrdlicka, the Austrian “artist” who depicted Jesus and his apostles engaging in homosexual acts of sodomy during the Last Supper, has not been indicted. Nor will he be. Depicting Jesus sodomizing his apostles is not considered to be a “degradation of religious symbols” in Austria, but referring to the historic fact that Muhammad married a six-year old girl is “incitement to racial hatred.”

Neither has Mr Hrdlicka been threatened by Christian assassins for his "opinions." The difference between Christian and Muslim extremists is that the former do not aim to kill those who offend them, but the latter do – which is perhaps also why the European authorities fear the radical Muslims and persecute their opponents while they subsidize those who insult Christians.

CAIR FIERCELY OUT TO KILL FREEDOM OF SPEECH: TARGET ART HALL, PUBLISHER

Art Hall, Publisher of the Cape May Herald,  wrote this  excellent oped piece last week. It is a solid opinion piece. CAIR, US front for the Muslim Brotherhood,  does not believe we here in America should be free to express our opinion. They want a Muslim nation living under sharia law.

Keep the Muslims Out? Art Hall (hat tip Mike  Pa)

As we gather to celebrate the birth of Christ from a religious perspective, it is also worth pausing to consider what structure civilization would have attained, had he not come.

When large groups of people live together in close proximity, there must exist a code of conduct separate from the law, which establishes how we interact with each other. Are we polite, or are we rude? Are we refined, or are we vulgar? Are we truthful, or do we lie? Do we tip the waitress, or do we stiff her? Are we honest, or do we steal? Are we respectful of other people’s things, or do we abuse them? Are we true to our spouse, or do we cheat?

A nation of upright citizens thrives; a nation of vulgar, lying, dishonest cheats, declines.

I said it is important to think about it because things of value can slip away in the night if they are not guarded. Currently the America we love is facing two significant threats, one internal, the other both internal and external.

The internal threat is from a tiny, well-placed minority of antichristians who stay up nights crafting schemes to convince us, against all historical evidence, that we are not a Christian nation, and that our biblical rulebook no longer has any place in society.

But the jihadists particularly despise democracy…
an affront to the sovereignty of God,

================

The internal-external threat is like no other we have ever faced. It is from Islam. While Christianity preaches peace, the Quran preaches conquest by force of arms. Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005, states:

“Jihadist leaders declare that the aim of their holy war is not to alter specific policies of their enemies, but rather to establish a universal Muslim state. Fighting and killing to implement this apocalyptic vision, they have a long list of grievances and hatreds, including against the rulers of most Muslim countries…But the jihadists particularly despise democracy.

They believe law-making and self-government by human beings is blasphemous, an affront to the sovereignty of God, who is the only proper source of legislation.”

Christ, on the other hand, was perfectly content to leave world affairs to people, and therefore this antidemocratic sentiment does not exist in Christian countries like America.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, writes of a growing threat to his native Holland by immigrants from Muslim countries who do not share Western values. He desires to end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands, and warns the West of the need to diligently defend our principles.

On a recent trip to Europe, I spent numerous hours discussing the Muslim problem with an Austrian who travels extensively throughout Europe. He echoed Wilders fears, predicting widespread civil turmoil in many of Europe’s cities in the not-to-distant future.

In order to chart a course for the future, we must first remember who we were, review who we are now, and consider the national structure we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren. We were and are both a democratic and Christian nation in our fundamental structure. If we desire for America to remain thus, we must first recognize the current threats, and then develop the will to stand against those who are undermining them, those who detest what we cherish.

Art Hall, publisher

CAIR, destroyer of all things good, free and American are trying to get of the man now. Weasal Zippers has taken up the cause:

Please, give some support to the author of the article, New Jersey Press Association president Art Hall (email Mr. Hall here). CAIR's bullshit, bullying tactics need to be countered......

(SOUTH PLAINFIELD, N.J., Dec. 23)- The New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ) today called for a "clarification" from the president of the New Jersey Press Association, who wrote in an editorial that he believes Islam is an "internal" threat to the United States and seemed to support the exclusion of Muslims from American society.

In his editorial, headlined "Keep the Muslims Out?" and published in the Cape May County Herald, Art Hall wrote: "The internal-external threat is like no other we have ever faced. It is from Islam. While Christianity preaches peace, the Quran preaches conquest by force of arms... We were and are both a democratic and Christian nation in our fundamental structure. If we desire for America to remain thus, we must first recognize the current threats, and then develop the will to stand against those who are undermining them, those who detest what we cherish." (perfecto -ed.)

Hall, who is publisher of the Cape May County Herald,also seemed to support the views of one of Europe's leading anti-Muslim ideologues, Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders has called for banning the Quran, Islam's revealed text, in the Netherlands. Wilders has been quoted as saying: "I've had enough of Islam in the Netherlands; let not one more Muslim immigrate... I've had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: Forbid that fascist book."

"In his editorial, Mr. Hall labels Islam and American Muslims as an 'internal' threat, seems to indicate that America is an exclusively 'Christian' nation and promotes the intolerant views of one of

Europe'sleading Islamophobes," said CAIR-NJ

Public Relations Director

Afsheen Shamsi. "As someone who holds responsible positions as both a newspaper publisher and head of the New Jersey Press Association, Mr. Hall should offer a clarification of these disturbing remarks and a right of reply for the American Muslim community."

THE UN VOTE AGAINST FREEDOM OF SPEECH, WHO VOTED HOW

This nonsense about not insulting totalitarianism, misogyny, murder in the name of conversion was voted on at the UN. It is not surprising that the old Soviet bloc nations voted against it - they have lived under the scourge of a totalitarian regime.

New Islamic-sponsored U.N. resolution against free speech: Who supported it, who opposed it, and who stood on the fence

The newest Islamic-sponsored resolution on "Combating defamation of religion" (A/C.3/63/L.22/Rev.1) was adopted Thursday by a vote of 86 to 53, with 42 abstentions, as follows below. Selected votes of interest are in bold.

In favour: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Bhutan, Bolivia, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Djibouti, Dominica, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

Against: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Cape Verde, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Palau, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Moldova, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States.

Abstain: Argentina, Armenia, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Japan, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Nauru, Nepal, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Zambia.

Absent: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kiribati, New Zealand, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, Solomon Islands

FREE SPEECH ATTACKED! FITNA BANNED

The continuing quest for Islamic worldwide domination scored yet another victory made possible by the  West's peculiar desire to grant their wish. Freedom of speech suffered another devastating blow. The West continues its suicide mission by way of surrender by appeasement.

SHOWING OF THE FILM FITNA BANNED BY ORDER OF THE CONFERENCE OF PRESIDENTS (hat tip Paul Belien)

It is with great regret that I have to announce the cancellation of the showing of the film Fitna at the meeting with Mr Geert Wilders MP today at 2pm.  

I was informed of this decision today.  

Nevertheless a press conference will take place at 2pm in room R 3.1 with Mr Wilders and myself.  

The banning of this film is a direct attack on free speech. A parliament that constantly talks of freedom, democracy and tolerance has shown once again that these are empty words when it does not agree with what is being said.  

On the same day that the European Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize to the Chinese freedom campaigner Hu Jia the Conference of Presidents deny free speech to one of its own members.  

The press conference is open to MEPs and their assistants as well as accredited members of the press.  

Anyone who wishes to view Fitna before the meeting can do so by going to www.liveleak.com/view?i=216_1207467783  

Yours sincerely,

Gerard Batten MEP
UK Independence Party

UPDATE: More from the EUROIDS: EU parliament prevents screening of anti-Islam film

GOOGLE RESPONDS TO WND INQUIRY, PARTIALLY

Chelsea Schilling, the intrepid journalist at WND that did the article on my Google ban,   contacted Google about the “sandboxing” issue, and this is what they said:

Hi Chelsea,

Thanks for your inquiry. Atlas Shrugs was in violation of our terms of service. When we are made aware of a potential policy violation, our team of specialists will manually review the site to make sure it abides by our program policies. In this case we have stopped serving ads to Atlas Shrugs.

More information about our policies can be found here: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&topic=8423

Thank you,

Elisabeth

Needless to say,  I have no idea what kind of violation they are talking about' NONE. They told me nothing.I asked Schilling if she could dig deeper and find out what violation.

I have written many times and met a wall of silence.

The good news - I am back on Google. Thanks World Net Daily.

UPDATE: But my google search box is still blacklisted. Try it (right sidebar)  - search any term FORBIDDEN!

Reader D adds,

"And by the way, you should know that when one enters a search term in the box, and press ENTER -twice- then it finds the pages. This is because the first time it is from your site, so it gets blocked and a page from google's site says forbidden. After that it's the same URL, doing the same search on/through your site, but no longer from your site's webpage, so it works (any number of times when not done from your site). You are still blacklisted, and by removing the search box you have removed some of the evidence that she was!!!!!

(it may be that this is a misinterpretation, but I doubt it. Google did claim that you violated their TOS, so I think you're right that the search box failing is their work. Things went down simultaneously for you, due to actions at Google's end)

users can still use the search if they press enter twice.. once and they get the error. then click Go and it will bring results.  Because the second time they are doing it from Google's page not your page.

it's a technical measure google took against you, not a particularly intelligent one, but it is damaging and bad and you should keep the evidence up. That will also pressure them to put it right.

DANISH CARTOON DEATH THREATS FOR HEDEGAARD AND WESTERGAARD

Lars Hedegaard, President of the Free Press Society and free speech champion and Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist and  free speech icon, are under renewed threat of death from pious Muslims and adherents to the religion of pieces. I know, they kill people, it's what they do.

Learn these men's names, ladies and gentlemen. Commit them to memory. They fight for you. Their lives are in danger because they speak freely. If they and/or their cause go down,you are next.  What will you be harassed, fined, arrested (or worse) for? What is in your mind, your words, your deed that is unacceptable to the Islamic overlords and multicultural brownshirts?

Free speech is the line in the sand in this war. It is not ambiguous. This is not a gray area. Nuance? Not. Free speech is the end game. If we lose freedom of speech, all is lost.

It is not lost on me that the brave warriors on the fight for the West should emerge from the only country in Europe that saved its Jews during the last holocaust. How fitting and predictable.

If you missed my video interview with Lars Hedegaard - watch it, it's delish. Here's part I and part II.

The Institute for Counter-Terrorism has uncovered  two websites known for their affiliation with al-Qaeda - al-Hesbah (the Front) and al-Hanein - are baying for Danish blood as a reaction to the just released book by Lars Hedegaard and Kurt Westergaard (of Danish cartoon fame). Exclusive coverage of book and the cartoons ran at Atlas here:

ATLAS EXCLUSIVE: JUICY DANISH CARTOON Va Va Boom 11/17/08 

NEW DANISH CARTOONS: MO TOONS!  MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS! 11/15/08

HEDEGAARD & WESTERGAARD: DANISH CARTOONS, MO MOTOONS! UPDATE: EXCLUSIVE TO ATLAS: HEDEGAARD SAMPLE TRANSLATION! 11/14/08

Here's an excerpt form the report:

Danish sources said the 73-year-old Danish caricaturist, Kurt Westergaard, has provided new caricatures for a soon-to-be published book in Denmark by Danish Historian Lars Hedegaard. The new caricature drawings depict the Prophet, politicians, and religious leaders. The book will contain 26 drawings by Westergaad, whose caricatures in the “Jyllands Posten” newspaper in September 2005 triggered a local and international crisis.

Historian Lars Hedegaard heads an organization supporting freedom of speech and invited Geert Wilders, producer of the controversial movie “Fitna,”4 to Denmark in June 2008. According to the online post, Hedegaard’s book is set to be published at the beginning of December 2008.

In his post, Abu Salem requests that all who love the Prophet Muhammad help spread the news of the upcoming publication and notify religious leaders of what “these pigs” are attempting to do. One forum visitor responded to the post, suggesting that Bin Laden attack Copenhagen, repeating the call: “Bin Laden, Copenhagen!” several times. Another forum visitor wrote: “Our blood... our souls... our children... our money... all that we have... the entire world… anything so that a single hair of your distinguished head [i.e. Muhammad] is not harmed.”5

Abu Salem’s call provoked a significant response by internet users, also appearing in discussions on several of the main Jihadi online forums. On November 13, the “Al-Hesbah” forum quoted a report by the Jihad Press6 titled “Due to the silence of the Muslims, Denmark is preparing for a new crime against the Muslims – a book offending Islam.”7 The report describes the intended publication of Hedegaard's book and reminds readers that in June 2008 al-Qaeda carried out a “successful” attack on the Danish embassy in Pakistan in retaliation for the publication of caricatures in September 2005. In addition, the report claims that Bin Laden had threatened to attack Danish targets even before news of the publication of the new book.8 An internet user named Saqr Al-Islam Al-Maqdasi cynically wrote that if the book is in fact printed and distributed, small demonstrations would arise protesting the import of Danish cheese and meat productions. However, “the best defense is offence," he wrote. Al-Maqdasi explained that the best defense of the Prophet Muhammad does not come from boycotting Danish products, but rather:

"[…] by attacking Denmark everywhere so that it be known we are a nation sacrificing itself for Islam and its Prophet […] this cattle doesn’t understand anything but the language of rage, and we will decapitate the heads and set fire to the ground underneath their feet. They do not understand anything but the language of blood and scattering of body parts. I ask that Allah make successful the way of the loyal Jihad warriors, in order to blow up and set fire to Denmark."

In response, an internet user called for the complete halt of imports from Denmark, suggesting that they “begin exporting some of our products! Such as car bombs, suicide terrorists and missiles.”

News of book's upcoming publication has also been reported in the “Al-Faloja” online forum. A forum user that identified himself as “Jil Al-Qaeda Al-Qadim” (Al-Qaeda’s next generation), registered since September 2008, requested that the news be published widely and added that if he had any money, he would have killed every Danish person in his country.9

Background: The Affair of the Muhammad Caricature
Following the publication of 12 caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, a crisis erupted between Denmark and the Muslim World, dubbed "The Affair of the caricatures."
The caricatures were published in the cultural and satire section of the popular Danish newspaper “Jyllands Posten” on September 30, 2005, and later appeared in more than 20 newspapers around the world. Response to the caricatures was far more extensive than had been expected, spreading beyond Denmark and the European continent, ranging from murder threats against reporters and the caricature artists to attacks against Danish targets around the world.10

Read the whole doc here

Hedegaard translates the toon for us:

The lady says: “Oh martyr. You are in the most wonderful place”

And the martyr answers: “Paradise? Denmark?”

By the way, the text “Ytringsfrihed” on the ink well means: Freedom of expression. The § sign above it refers to the provision in out constitution guaranteeing just that.

The kneeling man with the pipe is Denmark’s most notorious dhimmi, former foreign minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen

Here are more of the new moe cartoons.

Jihadwatch is covering the new threats as well: Jihadists call for attacks on Danish targets in revenge for book containing new Muhammad cartoons

RACIST OR REALIST? UK EPIDEMIC - MUSLIM TAXI DRIVERS RAPING BRITISH GIRLS & WOMEN

So let me get this straight, we are supposed to sacrifice our daughters to the misogynist death cult to insure we do not insult Islam. Got it.

Is reporting these acts of jihadi rape  insulting to Islam and in violation of the UN resolution against "defaming Islam"? Fines or jail? What's next? They fined Brigitte Bardot.

UK EPIDEMIC - MUSLIM TAXI DRIVERS RAPING BRITISH GIRLS & WOMEN The Opinionator

Recently a BBC announcer was sacked/fired for requesting a "non Asian taxi driver" to transport her young unaccompanied 14 year old daughter. (Out of concern for her daughter's fears/mental well being & safety)

Of course, the "racist" club was trotted out by the mainstream media and others to verbally bludgeon Sam Mason for having the audacity to demand an "English driver". But was Sam Mason really exposing her racism or was she reacting, as any mother would, to the facts that there is a ongoing epidemic of muslim taxi driver rapes in the UK? (Note: the media prefers the more vague term "Asian")

Not surprising - the mainstream media, is aiding and abetting these rapes, by refusing to "connect the dots" and report on the clear evidence: The growing numbers of predatory muslim taxi drivers (some posing as taxi drivers)raping British girls and women.

Here are some - but far from all - examples of muslim taxi driver rapists:

Abul Malik. 29.  raped 19 yr. old female student - he was angry she didn't have all the fare money - Oct 2008

Salam Rahman, 27, and his friend, 26-year-old Mohammed Elahi - along with two other men - gang raped two woman - a newlywed and a city worker - Aug 2002 (Police said after the case that they feared these were not isolated cases and appealed for any woman who may have suffered a similar attack to come forward.)

Assadullah Razaq, 31, raped 28 yr. old secretary - Mar 2003

Mohanid Al obaydi, raped 22 yr old woman (was found guilty), Apr 2005

Ghulam Haider, 49, brutally raped 16 yr old gir,l Aug 2006

Murtaza Mateen, aged 47, lured 42 year old woman into his taxi & raped her, Jan 2007

Shahjahan Islam, 27, linked by DNA to attempted rape of lone young woman, Nov 2008

Rami Kayyali, 26, found guilty of raping young woman, Nov 2008

Asian - bogus taxi driver, in his mid-20s, wanted for attempted rape of 18 yr. old girl, Mar 2008

Asian male, aged in his late 20s or early 30s, wanted for brutal rape of 24 yr old woman, Aug 2008

Asian "taxi driver", in his 40s, sought in rape of teenager, Nov 2008

Also disgustingly prevalent are examples of dhimmi members of the British police denying and intentionally obfuscating of the epidemic of muslim taxi drivers raping British women:

"Speaking after Kayyali's conviction, Detective Sergeant Andy Willmott said: “Thankfully these types of crimes are very rare, but that makes it no less distressing for the young woman subjected to an attack by this man."

Liberal Facists will Exploit the "utter vacuum of conservative political voices"

Thew conservatives better get their act together and fast. The totalitarians are on the march. Over at American Thinker

Prelliminaries for an assualt on talk radio? letter to the editor

A Monday New York Times editorial discussed radio ads for "loan-modification companies."  In the process they got in a few jabs at talk radio, and specifically WABC talk radio, which hosts Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin.  It sounds to me like a little preliminary rope-a-dope, with a few soft jabs, to get attention and set us up for a few one-two punches before the liberal hope of a knockout punch.  I'm sure Senators Schumer and Bingaman were pleased to read this over their morning coffee.

The three hosts mentioned above are our conservative leadership by default, as there is a complete and utter vacuum of conservative political voices right now on the national stage. The liberal left would love to take advantage of that by shutting down conservative talk radio. They will do it in nicks and cuts like yesterday's editorial.

Liberal Fascism: PELOSI SUPPORTS CONTROLLED SPEECH

Speaker Pelosi made some stunning comments to a group of journalists yesterday regarding her support for the Fairness Doctrine:

“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.

“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation

Of course if this meant that the right would get equal time in and on the mainstream media, then the choke hold the media has in the big message and the national dialogue would forever change. And perhaps America would stay true to her fundamental values. NC, ABC, CBS, New York Times having to give eual time to every leftist position and slant would be the greatest thing that could happen to America. This sadly is not the case. The fairness doctrine would usher in a dark age. The American people have no clue what is going down.

The name itself is Randian "fairness doctrine". It is so Ellsworth Toohey. These folks are frightening, really scary.

 

Pelosi on 'Hush Rush,' and Filibustering FISA

by John Gizzi (more by this author)

The speaker of the House made it clear to me and more than forty of my colleagues yesterday that a bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine” (which a liberal administration could use to silence Rush Limbaugh, other radio talk show hosts and much of the new alternative media) would not see the light of day in Congress during ’08.  In ruling out a vote on Pence’s proposed Broadcaster's Freedom Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA.) also signaled her strong support for revival of the “Fairness Doctrine” -- which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested.

Experts say that the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was ended under the Reagan Administration, would put a major burden on small radio stations in providing equal time to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters, who are a potent political force.  Rather than engage in the costly practice of providing that time, the experts conclude, many stations would simply not carry Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other talk show hosts who are likely to generate demands for equal time.

At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, I asked Pelosi if Pence failed to get the required signatures on a discharge petition to get his anti-Fairness Doctrine bill out of committee, would she permit the Pence measure to get a floor vote this year.

“No,” the Speaker replied, without hesitation.  She added that “the interest in my caucus is the reverse” and that New York Democratic Rep. “Louise Slaughter has been active behind this [revival of the Fairness Doctrine] for a while now.”

Pelosi pointed out that, after it returns from its Fourth of July recess, the House will only meet for another three weeks in July and three weeks in the fall.  There are a lot of bills it has to deal with before adjournment, she said, such as FISA and an energy bill.

“So I don’t see it [the Pence bill] coming to the floor,” Pelosi said.

“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.

“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation

First they came for Steyn/Levant ... but they are only warming up

The terrible tragedy in this war is the basic understanding of the enemy. The premise is wrong and so everything that is subsequently deduced is wrong and dangerous. Terror front groups like CAIR should be exposed, indicted, and made a pariah by the society at large. Those on the front lines  of the quiet but deadly jihad should be revered. Instead, the courageous souls that should exalted and supported are relegated to the outer rings of the national discourse. Wafa, Ayaan, Warraq live under constant threat of death and must employ 24 hour security to stay alive.

 

Those that dare to speak out become victims of lawfare and vile smear campaigns: MARK STEYN IS LIKE A NEO-NAZI WAR CRIMINAL.

Looks like they tried to do to the Star (a usual supporter of Islamic bullying) what they did to Macleans/ Steyn at the Human Rights Commissions ...... but rest assured they are only warming up. There is a jihad against free speech.

Taboo topic sparks critical debate Kathy English The Star

I

n the month since the Star published its investigation into the secret world of polygamy in our community, reporter Noor Javed has braved a firestorm of criticism.

So too has the Star itself, with several complaints about Javed's groundbreaking articles about polygamy within the Muslim community in the GTA coming to the public editor's office. I've spent considerable time looking into these concerns and I think that the Star's reporting on this was accurate, fair and balanced.

I also believe it was a courageous act of journalism for Javed, a Muslim woman who has written illuminating articles for the Star in the past about her spiritual journey to Mecca to fulfill the holy Muslim pilgrimage called the hajj, and also about her choice to wear the Muslim head scarf, the hijab.

As a journalist and a "visible" Muslim who chose to expose evidence of polygamy within the GTA's Muslim community, Javed well knew she would come under fire. But she also believed that reporting on this controversial, "taboo" issue, which is clearly illegal in Canadian law, could spark critical debate among Canadians.

I, however, was surprised by the personal attacks against her. Javed's commitment to her faith has been questioned by other Muslims and some have even suggested it was improper for a Muslim reporter to report on this.

One "open letter" that came to my office, the Star's letters page, and is now circulating in the online blogosphere, accuses Javed of demonizing Islam itself. "If your intention was to spark debate on polygamy in the community then the Toronto Star was not the forum for it," the letter states. "There is already ample anti-Islamic sentiment in the world and it is not befitting for a Muslim to add to it.

"As a Muslim woman, you had an Islamic obligation, to defend this aspect of your faith, not to deliver a further blow to an already bruised community."

While many North American Muslims have widely, and sometimes justly, criticized the media for anti-Islamic bias in the days since 9/11,

Huh? Here English wusses out and attempts to bow -- the media never criticizes Isalm - hellooooo.  That's why you got slammed English. You can forget all those media outlets that printed the Danish cartoons?

I don't think the Star's reporting on polygamy was either anti-Islamic or unfair. Javed spent several months investigating this, talking to dozens of people including four local Muslim women who believe they have been victimized by polygamy. This has not been about "airing dirty laundry," as some have accused Javed of doing, but of airing these concerns.

Javed's reporting put the issue into context, explaining the perspective on polygamy of both the Muslim faith and Canadian law. She wrote that while polygamy is generally among the "last taboos" in Western society, it's practised in more than 850 societies worldwide, including within the fundamentalist Mormon community in Bountiful, B.C. She also spoke to several legal experts who believe polygamy will soon be forced to face a constitutional challenge.

But as Star columnist and editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui also pointed out in a follow-up column to Javed's articles, those practising polygamy in Canada are breaking the law as it now stands: "Muslims are obliged to obey the law of the land where they live" he wrote.

Aly Hindy, the iman of Saluhuddin Islamic Centre who openly told Javed that he has "blessed" numerous polygamous unions, now accuses the Star of bias against the Muslim community. In an email to several hundred people, now posted online, Hindy's son, Ibrahim, states that the Star has an "agenda" to "caricature" the Muslim community and Hindy as "backwards, as anti-women and even anarchist ..."

Railroading Steyn

And the New York Times guy says he "can't believe what he's witnessing".

Hmmmmmmmmmm.... can't see why, they help usher in this scourge. And if Obombshell gets into the office, expect the same - think un"Fairness" doctrine. Steyn blasts at NRO: (links hat tip s)

THERE'S A NEW SHARIF IN TOWN

The Canadian Islamic Congress lawyer says that freedom of speech is a "red herring". If it were, it would be on the endangered species list. And the New York Times guy says he "can't believe what he's witnessing".

With their usual low cunning, the "human rights" sheikhs chose a courtroom that only seats 40 people so a big crowd (including CBC reporters) were wedged up peering through the glass in the door until the head sheikh (a judge best known for fining the Knights of Columbus for declining to rent their hall for a lesbian wedding) said the pressed faces of the people were distracting her and shooed them away. Typical. A third-rate bureaucracy that tells everyone from McDonald's to Maclean's magazine how to run their affairs can't even organize a show trial with minimal competence.

Pela tried!

Maybe the folks who can't get in should file a "human rights" complaint against the "human rights" tribunal for denying them the human right to attend a human rights trial. Say what you like about Saddam's justice system, but at least I'd be dead by now and out of my misery.

Over at The National Post: The Court of Last Resort

VANCOUVER -In the subterranean bowels of a provincial courthouse, a bizarre and frightening spectacle starts to unfold.

 

if found to have violated the code, Maclean's faces sanctions, including payment to the complainant "an amount that the member or panel considers appropriate to compensate that person for injury to dignity, feelings and self respect or to any of them."

The magazine could also be ordered to stop publishing certain ideas and points of view. Lawyer Faisal Joseph, representing the complainant, asked the Tribunal yesterday to use its "discretion" and order Maclean's to publish a suitable response in its pages. That, or publish the panel's ultimate findings. Such are the frightening aspect of this case.

"Strict rules of evidence do not apply" in cases before the Tribunal, noted its chairwoman, Heather MacNaughton. A lawyer and a veteran of human rights inquiries, she made the comment yesterday afternoon, when allowing an Ontario law student -- yet another non-B. C. resident -- to deliver for the complainant testimony about the "Islamaphobic" Steyn excerpt.

WTF? Evidence does not apply?

Coyne's liveblog coverage parts I and II.

The Canadian Islamic Congress lawyer says that freedom of speech is a "red herring".

Throwing out the greatest civilization in human history with both hands.

 

UPDATE: Supercargo left this comment. Canada better get it together -"mulitculturalism" will be the death of the West:

Prior to 9-11 a Canadian Christian preacher was convicted under the "hate" law for accusing muslims of hate, deceit, and subversion. In Dec. 2001, an Appeals court upheld his sentencing. At the time, I communicated with Harding and he claimed that he was forced to take instructions in Islam, from the Islamic Society of North America. In fact, one text was written by arch terrorist, Maulana Maududi, founder of Jamaat-i-Islami (the JI invited bin Laden to attend their 1998 convention in Peshawar, Pakistan). Harding told me that the ISNA enforcer threatened to throw him in jail if he didn't co-operate. In Canada, scrutiny of Muslims is a hate crime.( Court doc here)

ORWELLIAN FREEDOM OF SPEECH BLOG FREE OR DIE

If you would have asked me late last year what I was going to do with myself after shutting down the Western Standard, I might have had a few guesses. But I never thought I would be fighting off a human rights complaint from radical jihadis in Alberta, and a defamation action from a radical censor in Ontario -- and trying to get our politicians to listen. But I’m up for the fight -- I just need help paying the lawyers.

Can you please help me? Ezra Levant

What timing! Tomorrow, the most courageous truth tellers and fighters for free speech descend on Manhattan to attend the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies  and The New Criterion's conference: FREE SPEECH IN AN AGE OF JIHAD. Luminaries include Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Ezra Levant, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Dr. Andrew Bostom, Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Claudia Rosett, Cliff May as well as other leading lights in the fight for free speech and against libel tourism. And I will be there reporting live.

How ironic that one day before this historical conference, Richard Warman has sued Ezra Levant -- and other conservative bloggers.

The suit names:(hat tip Malkin)

•    Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”)
•    FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com)
•    Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com
•    Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog
•    and me, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com

At Ezra’s, Kathy’s, Connie and Mark’s, and Kate’s blogs, you can find “Donate” buttons. They are going to need dough. Send whatever you can. This is how the leftist Islamic alliance removes the enemy -- bankrupts him. Just ask Rachel. And please note, it's all conservative bloggers. All of them....... this from Ezra: 

Today I was sued by Richard Warman, Canada’s most prolific – and profitable – user of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. As readers of this site know, Warman isn’t just a happy customer of section 13 and its 100% conviction rate, he’s a former CHRC employee, an investigator of section 13 thought crimes himself. In fact, he was often both a customer and an investigator at the same time.

Being sued by Warman is like being sued by the CHRC

It’s impossible to criticize section 13 without criticizing Warman, because without Warman, section 13 would have been defunct years ago – almost no-one else in this country of 33 million people uses it. I’d call it “Warman’s Law”, but I’ve already given that title to another law enacted because of Warman. Warman’s Law is a law brought in by the B.C. government specifically to protect libraries from Warman’s nuisance defamation suits. (We should find some way to set up a Warman’s law to protect universities from Warman, too.)

Warman doesn’t just “use” section 13. As I’ve documented here before, he actively interferes with other CHRC investigators working on his complaints. For example, he called up Hannya Rizk, a fellow investigator he trained, and told her to improperly withhold information from the person Warman had complained about; he told Rizk to slow down her work to fit his other plans; he tried to get Rizk to improperly disclose confidential information about cases to third parties.

And then there’s Warman’s direct interference in the investigation of his own complaints – wandering right into the CHRC offices, hopping right on investigator’s computers, using their passwords, and just having a ball – violating not only privacy and confidentiality, but the integrity of the CHRC’s evidence – not that such sloppiness has detracted from their 100% conviction rate.

Warman isn’t solely responsible for the corruption of the CHRC, of course – he couldn’t get away with his antics without the cooperation and even encouragement of the rest of the CHRC staff, which happens to include some decidedly ethically challenged people. But Warman is the central figure in its abuse. That is a source of great pride for Warman, who professes a philosophy he calls “maximum disruption”.

The more I learn about Warman, the more I write about him. And, like the CHRC, he hates public exposure. Earlier this year, Warman’s lawyer served me with a lengthy Libel Notice, which I posted to my website here, with my commentary on it here.

Warman’s new lawsuit, which you can see here, covers much of the same ground – but not all of it. For example, you’ll see that part 4 of his Libel Notice – which made up a third of his lengthy complaint – has been dropped from his lawsuit. That part was Warman’s threat to sue me for discussing his conspiracy to assault his nemesis, David Icke. I guess it’s pretty tough to complain about that, when the whole thing was caught on video.

Warman’s suit would censor the conservative blogosphere

Warman’s not just suing me. He’s suing some of the biggest names in the Canadian blogosphere – from Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals to Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury (or, Five Feet of Furry, as the lawsuit says on page 2), to Free Dominion, the largest conservative chat site in Canada. Warman’s goal is breathtaking in its chutzpah: he wants to muzzle the Canadian conservative Internet. It’s not just his goal – it’s the goal of the CHRC itself, and its friends at the Canadian Jewish Congress, who have stated their goal is to “tame” the Internet – or at least those voices they disagree with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the CJC was bankrolling Warman’s lawsuit – they’ve done joint legal work together before, and Warman’s number one defender is on the CJC’s legal committee. The CJC hates conservatives, and this would be a way for them to do damage to the conservative blogosphere without taking the political flak for it.

Take a look at the language Warman’s lawsuit uses to smear Free Dominion. At paragraph 17, Warman calls them an “extreme right-wing discussion forum”. Look at that language – hardly distinguishable from the CHRC’s and CJC’s boilerplate insults reserved for neo-Nazis. That’s what this lawsuit is about: an attempt by the CHRC’s biggest star to try to marginalize Canadian conservatism. And why not? The CHRC has moved from targeting white supremacists to targeting mainstream conservatives like Mark Steyn; the Alberta HRC has already gagged Christian pastors and taken a run at Calgary’s bishop, and two years ago they charged me with publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Surely attempting to criminalize conservatism is just the next, natural step for these congenital censors.

Warman has admitted to posting anonymous, hateful comments

I’m not going to go through every line in the Statement of Claim; the bulk of it refers to the revelation that Warman published bigoted comments about Sen. Anne Cools under a pseudonym, calling her a n*gger and a c*nt. I’m a little surprised that Warman would choose this as his hill to die on – after all, he has already confessed to calling gays “sexual deviants” who are a “cancer” and he would sign off his online remarks with Nazi shorthand for “heil Hitler”, so I’m not sure how denying his Anne Cools remarks salvages his reputation. Warman has a habit of trying to revise history when it’s embarrassing to him. Here are some excerpts from a transcript where he vigorously denies – then sheepishly admits – making bigoted remarks online under a fake name. And sometimes when Warman himself won’t fess up, he forgets to coordinate his answers with his fellow CHRC staff, who confess his dirty deeds for him. That kind of crap might fly in a Human Rights Tribunal – then again, what doesn’t? But good luck with those kind of shenanigans in a real court, with a real judge who’s wondering why his time is being wasted adjudicating a political dispute with no legal merit dressed up as a defamation action.

I’ve got a few more things to say about the Statement of Claim, but for strategic reasons and for legal reasons, I’m going to save them for my Statement of Defence. But there are a couple more things I’d like to point out.

A comedy of errors

Defamation law and law in general is a details business. So it makes me chuckle to see a Statement of Claim, that has obviously been in the works for three months, so riddled with little typos. I laughed out loud when I saw Kathy Shaidle’s site, Five Feet of Fury, called Five Feet of Furry on page 2 of the lawsuit. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it might even be cause for Kathy to file a defamation suit against Warman!

On page 4 Warman brags about his “Saul Hayes Human Dignity Award”, but on page 16 it’s the “Saul Human Dignity Award”. On page 14 he calls the Justice Minister Rob Nichols, not Rob Nicholson.

Or take the various names by which the National Post’s Op-Ed blog is described: on page 4 it’s “Full Comment”, on page 18 it’s “FreeComments” and by page 20 it’s “FullComments”, “Freecomments” and “FullComment.com”, all on the same page.

Kate’s first name is spelled Catherine on page 2 but Catherin on page 22. Her last name is spelled McMillan on page 2 but MacMillan on page 22.

Obviously, none of these typos will determine the outcome of this suit. But the kind of sloppiness that doesn’t even get the name of two of the websites and one of the defendants right is the same kind of sloppiness that makes other, more serious errors. The Statement of Claim is the foundation of a lawsuit – it’s the primary document. I love the fact that everyone – including the judge – will read typos and grammatical errors on almost every page and wonder: “what else is wrong with this?” My lawyers will be there to answer that question.

The inexplicable decision to sue the National Post

As per the typos, there are two other defendants in this suit: the National Post and its editor, Jonathan Kay. Six weeks ago, Kay briefly – maybe for an hour or two – posted a column about Warman’s Sen. Cools comments on the National Post’s website. But as soon as Warman complained, Kay took it down, and the Post later published an apology both in print and online. I obviously disagreed with that decision, but I’m not the one responsible for putting out a newspaper every day on a tight budget. Kay and the Post are in the business of publishing, not suing. They made the decision to cut bait, and move on to other, more important fights – as they have done with their outstanding coverage of the CHRC ever since.

But that act of over-generous magnanimity – legally unnecessary in my view, but probably a smart business decision – did not exempt them from Warman’s litigious nature. He’s suing them nonetheless. I’m not sure what Warman hopes to get from them – they’ve already apologized in a disproportionate way. It will be interesting to see how the Post responds. Will they try to cut bait again? If so, how? Or have they reached a point with Warman where they realize he is using this lawsuit as a punishment to them – maximum disruption-style – for their excellent reporting on Warman and the CHRC?

Warman will never sue Rogers

Speaking of big, corporate defendants, where is Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn on the list of defendants? I would never wish a Warmansuit on Maclean’s or Steyn, of course. But next to the Post, nobody’s been tougher on Warman and his bigoted, anonymous online comments then them. Could it be – perhaps? – that Warman doesn’t want to sue Maclean’s, which is owned by Rogers – which just happens to be the ISP through which the Cools comments were posted? Is Warman afraid that they will prove what he doesn't want them to prove -- that it was he who posted those bigoted remarks? I don’t know, but I’m curious. And I think a judge will be curious as to why comments in Maclean’s magazine, with its 2.8 million readers, weren’t regarded as actionable, whereas a few bloggers were. In a lawsuit that already reeks of politics, not serious legal matters, it’s just one more reason for judges to raise an eyebrow.

There is much more to this. Go here. If you missed my radio  show with Ezra Levant, go listen here. And while you at it, listen to Ibn Warraq and I here.

Clitorectomy Opponent Murdered

140 million women, girls suffer genital mutilation

PARIS, France (AP) The body of Katoucha Niane, one of the first African women to attain international stardom as a model and a vocal opponent of female genital mutilation, was found in the Seine River, police said Friday. (more here)

The body of former top model Katoucha Niane has been found in the river Seine.
Norman wrote, "very sad, she was a mother and a thoughtful caring person."

The keystone cops  say there was no sign of foul play - but she had been missing since January. I'll bet there is more to this story.

ABUJA - UNICEF said today that more than 140 million women and girls worldwide have suffered genital mutilation.

A statement issued on behalf of UN agencies in Abuja said that another 3 million girls a year are at risk of undergoing mutilation.

The agencies said that female genital mutilation has damaging effects on the health of women, girls and newborn babies.

“It also violates the rights of women and girls to health, protection and even life, as the procedure sometimes leads to death,” the statement said.

Excessive bleeding and shock are some of the immediate consequences risked by the procedure.

The statement noted that the long-term effects could include chronic pain, infections and trauma: “Recent studies show that women who have undergone genital mutilation have higher risks for Caesarean sections, longer hospital stays and post-partum haemorrhaging. Their newborn babies have higher death rates during and immediately after birth, as well.”

UNICEF pledged to support governments and communities to end the practice.

“We recognize that traditions are often stronger than law, and legal action by itself is not enough,” the statement said. “Change must also come from within. This is why it is critical for us to work closely with communities so that they can bring about sustainable social change.”

A Visit to the Family Self-Mutilation Store

January 18,2008

Jewish Books! NEVER!

The hatred of the good for being good and the jealousy of the Jewish brain.

Palestinian writers urge Paris Book Fair boycott hat tip Rut

JERUSALEM, February 26, 2008  - The Palestinian Writers' Union on Monday
urged Arabic publishers to boycott next month's book fair in Paris because
Israel will be the guest of honour.
   "We asked Palestinian and Arabic publishing houses to boycott this fair,"
the union's president, Al-Mutawakel Taha, told AFP.
   "It is not worthy of France, the land of the revolution and human rights,
to welcome at its book fair a racist, occupying country," Taha said.

Coming from savages that's rich. Do they have books in Gazastan? Ibn Warraq in his remarks at Columbia a couple of weeks ago said, ""the total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year. Greece, with a population of fewer than 11 million, translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translated into Arabic." (more here) 

   He claimed that inviting Israel at the March 14-19 fair would "legitimise
all its fascist acts".

No silly, you mean the UN. That's their reason for existing.

   Some 40 Israeli writers have been invited by the fair's organisers, to mark
the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state.
   Palestinians call the May 15 anniversary the "Nakba," or Arabic for "the
catastrophe".

The catastrophe is the repect the world gives these barbarians. Farenheit 451, eh?

Ibn Warraq, Extraordinary Apostate

I had the good fortune to join Ibn Warraq at his book signing at the Columbia book store this evening. The crowd was too small for such a great mind.  Warraq is meticulous and studied. The basis for his arguments and its logical conclusions are rooted in historical fact. Warraq's exhaustive body of work should be part of every  public school curriculum. . Go here and check out all of his books.

(Videos in the extended post, click bottom link)

It was not lost on me that one of the few in attendence was the crazy, violent "rabbi" Feinberg, he is the first questioner in the video above - I think he says he studied with Said,  (check out crazy "rabbi's" previous video act and more here,  and his support for hamas support here). The crazy, belligerent rabbi is at every pro CAIR rally, pro Pali Arab rally, Pro public school madrassa rally and here? At Warraq's book signing? Think about it.

Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Reading and Book Signing

Celebrated Muslim apostate and Koranic scholar Ibn Warraq discussed his new book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism at the Columbia University Bookstore.

As Martin Kramer has pointed out, Said admitted in the afterword of the 1994 edition of Orientalism that "I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are." In other words, Said was not interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious invective against past and present Orientalists, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Bernard Lewis.

When Ibn Warraq met Edward Said (here)

Ibn Warraq's dissection of Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient is a masterfully written, albeit long catalogue of Said's errors and misconceptions. Indeed, one of the most absurd charges made by Said was one levelled against Bernard Lewis. In an essay, Lewis had discussed the etymological root of the classical Arabic term thawra [revolution] as follows:

The root th-w-r ? in Classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel) , to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty; thus, for example, the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are called thuwwar ( sing. thair ).�

Andrew Bostom writes, Ibn Warraq reminds Us, unapologetically, of What Cultural Jihadists Like Tariq (Taqiyya) Ramadan (Above)  Would Destroy, and “Establish” in its Place

A culture [i.e., Western]  that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

Read the rest of Ibn Warraq’s essential new book, Defending the West—A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Caroline Fourest’s book (“Brother Tariq”) exposing Taqiyya Ramadan’s Doublespeak, and the rest of Warraq’s evisceration of Taqiyyya Ramadan, in City Journal, below: 

Ibn Warraq
Why the West Is Best

My response to Tariq Ramadan

Winter 2008 Last October, I participated in a debate in London, hosted by Intelligence Squared, to consider the motion, “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values.” Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, among others, spoke against the motion; I spoke in favor, focusing on the vast disparities in freedom, human rights, and tolerance between Western and Islamic societies. Here, condensed somewhat, is the case that I made.

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery.

The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.

In short, the glory of the West, as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, is that life here is an open book. Under Islam, the book is closed. In many non-Western countries, especially Islamic ones, citizens are not free to read what they wish.

In Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith—clear violations of Article 18 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In contrast with the mind-numbing enforced certainties and rules of Islam, Western civilization offers what Bertrand Russell once called “liberating doubt,” which encourages the methodological principle of scientific skepticism.

Western politics, like science, proceeds through tentative steps of trial and error, open discussion, criticism, and self-correction.  One could characterize the difference between the West and the Rest as a difference in epistemological principles.

The desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to an institution unequaled—or very rarely equaled—outside the West: the university. Along with research institutes and libraries, universities are, at least ideally, independent academies that enshrine these epistemological norms, where we can pursue truth in a spirit of disinterested inquiry, free from political pressures. In other words, behind the success of modern Western societies, with their science and technology and open institutions, lies a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it, and recognizing and rectifying problems. 

The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western man’s greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 years—from electricity to computers—but also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance.

Moreover, other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished. It is to the West, not to Saudi Arabia or Iran, that millions of refugees from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes flee, seeking tolerance and political freedom.

Nor would any Western politician be able to get away with the anti-Semitic remarks that former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad made in 2003. Our excusing Mahathir’s diatribe indicates not only a double standard but also a tacit acknowledgment that we apply higher ethical standards to Western leaders.

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate. As Ayatollah Khomeini once famously said, there are no jokes in Islam.

The West is able to look at its foibles and laugh, to make fun of its fundamental principles: but there is no equivalent as yet to Monty Python’s Life of Brian in Islam. Can we look forward, someday, to a Life of Mo? Probably not—one more small sign that Western values remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.

Since 1998, Ibn Warraq has edited several books of Koranic criticism and on the origins of Islam, including Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out,, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Which Koran? (forthcoming).

Buy Warraq's book here: Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism    

UPDATE: In case you missed Jamie Glazov's interview with Warraq back January at Front Page go here;

Edward Said's Orientalism gave those unable to think for themselves a formula. His work had the attraction of an all-purpose tool which his acolytes, eager, intellectually unprepared, aesthetically unsophisticated, could apply to every cultural phenomenon without having to think critically or without having to conduct any real archival research requiring mastery of languages, or research in the field requiring the mastery of technique and a rigorous methodology. Said's Orientalism displays all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not have much time for empirical research or, above all, for making sense of its results FP: What do you hope your work will help achieve?

Warraq: Let me answer that by an example. Even before my book was actually published there was a description of it and a photo of the cover on Amazon.com. An art historian wrote to me that the description alone gave him confidence to defend certain works of 18th Century French paintings that had hitherto been dismissed as “orientalist” in Said’s pejorative sense. I hope curators in art museums will now dust off paintings left to moulder in damp basements because they had been dubbed “orientalist”.

I also hope that the humanities departments in Western universities will get back their confidence and teach the Western canon in an unabashed manner- from Herodotus and Aeschylus to George Eliot and Jane Austen. That the real Orientalists-such as Sir William Jones, Ignaz Goldziher, and many others I discuss in my book- will get their due recognition as great scholars who devoted their lives to recovering humankind’s manifold creations, to uncovering the history of our past. That the universities will go back to their traditional task of scholarship untainted by political correctness, to the never-ending labour of striving for the objective truth.

Read the whole thing: Defending the West

UPDATE: From Jason in the audience,

I happened to be sitting behind the guy who I later found out frorm your website was the crazy "rabbi."  We had an interesting interaction--he was sniping at Warraq the whole time, whispering snarky comments to his friend.  Finally I whispered to him, "Rather than sniping at him, why don't you ask another question and actually engage him?"  The crazy rabbi then snapped at me, whining "I can snipe at anyone I want!"  Afterward, I told my friend about this wacko, and only later that night found out who he was!

CLICK BELOW FOR ALL VIDEO

SWEDEN: DEATH BLOW FOR FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Unfathomable. In a normal world, this would be splashed across the front pages of every world newspaper, headlining every news network .......... in a normal world. Freedom of speech is under attack in every corner of the free world and media is its's happy handmaiden.

SWEDISH MIGRATION BOARD BANS FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION by ILYA MEYER

The Swedish Migration Board has demoted – and in practice fired – Asylum Assessment Manager Lennart Eriksson, 51, for voicing support for democracies such as Israel and the USA on his personal website. The Migration Board has not alleged that Eriksson's personal beliefs have in any way affected the quality of his work, nor is it alleged that he has behaved in any way inappropriately while at work, acknowledging that he manages his website entirely in his own private time. It is for his political beliefs that he is being persecuted. Eriksson is a Conservative.

Lennart Eriksson, 51, has worked at the Swedish Migration Board in Göteborg in western Sweden in a variety of positions for almost 20 years. He is a Conservative in his personal political affiliations and has for many years managed his own Internet website where he has expressed his personal opinions on a variety of subjects. On this website Lennart Eriksson has voiced support for Israel and the USA as pillars of democracy. His employers have known about the website for many years.

Conservative politics "not mainstream"

Over the past five years, up to September 2007, Lennart Eriksson served as manager of an asylum assessment unit. On his return from a year-long leave of absence during which he completed his doctoral thesis, he was immediately called to a meeting with the newly appointed operational manager. The manager informed Eriksson that he had seen his website and that Lennart Eriksson's Conservative views were both "unusual" and controversial. The manager was particularly opposed to Lennart Eriksson's support for Israel and the USA and his online description of WW2 US general George Patton as one of the heroes of the Second World War. Lennart Eriksson was then summarily informed that he had been demoted.

In response, Lennart Eriksson sued the Swedish Migration Board in county court. Eriksson's view is that he has in practice been fired from his job as asylum assessment unit manager, camouflaged in the form of a transfer. Lennart Eriksson feels that whatever the final legal outcome regarding the terminology – demotion or transfer – there is no cause for this move. The Migration Board confirms that Lennart Eriksson has been transferred as a result of the opinions he expressed on his private website. Opinions that are not against anything, but rather for certain beliefs – Conservative politics and democratic countries, specifically Israel and the USA.

Freedom of expression in danger in Sweden

The right to freely express opinions on political, cultural and social issues without risk of reprisal is the very foundation of a democratic society. Freedom of expression, which is protected in Sweden by the Constitution, does not provide unlimited freedoms but it is a very far-reaching right indeed. The opinions that Lennart Eriks­son expresses are based in their entirety on a strong democratic foundation whose cornerstone is an unassailable conviction of every individual's equal human value. Lennart Eriksson's opinions are politically Conservative. These opinions may naturally be disputed within certain quarters, not least among a largely left-leaning media. They may not always be regarded as politically correct in a society where there is a strong innate tendency to conformity. However, these views are nonetheless shared to a large extent by the entire Swedish government, a coalition that includes a large number of Conservatives. A long history of Social Democratic control at the helm of the nation and of the Swedish Migration Board, however, has left a very firm imprint on both the nation's media and various state departments – not least the Migration Board.

Political persecution

Political persecution is not easily identified in a country where generations of citizens have been brought up to hear that this sort of thing does not occur in Sweden. If someone in another country had suffered the treatment to which Lennart Eriksson has been subjected – the more so in a State-run and State-funded department – the victim would in fact have been entitled to seek and thus be granted political asylum in Sweden.
 
The Swedish Migration Board fulfils a vital social function. Protecting human rights and offering asylum to victims of persecution are among the Board's central roles. However, the Swedish Migration Board reveals that it will not hesitate to pursue its own employees for their political beliefs. Consequently, the Swedish Migration Board's credibility in its everyday operations – operations of immense sensitivity to the nation's security – is being rapidly undermined and risks total collapse 

By supporting an operational manager who displays a remarkable lack of education, an embarrassing shortfall in historical perspective and a penchant for prejudice coloured by personal political belief, the Swedish Migration Board has diluted the democratic nature of one of Europe's oldest democracies.

UK MUSLIMS: "YOUR SELF DEFENSE OFFENDS US!"

In other words, submit or die. We don't need no stinkin badges.

UK TERROR TACTICS "CREATE UNEASE"  BBC hat tip ejo

"Create Unease"? Imagine how we feel

The government's approach to terrorism is creating an atmosphere of suspicion and unease, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain has said.

Uh, the global jihad create an "atmosphere of suspicion and unease, dear.

Muhammad Abdul Bari told the Daily Telegraph the amount of debate relating to Muslims was disproportionate.

He cited Nazi Germany in the 1930s as an example of how people's minds could be poisoned against a community.

The Home Office said it would not allow terrorists to undermine the UK's long history of strong community relations

Read it all.

More on the Muslim Council of Britain here.

MURDER ATTEMPT ON DENMARK LEADER AGAINST ISLAMISATION OF EUROPE

The attacks on freedom fighters, truth tellers continue unabated. The siege on Europe is of f frightening proportion which is why these efforts are so important and must succeed.

MURDER ATTEMPT ON SIOE/SIAD DENMARK LEADER AND MEMBERS SIOE website

SIOE Denmark is only coming with a report now on the murder attempt and the demonstration in Copenhagen. There was a need for recover but also because the main stream medias have been either completely silent or have published lies about the incidents. We have waited to see if the msm would write about the incident. This is the first article about it, and one more will follow about the demonstration.

Murder attempts on SIOE/SIAD Denmark leader and members

One of the wounded SIAD members

Sunday the 21th October was not only a severe attack on freedom of speech but an attempt to close the mouth forever on an organisation who stands up for freedom, freedom of speech and for democracy. Small details were the reason why it didn’t ended up with murder like in Holland, on one of the brave advocate’s for freedom of expression who dare to stand in the frontline.

On sunday the 21th October SIOE Denmark had announced a demonstration in Copenhagen. Read previous post. Before the demo Anders Gravers (SIOE and SIAD) and 2 other members were driving in a van with three seats in the front, following the security car, where an elderly woman, 74 years, (foto) and member of SIAD and another SIAD member were passengers.

Anders was driving and followed the security car down in a parking cellar to park so the cars would be in a secure place before the demo.
He drove very slowly down because apperently there was very little space in the hight for the van. The driveway is very steep and is divided by concrete pillars. Because of the delaying, the driver of the security car got out of his car to open the metalgate again because it was closing after 30 sek. so we could enter the cellar. He directed the van forwards close along the pillars and directly in front of a big concrete pillar supporting the cellar roof.

2-5 sek. after there was a loud bang and the frontwindow was damaged. About two autonomous looking types were in the front and two on ecah sites smashing the site windows shouting Get him out get him out! and started hitting Anders and the SIAD passenger in the other site with ironbars. The SIAD member in the middle (foto) was hit of a thrown filled soda bottle in her backhead.

Anders succeded after a while to kick one of the autonomous hard in the face as he leaned in to unlock the door. Anders mananged to get out with a fire extinguisher from the van and hit another one hard on the shoulder. It remained later that they attemted to stab him down when there was found cut holes in the shirt, jacket and vest. Anders was wearing his securityvest which saved his life.

Suddenly they disappeared and Anders got around the van and saw a SIAD member (foto top) lying on the floor while he was beaten in the head of 4-5 persons with ironbars. Apperently they also tried to stab him down, but again he also wore his security vest which saved his life.

Meanwhile, you have to have it to the Danes. They have enormous cujones.

Atlas Readers Fight Atlas Ban

Here in the latest on the ongoing ban on truth by Sonic Wall. Ron sent this to me with this note,

"Hi Pamela,  I just received this from SonicWall.  My response follows. 

I'm reading this as that they will continue with the hate/violence/racism crap.  If they confirm, I will respond with a reference to their acting with a reckless disregard for the truth."

cfssupport@sonicwall.com
To : Ron

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com as "33.News and Media" at 2007-08-30 03:25:09.703

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
"1.Violence/Hate/Racism" at 2007-09-01 13:28:03.150

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.

Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support -----------------

My reply: 

I'm not sure that I understand this correctly.  

I requested that atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com be rated as "33.News and Media".  

Your reply to that request suggests that you're going to continue rating it as "1.Violence/Hate/Racism".  

Please clarify and provide justification.  Rating atlasshrugs as a hate/violence/racism site makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Thank you very much.

UPDATE: 1389 writes;

For rolling updates on the current status of our battle against blog censorship - and for information on what you can do to help - please visit and bookmark this link:

Yeah baby! I love the blogosphere!

CBS COWARDS CAVE TO CAIR on KELLER

Islamists (and the left's useful idiots) are now firmly in control of the  national conversation. CBS cowered to CAIR's bullying like white livered, gutless worms. CAIR EMAIL ALERT:

CAIR: FLORIDA TV STATION DROPS ANTI-ISLAM PROGRAM

(TAMPA, FL, 8/24/07) €“ The Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Tampa) announced today that a local television station has dropped a program that promoted hatred of Islam and Muslims.

Uh oh, Keller must have recited passages from the Koran.

CAIR-Tampa said WTOG-TV (CW 44) dropped “Live Prayer with Bill Keller” after the station and its parent company CBS received a letter from and had discussions with the Islamic civil rights and advocacy group.

Keller told the St. Petersburg Times: "Ultimately, it was pressure by CAIR that intimidated these people into taking me off the air. It was not mutually agreeable. They told me they were taking me off the air, period."

SEE: Televangelist: I Lost My Show Over Muslim Remarks (St. Petersburg Times)

The controversial late-night Christian talk show host, known for his biting criticism of religious, political and pop culture figures, is going off the air. Keller, 49, says he ran afoul of the Tampa Chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations. The group calls Live Prayer with Bill Keller a hate-filled broadcast that damages Muslims and Islam.

It aint Keller that "damages Muslims and Islam" - it's the dogma and violent war its declared on the West.

Earlier this month, CAIR asked CBS executives to remove Keller's nightly talk show from WTOG-TV Ch. 44, a CBS-owned station that airs the CW network locally. The group was upset about a spate of recent broadcasts by Keller that disparaged Islam and the prophet Mohammad.

They are upset about freedom of speech? America is upset that they fund Islamic jiahd and have terror ties to hezbollah.

CAIR's leaders say both local and network representatives assured them that the program would no longer air on the station after Sept. 11. WTOG station manager Laura Caruso said the decision to end Keller's contract was a mutual decision and had nothing to do with complaints from individuals or groups.

Dhimmi liar can't even stand up for their stand against Keller.

Keller disagrees.

He confirmed today that his show will no longer air after Aug. 31. But he cites CAIR's complaints as the primary reason for his departure, saying he had no desire to leave the station that has broadcast his program weekdays from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. for nearly five years.

Here is Bedier's youtube "indictment" of Keller. Seems to me Keller makes salient points.

The controversial late-night Christian talk show host, known for his biting criticism of religious, political and pop culture figures, is going off the air. Keller, 49, says he ran afoul of the Tampa Chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations. The group calls Live Prayer with Bill Keller a hate-filled broadcast that damages Muslims and Islam.

It aint Keller that "damages Muslims and Islam" - it's the dogma and violent war its declared on the West.

Earlier this month, CAIR asked CBS executives to remove Keller's nightly talk show from WTOG-TV Ch. 44, a CBS-owned station that airs the CW network locally. The group was upset about a spate of recent broadcasts by Keller that disparaged Islam and the prophet Mohammad.

They are upset about freedom of speech? America is upset that they fund Islamic jiahd and have terror ties to hezbollah.

CAIR's leaders say both local and network representatives assured them that the program would no longer air on the station after Sept. 11. WTOG station manager Laura Caruso said the decision to end Keller's contract was a mutual decision and had nothing to do with complaints from individuals or groups.

Dhimmi liar can't even stand up for their stand against Keller.

Keller disagrees.

He confirmed today that his show will no longer air after Aug. 31. But he cites CAIR's complaints as the primary reason for his departure, saying he had no desire to leave the station that has broadcast his program weekdays from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. for nearly five years.

Gitmo's tools: Sympathy for the Devil

Cinnamon writes Gitmo: Myth vs. Reality:

Those pushing to close down Guantanamo Bay might want to read an op-ed by Air Force colonel and chief prosecutor in the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions Morris D. Davis in today's New York Times. As Col. Davis makes clear, the reality of Gitmo is a far cry from the myths put forward by its opponents:

Today, most of the detainees are housed in new buildings modeled after civilian prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Detainees receive three culturally appropriate meals a day. Each has a copy of the Koran. Guards maintain respectful silence during Islam’s five daily prayer periods, and medical care is provided by the same practitioners who treat American service members. Detainees are offered at least two hours of outdoor recreation each day, double that allowed inmates, including convicted terrorists, at the “supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo.

Standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions in the United States and abroad. After an inspection by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in March 2006, a Belgian police official said, “At the level of detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

Clearly, the standards being maintained at Gitmo are above and beyond what, some might argue, hardened Islamic terrorists deserve. But to demand further accomodations is beyond the pale. And why should terrorists who wear no uniform and subscribe to none of its precepts be accorded the rights of the Geneva Convention anyway?

There's more here. Meanwhile, Pamela caught this moonbat rally in the hometown of greatest Islamic attack on the West.

Clinton- Schumer crowd listens to MORE speakers

This asshat can't get enough of that abu ghraib stuff

A Gershwin tune "Leftarded in NY"

Pamela's counter protest poster .....heh Check back later .........Pamela is uploading video

UPDATE: As promised, the videos. Click each link below;

Berrigan's substitute speaker.MOV"

the speakers assemble #1.MOV"

the speakers #2.MOV

the speakers #3.MOV"

end Rabbi Michael Feinberg.MOV"

the muslim speaker.MOV

indian song in hebrew.MOV

Exit for the march to HRC.MOV"

The march begins to Clinton-Schumer offices

the march #2.MOV"

the march # 3.MOV"

In front of clinton schumer offices.MOV"

Clinton-Schumer offices # 2.MOV"

Clinton-Schumer offices # 3.MOV"

The first speaker who spoke in place of Daniel Berrigan was from the Catholic Worker. Ten minutes into his speech he reminded us we were marching to the Clinton-schumer offices and STRESSED that he was NOT supporting HRC for President.  That more children were murdered in Iraq by her husband than the current administration.IS THAT LEGAL? In a CHURCH? What about the income tax thing for churches...And he repeated is opposition to her candidacy about 10 minutes later. It was a LONG tedious and predictable speech.

JFK Plot Informant US Citizen

Trinidad newspaper tells all - everything about the informant that saved tens of thousands of American lives. The leftards love to question his motives. But who cares? This man helped the war effort and now he and his entire family are in terrible jeopardy. Shame on us. Read the whole thing here in The Trinidad Express. Even the Trinidadians are mortified. The people of Trinidad love the US and despise the traitors in their midst (read the reader comments that follow the article.)

What the hell is going on in Trinidad. This guy is as good as dead. Dead I tell you. His family? Dead. , They will get it from all sides for being a snitch. The informant was a known drug dealer. They got his mug shot fro an USA arrest.  I thought depositions were supposed to be confidential? THERE IS NO PUBLIC RECORD OF A DEPOSITION IN A COURT CASE BEFORE A RULING (EXTRADITION OF THE TRINIDAD GUYS) !

Who will come forward to help America fight the jihad now? WHO?

UNMASKED
JFK terror plot informant is US citizen

The convicted drug dealer who blew the whistle on the JFK terror plot and has been named as an informant in the deposition against the four suspects, Guyanse nationals Russell Defreitas, Abdul Kadir and Abdel Nur, and Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahiim, has been identified as Terry DeSouza, a US citizen.

The Guyanese Police, reports out of Guyana said yesterday, have since taken DeSouza's maid into custody for questioning.

DeSouza, of stocky build and a Muslim, reportedly told persons with whom he boarded while in Guyana that he was originally from the Dominican Republic, and gave them his number there as 917-301-6582. He told them that his Muslim name was Anas Nabdel.

The media is reporting  his cell phone number?

Media reports suggested that a group of Muslim men broke their silence on his identity on Wednesday, noting too that DeSouza left owing them Guy$340,000 for boarding and lodging after he departed Guyana.

You mean to say we didn't protect this man?

The men said that DeSouza, when he arrived in Guyana, expressed an interest in establishing a fat-pork (a fruit in abundance in Linden) project. He was interested too in lime soap and exporting boards and staves.

The men said it was they who took him to Linden and while there he was introduced to Kadir.

They subsequently parted ways with him after he began showing an interest in Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, a nuke phantom being targeted by the FBI and one of Osama Bin Laden's henchmen.

DeSouza reportedly told the men he had a message for el-Shukrijumah, and had requested that the Guyanese men accompany him to Trinidad and Tobago for a meeting with el-Shukrijumah, reports said.

El Shakrujumah is the son of a Guyanese man who headed a masjid in Florida. Subsequent to the news that the son was one of the most wanted people, the members of the mosque sacked El Shakrujumah's father, who later became ill.

TERROR PLOT INFORMANT USED BY MANY NAMES Guyana Chronicle

TERRY DeSouza, the man identified by sources as the informant in the United States indictment against four men charged in a foiled plot to blow up fuel installations at New York's JFK International Airport, reportedly presented himself to persons who befriended him with different aliases.

These included Steve Francis, and Anas Knaddert, the name he adopted on becoming a Muslim, sources said.

One source said he travelled here from New York on May 10 this year as Steve Francis, with Russell `Mortimer’ De Freitas, 63, the Guyana-born American citizen charged in Brooklyn in the case.

De Freitas migrated to the U.S. more than 30 years ago, but has a house in Roxanne Burnham Gardens, Georgetown, officials said.

The airline ticket for Francis was paid by a Faisal Saleh, who asked that both men, as practicing Muslims, be served vegetarian food on the flight, airline records show.

Court documents filed in New York which described the informant as a convicted drug dealer, said he began working for the U.S. government in 2004 after his second drug-trafficking conviction in the `Big Apple’.

Once he proved to be a credible source, he was sent to meet De Freitas in 2006.

NY Public school Madrassa Army PR Lie ADVANCE ISLAM AT ANY COST, LIE, CHEAT

How low can Islam go to get what they want? There is no bottom. They want that public school madrassa and they mean to get it. They are going to use our tax dollars to brainwash our kids.

Here is the latest dirty, disgusting trick. On May 28th The New York Post reported here,

IRAQ GI SALUTES CITY ARAB SCHOOL

-- As resistance in Brooklyn to a public school focused on Arabic language and culture persists, a U.S. soldier has emerged as its unlikely champion.

Army Sgt. Patrick Kowalchuk, 28, who has completed two tours in Iraq, intended only to support Khalil Gibran International Academy's principal when he wrote her an e-mail early this month.

But it soon evolved into a public-relations tool.

"American society desperately needs this bridge to Arabic language and culture, and I am glad there are visionary and courageous people like yourself who are laying down the framework," Kowalchuk wrote to the principal, Debbie Almontaser.

Almontaser recently read the e-mail, with Kowlachuk's permission, at a meeting of 100 parents of kids at Brooklyn HS of the Arts and Math and Science Exploratory School.

Kowalchuk told The Post parents must embrace the academy.

"If it were given a chance to prove itself, it could," he said by phone from Fort Carson, Colo., where he teaches Arabic to soldiers in his unit.

Photo: Principal and useful tool: Almontaser

Almontaser is well schooled in the Islamic practice of taqiya. Deception, any and all, to advance Islam. Almontaser ruse was exposed by William Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz at Militant Islam Monitor.org here

Khalil Gibran Jihad School's new public relations ploy - Army Sgt. Patrick Kowalchuk reports for duty

Kowalchuk's appearance at this point in the KGIA controversy appears to be nothing more than a desperate ploy by Ms. Almontaser, who is seeking to create a patriotic symbol to rescue her school which has already been rejected by PS 282 and is encountering similar resistance at Boerum Hill where Joel Klein's Department of Education is trying to cram the institution down the throats of protesting students, parents and faculty members.

Finding it intriguing - to say the least - that a U.S. serviceman would be involved with Almontaser, whose record of anti-war activism and public statements reveal her to be a radical Islamist, PipeLineNews contacted him Tuesday morning, asking for a comment.

He stated that he couldn't talk at the moment because he was "at work" but would speak to us "in his off hours" and gave us a cell contact number and a time to call back this afternoon.

When the return call was made - at the time he suggested - we found he had provided a cell number which wasn't his, but belonged to someone in New York, a male with a heavy accent. In a follow-up call to Fort Carson, one of Kowalchuk's associates informed us that the Sergeant was now refusing to talk to us, period.

Kowalchuk's amateurish game playing and deceit should place him in good stead if and when he decides to teach at KGIA. It is also illustrative of the larger duplicity manifest in Almontaser's developing PR strategy.

This strategy shift came about because New York's DOE, Ms. Almontaser and all of those involved with lobbying for KGIA are denying the implicit religious and political nature of the institution and as a result are now trying to do an end run around the issue, seeking out friendly journalists to shill for the school while Almontaser, Joel Klein and others sit back and calculate the effect.

Read it all. These people will stop at nothing to set the precedent and establish Arabic schools in our public school system. This Arabic school MUST BE STOPPED. As Mark Steyn so succinctly put it:

" it shows how we mischaracterized, we willfully misunderstand Islam. Yes, on the face of it yes Arabic is a language in a sense there is would be no difference between opening a foreign language school - a Spanish language school or a french language school - but in fact Arabic is more than a language. It is explicated the language of Islam so in that sense it is part of the Islamic religious imperial project. Radical Islam advances through the Arabic language. And you go all kinds of places that aren't in the Arab world now like Pakistan, Indonesia, Central Asia, the Balk ins, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Canada and the United States and you will here those Imams preaching in Arabic. Arabic is not just another language like French or Italian, it is the spearhead of an idea logical project that is deeply opposed to the United States.

Related:
NY Public School Madrassa Advisor Threatened NYU with Danish Cartoon JIHAD
NYC To Open Arabic  Public School
STEYN on NY Arabic Public School
Allah Snackbar! NY Public School Madrassa Defeated
IT'S ALIVE! NY Public School Madrassa
Islam Attacks! Madrassa in NY Public School System

and also check out

An Arabic Public School

Read the Sun’s coverage of plans to open an Arabic-language public school in Brooklyn.

UPDATE: Christine of The Center for Vigilant Freedom sent this incredible background info on dhimmi soldier boy:

I don’t think that  soldier and his Arabic teaching is as innocent as portrayed in the media.  IF this is the same guy….

I think this is a book review by this Patrick Kowalchuk – it seems to be about Arabic as a language -

It’s pretty incoherent I think, but he definitely has literary aspirations.  Here’s his poetry…if it’s the same fellow

I wonder if this is the same Kowalchuk (and if he is the school’s same kowalchuk?) here – “A poet’s gathering against the war” – but in 1999 (Serbia/Bosnian war….) (another link to same email on the “war resistors league” here ).  And another here

Maybe there are 2 Patrick Kowalchuks who know Arabic?

Or this review of Jarhead

This guy sure writes fancy huh….And the Tribes organization (actually your standard Lower east side artsy group) has a great Hillary photo here (scroll down) here

Also you’re probably aware of this, but Debbie Almontaser’s son is in the army – wonder if he knows Kowalchuk – and that curricula is to be spread through all the schools in NY, not just the madrassah – or so she writes here

 

AL Qaeda & ACLU Team Up Sue Boeing

How do I sponsor a bill that labels the ACLU a terror organization?

Al Qaida suspects sue Boeing, with ACLU's help World Tribune hat tip Clyde

WASHINGTON — Boeing has been sued by suspected Al Qaida operatives transported by the CIA to Arab countries for interrogation and torture.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan on behalf of three Al Qaida suspects transported by the CIA under the so-called "extraordinary rendition program."

The suit charged that Jeppesen helped the CIA transport the three plaintiffs to secret locations in Egypt and Morocco, where the company knew they would undergo torture.

Give them an award!

"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."

Seditious asshat. Read it all and hurl.

America: Thank the Dhimmicrats

Cliff May over at FDD:
GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Bernard Lewis, the foremost living scholar of the Islamic world, writes that Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and other Islamist empire builders had long expected that defeating America

would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. ...

The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences -- both for Islam and for America -- will be deep, wide and lasting.

The full essay is here.

Peace Conspirators Unhinged

Atlas operative Underzog first youtube of peacenoodniks  going crazy on him for opposing their treason and wearing an Ann Coulter t shirt.

I wore my Ann Coulter t shirt to a co-called peace demonstration headed by Cindy Sheehan. The first traitor I was filming said I was crazy for wearing the t shirt. A little later on in the video a guy in a keyiffah screamed barborous obscenities to me. This eventually made me mad and made me scream he was a traitor. As Cindy Sheehan was starting to speak, there was a young man so angered at my Ann Coulter shirt that he threatened to beat me up. I didn't really much care because these phony peaceniks piss me off with their treason and sympathy with the enemy.

The Gathering of Eagles

Photo hat tip George S (his report in update section)

The Gathering of Eagles descends into  Washington DC today, protecting our war memorials from

the  massive moronic covergence led by the Stalinist/anarchist group International ANSWER. More over at LGF here

CSPAN is covering the moonbats, libtards, smelly old hippies here but true to CPAN'S leftist agenda will not be covering the Gathering of Eagles.

Any Atlas readers who made to the Gathering of Eagles is encouraged to send me their thoughts, impressions, pictures etc and I will post. Family obligations kept me from attending.

Billed as a massive anit-war protest, I understand from FOX News,  it  is hardly massive.  They were expecting 30,000 but it appears to be more like a few thousand [UPDATE: less than that]. Mama moonbat  Sheehan is shrieking now. Why has the media made  that bottom feeder Sheehan the maternal icon  for fallen soldiers of the battle for Iraq?

Think about it. Name one other mother, quick! -  off the top of your head, that has been given the publicity and the soapbox  than that opportunistic zombie has.   

FIGHT THE GREAT FIGHT!!

UPDATE: Jim has the video hat tip Larwyn

Cindy Sheehan: "Stop this BullSh*t!"
DC Antiwar Rally: Michael Berg Blames Bush for Son...

UPDATE: Go over to Flopping Aces  here. He has great pics and reportage. Look at this pic, these are our folks! Hooha!

There's more .......much more: (via Jeff)

Some more good pic's from This Ain't Hell

Now for the ugly side of this country:

(via Midnight Blue)

Lifelike Pundits has some video up showing the Gathering and the idiots from the left.

Go over to Flopping Aces, he's got it all. What a post!

Lastly, if you want a good rundown of the Communist speeches go to Perish The Thought who did an excellent live blog of the idiots.

What a great day for our country.  Not only did we show the lefties that yes, there are many here who do believe in this fight and the need to protect this country but we showed the world (via Fox at least).

Other's Blogging:

• The City Troll
• Michelle Malkin
• Sweetness & Light
• Atlas Shrugs
• Old War Dogs

 UPDATE: Karl tells me a group of local vets (West Virginia Vets for Victory) had a Home Guard operation in Charleston, WV today.  Six of them guarded the veteran memorial on the capitol grounds until the anti-troop group finished their anti-war rally in the Capitol rotunda.

Thank you Karl.

UPDATE: Perish the thought livebloggged here. Great stuff.

And Bruce give his impression from the left coast, Spongebob Sheehan and the Eagles, click here.

UPDATE: Atlas reader Martin McBride attended and files this report for Atlas readers;

As I walked with my friends from the metro towards to Vietnam Memorial several blocks away, I was amazed at all the freaks here to protest the war and hurt our troops. They were everywhere, in all sorts of outrageous costumes piling out of buses, like hundreds of ants streaming in from the corner, they kept coming from everywhere.

Attitude kicked in and I was overwhelmed with a sense of duty to our Troops - I felt a duty to let them know that the troops don't appreciate what these peace freaks (and I DO mean FREAKS) were doing while they are trying to fight and kill the jihadists.

One of them handed me a protest sign on a stick, I took it and tore sign to pieces, in front of all of them, I waded through a sea of the nastiest most demeaning protestors you ever saw, and through it all I kept seeing more and more EAGLES gathering too, and Bikers, and Vets, and Patriots, and Families, and I knew the Eagles had Gathered to respond to the Soros-backed hippie freaks bent on getting more of our greatest patriots killed.

We found the "good guys" side and after spending over 2 hours with thousands of good decent patriots, I walked with my friends to a strategic spot to wait for the moonbat procession.

We tried to block the street, but the horseback cops pushed us back to the sidewalk. I must admit, the protestor's mass was huge, waves of the most anti-american crap you ever saw. What I'm about to say may surprise a few of you, but I couldn't help it, I felt it must be done. I ended up giving a few of them a little kick in the backside and when the moonbat turned and looked at me in surprise, I said, "That's from the Troops!" and I did it to about 6 of them.

In addition, a few clowns decided to walk by looking like terrorists, with their faces covered in the palestinian rag and just their eyes showing, I reached out and ripped their mask/towels off and told 'em, "No one who looks like a terrorist is walking near me" and finally, one protestor clown was walking with an orange jump suit and a black hood completely covered his head. I reached out and took that hood off and said, "This is for the Troops"

I'm horse because I yelled, "The troops hate protestors"

On the bright side, you should have seen all the great genuine Americans who showed up to protect the memorials and counter the FREAKS. It was amazing, my hand is sore from shaking hands and patting backs.

Was I wrong to give the protestors a little taste of my boot on their backside. Maybe, but I think the troops would be glad that somebody did it for them.

What a day. We did it, we didn't let the moonbats rule the day. We gathered and they knew not to mess with us or ours.

Martin adds;

It was amazing.  You would have had a field day at this "Liberal Zoo".  These people were "the mother of all protestors" - loud, arrogant, one guy had on a "Pinnocio half/donkey suit" bright green body suit, with huge enlarged buttocks checks, clashing red & white, and red & blue striped socks, a red striped shirt, a straw hat w/ donkey ears sticking straight up! and his face and bushy hair and eyebrows was painted white with black lipstick and mascara eyes - he was the wildest of the wild..." 

And they had huge posters of photos of babies with deformed heads or bodies with the caption, "Bush's Fault".  And I saw a dog with a shirt on that said, "Bombs kill puppies"...

There were hippies on stilts (female) and hippies with Bush masks with devil horns (I wanted to pull that one off, but couldn't get to him).  Someone had one of those GIANT paper-mache heads of Bush with a tiny hat on...

It was a circus parade,  a amazing assortment of twilight zone people, and I swear every single one of them carried a sign.  Most were professional made (paid for by Soros and made by ANSWER Act Now To Stop War & Racism)  It was a liberal Zoo.

UPDATE: Whoops. The video is not McBride's, the film maker is The Age of Hooper. McBride provided it, thought it best represented what he saw. Proper props, man. Credit where credit is due. Nice job, Charles

UPDATE: Go over to Maverick News Media for complete coverage;

• Signs from the Protest
• For the TROOPS - Eagles Gathered
• Gathering of Eagles Photos

UPDATE: Steve has pics from the protest are HERE and HERE. 

What stunned me was the unusually large amount of Kufayeh that was being worn by the anti-war protesters. The Kufayeh is the scarf worn by the palestinian terrorists. Again, this told me that it was blatantly obvious that the terrorists are on the same side as the protesters. This also made me question if palestinian terrorist cash was used to help kick off this carnival of morally bankrupt losers. Seriously, I wouldn't doubt this for a second.

The Fifth Column is alive and well in America - and the liberals are the embodiment of the Fifth Column. 

UPDATE: I thought this was weird too.:

The REAL Gathering of Eagles Count! What Gives With Fox News?

UPDATE: Atlas reader George files this terrific on the scene report;

The Jihad's Jew

Do you get the sinking feeling the majority of the Democrats care more about our executioners than dead Americans? WTF is wrong with these assclowns?

Levin calls for inquiry on terrorist's torture claim
Detroit News
WASHINGTON -- Accusations made by the chief planner of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that he was tortured while in U.S. custody should be fully investigated, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin said today, six days after he and a Republican colleague witnessed the detainee making the statements during a dramatic hearing.

Silencing the anti-Jihad

"Woe to those that evil good and good evil", a specialty of the United Nations. The favorite weapon to silence fighters of the jihad and those lovers of freedom is the famous epithet RACISM (not to be outflanked by the increasing popular "islamophobe."

United Nations Special Rapporteur warns of rising racism worldwide

Racism is not the problem. It's the jihad, stupid.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Racism, Dr Doudou Diene, is concerned about the increasingly violent face of racism worldwide.

Racism triggers discrimination and even killings - that's the warning issued by him

Seems to me that its Jews, Christians,  apostates, and moderate Muslims that are being killed.

Dr Diene identified racism as a serious problem in parts of Europe and Latin America, and some Arab countries.

The targeted groups are people of African descent and indigenous origins.

The trend, he said, started after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, and worsened with subsequent bombings by terror groups.

Shocking. Imagine that.

Dr Diene said: "Entire communities or groups are targeted as being potentially terrorists. And all of this is creating this dynamic of racism which I'm trying to analyse in my reports. So behind the violence you find one single issue. The refusal or rejection of multi-culturalism."

France pre-emptively surrenders

I guess Chirac believes in a certain kind of pre-emption. Not to save lives but to surrender. hat tip ISI

Chirac backs easing pressure on Iran to protect UNIFIL troops Haaretz

French President Jacque Chirac has announced his support for lessening pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program, for fear Hezbollah will strike at French troops serving in Lebanon, according to information recently received in Jerusalem. According to reports, Chirac proposed sending a special envoy to Tehran to reach understandings that would protect the French soldiers serving in in the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

A government source said Chirac's position is controversial in Paris, with the French Foreign Ministry continuing to support a hard line with regard to the Iranian nuclear program, a position also expressed Wednesday by the French ambassador to Israel, Jean-Michel Casa, in an interview with Haaretz.

Chirac told reporters at the end of January that it would not be terrible if Iran had a nuclear bomb or two, but quickly reversed himself following protests from officials at home. Israeli experts said that the link Chirac is making between French presence in Lebanon and the closing down of Iran's nuclear program shows the shortcomings of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the second Lebanon war. According to one expert, Israel "begged the French to send soldiers to Lebanon" and end up paying for it by damaging its strategic interests. Israel is conducting an intensive international diplomatic effort to increase sanctions on Iran, in an attempt to put a stop to its nuclear program.

Muslim Queen: The Veil Aint Real

Muslim woman do not have to take the veil, it is not in the Koran - a point vigorously made by Mark Steyn is his book America Alone,  "there is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms and cheesecloth shirts." (BTW Steyn will be on my show Tuesday night at 9pm - we will be tearing down da hous.)

But coming from a Queen (Palestinian, no less) of a Muslim country is a big deal. The veil is a political statement. It's all about the power (and the weapon - click here)

Muslim women don't have to wear veils: Queen Rania AFP hat tip Bruceth

ROME (AFP) - Islam does not require women to wear veils, Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan has said in an interview, calling on Muslim moderates to "make their voices be heard."

"Islam neither requires one to be practising, nor to dress in one way or another," the stylish 36-year-old queen told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera during a visit to Rome on Friday.

"So imposing the veil on a woman is contrary to the principles of Islam," said Queen Rania, who is in Rome for the launch of a Group of Seven (G7) programme to develop vaccines against diseases that are endemic in poor countries.

"Unfortunately, after all the suspicion weighing on Islam, many people have begun to consider the veil as a political problem, but this is not the case," she told Corriere. "Wearing the veil is a free personal choice."

Queen Rania urged "all moderates to stand up and let their voices be heard."

She added: "Many people are frustrated in the Arab world. Many give in to the anger because they are accused of violence. But instead we should get up, explain who we are and what we believe in.

"Over the last three years, most victims of terrorism have been Muslim. So there's not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions," the queen said.

Stylin'. Say it loud and say it proud. And pretty too.

MUSLIM POLICE WILL RISE UP

The biggest stories get the smallest attention. And the smallest stories ......... well you get the picture. More from that wonderful religion of enormous contributions to the betterment of man, society, arts, science, medicine, intellect and, oh yeah, women's rights . Give 'em nukes!

MUSLIM POLICE WILL RISE UP Aussie News via Telegraph

Moderate British Muslims in the police, Armed Forces and Civil Service will one day revolt against the system to "crush it from within", according to Omar Bakri Mohammed, notorious Islamic extremist.

Omar Bakri Mohammed claimed that the world was a better place after the July 7 bombings in London

In claims condemned as a cynical attempt to create division, the co-founder of the extremist al-Muhajiroun group said that Britain was "digging a deep hole" for itself by allowing Muslims into the Services and Whitehall.

Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph in Lebanon, where he moved in August 2005 — at about the time it emerged the British authorities might charge him with incitement to treason — he claimed police officers, soldiers and civil servants would one day become radicalised.

"When you start to ask Muslims to join your Army and your police you are making a grave mistake. That British Muslim who joins the police today will one day read the Koran and will have an awakening," he said.

Bush's Isolation

If there is any truth to the beltway rumor of Bush's isolation, it would not surprise me. Bush backed the wrong camp. For the past couple of years, Bush has systemically removed, rejected, ignored the most astute in his administration and invariably those most loyal to him. The two camps within the Bush administration could not be more diametrically opposed. Advocates of the Bush Doctrine (you are either with us or against in the war on the global jihad) have all but fallen away - Rumsfeld and the Senior Pentagon officials that followed him, Dick Cheney,  Richard Perle, etc. and John Bolton?(with a Republican  House,  Senate, and White House, they did a piss poor job of confirming that man.)  These  folks understood the enemy, then struggle , and they were loyal to Bush. LOYAL. They know who the enemy is and how to win. Courage.

Bush has been ill served by the "winners" in the internal struggle for his heart and mind. The administration's fifth column, Colin Powell, Dick Armitage, Steven Hadley, Nic Burns (I can't stand him), Condi Rice have won the day. And America is the biggest loser.

There was nothing wrong with the Bush Doctrine, it was (and still is, now more than ever) the right plan at the right time. Bush was subverted by a fifth column media bias and the absence of a messenger to define to the American people the war the global jihad is waging on us.

If Bush is isolated, it is because he has no friends in the WH. And maybe there can be no "friends" in the White House, but certainly there can be loyalty and there is none now. Bush is surrounded by sharks and the new direction in foreign policy is a slippery slope to hell. Bringing in James "Fuck the Jews" Baker's  brand of realpolitik will be an unmitigated disaster, empowering the barbaric Islamists. Read Mark Steyn's, Iraq is just a test of will for America here.

Rumsfeld memo highlights Bush isolation Financial Times

President George W. Bush’s isolation over Iraq deepened on Sunday following the publication of the leaked memo from sacked defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld calling for a “major adjustment” in Iraq policy.

John Warner, the outgoing Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press that the president should respect the will of the people, and seek agreement with the Democrat leaders of the new Congress on a new Iraq policy.

The dhimmicrats never respected the will of the people when they elected a Republican President, House and Senate, why should they now?

Meanwhile, top Democrats attacked the president for appearing to dig in his heels ahead of the publication on Wednesday of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq. Carl Levin, the incoming chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said “his stubbornness has continued…it seems to me to be more of the same.”

Carl Levin?

The pressure on the President, who last week insisted there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq, comes ahead of what may prove a defining week in US Iraq policy.

On Monday Mr Bush meets Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the big gest party in Iraq’s governing coallition, while on Tuesday Robert Gates, the nominee to replace Mr Rumsfeld as defence secretary, faces confirmation hearings. More here

Bush never should have left Rumsfeld go. Never. That Rumsfeld memo is here.

UPDATE: One editor's moxie is another blogger's balls. Whatever. Barnes sees it too.

The president, stung by the defeat of Republicans in the midterm election, may be reluctant to step out on his own. The safer tack would be to negotiate with Congress to pass legislation in hopes of enhancing the legacy of his presidency. That's the normal exit strategy for presidents.

But Bush has little to lose and much to gain by acting on his own. His legacy will be determined largely by the outcome in Iraq and in the war on terror--and we may not know that verdict for years. Congressional passage of a compromise measure on, say, immigration or education reform would be nice, but neither is likely to affect his legacy in a major way. So why not be bold and go unilateral?

Here are ways the president can do just that. All they require is maximum moxie.

Go here and read his recommendations.

Victor Davis Hanson on the majority opinion vs. the minority opinion here.

Breakthrough for Truth and Freedom

Score one for for oppressed peoples fighting for freedom, for seekers of the truth, and for those trying to get the truth out. Psiphon will let individuals (VIVA LA INDIVIDUAL!) living in a country theat censors the web to log on to a server that gives access to pages anywhere (even Atlas!) - completely circumventing government restrictions. That means the closed Chinese government's wall preventing its citizens from accessing the net ( the wall that  Google was only too happy to help build) will come crashing down.

Tool to Circumvent Internet Censorship Set to Launch hat tip Carolyn

Researchers at University of Toronto plan to introduce a software tool on Friday that aims to help people in countries that censor the World Wide Web.

Psiphon (pronounced sigh-fawn), a web-based utility, lets individuals in a country that censors the internet sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing government restrictions.

A new Canadian software tool aims to help people in web-censoring countries like Iran, where this woman was on the internet in a cafe in Tehran in August."Its creators plan to launch the software at the Protect The Net conference at the university's Munk Centre for International Studies, where psiphon emerged as a project of Citizenlab. Researchers at the facility examine the relationship between digital media and politics around the world.

Michelle Malkin has the download. She says;

Like they say, information wants to be free. And where there's a programmer, there's a way.

Ahmadinejad Predicts Collapse of Israel, U.S., U.K.

The man speaks, the man says what he means and the world spins out of control explaining how he really didn't mean it. I , for one, believe him. And the way we in the West have bent over and submitted, I am sure Ahmadinejad is not wrong. The West needs Ahmadinejad  and Co.'s brass ones.   From Bloomberg

Ahmadinejad Predicts Collapse of Israel, U.S., U.K.

(Bloomberg) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted the collapse of Israel, the U.S. and Britain, attacking what he called their ``oppressive behavior.''

Now that's rich .............. considering (not to many all those Iranian foreign legions in Lebanon (aka Hezbolla), Gaza (Hamas), Iraq (al Sadr)

``The Zionist regime is on a steep downhill towards collapse and disgrace,'' Ahmandinejad told supporters at a rally of Basiji militia forces near Tehran today. In a reference to the U.S. and U.K., he said ``the collapse and crumbling of your devilish rule has started.'' The speech was carried live on state television.

Iran doesn't recognize Israel, and Ahmadinejad drew international condemnation after saying in October 2005 that Israel should be ``wiped off the map.'' The U.S. and Iran have had no diplomatic ties since 1980 following the seizure of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

The U.K., which has an embassy in Tehran, is among the three European countries pushing for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

The Iranian president also called on neighboring countries to drive out ``foreign occupiers,'' in a reference to U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

JOHN BOLTON: FUTURE OF MIDDLE EAST MAY WELL BE DECIDED IN DAYS

 

The Thud Heard Round the World

That  thud, that "thumpin" you heard was the sound of Bush's balls hitting the ground after the 11/7 election. The world heard it too. And saw its ill effect immediately. RUMSFELD! And while Bush's  long time supporters continue to hold our  individual collective breath waiting for him to pick them up off the ground, our enemies around the world are wasting no time rolling over the Bush Doctrine. The reverberations from the election of a pacifist Congress are coming fast and furious.

VDH HERE: For five long years many of us have praised this administration’s constancy and idealism, in removing the Taliban and Saddam, and then staying on to do the hard, the easily caricatured work of democratization. The liberal hawks have long bailed. The paleos have turned venomous in their criticism. Many of the neo-cons have sought escape by blaming the flawed occupation for ruining their supposedly perfect three-week take-down of Saddam. But there are millions of us still out there who, Jacksonian in spirit, close ranks and will support our troops wherever they are. But we simply cannot ask Americans to die in Anbar province while talking to the Iranians and Syrians who are doing their best through surrogates in killing them.

And so now the axis strikes back. Robert over at TIA Daily writes;

Here is the first big reverberation from the 2006 election: sensing American weakness, Syria is moving to brutally reconquer Lebanon.

Hours after Gemayel was murdered, his killers issued a communiqu calling themselves the "Fighters for the Unity and Liberty of Greater Syria." They said that they killed Gemayel because he was "one of those who unceasingly spouted their venom against Syria and against [Hizbullah], shamelessly and without any trepidation." Gemayel, they threatened, would be the first of many victims. As they put it, "Sooner or later we will pay the rest of the agents their due..."

Clearly the killing of anti-Syria pro Democracy leader Gemayel was the act of an emboldened Syria;

Killing seen as bid by Damascus, Tehran to hit U.S. role in Mideast

The brazen assassination yesterday of Christian Cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel has pushed Lebanon's fragile democracy, heralded by the United States as a model for the region, to the brink of collapse.
    Coming amid moves by Syria and Iran to improve relations with Iraq, the killing also was seen by analysts as part of a coordinated attempt to push the United States out of the Middle East.

But really, what is Syria but a puppet,  Iran's organ grinder's monkey and Iran is certainly feeling emboldened.

IRAN: WORLD SHOWING SIGNS OF 'AHMADINEJADISATION' SAYS PRESIDENT

"Many of the world's countries are waiting for our signal to follow our example of good governance," Ahmadinejad said in a recent speech, apparently also a reference to "Ahmadinejadisation".

The president's conviction of the importance of his international stature seems to have grown through forays such as letters he wrote to US President George W. Bush and Gernam Chancellor ANgeal Merkel.

The Iranian president has repeatedly described himself as the "saviour of the world" and the "spokesman of the disenfranchised". At a dinner gathering to mark the breaking of the day-time fast during the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, he told those with him that he has a direct lineof communication with God, or Allah.

 Iranian self-confidence may thwart U.S. talks

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Reveling in President George W. Bush's electoral thumping, his woes in Iraq and his difficulty in pushing through U.N. sanctions against Tehran, Iran feels it has a strong hand to enter any talks with "the Great Satan".

But Iran's self-confidence could be the biggest hurdle to productive dialogue because Tehran will set conditions on security and its nuclear program that Washington will not stomach, analysts say.

Bottom line, America was sold a bill of goods for years. America was lead to believe things were going poorly, badly in fact, in almost everything. The brilliant, busting, burgeoning economy (4.4% jobless rate!) was derided, Iraq was depicted as "another Vietnam" (not according to our troops or our vets),  and the fact that we have not had another Islamic attack since 9/11 is astonishing. The MSM and the left continually insist there is no enemy, refuse to speak of the global jihad and calls anyone that does speak of Islamofascism "racist" or "fearmonger". But all you have to do is go to the airport to board a plane with your one 3-1-1 plastic bag and stand on security lines to get to the security line and you know this is some serious imaginary enemy.

I spent the better part of my day traveling and I can tell you its fookin torture.

Robert Tracinski in TIA Daily writes;

The Fantasy World of the Realists

The old foreign-policy "realists" have tried to claim the 2006 election as a mandate for their policies, the centerpiece of which is to negotiate with Iran and Syria over the terms of our surrender in Iraq.

But there is also an attempt to push back against the realists and deny them a victory. For its part, the Bush administration has tried to work itself out of the trap of being pressured to follow the exact recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission—which is expect to present the realist conventional wisdom—by promoting an internal Pentagon report that will come out at the same time.

Meanwhile, the pro-war intellectuals on the right are going to work on the project of discrediting the realists. Christopher Hitchens weighs in on this, and the article below is another example, though from a more conventional, center-left "idealist" outlook, which seeks to save "humanitarian interventions" as a foreign policy goal.

But the good news is that the main line of attack being taken against the "realists" is that they are unrealistic, basing their policy recommendations on diplomatic fantasies, while flying in the face of the facts and ignoring the actual results of their past policies.

"Unrealistic," George Packer, The New Yorker, November 20

Bush need not be told, he is still our elected President. He must pick up the dropped ball and follow through.  He must push through the UN (the collective negation of humanity) appointment of John Bolton (I assure you the world is watching that as well.)  Oh and while we're at it, sign this petition.

If you think Iraq was going badly before, you ain't seen nothing yet. Al-Qaeda Blamed for Attacks on Shias that Kill 150 in Baghdad.
Stand tall, stop apologizing, stop appeasing and do the right thing. I am sure I was not the only American that winced during this exchange this past May;

Question: which missteps and mistakes of your own you most regret?

PRESIDENT BUSH:  Sounds like kind of a familiar refrain here -- saying "bring it on," kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people.  I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, "wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that.

Me? I loved that kind of talk. It's the only thing the enemy understands and respects.

UPDATE: Toczylowski got it. From the Strategy Page hat tip wkpcl

"Don't ever think that you are defending me by slamming the Global War on Terrorism or the U.S. goals in that war. As far as I am concerned, we can send guys like me to go after them or we can wait for them to come back to us again. I died doing something I believed in and have no regrets except that I couldn't do more."

And Caroline Glick

Tuesday saw another nail driven into the coffin of US President George W. Bush's vision of a free and democratic Middle East. The Syrians aren't even trying to hide their involvement in the assassination of Lebanon's Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel.

Hours after Gemayel was murdered, his killers issued a communiqu calling themselves the "Fighters for the Unity and Liberty of Greater Syria." They said that they killed Gemayel because he was "one of those who unceasingly spouted their venom against Syria and against [Hizbullah], shamelessly and without any trepidation." Gemayel, they threatened, would be the first of many victims. As they put it, "Sooner or later we will pay the rest of the agents their due..."

[...]

What a casual observer misses is the simple fact that events in Lebanon do not stand on their own. Like Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon is a front in a regional war being waged against the US, Israel and their allies by Iran and Syria. Iraq is another front in this war and Gemayel's murder is intimately tied to developments in Iraq.

The Democratic Party's victory in the November 7 Congressional elections convinced Iran and Syria that they are on the verge of a great victory against the US in Iraq. Iranian and Syrian jubilation is well founded in light of the Democratic leadership's near unanimous calls for the US to withdraw its forces in Iraq; Bush's firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his appointment of his father's CIA director Robert Gates to replace him; and Bush's praise for the Congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group charged with revisiting US strategy in Iraq, which is being co-chaired by his father's secretary of state James Baker III.

Sex, Lies and Islamic Jihad

Sandmonkey has part  two of  this awful story here. He writes," I wish I was lying. They seem to be willing to go to any length to stop the public outrage on the eid mass sexual assault."

Oh, and in other news, they blocked one of the best egyptian english blogs in Egypt.

Yesterday was the second sexual harrassment protest in downtown cairo against what went down in the eid incident. And while the first one passed without incident, the police has cracked down on the second one. On my way there I bumped into Sharkawy, who told me that its nearly impossible to get to the protest: State security cars were everywhere, and police agents were blocking anyone from reaching the protest area, so they had to cancel it. The few activists who were there, however, were harassed, beaten up and arrested. Here is a describtion of how the situation was like:

PHILLIPS: The War Within the West

The country that is a principal target of the jihad is being accused of causing the jihad.

Melanie Phillips in Part III  in her series of essays, "The War Within the West," warns,  "history is repeating itself: the first time as tragedy, and the second time as tragedy."

Savage piece about British antisemitism by David Gutmann, who draws on his first-hand World War Two experience to make the bitter charge:

The Brits don’t mind seeing Jews killed, but they are fastidious about it, generally leaving the dirty business to others. Thus, as I charge, they indirectly abetted the Nazi Holocaust, and then stood by while the Palestinians attempted with less success to continue it.

It appears that the game is afoot once again, with the task no longer out-sourced to Palestinians alone, but to the much larger body of radical Islamists now piling into Britain, all eager for the treat. The Brits still limit themselves to talk, but from all accounts, the chatter in the trendiest salons, at party congresses both of the Left and the Right, at A-List dinner parties and scholarly gatherings, has become obsessively, fiercely anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and at times frankly anti-Semitic, to the point where the received and conventional wisdom has it that Israel has no right to exist, and should be eliminated. Again, this genocidal act will presumably be left to radical Islam, or to Iran’s nukes, while the British gentlefolk avert their eyes - or in a few cases, feast them… Along with the rest of what is now being called ‘Eurabia,’ the Brits are soothing the Muslims among them by acts of appeasement. In 1938, they bought a year of peace by offering Czechoslovakia to Hitler; now, for a temporary peace, they offer Muslims a piece of the Jews who are like the unlucky passenger tossed from the sled to appease the ravening wolves.

And the ravening wolves are certainly now gathering for the kill, in Britain and around the so-called civilised world. The systematic demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel has now reached such a point in our post-rational discourse that Israel is being openly blamed as the cause of global Islamic terrorism. The country that is a principal target of the jihad is being accused of causing the jihad.

Steyn: "We are all Spaniards Now"

Mark Steyn's  razor sharp analysis on post election America here in the Chicago Sun Times. America! Is anyone listening?

U.S. must  prove it's  a staying   power

We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.

For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"

On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.

As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.

It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.

 

NIDRA POLLER: ATLAS EXCLUSIVE French-fried incident in the skies of Lebanon

NIDRA POLLER - Our favorite French pastry is back and she has it hot out of the oven. Here's the exclusive SCOOP on those lifesaving Israeli flyovers those French are dying to shoot down.

BAKED ON THE PREMISES -- 
French-fried incident in the skies of Lebanon Paris 10 November

Nidra Poller

Is this another al-Dura style fabrication? The story began with saber-rattling bravado in France and slowly made its way into the international news stream, toned down to make it appear even more reliable: an almost incident almost occurred when Israeli warplanes almost swooped down on French UNIFIL troops who removed the covers from their anti-aircraft batteries and almost fired. The dedramatized international version of the incident may be even more misleading than the original, baroque accusation wrapped in several layers of domestic and international intrigue.

A quick recall of France’s pivotal role in drafting UN resolution 1701 is in order. Presented as Lebanon’s best friend, France was entrusted with inordinate power to shape the exit strategy by which Israeli troops were forced to withdraw and Hezbollah was awarded a billboard victory. France’s trump card during the negotiations was the promise to provide 5,000 troops for a beefed-up UNIFIL under French command. Once the deal was signed, the ante was lowered from 5,000 to 200. Finally reassured that his soldiers would not be the target of “fire from Hezbollah positions,” President Chirac offered something like 2,000 but no one has checked to see if they all arrived. Further retrospective and anticipatory haggling revealed that the beefed-up UNIFIL was a bit of a ham-actor in this Lebanese theater of war. Hezbollah would not, after all be disarmed. The kidnapped Israeli soldiers would not be released. The Syrian border would not be patrolled. Gun-runners would not be forced to cease and desist. The Lebanese army would be deployed but not employed.

And now it appears that Hezbollah is going to topple or gobble the Sinora government. Only one thorny problem remains on the horizon, as seen through the super-binoculars of a French-Unifil soldier: Israeli planes violating Lebanon’s air space. The French public is repeatedly reminded of this grave problem. The eventual collapse of the Sinora government is a faint flicker, the demise of the last remnants of the Cedar Revolution is not even mentioned, the plight of war torn civilians is forgotten… women may still be wailing but the French media have found fresh blood in Gaza. We have been led to believe, here in France, that the international community is extremely preoccupied by Israel’s repeated violation of Resolution 1701.

The tension has been increasing…not necessarily in Lebanon, but surely in the French media, unanimous as always on crucial issues of foreign policy. Israeli flights over Lebanon are mentioned so often you can almost hear the sonic booms. No other violation of the Resolution is even vaguely suggested. I repeat, no other violation. Everything is peaceful and orderly, or would be if it weren’t for those pesky, naughty, intrusive, provocative Israeli planes.

Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, ever-present in the media these days, has been using her severe schoolmarm voice to castigate Israel and warn of dire consequences if ever an incident should occur. Rapping knuckles and international frowning did not scare the planes away. Enter: the incident. Reported almost a week later, making it even more dramatic.

Dear TV viewer, do you realize that last week, while you were unaware of the little train robbery in the Parisian metro you were also unaware of a near clash between the armed forces of France and the Hebrew State respectively? Whoooah!

Le Figaro reports the incident, adopting the Defense Minister’s tone of utter exasperation (“The French army in Lebanon feels threatened by Israel,” Thierry Oberlé, 10 November). The vocabulary is extravagant, the very words breathe fire. Simulated attack, provocation, hostile attitude. Fortunately “our men” kept their cool, and did not fire. Ouf!

The litany of accusations is repeated, a German ship was similarly threatened, a French frigate was also harassed, FM Douste-Blazy lodged an official complaint, the situation is explosive, the international community is exasperated too. Alliot-Marie warned Israel against committing “acts that could upset the calm that reigns in southern Lebanon.”

In the last paragraph the tone of the article drops with a dull thud. Something about Israel flying over Lebanon because of arms delivery to Hezbollah (ho-hum) and yeah so what, because it’s really freaking out the UN soldiers.  And it concludes: the Israeli army claims to have no knowledge of these dangerous games [played by its own pilots] and denies making “offensive flights.” But the French Minister of defense is “absolutely certain”; “the material facts are undeniable.”

One small problem: there is no material evidence of the material facts. The prime time news version of the story was a pastiche of background images, archive images, close ups, fadeouts, and blue flags flapping in the breeze, but of course no one has ever filmed one of these repeated hostile flights of beastly Israeli planes swooping down on UN soldiers.

Stéphane Juffa, director of Metula News Agency, has a front seat on events from his balcony overlooking Lebanon. Reporting on his agency’s investigation of the incident (Is Paris Burning? Info 010911/6 [Scoop]), Juffa notes that Alliot-Marie had emitted dire warnings on the dangers of the Israeli reconnaissance flights when she spoke at the UN on October 20th.. General Pellegrini, the French commander of UNIFIL threatened to shoot down the planes.

Questioned by Metula News Agency, Israeli Air Force officials replied that they had no mention of the October 31st incident in their logs.  And they do not make low altitude flights of the type described by Alliot-Marie.

Juffa spoke with several high-ranking UNIFIL officers in Naqura (Lebanon), including some from the French contingent. None of them had ever heard of any such incident. They were embarrassed by the Defense Minister’s extravagant declarations. A UN officer said that they had excellent relations with the Israelis.

The credibility gap is enormous. Alliot-Marie claims that UN troops were a hair’s breadth away from firing at hostile Israeli planes; UN troops on the ground say the incident never happened. The French Defense Minister describes dramatic swooping; the Israeli Air Force declares that the flights are high-altitude reconnaissance flights. The French claim the international community is running out of patience; the international community didn’t say anything until the French rang the alarm bells. Now the media are picking up the French story and repeating it without investigating, the same way they pick up information from Palestinians and other jihad entities.

A very serious accusation is tossed onto the information heap, picked up, passed around, and thoughtlessly imposed. The information is verified by repetition, not by investigation. That’s not good enough.  And it’s not journalism.