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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Andrew C. McCarthy</title>
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		<title>Take No Prisoners</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-c-mccarthy/take-no-prisoners-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=take-no-prisoners-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 04:59:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Battle Plan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new book unveils the battle plan for defeating the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239807" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bb.jpg" alt="bb" width="194" height="298" /></a><strong>To purchase David Horowitz&#8217;s new book, <em>Take No Prisoners</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621572560/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1621572560&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20&amp;linkId=ZLFKIO3OORHJOL6H">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The Republican presidential ticket was animated, with both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan finally ripping President Obama’s foreign policy to shreds. Pity that it happened nearly two years after they were soundly beaten in the 2012 election.</p>
<p>The too-little-way-too-late indictment occurred during a Fox News <a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/3743003045001/exclusive-mitt-romney-and-paul-ryan-on-isis-threat/#sp=show-clips">interview</a> days after Islamic State jihadists decapitated an American journalist. It was a stark departure from the campaign, when so scathing a critique might have made a difference. Take, for example, the third debate between the candidates, a session on foreign affairs. All of America, it seemed, waited for Romney to unload on Obama’s shameful malfeasance before, during and after the then-recent Benghazi massacre. Alas, the Republican standard-bearer decided the winning debate strategy was to permit no daylight between Obama’s approach and his own, the better to focus the election on the economy. Quickly seeing that Romney had no intention of attacking, Obama reverted to the default Democrat strategy of ridiculing his rival as an out-of-touch rich guy who hadn’t heard the Cold War was over and wanted to hunker down in Iraq for a thousand years. Romney, to the contrary, seemed by debate’s end to be on the verge of endorsing Obama, whose foreign policy outpaces even Jimmy Carter’s in sheer destructiveness.</p>
<p>Romney, Ryan and their GOP leadership colleagues might not be the nice guys who finished last if they’d taken a few lessons from David Horowitz in the art of political warfare. Yes, <em>warfare</em>: The exercise in aggression in which the object is to defeat your adversary, not demonstrate how much you admire and have in common with him.</p>
<p>Political warfare is the subject of Mr. Horowitz’s latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating-ebook/dp/B00INC64FW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1409238496&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=david+horowitz"><em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left</em></a>. It is a particularly fitting topic for the bestselling author – the publisher of <em>FrontPage</em> and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is, after all, an unparalleled expert in the Left’s tireless and transformative political activism having learned it, lived it, escaped it, and dedicated his career to defeating it.</p>
<p>But <em>warfare?</em> Must it really be so cut-throat? Well, perhaps not … but let’s not kid ourselves. The old saw that “politics ain’t beanbag” predates the modern Left. Today’s timid consultant-class cautions about avoiding political “divisiveness” – the only schooling to which Republicans seem attuned – is nonsensical. <em>Politics is innately divisive.</em> People in a democratic society have vastly different policy preferences, and politics is the process by which we choose. One doesn’t get to govern, to apply policy preferences, without first prevailing in the sharp-elbowed electoral arena. As Horowitz demonstrates, moreover, good policy can be bad politics – the skill sets are different, and while voters may say they want policy that works, they elect candidates who <em>care</em>, or at least give the appearance of caring, even if such treacle translates into ruinous policy.</p>
<p>The inevitable divisiveness of politics has become more akin to warfare because, Horowitz explains, the modern Left is out not merely to defeat but to annihilate its opposition. Today’s Democrats have transformed the proudly pro-American party of Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy into the post-American party of the radical, antiwar, anti-captitalist and anti-Constitutional Left. It is not so much a political party as a missionary movement suffuse with apocalyptic zeal. It does not have opponents; it has <em>enemies</em>. Its grandiose aim is to elevate government as the “social savior,” transcending human history and experience, transmogrifying the United States into a remorselessly egalitarian society based on forced equality of results, not vibrant equality of opportunity.</p>
<p>For the Left, those who stand athwart their utopia rate not reasoned opposition but seething contempt. Democrats blithely portray Republicans in bracing terms: racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, greedy villains – defenders of the parasitic “top one percent” who luxuriate on the backs of decent working people.</p>
<p>Republicans are ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught because its driving convictions lie outside their worldview. Guided by history and experience, they are all too conscious of human failing, very much including their own. They are skeptical of grand schemes to perfect our nature, particularly those orchestrated through the notoriously imperfect vehicle of government. And their basic assumptions about caring – steeped in self-sufficiency and personal responsibility – do not sound-bite nearly as well as extravagant promises to provide for your needs by spending other people’s money.</p>
<p>We are left, then, with a serious passion gap. Republicans depict Democrats as wrong; Democrats decry Republicans as evil. Republicans deconstruct Democratic policy as well-meaning but misguided or “liberal”; Democrats counter that their mean-spirited opponents are the oppressors of women, children, minorities, the poor, and the environment.</p>
<p>In warfare, Horowitz observes, you cannot win “when the other side is using bazookas and your side is wielding fly swatters.” If they are to be viable competitors, Republicans must regard politics as warfare because that is what the opposition is doing. Horowitz explains that for the Left, “the issue is never the issue”; each controversy that arises, each crisis that is manufactured, is fit into an overarching narrative, like the “war on women,” based on its serviceability to “the socialist future and the revolution” by which it is being ushered in.</p>
<p>The narrative is designed not so much to win the day as to drive this transformative agenda. A good-and-evil narrative needs a scoundrel – recall the most infamous of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” To gin up the hostility necessary for such a campaign, an abstraction will not do. Best to have a flesh-and-blood enemy that can more realistically be cast as a threat to society. That is the role of the Republicans, one they often seem only too willing to play.</p>
<p>Horowitz contends that Republicans must fight fire with fire. Importantly, he is not suggesting that the GOP should slander its opposition with lies. That, in fact, is the power of his argument. Horowitz wants Republicans to throw at the Left the abysmal failures of a half-century’s social welfare policies, and to do it with righteous passion, not apology.</p>
<p>Horowitz elaborates that this is crucial because the “racial Teflon is the reason Republicans lose elections.” Even though it foolishly narrowed the campaign to the economy – to the exclusion of national security, a defining issue in nearly every presidential election won by Republicans since 1952 – the Romney campaign still had a very strong case in light of Obama’s non-recovery, 23 million jobless, and millions more underemployed. Yet much of the voting public never heard the case: Democrats spent $200 million on a television ad campaign that smeared the candidate as a rich, heartless, untrustworthy job-destroyer who was cruel to his dog.</p>
<p>The consultant-driven campaign did not respond in kind despite the fact that a true response was ready to hand. As Horowitz puts it:</p>
<blockquote><p>Obama is undoubtedly the most obvious and determined liar in presidential history. He is an absentee executive, notably missing in crisis after crisis or busy complaining he was uninformed about matters of crucial concern. While Egypt and Syria burned, he golfed and attended campaign fund-raising events. His endless dithering, misguided interventions, and steadfast support of the Muslim Brotherhood helped to set the Middle East aflame. Meanwhile, he and his wife carry on like royalty, consuming tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on their family vacations and dog, while tens of millions of Americans suffer historic levels of deprivation because of his policies.</p></blockquote>
<p>Cutting to the chase, Horowitz observes that Republicans were petrified to paint this portrait of Obama because he is black – or, more accurately, half-black and staunchly leftist. In our hyper race-conscious political environment, this qualifies him as a man “of color,” insulated from the “standard to which others are held.” To break through this paralyzing political correctness, Republicans must not be afraid to show that the poor and minority groups are the victims – the human face – of Democratic programs that cheat them out of education, employment opportunity, quality healthcare, security, and stable families.</p>
<p>Horowitz upbraids Republicans for tepidly describing these programs “wasteful,” or sugar-coating them in a wrong-headed and self-defeating concession of the Democrats’ noble intentions. Instead, they are “morally repulsive, life-destroying programs that are inhumane and unjust,” and must be attacked as such. And attacked with real-life images of blight, such as once great American cities like Detroit – a global industrial jewel in living memory, but half of whose population (i.e., over a million people) has now abandoned the wreckage wrought by generations of exclusively Democratic rule.</p>
<p>Modern politics, the author counsels, is about inspiring fear as well as hope. And it is an art of war in which the aggressor usually prevails. Thus, if the opposition’s objectives will imperil the nation, it is essential to convince the public that they are to be feared. Hope can work, as it did for the 2008 Obama campaign, “but fear,” Horowitz writes, “is a stronger and more compelling emotion.”</p>
<p>As we are seeing day after day, Obama and his allies are to be feared. Will that be enough for the Beltway GOP and the grassroots conservatives of the Tea Party to concentrate on what unites rather than divides them? As the author admonishes, it better be. An America that is free, secure, and a positive, decisive leader on the world stage – the America that David Horowitz fights for – hangs in the balance.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Zimmerman Prosecution Predictably Collapsing</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-c-mccarthy/zimmerman-prosecution-predictably-collapsing/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=zimmerman-prosecution-predictably-collapsing</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:37:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder charge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[proof]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prosecution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trayvon Martin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[zimmerman]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=195225</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s easy for a corrupt process to produce criminal charges. It is quite something else to prove them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Zimmerman.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195228" alt="Zimmerman" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Zimmerman.jpg" width="280" height="158" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>To order David Horowitz and John Perazzo&#8217;s pamphlet, <em>Black Skin Privilege</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=KD25VC00LEHE">click here.</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>This article first appeared in <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">PJMedia</a>.  Andy McCarthy is the director of the Philadelphia branch of the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The state of Florida’s politically driven decision to charge George Zimmerman with murder has resulted, as some of us <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295997/martin-case-affidavit-andrew-c-mccarthy">predicted</a> it would, in a pathetically weak case. It has taken only a few days of trial to collapse of its own weightlessness – undone, in fact, by the <i>direct</i> testimony of a <i>prosecution</i> witness, as Bryan Preston <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/06/28/zimmerman-prosecutors-are-having-a-very-bad-week/">relates</a> at the Tatler and Ed Morrissey <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/28/prosecution-witness-in-zimmerman-trial-testifies-martin-on-top-in-fight/">details</a> at Hot Air.</p>
<p>Over a year ago, I <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/296005/holder-meets-sharpton-andrew-c-mccarthy/page/0/1">explained</a> why this would happen:</p>
<blockquote><p>When Trayvon Martin was first shot to death nearly two months ago [on February 26, 2012], state authorities sensibly opted not to charge George Zimmerman with murder. It wasn’t that they were looking to excuse wrongdoing. It was that the evidence was insufficient to prove <i>murder</i> beyond a reasonable doubt.</p>
<p>Plainly, there was a lack of criminal intent: There was obviously no premeditation; and, alternatively, the facts do not remotely suggest that Zimmerman acted with a “depraved mind regardless of human life” (e.g., the savage indifference of a man who fires into a crowd, heedless of the consequences). To the contrary, the known facts indicate (a) Zimmerman’s concern that Martin was acting suspiciously (the depraved do not call the police, as Zimmerman did, before shooting), and (b) a struggle in which Zimmerman may well have been severely beaten and, in any event, would have a strong basis to persuade a jury that he shot in self-defense.</p>
<p>In advancing that argument, Zimmerman would be aided by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives the law-abiding latitude to use guns for protection….</p></blockquote>
<p>The “Stand Your Ground” point was gravy as far as the baseless murder charge was concerned. If a prosecutor cannot prove the statutorily required intent element (<i>mens rea</i>) for murder, then the accused’s conduct cannot amount to murder, period. The accused only needs to rely on a legal defense of his conduct (such as self-defense) if the prosecution’s proof is sufficient to establish the offense (here, murder) in the first place. But “Stand Your Ground” would have been very relevant had Zimmerman been formally accused of an offense less serious than murder. Regarding that, as I <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295997/martin-case-affidavit-andrew-c-mccarthy">observed</a> when Zimmerman was initially charged:</p>
<blockquote><p>Florida law makes causing the death of a person under the age of 18 manslaughter, provided there has been “culpable negligence.” It also criminalizes as manslaughter the “unnecessary killing” of a person in order to resist or prevent that person’s violation of law (e.g., the use of lethal force to repel a clearly non-lethal threat). Neither of these charges would [be] a slam-dunk; indeed, they’d be losers if Zimmerman shot because he was justifiably in fear of his life.</p></blockquote>
<p>Despite the palpable lack of evidence that Zimmerman had the required intent to commit murder, the state bowed to pressure from the racial grievance industry (led by Huckster-in-Chief Al Sharpton), shamefully <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/296005/holder-meets-sharpton-andrew-c-mccarthy/page/0/1">aided and abetted</a> by the most politicized, race-obsessed Justice Department in American history. Lest we forget, it was Attorney General Eric Holder’s collaboration with Sharpton and threat to trump up a federal civil rights prosecution that induced state officials in Florida to reconsider the initial decision not to charge Zimmerman.</p>
<p>It’s easy for a corrupt process to <i>produce</i> criminal charges. It is quite something else to <i>prove</i> them. To try to fill the gaping intent hole in its case, the Zimmerman prosecution has transferred the hobgoblin of racism from the headlines into the courtroom. Indeed, it did not even wait for the trial to do that; the prosecutor injected racism directly into the charging documents.</p>
<p>As I <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295997/martin-case-affidavit-andrew-c-mccarthy">noted</a> at the time, the affidavit in “support” of the murder charge employed the explosive term “profiling” to describe Zimmerman’s suspicion of Martin. That word has no place in a charging instrument: It was transparent code to imply, in the absence of any evidence, that Zimmerman is a bigot who assumed Martin was up to no good just because he was black.</p>
<p>“Profiling” is an ambiguous term. Generally speaking, it is a perfectly appropriate, commonsense practice – a marshaling of various characteristics and behaviors typically found in kinds of criminal conduct. It is routinely used by police to avoid hassling innocent people. Like all sound police practices, it can be abused – a bad cop can invidiously home in on one characteristic (like race, religious belief, political stance) and groundlessly associate it with criminality. The latter is rare, but it is unfortunately what the racial grievance industry, echoed by the media, has conditioned the public to think of when the term “profiling” is used. It is this slanderous connotation of “profiling” that the prosecution wants people (especially juror-people) to associate with Zimmerman. Rather than as a legal term, the charging documents use “profiling” as an atmospheric – since prosecutors had neither the evidence to prove racism nor the courage to be forthright about what they were doing.</p>
<p>It would be bad enough to do this in a case where attitudes about race were pertinent – say, a prosecution for violating someone’s civil rights. But it is even more shameful to do it in a case where attitudes about race are legally irrelevant. However much the media may be fascinated by racial dynamics, racism or the lack of it should have no bearing on a prosecution for what the law calls “depraved indifference” murder (second-degree murder in Florida).</p>
<p>Apropos of that, Powerline’s John Hinderaker has had an interesting <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/who-cares-if-george-zimmerman-is-a-racist.php">exchange</a> with Legal Insurrection’s Andrew Branca. Putting aside the lack of evidence that Zimmerman is a racist, John forcefully argues that, in the context of this homicide prosecution, his purported racism is “utterly beside the point.” The crux of the case, instead, is a simple matter of whether Zimmerman’s admitted shooting of Martin was in legitimate self-defense. Mr. Branca counters that the prosecution is using racism (or at least the specter of racism) to substitute for its dearth of evidence on the required mental element – namely, that Zimmerman acted with a “depraved mind.”</p>
<p>Mr. Branca is quite right that this is what the prosecution is trying to pull. He goes off the rails, though, in suggesting that this is a viable theory. With due respect, I think his explanation of the statutory term “depraved mind” is wrong. In part, he is conflating two separate <i>mens rea</i> concepts that arise in murder cases: depravity and premeditation.</p>
<p>After correctly observing that “Murder involves premeditation to kill or, in Florida, a ‘depraved mind’,” Mr. Branca elaborates (italics are mine):</p>
<blockquote><p>In order to prove the second degree murder charge the State brought against Zimmerman they must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted with a depraved mind. <i>To get to a depraved mind they need to show some kind of hatred or ill-will.</i> In most murder 2 cases <i>the people know each other and have a long history of animus, which is the source of the “depraved mind”. </i>Here Martin and Zimmerman did not know each other, so the State is forced to pursue <i>some more generalized hatred – such as racism</i>.</p></blockquote>
<p>I disagree. Generalized hatred has nothing to do with “depraved mind” murder. In such cases, we are not talking about intent driven by an attitude specifically related to the victim, triggered by long-held animus. We are talking, instead, about something almost diametrically opposite: a perverse <i>lack of regard for human life</i> – not the victim’s human life but <i>all</i> human life.</p>
<p>Explaining this concept (with reference to New York state law) in the 2012 case of <i>Gutierrez v. Smith</i>, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals <a href="http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/a49fb8a4-686d-416d-97f0-2e3dd983f279/1/doc/10-4478o_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/a49fb8a4-686d-416d-97f0-2e3dd983f279/1/hilite/">instructs</a> (my italics):</p>
<blockquote><p>The archetypal depraved indifference murder … would resemble “shooting into a crowd, placing a time bomb in a public place, or opening the door of the lions’ cage in the zoo.”  <i>By contrast, … a one-on-one shooting or knifing (or similar killing) can almost never qualify as depraved indifference murder.</i>”</p></blockquote>
<p>Zimmerman’s killing of Martin is a one-on-one shooting. Now, to be sure, the court did not say that one-on-one killings can <i>never</i> qualify as “depraved indifference” murders. But it is exceedingly rare. When it does occur, the focus is not on the <i>subjective intent of the killer</i> but the <i>objective recklessness of the killing</i> – e.g., a mother who beats her infant to death (<a href="http://www.nycrimblog.com/nycrim/2011/02/depraved-indifference-murder-applies-to-one-on-one-killing-of-baby.html">uncommon brutality combined with a particularly vulnerable victim</a>), or perhaps a game of Russian Roulette (or “Polish roulette” as it was called in a 1989 New York case – <i>People v. Roe</i> – in which the accused loaded a gun with both real and dummy bullets, pointed the gun at the victim, and callously fired).</p>
<p>With due respect to Mr. Branca, when the murderer knows his victim and there is a long history of animus, we are usually talking about <i>premeditated murder</i>. The animus tends to prove that the decision to kill was made before the act that caused death. In Florida, that is first-degree murder, which is not charged in the Zimmerman case.</p>
<p>Depraved mind murder, to the contrary, involves a state of mind evincing no regard for human life. Far from a feeling of hatred or ill-will toward the victim, what makes the killing depraved is the perverse <i>lack of feeling</i> for the victim (i.e., there is no recognition of the victim’s humanity). Having a motive is indicative of acting with deliberation, not recklessness or indifference. In a depraved mind case, motive is superfluous because what establishes the <i>mens rea</i> is the objective barbarity of the act itself, not some fuzzy “generalized hatred” that may have been crawling around the killer’s brain.</p>
<p>It is virtually inconceivable that a situation involving self-defense on the killer’s part will fit a “depraved mind” charge. And I am not limiting myself to situations when the self-defense claim is legally convincing. I am saying that in any one-on-one scenario where self-defense is worth raising, it is nigh inconceivable that a “depraved mind” murder has occurred. To be more concrete, let’s say we are in a self-defense situation where the claim is legally insufficient: for example, the use of lethal force was not a proportionate response to the threat; or perhaps the killer provoked the altercation that eventually led to his use of lethal force. In such circumstances, we can reject the self-defense claim but still recognize that the killing was not “depraved.” The degree of inhumanity required to make a killing “depraved” is not going to be found in circumstances where a person is defending himself, even if that defense is – as a matter of law – excessive.</p>
<p>There is thus a chain of abuses that makes the Zimmerman prosecution a disgrace. There is no evidence that Zimmerman is a racist. Racism cannot be inferred from invocations of “profiling” – which tell us more about the prosecutors than about Zimmerman. The imagined “profiling” cannot be inflated into a “generalized hatred.” Even if there were a generalized hatred, it cannot substitute for proof of the required mental element of <i>depraved indifference to human life</i> – racism is a noxious attitude, but there are people who are mildly racist; no one is mildly depraved.</p>
<p>It is abundantly clear that the murder of Trayvon Martin is not a case of second-degree murder, a charge that carries a possible life sentence and a minimum of 25 years’ imprisonment (because a firearm was used). Yet, the special prosecutor brought the charge anyway. Plainly, she hoped Zimmerman would be either railroaded in a trial that substituted incitement for proof, or intimidated into pleading guilty to a lesser charge.</p>
<p>This case does not belong in a criminal court. That it has gotten this far is a sad triumph of demagoguery over due process.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Rand Paul’s ‘Here’s to Crime’ Act</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-c-mccarthy/rand-pauls-heres-to-crime-act/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rand-pauls-heres-to-crime-act</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:54:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[His interpretation of the Fourth Amendment would be a boon for lawbreakers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/rand.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-193043" alt="rand" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/rand-280x350.jpg" width="280" height="350" /></a></div>
<div><strong>This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">NRO</a>.  Andy McCarthy is the director of the Philadelphia branch of the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>.</strong></div>
<p>The notorious “civil rights” lawyer William Kunstler, in addition to his work on “political” cases (i.e., anti-American radical-leftist and terrorist cases), gladly made himself available to mobsters, too — after all, someone had to pay the bills. Invited to a dinner once after a job well done for a mafia don, he hoisted a glass to the assembled capos and button men, toasting them, “Here’s to crime!”</p>
<p>Gleeful crooks across the country could be giving the same toast if Senator Rand Paul gets his way. The self-styled libertarian Republican from Kentucky, firmly in his father’s tradition of overreaction to imagined constitutional violations (or, perhaps I should say, violations of an imaginary Constitution) is outraged by reports that the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting “metadata” on phone calls of millions of Americans. He has responded by introducing an absurd piece of legislation he calls the “<a href="http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf">Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013</a>.”</p>
<p>Naturally, the bill is unacquainted with the Fourth Amendment — either the one given to us by the Framers or even the one enlarged over time by Supreme Court jurisprudence. I use the word “naturally” advisedly. Senator Paul’s proposed law asserts: “The collection of citizen’s [ACM: I take it he means <em>citizens’</em>] phone records is a violation of the natural rights of every man and woman in the United States.” A citizen’s “natural right” to <em>telephone-usage records </em>that are actually the property of third-party service providers? I wonder what St. Augustine would have made of that.</p>
<p>Not content to contort natural law, Paul then works his magic on positive law. He alleges that collection of records of telephone activity (but not the content of phone conversations) is somehow “a clear violation of the explicit language of the highest law of the land.”</p>
<p>By “highest law of the land,” Paul is referring to the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The senator apparently did not read the Fourth Amendment before cutting and pasting it into his bill. It requires (in relevant part) that “the right of the people to be secure in their <em>persons, houses, papers, and effects</em>, shall not be violated.” Perhaps Senator Paul will edify us on how it is “clear” that a phone record, owned and possessed by a telephone service provider (not the customer), qualifies as the <em>person</em>, <em>house</em>, <em>paper</em>, or <em>effect</em> of the customer, such that the government’s acquisition of it violates the Fourth Amendment. The federal courts have consistently, emphatically rejected this implausible suggestion, holding that government’s collection of phone records does not even implicate the Fourth Amendment, much less violate it.</p>
<p>Maybe Senator Paul would tell us that this is just the muck those crazy left-wing judges have made of the Constitution. But what Paul is advocating is a Constitution even more warped than the “organic” one progressive jurists have contrived. His proposal bears no resemblance to the Constitution of the Framers.</p>
<p>In last year’s <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf"><em>United States v. Jones</em></a> decision, Justice Scalia explained (not for the first time) that the animating idea behind the original Fourth Amendment is protection of <em>personal property</em>. The Constitution was not deemed to be violated absent some form of government trespass. That is why, under the Fourth Amendment as originally understood, it would be a violation for police, without a valid judicial warrant, to attach a GPS tracker to a person’s car and monitor his movements (the situation in the <em>Jones</em> case). On the other hand, it would not be a violation to wiretap a person’s conversations by physically attaching a monitoring device to the phone company’s line on a public street, without any entry into the person’s home or trespass on his property. (See <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0277_0438_ZS.html"><em>Olmstead v. United States</em></a> [1928].)</p>
<p>This changed because the Supreme Court deviated from the original Fourth Amendment’s bright-line focus on the physical person and his property to embrace the vague concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The original Fourth Amendment preserved the proper constitutional order: It instructs us on what the government must protect, while the people’s representatives in Congress are free to enact additional safeguards beyond this irreducible constitutional guarantee. By contrast, were we to rewrite the Fourth Amendment consistent with its modern understanding — assuming the written word means anything when we could evolve again at any moment — it would say: “The right of the people to be secure in whatever expectations of privacy we judges think are reasonable shall not be violated.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Senator Paul, even this new Fourth Amendment that progressives have erected on the remains of the original one has never protected third-party business records. That, in particular, includes “metadata” — customer telephone activity (not the content of conversations, but numbers dialed, time and duration of calls, etc.), records of which are maintained by service providers.</p>
<p>To give such third-party business records constitutional status, Senator Paul would have to get the judges to invent a newer, more expansive Fourth Amendment. So could we please drop the bunkum about how Senator Paul and his anti-government followers are “constitutional conservatives” crusading to “restore” the Fourth Amendment? If Senator Paul were actually trying to “restore” the Fourth Amendment, he’d be calling not for phone-<em>usage records</em> to be <em>shielded</em> from government but for phone <em>conversations</em> to be <em>more easily monitored</em> by government.</p>
<p>Besides its other demerits, Paul’s proposal is an exercise in naked partisanship. Indications are that the collection of telecom metadata began during the Bush administration. Yet, Senator Paul’s bill states: “Media reports indicate that President Barack Obama’s Administration has been collecting information about millions of citizens within the borders of the United States and other countries.” Republicans are quite right to point out that the Obama administration has abused its powers in several contexts; they are equally right to complain that President Obama’s default position when something goes wrong (as it often does with his administration) is to blame President Bush. It is sheer hypocrisy, though, to pretend, as Paul’s bill does, that telephone-metadata collection is an Obama innovation. It started as a Bush program, rooted in the PATRIOT Act’s business-records provision, which was strongly and appropriately supported by Republicans.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is equally wrong to imply, as Paul’s bill does, that the metadata collection is of a piece with other scandals involving Obama’s abuses of power. As Senator Paul well knows, the IRS scandal, spying on the media, Benghazi, Fast &amp; Furious, etc., involve unilateral executive-branch lawlessness, stonewalling, and/or overreach. In contrast, the ongoing phone-record collection is the lawful, statutory <em>retention</em> component of a program with extensive civil-liberties protections. Significantly, these protections prohibit the government from inspecting the retained records without judicial approval based on a demonstration of reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.</p>
<p>Perhaps the worst aspect of Paul’s irresponsible proposal is how it would cripple law enforcement.</p>
<p>In its <em>précis</em>, the bill professes its objective “to stop the National Security Agency from spying on citizens of the United States.” That in itself is ridiculous — the NSA is not “spying” on Americans; again, it is lawfully retaining records that it is not permitted to sift through absent court approval — in a program that also includes an exacting regimen of legislative oversight. But that’s not the half of it. After Paul gets through bloviating about natural rights and botching the Fourth Amendment, his bill gets down to brass tacks. The target is not merely the NSA but the entire government. The proposed law states: “The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow <em>any agency of the United States Government</em> to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>Hate to break this to you boys and girls, but “any agency of the United States Government” includes the FBI, the DEA, and every other agency performing everyday law enforcement — the police work that provides law and order, without which there can be no liberty. I do not know what, if any, familiarity Dr. Paul has with how law enforcement works, but it would be next to impossible for police to make cases against organized-crime groups, drug cartels, and other large-scale criminal enterprises if they had to have probable cause of crime before they could obtain phone records.</p>
<p>Records of telephone usage are not constitutionally protected under any credible construction of the Fourth Amendment — not the original Fourth Amendment described and applied by the Supreme Court in the aforementioned <em>Jones</em> case, not the Fourth Amendment as enlarged by the “reasonable expectation of privacy” jurisprudence beginning in the mid 20th century. As a result, criminal investigators and grand juries routinely obtain telephone-usage records by issuing subpoenas and applying for “pen registers” — devices applied to phone lines that enable investigators to learn the time, duration, and subscriber numbers involved in telephone calls. This information, coupled with physical surveillance of suspects, is typically how police build <em>probable cause</em> that crimes are being committed. They need to meet that threshold because the Fourth Amendment has always protected a person’s property, and our jurisprudence (along with federal statutes) extends this protection to the content of telephone conversations and other electronic communications. Consequently, to search property or monitor conversations, police must obtain search or eavesdropping warrants.</p>
<p>If, as Senator Paul proposes, law-enforcement agencies had to have probable cause before they could get telephone-usage records and pen registers, there would be far fewer search and eavesdropping warrants. Were that to happen, the most culpable, most insulated members of criminal organizations could no longer be penetrated by investigative techniques that police have been using, lawfully and with great public support, for decades — for as long as there have been phone records. The most efficient, most threatening criminal organizations would operate with impunity.</p>
<p>Perhaps he does not realize the ramifications, but Senator Paul’s proposal will not protect Americans. Our prosperity hinges on effective law enforcement. We have thus derived great benefit, and suffered little discernible harm, from the fact that police have long been permitted to acquire third-party phone records without a warrant. The Paul proposal is, instead, a boon for lawbreakers. That it should be proposed under the guise of a “Fourth Amendment Restoration” is perverse.</p>
<p>Here’s to crime!</p>
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		<title>Don’t Intervene in Syria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-c-mccarthy/dont-intervene-in-syria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dont-intervene-in-syria</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:47:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[There is no American interest in doing so.]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-c-mccarthy/dont-intervene-in-syria/syria-10/" rel="attachment wp-att-184856"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184856" title="syria" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/syria-450x297.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="208" /></a><strong>This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">NRO</a>.  Andy McCarthy is the director of the Philadelphia branch of the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Those clamoring for American intervention in Syria — I should say, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?_r=0">even more</a> American intervention in Syria — have a lock on two influential drivers of conservative opinion, Fox News and the <em><a id="_GPLITA_0" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344840#">Wall Street Journal</a></em>’s editorial pages. They are also bedfellows on this issue with our Muslim Brotherhood–enthralled president, even if Mr. Obama’s skittishness about going all in has them a bit testy.</p>
<p>All of this puts the media wind at their backs. Repeated often enough and reported uncritically enough, the interventionists’ shallow story has thus become the narrative. And so we have: The Vacuum.</p>
<p>The Vacuum theme goes like this: The Middle East may be in flux, but our threat environment remains frozen in time — a Nineties warp in which Iran, singularly, is the root of all evil. In Syria now, we have a golden opportunity to hand the mullahs a crushing defeat. All we need to do is commit to toppling their client, Bashar al-Assad. Media spin thus suggests that Assad’s minority Alawite regime is responsible for each of the 70,000 killings and half a million displacements that Syrians have endured since the civil war began — as if the Sunni majority, led by the local Brotherhood affiliate with al-Qaeda as the point of its spear, were not carrying out reciprocal mass murders and an anti-Christian pogrom.</p>
<p>Alas, misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have left the Obama administration gun-shy about leaping with both feet into another Muslim mess. The president thus prefers to “lead from behind” the Sunni supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. This failure of American will has created The Vacuum: a leadership lacuna in the anti-Assad opposition. Into this purported breach, Islamic supremacists — seemingly out of thin air — have rushed in to hijack the forward march of freedom.</p>
<p>As a result, the narrative continues, untold legions of Muslim moderates, secular democrats, and religious minorities who would otherwise be charting Syria’s democratic destiny are being elbowed aside. Even worse, by failing to intervene forcefully — meaning, to fuel the jihad with high-tech combat weapons and an aerial campaign to soften up Assad’s remaining defenses — the administration is frittering away the opportunity to strike up pragmatic alliances with the Vaccum-filling Islamists. Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought — eager to help the Brotherhood, but too concerned about arms falling into terrorist hands — Obama is forfeiting our chance to influence the outcome.</p>
<p>Right. I mean, look at how ably our decade of heavy investment has steered Iraq and Afghanistan in a pro-American direction. And behold how they love us in Benghazi!</p>
<p>Syria hawks counter such scoffs by putting on their best Paul Krugman: The “freedom” stimulus was not a harebrained idea, it just wasn’t big enough. Put aside the fortune expended and the thousands of American lives sacrificed. It is not the nature of the Middle East but a void of American leadership that has the <a id="_GPLITA_2" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344840#">region</a> waving al-Qaeda’s black flags. The Vacuum turns out to be the best all-purpose rationalization of failure since Barack Obama discovered George W. Bush.</p>
<p>Baghdad, you are to understand, would look like Bayonne right now if only American troops hadn’t skipped town, creating The Vacuum that ceded the place to, er . . . Iraqis.</p>
<p>The Vacuum explains the Benghazi debacle, too. Some amnesia is <a id="_GPLITA_1" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344840#">required</a>: You are not supposed to remember that Eastern Libya has for decades been a hotbed of rabidly anti-American jihadists. History goes back only as far as 2011, when Obama and the interventionists decided Qaddafi — their erstwhile ally — had to go. Presto, Benghazi’s Islamic-supremacist battalions were suddenly our guys, the heroic, freedom-fighting “rebels” — and let’s not dwell on the droves of them that had raced to Iraq for the terror war against our troops.</p>
<p>So how come we didn’t have all that profound influence over the outcome after helping the rebels kill and mutilate Qaddafi? How come our diplomatic posts were attacked? How come our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered? Why, The Vacuum, of course. It’s not that the clock struck twelve and the rebels turned back into jihadists. It’s that by “leading from behind,” Obama left a leadership void that enabled violent jihadists — apparently beamed down from the Starship Enterprise — to grab control before Libya’s rising tide of democracy devotees had a chance to roll in.</p>
<p>Hate to break this to you, but there is no vacuum. The Vacuum is a <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1594036918">spring-fever</a> hallucination, another empty grasp at the illusion of Islamic democracy.</p>
<p>Syria, like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Middle East, is predominantly Islamist. There need be no leadership vacuums to invite the Islamists in. They are there by the millions. Their supremacist ideology dominates the region.</p>
<p>But that’s not how the interventionists see it. On her way out the door in January, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton clung to the fiction that passes for bipartisan Beltway wisdom. She told a Senate panel that we must distinguish between jihadists and “non-jihadists.” The latter are our hope. Therefore, she maintained, we must be “effective in partnering with the non-jihadists,” even if they fly al-Qaeda’s “black flag.”</p>
<p>Clinton’s words were chosen carefully. The term “non-jihadist” connotes nonviolence. She was trying to distance the administration’s Muslim Brotherhood friends from the terrorists — consistent with the lunatic Beltway consensus that the Brotherhood, whose Palestinian branch is the Hamas terrorist organization, is a nonviolent organization. All right, let’s indulge that whopper — let’s, as Mrs. Clinton likes to say, suspend disbelief. Accepting the Brothers and their followers as “non-jihadists” tells us only <em>what they are not</em> — namely, terrorists. Mrs. Clinton avoided telling us <em>what they are</em> — namely, Islamists.</p>
<p>Islamists are Muslim supremacists who want to impose sharia. The Associated Press has a point in <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/associated-press-islamist-illegal-immigrant-stylebook/2013/04/05/id/498068">instructing</a> that “Islamist” is not — or, at least, is not necessarily — a synonym for “Islamic fighters” or “militants.” The AP is all wet, though, when it further posits that Islamists are neither “extremists” nor “radicals.” If the vapid term “moderate” means anything, then “extreme” and “radical” precisely describe Islamists. They seek to impose sharia, a totalitarian, liberty-averse social system. They want Israel annihilated (even if they’d have someone else do the honors). They are implacably hostile to the United States — at least while Americans remain champions of freedom and equality. There is nothing moderate about any of this.</p>
<p>Even if you believe these Islamists really are “non-jihadists,” the stubborn fact remains that they wave al-Qaeda’s flag because they want the same thing al-Qaeda wants. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that they prefer to establish a sharia state through political processes rather than violent jihad (in reality, it is political processes <em>leveraged by </em>violent jihad). Islamists still want the opposite of what we want. If we are truly promoting liberty, we can never “partner” with them.</p>
<p>No one is saying there is a total dearth, in Syria and the wider region, of secular democrats, non-Muslims, and Muslim moderates averse to sharia fascism. The point is that these factions are vastly outnumbered. They are, moreover, very far from uniformly pro-American. The radical Left is well represented among them. And even those who long for Western liberty regard us with increasing contempt thanks to the administration’s infatuation with the Brotherhood. So if ousting Assad is your priority, you are stuck with Islamists and jihadists. Unless you’re in favor of a very long-term American occupation of Syria, no one else could get the job done — and, in fact, many secularists and religious minorities prefer Assad, the devil they know, to the prospect of Egypt 2.0.</p>
<p>It is no longer 1996 — the year Iran bombed the Khobar Towers and killed 19 American airmen. The Syria hawks are quite right to argue that Iran remains a major threat to American interests. They are wrong, however, to treat Iran as the only such threat. The Sunni supremacist crescent that the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and their allies would run from Anatolia through the Persian Gulf and across North Africa would be no less hostile to the West than the Shiite competitor Iran is trying to forge. If Assad falls and the Brothers take over, that defeat for Tehran will not be a boon for the United States.</p>
<p>It is not isolationism to insist that American interventions be limited to situations in which a vital American interest must be vindicated. There is no such interest in Syria.</p>
<p><em>— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the <a href="http://nrinstitute.org/">National Review Institute</a> and the executive director of the <a href="http://www.phillyfreedom.org/">Philadelphia Freedom Center</a>. He is the author, most recently, of </em><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=B0097F4B8Q">Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy</a><em>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone: Hamas Won</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:48:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The administration spends far more time appeasing Islamists than killing terrorists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-c-mccarthy/shhhh-dont-tell-anyone-hamas-won/hamas33-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-183840"><img class=" wp-image-183840 alignleft" title="hamas33" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/hamas33-450x297.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="208" /></a><strong>This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">NRO</a>.  Andy McCarthy is the director of the Philadelphia branch of the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Barack <a id="_GPLITA_0" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344294#">Obama</a> brought enough Chicago-style community organizing to Israel that Benjamin Netanyahu knew what he would have to do. If he hoped to keep the tepid support of his country’s essential but icy ally, Israel’s prime minister would have to do what he’d spent nearly three years steadfastly refusing to do. Netanyahu would have to apologize to a state sponsor of terrorism that openly, notoriously, and enthusiastically supports Hamas.</p>
<p>He would have to apologize to Turkey — to its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama’s <a id="_GPLITA_1" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344294#">close</a> friend and confidant.</p>
<p>He would have to apologize for <a href="http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/03/24/terror-flotilla-part-ii-the-mavi-marmara-incident-turkish-terror-and-hypocrisy/">military action</a> taken in his country’s righteous defense against violent jihadists with <a href="http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/03/23/terror-flotilla-part-i-turkey-and-the-terrorist-ihh-organization-champions-of-hamas/">close connections</a> to Erdogan’s ruling party and, seamlessly, to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>As I recount in <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1594036918"><em>Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy</em></a>, the violent jihadists in question were from the grotesquely named “Humanitarian Relief Foundation” or IHH (<em>İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı</em>). The IHH is an Islamic “charity” based and basted in the Islamic supremacism of Erdogan’s Turkey. It is part of the <a href="http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/07/24/huma-abedin-and-the-muslim-brotherhood-closely-connected/">Union of Good</a> (sometimes referred to as the “Union for Good”), a jihadist umbrella enterprise that was <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp1267.aspx">designated</a> by the United States government, during the Bush administration, as an international terrorist organization. Under the direction of a top Muslim Brotherhood honcho, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Union of Good’s main purpose is to transfer funds to Hamas, another designated terrorist organization. Besides being the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas boasts Turkey, our NATO “ally,” as its chief benefactor.</p>
<p>In late May 2010, IHH terrorists attempted to break Israel’s lawful naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade is necessary to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, Gaza’s rulers having responded to Israel’s painful peace offering — its withdrawal in 2005 from territory it had captured in a war of Arab aggression — by stepping up their terror campaign against the Jewish state. In seeking to break the blockade, an act of war, the IHH was willfully abetted by the Turkish government.</p>
<p>Israeli officials had pleaded with their Turkish counterparts to prevent the terrorists from embarking on their “peace flotilla.” Members of Erdogan’s government and party not only turned a deaf ear; they sold the jihadists the offending vessel, the <em>Mavi Marmara</em>. They allowed the jihadists — armed with flares, night-vision goggles, 150 bulletproof vests, 200 gas masks, several dozen slingshots, 200 knives, 20 axes, 50 wooden clubs, 100 assorted iron bars, etc. — to board the ship without inspection. When the inevitable high-seas confrontation occurred, the Israeli Defense Forces tried to subdue the terrorists with paintball guns. The IDF resorted to lethal force only after being premeditatedly and savagely attacked — with several of its sailors seriously wounded. In that response, nine of the terrorists were killed.</p>
<p>Squeezed by Obama, Netanyahu would have to apologize for the killing of those terrorists.</p>
<p>More often than not these last five years, Israel’s prime minister has felt President Obama’s heel on the back of his neck. In stark contrast, Turkey’s prime minister has enjoyed Obama’s warm embrace. In Ankara, Erdogan <a id="_GPLITA_2" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344294#">hosts</a> the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as foreign dignitaries. He accuses Israel of turning Gaza into a “concentration camp.” Only days before Netanyahu’s coerced apology, Erdogan — whose history of anti-Semitism is infamous — publicly <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/erdogan-calls-zionism-a-crime-against-humanity/">pronounced</a> that Zionism is a “crime against humanity.”</p>
<p>This heinous accusation, “crime against humanity,” has become something of a verbal tic with Erdogan. He cavalierly applies it to Israel’s self-defense from thousands of jihadist rockets fired into its territory, and to the suggestion by European governments that the millions of Muslims who’ve immigrated to the West ought to assimilate into their new societies. Nevertheless, Obama openly regards Erdogan as one of his most trusted partners on the world stage. “The bottom line is that we find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues,” <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/26/obama-turkeys-islamist-prime-minister-discuss-nukes-teenagers/#ixzz1tdfcERsa">said</a> Obama of Erdogan in March 2012, upon seeking him out at a South Korea summit for advice on the crisis in Syria, the tumult in Egypt, the nukes in Iran — even the challenges of raising daughters.</p>
<p>With Obama on the phone egging him on, Netanyahu abased himself. Not only did he apologize to Turkey, he further capitulated to Erdogan’s demand that Israel pay compensation to the <em>Mavi Marmara</em> “victims.” After the apology, Erdogan <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/After-Israeli-apology-Hamas-says-Turkish-PM-to-visit-Gaza-307482">briefed</a> his Hamas confederates and <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4360151,00.html">announced</a> he would be visiting them in Gaza next month. Predictably, he has since announced that Netanyahu’s humiliating act of contrition <a href="http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/03/turkish-pm-thanks-for-the-apology-bibi-but-not-good-enough/">will not be sufficient</a> to restore diplomatic relations between the two nations. Just as predictably, <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4360381,00.html">other Islamic states</a> are now preparing demands for apologies and compensation for sundry exercises of Israeli self-defense against jihadist terror.</p>
<p>There has been no shortage of <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/954d2424-9498-11e2-9487-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2OxKhJbSL">speculation</a> about why Israel caved. Perhaps it was anxiety over Iranian nukes and Syrian tumult — the hope that rapprochement with Turkey would give Washington more maneuvering room to protect Israel’s interests. Perhaps there were financial considerations, including billions potentially to be made in the exportation of natural gas. None of these explanations is very satisfying. But that is beside the point. For Americans, what matters is not what this episode says about shifts in Israeli policy. It is the sea-change in U.S. counterterrorism that most concerns us.</p>
<p>We now know that Hamas has won.</p>
<p>In 2011, Erdogan made a startling <a href="http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=220358">pronouncement</a> on Charlie Rose’s PBS program:</p>
<blockquote><p>Let me give you a very clear message. I don’t see Hamas as a terror organization. Hamas is a political party. And it is an organization. It is a resistance movement trying to protect its country under occupation. So we should not mix terrorist organizations with such an organization.</p></blockquote>
<p>Really? Is this what we now mean by regular politics: In the <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=56&#038;x_miscitem=20">1987 charter</a> by which it proclaimed its existence, Hamas explained that it formed in order to “join its hands with those of all jihad fighters for the purpose of liberating Palestine.” Clarifying that Hamas is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers . . . the Muslim Brotherhood Movement … the largest Islamic movement in the modern era,” the charter elaborates:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.</p></blockquote>
<p>Invoking Islamic scripture, the charter further asserts:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! [Citing authoritative hadiths.]</p></blockquote>
<p>In its 25 years, Hamas has made good on its promise to kill. Yet Erdogan has been telling Obama since early 2009 that the United States must “<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/turkish-pm-obama-must-rethink-definition-of-mideast-terror-1.269133">redefine</a>” what it means by “terror and terrorist organizations.” It is increasingly obvious that portraying Hamas as a “political party” and a “resistance movement,” rather than a terrorist organization, is one among the “wide range of issues” on which the president finds himself in agreement with the Turkish prime minister.</p>
<p>Yes, nominally, it is still a crime in the United States to provide material support to Hamas. But these days you have a better chance of being prosecuted under those immigration statutes the administration declines to enforce.</p>
<p>Hamas prosecutions went out with the 2008 <em>Holy Land Foundation</em> trial. Since then, the investigation of outfits proved by the Bush Justice Department to be cogs in the Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to fund and otherwise encourage Hamas’s jihad against Israel have been dropped. Worse, some of those outfits, such as the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/white-house-partners-with-muslim-brotherhood-front-group/">Islamic Society of North America</a>, are regular guests at the Obama White House. They are consulted in the formulation of Obama foreign policy, which — lo and behold — just happens to favor lavish financial and military support for the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. As for Obama national-security policy, Islamic-supremacists have been <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/08/Nov-3-2011-Letter-From-John-Brennan-Capitulating-To-Muslim-Complaints-Against-FBI">invited</a> to censor the materials used to train our law-enforcement and intelligence agents.</p>
<p>Realistically, how could anyone expect the Obama Justice Department to prosecute the financial support of Hamas when the Obama administration is actively engaged in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/washington/24gaza.html?_r=0">financial support of Hamas</a> — sluicing <a href="http://www.tradeaidmonitor.com/2012/08/obama-300-million-palestinian-construction-project.html">hundreds of millions of dollars</a> in aid to Gaza, fully aware that it is under Hamas’s totalitarian control. In this, too, Obama is in concord with Erdogan, whose regime has similarly backed Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars — news that <a href="http://globalmbreport.org/?p=5398">comes to us</a> courtesy of Turkey’s grateful friends at the Union of Good.</p>
<p>Until 2009, U.S. policy was straightforward: Hamas was a terrorist organization and America would not deal with it unless and until it acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and convincingly renounced violence. All that has changed, though. Under Obama’s governance, Islamic-supremacists are bankrolled even as they act on their pledge to destroy Israel. Israel, in turn, is expected to apologize.</p>
<p>Our military’s killing of Osama bin Laden, complemented by the controversial drone campaign, has given President Obama cover. The occasional terrorist is taken out, the administration beats its chest, and few notice that al-Qaeda is resurgent, that the administration spends far more time appeasing Islamists than killing terrorists, and that Hamas has won.</p>
<p>Welcome to the next four years.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Director Mueller, Say No to CAIR</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/andrew-c-mccarthy/director-mueller-say-no-to-cair/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=director-mueller-say-no-to-cair</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:05:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[CAIR is in no position to police the conversation about Islam and terrorism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/mueller.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-68467" title="mueller" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/mueller.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="369" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">National Review</a></strong></p>
<p>At this point, the question about CAIR should be: Why does anyone care? Care about anything CAIR officials say, that is.</p>
<p>The notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations is back up to its old tricks. CAIR officials figure our ten-minute attention span has lapsed, and that we’ve probably forgotten by now that, in the 2007–08 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) — a case in which several Islamists were convicted in a scheme that poured millions of dollars into the coffers of the terrorist organization Hamas — CAIR was named as, and shown to be, an unindicted co-conspirator. CAIR reckons that the heat is off, so it’s back on the “Islamophobia” soapbox, demanding an apology from FBI director Robert Mueller.</p>
<p>An apology for what? The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces had the temerity to <a href="https://appdata/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.Outlook/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.Outlook/2A3M65EB/:%20http:/www.jihadwatch.org/2010/07/spencer-and-the-god-of-the-sea.html">invite Robert Spencer</a> — one of the nation’s leading experts on Islamist ideology — to lecture federal agents on Islamist ideology.</p>
<p>Spencer’s lecture departed from the government’s “religion of peace” dogma, which holds that there is no Islamist aggression, that there is no civilizational jihad to destroy the West from within (never mind that CAIR’s progenitor, the Muslim Brotherhood, has bragged about its “sabotage” campaign), and that terrorism is not merely unconnected to Islam but, in fact, is anti-Islamic. According to this thinking, Islamist groups like CAIR have a monopoly on what Americans — including American law-enforcement and intelligence agents — are permitted to hear about Islam from academic, media, and government sources. No dissenting views are permitted, no matter how steeped the dissenters may be in Islamic doctrine and no matter how much these dissents accord with what your lyin’ eyes are seeing.</p>
<p>“When I speak with the American,” said Nihad Awad, “I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything.” Awad is now CAIR’s executive director. He made this statement at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia on Oct. 27, 1993, when he was the public-relations director for the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). He and about two dozen other Islamist activists were meeting to brainstorm about how they might be able to continue supporting Hamas and to derail the Oslo Accords — the Clinton administration’s effort to bring a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p>
<p>For Hamas supporters, there can be no peaceful two-state solution, because they deny Israel’s right to exist. That is why, to this day, the charter of Hamas (which was established at the startof the intifada in the late Eighties) calls for the elimination of Israel by violent jihad. But in 1993, the United States was cracking down on Hamas. It would soon be designated a terrorist organization, and providing material support to it would be made a crime.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/439017/director-mueller-say-no-to-cair/andrew-c-mccarthy">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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