<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; attempt</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/attempt/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Being Safe While Isolated</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/being-safe-while-isolated/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=being-safe-while-isolated</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/being-safe-while-isolated/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:50:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coma]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pray]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[temple mount]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yehudah Glick]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244175</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An attempted murder in Jerusalem underscores the danger of Obama's subversion against Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244176" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811-450x299.jpg" alt="BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811" width="327" height="217" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Being-safe-while-isolated-380359">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Yehudah Glick has spent the better part of the last 20 years championing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Judaism’s holiest site. On Wednesday night, the Palestinians sent a hit man to Jerusalem to kill him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And today Glick lays in a coma at Shaare Zedek Medical Center.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Two people bear direct responsibility for this terrorist attack: the gunman, and Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. The gunman shot Glick, and Abbas told him to shoot Glick.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Abbas routinely glorifies terrorist murder of Jews, and funds terrorism with the PA’s US- and European-funded budget.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But it isn’t often that he directly incites the murder of Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Two weeks ago, Abbas did just that. Speaking to Fatah members, he referred to Jews who wish to pray at Judaism’s holiest site as “settlers.” He then told his audience that they must remain on the Temple Mount at all times to block Jews from entering.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">“We must prevent them from entering [the Temple Mount] in any way&#8230;. They have no right to enter and desecrate [it]. We must confront them and defend our holy sites,” he said.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday, in the three days leading up to the assassination attempt on Glick, the PA’s television station broadcast Abbas’s call for attacks on Jews who seek to enter the Temple Mount 19 times.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While Abbas himself is responsible for the hit on Glick, he has had one major enabler – the Obama administration. Since Abbas first issued the order for Palestinians to attack Jews, there have been two terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Both have claimed American citizens among their victims. Yet the Obama administration has refused to condemn Abbas’s call to murder Jews either before it led to the first terrorist attack or since Glick was shot Wednesday night.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only have the White House and the State Department refused to condemn Abbas for soliciting the murder of Jews. They have praised him and attacked Israel and its elected leader. In other words, they are not merely doing nothing, they are actively rewarding Abbas’s aggression, and so abetting it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Abbas called for Palestinians to kill Jews, the White House and State Department have accused Israel of diminishing the prospect of peace by refusing to make massive concessions to Abbas. The concessions the Americans are demanding include accepting the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from land they foresee becoming part of a future Palestinian state; denying Jews the rights to their lawfully held properties in predominantly Arab neighborhoods; and abrogating urban planning procedures in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem built within the areas of the city that Israel took control over from Jordan in 1967.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The US claims that it has great influence over the Palestinians. If this is true, then as Fatah’s official celebrations of Glick’s attempted murder make clear, that influence is being intentionally exercised in a negative way. The Americans are encouraging the Palestinians to be more violent, more radical and more extreme in their demands of Israel and propagation of Jew-hatred.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration is abetting Palestinian terrorism today. And it is doing so after it spent last summer siding with Hamas and its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey in its illegal war against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, it is important to note that the most outrageous statements the administration has made to date against Israel came after the first terrorist attack in Jerusalem directly inspired by Abbas’s call to murder Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most outrageous statements the administration has made about Israel came of course this week with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s report that senior unnamed Obama administration officials called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a chickensh*t” and a “coward.” They also described an administration in a state of “red hot anger” against Netanyahu and his government. Those statements were made after three-month old Chaya Zissel Braun, an American baby, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in Jerusalem in an Abbas-incited attack.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most distressing aspect of Goldberg’s quotes is that in and of themselves, these profane, schoolyard bully personal attacks against Israel’s elected leader were the mildest part of the story.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most disturbing thing about the gutter talk is what they tell us about Israel’s role in Obama’s assessments of his political cards as they relate to his nuclear negotiations with Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The senior administration officials called Netanyahu a coward because, among other reasons, he has not bombed Iran’s nuclear installations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And now, they crowed, it’s too late for Israel to do anything to stop Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They are happy about this claimed state of affairs, because now Obama is free to make a deal with the Iranians that will allow them to develop nuclear weapons at will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The obscene rhetoric they adopted in their characterization of Netanyahu didn’t come from “red hot anger.” It was a calculated move. Obama knows that he has caved in on every significant redline that he claimed he would defend in the nuclear talks with Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has chosen to demonize Netanyahu and castigate Israel now as a means to transform the debate about Iran into a debate about Israel. The fact that the trash talk about Netanyahu was a premeditated bid to capture the discourse on Iran is further exposed by the fact that Obama has refused to take any action against the officials who made the statements.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He isn’t going to punish them for carrying out his policies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama knows that after next week’s midterm elections, he will likely be facing a Republican-controlled House and Senate. He has no substantive defense against attacks on his policy of enabling the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons. The threat a nuclear- armed Iran poses to the US is self-evident to most people who pay attention to foreign affairs.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since he can’t win the substantive debate, he wants to change the subject by pretending that the only country that opposes Iran’s nuclear weapons program is Israel, which, his senior advisers insinuated to Goldberg, was apparently bluffing about its danger. After all, if it was a reason for concern, Netanyahu would have bombed Iran three years ago rather than try to accommodate Obama.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As a consequence, any congressional opposition to his deal makes no sense and therefore must be the result of the nefarious Israel’s lobby’s control of Congress. Loyal Americans, like Obama, must stand up to the cowardly, power grabbing, warmongering Jews, led by the coward in chief Netanyahu.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, in castigating Netanyahu and Israel, the Obama administration has decided to use Jew-hatred as a political weapon to defend its policies of abetting Palestinian terrorism and enabling Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are critical messages to the Israeli people and our leaders embedded in the Goldberg article.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the unbridled attacks against Israel’s democratically elected – and popular – prime minister show us that when we are faced with an inherently hostile administration, the wages of appeasement are contempt.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No Israel leader has done more to appease a US administration than Netanyahu has done to appease Obama. Against the opposition of his party and the general public, Netanyahu in 2009 bowed to Obama’s demand to embrace the goal of establishing a Palestinian state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Against the opposition of his party and the general public, in 2010 Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s demand and enacted an official 10-month moratorium on Jewish property rights in lands beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and later enacted an unofficial moratorium on those rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s pressure, released murderers from prison and conducted negotiations with Abbas that only empowered Abbas and his political war to delegitimize and isolate Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And for all his efforts to appease Obama, today the administration abets Palestinian terrorism and political warfare.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As to Iran, Netanyahu agreed to play along with Obama’s phony sanctions policy, and bowed to Obama’s demand not to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. All of this caused suffering to the Iranian people while giving the regime four-and-ahalf years of more or less unfettered work on its nuclear program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu only cut bait after Obama signed the interim nuclear deal with Iran last November where he effectively gave up the store.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And for Netanyahu’s Herculean efforts to appease Obama, Netanyahu found himself mocked publicly as a coward by senior administration officials who snorted that now it is too late for him to stop Obama from paving Iran’s open road to nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the assets that Netanyahu’s continuous attempts to please Obama was geared toward securing was US support for Israel at the UN Security Council. And now, according to the senior administration officials, Obama has decided to spend his last two years in office refusing to veto anti-Israel Security Council resolutions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Before formulating a strategy for dealing with Obama over the next two years, Israelis need to first take a deep breath and recognize that as bad as things are going to get, nothing that Obama will do to us over the next two years is as dangerous as what he has already done. No anti-Israel Security Council resolution, no Obama map of Israel’s borders will endanger Israel as much as his facilitation of Iran’s nuclear program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As unpleasant as anti-Israel Security Council resolutions will be, and as unpleasant as an Obama framework for Israel’s final borders will be, given the brevity of his remaining time in power, it is highly unlikely that any of the measures will have lasting impact.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At any rate, no matter how upsetting such resolutions may be, Goldberg’s article made clear that Israel should make no concessions to Obama in exchange for a reversal of his plans. Concessions to Obama merely escalate his contempt for us.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Bearing this in mind, Israel’s required actions in the wake of Goldberg’s sources’ warnings are fairly straightforward.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, to the extent that Israel does have the capacity to damage Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel should act right away. Its capacity should not be saved for a more propitious political moment.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only clock Israel should care about is Iran’s nuclear clock.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for the Palestinians, whether Netanyahu’s willingness to stand up to Obama stems from the growing prospect of national elections or from his own determination that there is no point in trying to appease Obama anymore, the fact is that this is the only pragmatic policy for him to follow.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The proper response to the assassination attempt on Yehudah Glick is to allow Jews freedom of worship on the Temple Mount. The proper response to Obama’s nuclear negotiations is a bomb in Natanz. Obama will be angry with Israel for taking such steps. But he is angry with Israel for standing down. At least if we defend ourselves, we will be safe while isolated, rather than unsafe while isolated.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/being-safe-while-isolated/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>38</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8216;A Stew of Anti-Muslim Bile and Conspiracy-Laden Forecasts&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-pipes/a-stew-of-anti-muslim-bile-and-conspiracy-laden-forecasts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-stew-of-anti-muslim-bile-and-conspiracy-laden-forecasts</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-pipes/a-stew-of-anti-muslim-bile-and-conspiracy-laden-forecasts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:39:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Pipes]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lars Hedegaard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179977</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shame on the New York Times for smearing Lars Hedegaard after his narrow escape from an Islamic assassin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-pipes/a-stew-of-anti-muslim-bile-and-conspiracy-laden-forecasts/picture-10-11/" rel="attachment wp-att-180200"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-180200" title="Picture 10" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Picture-10-450x295.png" alt="" width="216" height="142" /></a>At 11:20 a.m. on Feb. 5, Lars Hedegaard answered his door bell to an apparent mailman. Instead of receiving a package, however, the 70-year-old Danish historian and journalist found himself face to face with a would-be assassin about one third his age. The assailant shot him once, narrowly missing his head. The gun locked, Hedegaard wrestled with him, and the young man fled.</p>
<p>Given Hedegaard’s criticism of Islam and his even being taken to court on criminal charges of “hate speech,” the attack reverberated in <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/national/islam-critic-survives-assassination-attempt">Denmark</a> and beyond. The <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/06/the-bullet-flew-past-my-right-ear-danish-islam-critic-narrowly-escapes-assassination-attempt/">Associated Press</a> reported this incident, which was featured prominently in the British press, including the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/danish-critic-islam-attacked-gunman"><em>Guardian</em></a>, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273988/The-bullet-flew-past-ear-Danish-anti-Islam-writer-narrowly-survives-doorstep-assassination-attempt.html"><em>Daily Mail,</em></a> and the <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8842941/i-may-be-killed-if-i-write-this/"><em>Spectator</em></a>, as well as in Canada’s <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/02/27/george-jonas-making-excuses-for-an-aggrieved-gunman/"><em>National Post</em></a>. The <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424127887323495104578314751130285998.html?KEYWORDS=Lars+Hedegaard+"><em>Wall Street Journal</em></a> published an article by him about his experience.</p>
<p>When the <em>New York Times</em> belatedly bestirred itself on Feb. 28 to inform its readership about the assassination attempt, it did not so much report the event itself but an alleged Muslim support for Hedegaard to express himself. As implied by the title of Andrew Higgins’ article, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/europe/lars-hedegaard-anti-islamic-provocateur-receives-support-from-danish-muslims.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">Danish Opponent of Islam Is Attacked, and Muslims Defend His Right to Speak</a>,” he mainly celebrates Danish Islam: “Muslim groups in the country, which were often criticized during the cartoon furor for not speaking out against violence and even deliberately fanning the flames, raised their voices to condemn the attack on Mr. Hedegaard and support his right to express his views, <em>no matter how odious</em> [emphasis added].” This theme pervades the piece; for example, Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, is quoted pleased that “the Muslim community is now active in the debate.”</p>
<p>(For a close dissection of this agitprop, see <a href="http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2430/The-NYT-on-the-Would-Be-Might-Have-Been-Assassination-of-Lars-Hedegaard.aspx">Diana West</a>’s evisceration; and see <a href="http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/02/28/times-demonizes-hedegaard-lionizes-danish-muslim-instigator-of-murderous-cartoon-riots/">Andrew Bostom</a>’s analysis for a comparison of Higgins to Walter Duranty, the <em>NYT</em> reporter who whitewashed Stalin’s crimes.)</p>
<p>Secondarily Higgins delegitimizes Hedegaard, my topic here. In addition to the snarky “no matter how odious” reference, Higgins dismisses Hedegaard’s “opinions” as “a stew of anti-Muslim bile and conspiracy-laden forecasts of a coming civil war” and claims the Dane has “fanned wild conspiracy theories and sometimes veered into calumny.”</p>
<p>These characterizations of Hedegaard’s work are a vicious travesty. A few specifics:</p>
<p>1. What Higgins airily dismisses as Hedegaard’s “opinions” is in fact a substantial oeuvre in several academic books and articles laden with facts and references dealing with Islamic ideology, Muslim history, and Muslim immigration to Denmark. Those books include:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>I krigens hus: Islams kolonisering af Vesten </em>[In the House of War: Islam’s colonization of the West] (with Helle Merete Brix and Torben Hansen). Aarhus, Hovedland, 2003</p>
<p><em>1400 års krigen: Islams strategi, EU og frihedens endeligt </em>[The 1400 Year War: Islam’s strategy, the EU and the demise of freedom]<em> </em>(with Mogens Camre). Odense, Trykkefrihedsselskabets Bibliotek, 2009</p>
<p><em>Muhammeds piger: Vold, mord og voldtægter i Islams Hus. </em>[Muhammad’s girls: Violence, murder and rape in the House of Islam] Odense, Trykkefrihedsselskabets Bibliotek, 2011</p></blockquote>
<p>Hedegaard’s major articles include:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Den 11. september som historie” [September 11 as history] in Helle Merete Brix and Torben Hansen (eds.), <em>Islam i Vesten: På Koranens vej?</em> Copenhagen, Tiderne Skifter, 2002.</p>
<p>“The Growth of Islam in Denmark and the Future of Secularism” in Kurt Almqvist (ed.), <em>The Secular State and Islam in Europe. </em>Stockholm, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2007</p>
<p>“Free Speech: Its Benefits and Limitations” in Süheyla Kirca and LuEtt Hanson (eds.), <em>Freedom and Prejudice: Approaches to Media and Culture.</em> Istanbul, Bahcesehir University Press, 2008</p>
<p>“De cartoon-jihad en de opkomst van parallelle samenlevingen” [The cartoon jihad and the emergence of parallel societies] in Hans Jansen and Bert Snel (eds.), <em>Eindstrijd: De finale clash tussen het liberale Westen en een traditionele islam.</em> Amsterdam, Uitgiverij Van Praag, 2009</p></blockquote>
<p>To the best of my knowledge, no one has claimed these writings contain sloppy scholarship or wrong references. As Hedegaard puts it, “I am a university-trained historian and take my craft seriously.” The real criticism of Hedegaard is not about his scholarship – but that he raises difficult and even unpleasant questions.</p>
<p>And, as someone who has written <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/books/hidden.php">two</a> <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/books/conspiracy.php">books</a> on conspiracy theories, I judge Hedegaard’s writings innocent of that intellectual sin.</p>
<p>2. Higgins ascribes to him “forecasts of a coming war”; but these are not his forecasts, only his reporting what Islamist texts and spokesmen themselves predict and advocate.</p>
<p>3. Higgins writes that Hedegaard “for several years edited a mainstream Danish daily, <a href="http://www.information.dk/"><em>Information</em></a>, is a major figure in what a study last year by a British group, Hope Not Hate, identified as a global movement of ‘Islamophobic’ writers, bloggers and activists whose ‘anti-Muslim rhetoric poisons the political discourse, sometimes with deadly effect’.”</p>
<p>“Islamophobia” is a silly neologism intended to vilify anyone who criticizes Islam or even Islamism.</p>
<p>As for “sometimes with deadly effect”: that is applied to the whole group of 100 organizations and individuals in the Hate not Hope listing, not to Hedegaard individually. Higgins nastily insinuates that Hedegaard is responsible for deadly attacks on Muslims when, in fact, he was the victim not the perpetrator of an attack. (Hope not Hate, by the way, lists both the Middle East Forum and me in its <em>Counter-Jihad Report</em>; it <a href="http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/counter-jihad/country/USA">flatters me</a> as the “Powerhouse behind the international counter-jihadist movement.”)</p>
<p>In conclusion, it’s not “a stew of anti-Muslim bile and conspiracy-laden forecasts” but “a cocktail of sensible critiques and unsettling analyses.” Higgins has written a stew of shoddy aspersions of a brave, distinguished, and accomplished writer with whom I co-authored an article “<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/450/something-rotten-in-denmark">Something Rotten in Denmark?</a>” in 2002 and who is currently a colleague at the Middle East Forum.</p>
<p>Shame on Higgins for this article and shame on the <em>New York Times</em> for publishing him.</p>
<p><strong>Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. <em>© 2013 All rights reserved by Daniel Pipes.</em></strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-pipes/a-stew-of-anti-muslim-bile-and-conspiracy-laden-forecasts/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Al-Qaeda Eyes Yemen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-eyes-yemen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=al-qaeda-eyes-yemen</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-eyes-yemen/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frank Crimi]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al qaeda in the arabian peninsula]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ali abdullah saleh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aqap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[home]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic militants]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president ali abdullah saleh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[return]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violent protests]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=106943</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/al-qaeda5.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-106945" title="al-qaeda5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/al-qaeda5.jpg" alt="" width="399" height="266" /></a></p>
<p>President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s recent return to Yemen has been met by continued massive, violent protests calling for his immediate ouster. With separatists and al-Qaeda insurgents continuing to gain ground, the total collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Saleh had spent the past three months in Saudi Arabia recuperating from burns he received in a June rocket attack on his presidential compound, an attack which killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. While waiting for Saleh to return, his sons and relatives were charged with maintaining control over Yemen’s government, its armed forces and the capital city of Sanaa.</p>
<p>However, their heavy handed attempts to maintain order have only served to expedite Yemen’s descent into a state of near anarchy. In the past two weeks alone, savage street fighting has <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=140798686">claimed</a> over 150 lives as Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) forces have rained mortars and anti-aircraft fire onto crowds of anti-government protesters.</p>
<p>In the meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other Yemeni Islamic militants, such as the Partisans of Sharia, have overtaken several towns in southern Yemen, including the Abyan province capital of Zinjibar. Moreover, senior AQAP leaders have now <a href="http://www.yoobserver.com/front-page/10021442.html">admitted</a> that fighters from Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al Shabab had crossed over into Yemen and were now joined in the insurgency.</p>
<p>Then, days before Saleh was to return home, anti-government tribesmen <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=140798686">overran</a> an army base north of Sanaa, home to the Republican Guard under the command of Saleh’s oldest son, Ahmed. That attack had been preceded a week earlier when another Republican Guard base in Sanaa had been taken over by a group of protesters and renegade ROYG soldiers.</p>
<p>Finally, serving as a backdrop to all this upheaval has been a Yemen economy, saddled with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, which has all but collapsed. So, it wasn’t too surprising that the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-26/saleh-return-fails-to-end-yemen-clashes-as-protesters-shun-talks.html">wrote</a> that the ROYG has “appeared to have lost effective control of parts of the country and within the major cities.”</p>
<p>So, it was into this quagmire to which Saleh returned, hoping to stave off further unrest and perhaps spare him a stint in prison or a date in front of a firing squad. To that end, Saleh, who has repeatedly rejected calls by opposition groups to vacate his 30-year presidency, offered in a televised national address to abide by a deal brokered by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).</p>
<p>Under that deal, Sahel would allow for parliamentary and presidential elections. In return, Saleh would cede power within a month of signing the accord in exchange for immunity from prosecution by a newly elected Yemen government.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Saleh, the deal he offered had already been rejected three times by Yemen’s main opposition group, the Joint Meetings Parties. So, if Saleh had entertained thoughts that his televised peace offering would have a pacifying effect, ensuing events quickly disabused him of the notion.</p>
<p>Specifically, tens of thousands of protesters, quickly poured onto the streets of Sanaa demanding his immediate arrest, convinced Saleh was only stalling for time in an attempt to further consolidate his power. Perhaps their suspicions of Saleh being less than candid about voluntarily stepping aside was fueled by RYOG forces only one day after Saleh’s arrival having attacked an opposition camp in Sanaa, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/secret-drone-bases-avoiding-past-mistakes/2011/09/21/gIQAPaN0kK_blog.html">killing</a> 17 people in the process.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-eyes-yemen/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>United Nations MIA on Syria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/joseph-klein/united-nations-mia-on-syria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=united-nations-mia-on-syria</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/joseph-klein/united-nations-mia-on-syria/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:40:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[government crackdown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Press]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[result]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security council members]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united nations high commissioner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united nations security council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violent repression]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91673</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With the right friends, you get not only a pass on your human rights violations, but a UN seat of honor. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ap_syria_protest_dr_110422_wg.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91691" title="ap_syria_protest_dr_110422_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ap_syria_protest_dr_110422_wg.gif" alt="" width="375" height="272" /></a></p>
<p>The United Nations Security Council has reverted to its usual modus operandi: inaction. On April 27th, after receiving a detailed report by the UN&#8217;s Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs, Lynn Pascoe, on the violence unleashed by the Syrian government against its own people, the council members were unable to agree on a simple press statement calling on the Syrian government to stop its brutality.</p>
<p>In his briefing to the Security Council, Pascoe noted that the anti-government demonstrations in Syria had started in mid-March, following the detention of fifteen schoolchildren in Deraa for anti-government graffiti, and gradually increased in geographic scope and participation.  The protests began with demands for greater freedom and political and economic reforms and eventually included calls for the regime’s downfall.  The Syrian authorities had reacted with a mix of &#8216;reform&#8217; gestures, and increasingly violent repression. Despite the promise of reform, the government crackdown had dramatically intensified, Pascoe reported.  As a result, more than 100 persons were killed across the country from Friday April 22nd to Sunday April 24th alone, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.</p>
<p>Pascoe went on to say that the overwhelming majority of protests had been peaceful, but there were also credible reports of a very few instances where protesters had used force, resulting in some deaths of security forces.  Despite the Syrian government&#8217;s attempt to place the blame for the violence entirely on the protesters&#8217; shoulders, however, Pascoe said there were no reports suggesting that violence from the protester side was a recurring phenomenon.</p>
<p>The Security Council members listened to Pascoe, but the result was pre-ordained. Under Security Council rules, all fifteen members must approve in order for a press statement to be issued in the name of the council. In this case, Lebanon refused to go along with any press release for fear of offending Syria.</p>
<p>While Russia and China expressed caution in light of the interventions in Libya and the Ivory Coast under Security Council auspices that they believed went too far, Security Council sources have told UN reporters that Russia and China were at least willing to negotiate the wording of a press statement. However, the Lebanese UN ambassador reportedly had instructions from his government not to agree to any Security Council press statement, knowing that the unanimity rule would protect Syria from any official Security Council criticism.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/joseph-klein/united-nations-mia-on-syria/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Walker&#8217;s Second Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/arnold-ahlert/walkers-second-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=walkers-second-victory</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/arnold-ahlert/walkers-second-victory/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:45:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[concession speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david prosser]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[government unions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[percent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[recount]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Supreme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[victory speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vote]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90856</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Legal troubles may be over for Wisconsin's hotly contested government union legislation. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/scott_walker_291.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90865" title="scott_walker_29" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/scott_walker_291.gif" alt="" width="375" height="311" /></a></p>
<p>In what is viewed as a victory for Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to limit the power of government unions, it appears incumbent David Prosser has defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg in the race for a seat on Wisconsin&#8217;s state supreme court. Angry state Democrats fought vigorously to turn the supreme court race into a referendum on Walker&#8217;s legislative maneuvers, but their efforts now appear to be a lost cause. More importantly, Prosser&#8217;s victory will preserve the conservative tilt of Wisconsin&#8217;s supreme court, paving the way for the controversial union legislation, currently facing legal challenges, to be enacted into law.</p>
<p>Judge Prosser&#8217;s margin of victory was 7,316 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast, which provides Ms. Kloppenburg the right to challenge the results, as state law allows for such if a candidate&#8217;s margin of victory is less .5 percent of the vote. Mr. Prosser&#8217;s edge was 0.488 percent. The <a href="http://gab.wi.gov/">Wisconsin Government Accountability Board</a> (GAB) won’t certify the results until a recount is completed, or Ms. Kloppenburg declines the opportunity to have one conducted. She has until April 20th at 5 pm to make up her mind.</p>
<p>Last Monday, Prosser declared himself the winner. &#8220;A funny thing happened to me on the way to my concession speech,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The people of Wisconsin told me to tear it up, and go back to work.&#8221; The concession to which Mr. Prosser was referring involved the victory speech given by Ms. Kloppenburg the day after the election, when it was initially reported that she had prevailed by 204 votes. &#8220;You know the numbers show that we won, and we are gratified to have that victory in hand,&#8221; said Ms. Kloppenburg at the time. Those tallies, however, were unofficial, and it was the official vote that defeated Ms. Kloppenburg. Because of the substantial difference in the current totals, Mr. Prosser made it clear he considered a recount unnecessary. &#8220;Admittedly the election was uncomfortably close,&#8221; Prosser said. &#8220;My opponent ran a very effective campaign. But now that all 72 counties have completed their canvasses, the result of the election is not in doubt.&#8221;</p>
<p>Prosser campaign advisor Brian Schimming was even more direct: &#8220;We don&#8217;t feel that there is a need for a recount,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The largest number of votes&#8211;statewide&#8211;that&#8217;s ever been turned around is 489 votes, and we are now at 7,316? So we really don&#8217;t see the need for a recount right now. It would be enormously costly, and there&#8217;s just no evidence there to suggest that a recount&#8217;s needed.&#8221; Melissa Mulliken, Kloppenburg&#8217;s campaign manger, refused to reveal her candidate&#8217;s intentions. &#8220;State statute clearly contemplates recounts when the margin is less than one-half of 1 percent, as it is in this case,&#8221; she said.</p>
<p>The vote turnaround occurred when Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus reported on April 7th that, in her initial count, she had omitted 14,315 votes from the city of Brookfield which she had failed to save on her computer. The GAB investigated, but Democrats demanded an expansion of that investigation, citing a <a href="http://www.jsonline.mobi/119890909.htm">2006</a> attorney general race in which the results showed 174,047 votes, but only 156,804 ballots cast. Yet Kevin Kennedy, director of the GAB, while conceding that there was <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiAXv9cQKww">&#8220;negligence in the way things were handled on Election night,&#8221;</a> reported that the board hasn&#8217;t found any evidence of vote fraud. Mr. Kennedy added that they were already looking into 2006, explaining that the vote discrepancy then was the difference between votes scanned by Wisconsin&#8217;s voting machines and those that were hand counted. Less widely reported about the current election was a correction in the county of Milwaukee, where 409 votes were added for Prosser and 398 for Kloppenburg, a net gain of 11 votes for Prosser. That discrepancy was due to the fact that two wards on Milwaukee&#8217;s south side had reported totals for absentee votes only.</p>
<p>As most Americans know, this race was the latest chance for Wisconsin voters to weigh in on that state&#8217;s attempt, led by Governor Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature, to restrict the collective bargaining power of the state&#8217;s government unions solely to wages, and eliminate mandatory dues collection. That effort led to weeks of protests, the flight of 14 Democrat legislators from the state in order to prevent a vote on the issue, a torrent of hate mail and <a href="http://www.redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/03/10/the-lefts-new-tone-you-will-be-killed-and-your-familes-will-also-be-killed/">death threats</a> directed a Republic state legislators, as well as a disturbing <a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/03/wisconsin-unions-threaten-businesses-boycott-unless-they-denounce">letter</a> sent to a local businessman by union members demanding he rescind his support of Governor Walker or face a boycott.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, as reported by the <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/special_interest_tv_spending_sets_record_in_wisconsin/">Brennan Center for Justice</a>, a record amount of spending on television ad campaigns was underwritten by <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/judicial_public_financing_in_wisconsin_2011/">&#8220;special interest groups&#8221;</a> whose focus was largely centered on negative and attack ad campaigning. The center also notes that only Pennsylvania has spent more on state supreme court elections between 2007-2011.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/arnold-ahlert/walkers-second-victory/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>11</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Appeaser</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-appeaser/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-appeaser</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-appeaser/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:01:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William R. Hawkins]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[afghanistan pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Beijing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brasilia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brazil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[buzz word]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[changing climate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cold]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic upheaval]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[end]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[England]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Greece]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[India]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[indonesia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[integration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international rivalry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ireland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latin America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[look]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mediterranean]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security strategy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North-South]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pacific]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Portugal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Bill Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pyongyang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reconnaissance plane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South China Sea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tehran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[u s navy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. Brazilian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[weapons of mass destruction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=61660</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The troubling unwillingness of Obama to confront our enemies and protect our friends. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamam.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-61696" title="obamam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamam.gif" alt="" width="400" height="319" /></a></p>
<p>The National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the Barack Obama administration on May 27 is not so much a look forward as a look back. It is an attempt to return to the optimistic days following the end of the Cold War when it seemed a peaceful new world order was possible. In 1999, President Bill Clinton claimed “perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together.” President Obama says essentially the same thing in the opening paragraph of his cover letter to the NSS when he notes that “globalization”—the buzz word of the post-Cold War era &#8212; has “made peace possible among the major powers.” The dangers that remain are of a different sort, “from international terrorism and the spread of deadly technologies, to economic upheaval and a changing climate.”</p>
<p>That the world looked like the classical liberal model expounded by Clinton in 1999 was doubtful even then. A decade later, the cracks are even larger. Five months before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a Chinese fighter rammed a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea, an area Beijing has been trying to claim as sovereign territory. The rise of China and the emergence of other ambitious powers herald not a new world but a new cycle in the old world of international rivalry. The NSS explicitly rejects the “world as it is” in its attempt to fashion “the world we seek.” But the NSS does not lay out a path between worlds; it simply assumes the new world already exists.</p>
<p>There are still a few odds and ends to be cleaned up from the Bush administration, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSS pledges “a focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe” but sees no real dangers after that which would require a military effort. Though the NSS identifies the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological) as problems, the two most menacing rogue states, North Korea and Iran, are to be dealt with through diplomacy. As the NSS states on page 23, “If North Korea eliminates its nuclear weapons program, and Iran meets its international obligations on its nuclear program, they will be able to proceed on a path to greater political and economic integration with the international community. If they ignore their international obligations, we will pursue multiple means to increase their isolation and bring them into compliance with international nonproliferation norms.” This is at best a containment policy.</p>
<p>But how can Pyongyang or Tehran be contained, let alone “isolated” when they have friends among the other major powers? The NSS depends on there being a consensus among the powers on issues like non-proliferation within a general spirit of cooperation. That is not how world politics is evolving.</p>
<p>According to the NSS, “The European Union has deepened its integration. Russia has reemerged in the international arena as a strong voice. China and India—the world’s two most populous nations—are becoming more engaged globally. From Latin America to Africa to the Pacific, new and emerging powers hold out opportunities for partnership, even as a handful of states endanger regional and global security by flouting international norms.” Under the Obama policy, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”</p>
<p>The integration of the EU is being called into question by the sovereign debt crisis that has ripped through Greece and has threatened to spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The single euro currency, once thought to be an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is in free fall. Euro skeptics in England, France, Holland and Germany are balking at “saving” the Mediterranean and Eastern members of the bloc.</p>
<p>The NSS singles out Brazil for special praise saying, “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.” Yet, Brazil just brokered a deal with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program meant to shield it from a new round of UN sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had told President Obama personally at the Nuclear Security Summit that he would not back additional sanctions on Iran, and repeated this stance when meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Brasilia immediately after the two leaders left Washington. The Hu-Lula meeting took place within the larger context of a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) summit where the emerging powers coordinate policies formulated primarily against the positions of the United States and EU.</p>
<p>South Africa joins the mix in BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), a coalition at the UN that opposes the American and European demand for mandated limits on green house gas emissions to fight alleged global warming. Supported by Russia and the group of 77 developing nations, BASIC represents the world’s rejection of President Obama’s obsession about climate change that appears repeatedly in the NSS as a priority global threat.</p>
<p>The core value of BASIC and its allies is unrestricted economic growth, which means intensified competition in domestic and world markets. For some time, American officials have made it clear that unless China, India and Brazil provide substantial market access to U.S. exports commensurate with their high economic growth rates, there can be no conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks. These negotiations have been stalled virtually from their inception in 2001 due to a fundamental clash of national interests.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has hailed China and Russia for supporting a draft sanctions proposal against Iran at the UN. Yet, Beijing and Moscow watered down the resolution to prevent it from crippling the Tehran regime. Most importantly, Russia and China will be allowed to continue investing in Iran’s energy sector, which will boost the country’s revenues which the mullah’s use to finance their aggressive foreign policy as well as nuclear development. To improve relations, the Obama administration dropped sanctions against Moscow’s state arms export agency and three Russian entities previously found to have transferred technology or weapons to Iran. The UN sanctions proposal would also allow the Russians to sell S-300 air defense missiles (which have an anti-missile capability) to Tehran. So even if the UN Security Council adopts the resolution, it will not “isolate” Iran from its main international backers.</p>
<p>Nor is international rivalry confined to economics and rogue states. China’s massive military modernization program, led by new weapon systems designed to attack U.S. and allied forces across Asia, is not mentioned in the NSS. To do so would have undermined the fanciful vision of a peaceful, cooperative world. It would also have called into question why the Obama Pentagon is cutting back on the high-end conventional forces, from armored units and air superiority fighters to missile defense and naval shipbuilding, that would be needed to not only counter rising “peer” competitors like China but to defeat major regional powers like North Korea and Iran.</p>
<p>The NSS attempts to conjure up a world in which an NSS is not needed, but the Obama administration does not have the power to change the true, dangerous nature of global politics. What the NSS reveals is the unwillingness of President Obama to deal with the world as it is. Thus, America will remain vulnerable, as its leaders are continually blindsided by the strategies of adversaries they cannot bring themselves to think about.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-appeaser/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Symposium: Is Hannah Arendt Still Relevant?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:03:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barrage balloons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bernard wasserstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[core]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david satter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[definition of totalitarianism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[financial times of london]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hannah Arendt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ideology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intellectual rigor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[johns hopkins university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lawrence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[michel foucault]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moscow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moscow correspondent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nazism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nitze school]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oxford]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[society]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=52102</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Satter and Bernard Wassertein battle it out on Arendt's definition of totalitarianism and its relevance for the terror war.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/hanna.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-52105" title="hanna" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/hanna.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="477" /></a></p>
<p>In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have invited two distinguished guests to discuss the question: Is Hannah Arendt still relevant?<strong> </strong>We ask this in the context of whether Arendt&#8217;s definition of totalitarianism is still relevant and whether it can shed light on the conflict the West now faces.</p>
<p>Our guests today are:</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Bernard Wasserstein, </strong>a professor of history whose are area of interest is Jewish history. He is currently teaching at the University  of Chicago. In early 2009, he wrote a long and critical essay on Hannah Arendt that called her methods and arguments into question. He argued, among other things, that totalitarianism is not a useful analytical category, that Arendt relied in her writing on pro-Nazi sources and that she showed barely concealed hostility toward the Jewish people. His essay has evoked a big response both in Britain and the U.S.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>David Satter,</strong> a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the <em>Financial Times </em>of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Delirium-Decline-Soviet-Union/dp/0300087055/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256004140&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union</em>,</a> which is being made into a documentary film. His most recent work is <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Dawn-Russian-Criminal-State/dp/0300098928">Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.</a></em><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Satter and Bernard Wasserstein, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.</p>
<p>Prof. Wasserstein, let me begin with you.</p>
<p>I think the best way to start would be for you to briefly lay out your position on Arendt and her relevance. Kindly also touch on your take on Arendt’s relationship with the Jewish people and, in turn, with her own Jewishness.</p>
<p><strong>Wasserstein: </strong>Hannah Arendt is one of those twentieth-century figures, like Edward Said or Michel Foucault, who have acquired absurdly inflated reputations on the basis of work in which lack of intellectual rigor is concealed behind barrage-balloons of overblown rhetoric.</p>
<p>My essay, published in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009, was concerned specifically with puncturing Arendt&#8217;s claim to be taken seriously as a historian. I pointed out that the concept of totalitarianism, basic to the interpretation of Nazism and Communism that she presented in her book <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, is now treated with reserve by most professional historians.</p>
<p>I discussed her treatment of imperialism, especially British imperialism, and her absurd attempt to equate that with totalitarianism. And I focused on her analysis of modern Jewish history, showing that this was heavily derived from Nazi historians. From these and from the German academic environment in which her outlook was formed Arendt drew her contemptuous attitude towards Jews, an attitude that was basic to her interpretation of modern history and that infected her relationship to everything Jewish, including Zionism and Israel.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Satter?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Satter: </strong>I agree with Bernard that Arendt was no historian. The one thing that she does not explain about totalitarianism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” are its origins. Her description of the roots of Nazism is used mechanically and completely unconvincingly to describe the rise of Stalinism. And her explanation of the rise of Nazism neglects the role of the Western spiritual crisis in making possible the rise of both communist and Nazi ideology. In fact, it was the victory of communism – in which for the first time the moral edifice of 2500 years of Western civilization was totally rejected – that contributed to the victory of Nazism rather than the other way around. This is a reality that Arendt muddles completely.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I believe that Arendt’s contribution is absolutely seminal because she explains as no one else had not the origins of totalitarianism but its fundamental nature. Totalitarianism existed not just in Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany but in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where I witnessed it first hand. Briefly put, it consists of the attempt to create reality by force. This was brilliantly explained by Arendt in the concluding chapter of <span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Origins of Totalitarianism</span>, “Ideology and Terror.”</p>
<p>It can be argued that Arendt was guilty of oversimplification and revisionists always point to the extent to which Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany were not totalitarian. But Arendt sought to characterize the essence of the phenomenon and to describe its basic structure. This is something that she achieved and, as an analytical model that can be applied not only to the past but to fanatical Islamic movements and doomsday cults it remains highly relevant today.</p>
<p>Regarding Arendt’s attitude toward Jews and anti-Semitism, I think that Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, was, in part, correct when he wrote that Arendt, in her work, did not show a love for her people. But her purpose was to describe reality not to praise her own origins. I believe that she felt that her strictures against her own people (her comments about Germans were considerably more devastating) were a demonstration of love in that they showed that a Jew could value the truth above clan loyalty and, as such, could be fully developed as a human being. Whether in fact she always correctly identified the truth is another matter. Her description of the role of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) in <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Eichmann in Jerusalem </span>is not so much untrue as lacking an appreciation of the excruciating circumstances in which the Jewish leaders found themselves. But I think this attests to Arendt’s uncompromising personality rather than to anti-Semitism. Insofar as it reflected a demand for almost superhuman behavior from the Jewish leaders, one could argue that it also showed a kind of love.</p>
<p><strong>Wasserstein:</strong> David Satter has started off a number of hares (the nature of Communism, Islamism, etc.) that I shall not pursue here. Let&#8217;s keep the focus on Arendt and totalitarianism and Arendt and the Jews.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s deal first of all with totalitarianism and then proceed to Arendt and the Jews at a later stage:</p>
<p>One of the problems with Arendt&#8217;s discussion of totalitarianism is that she nowhere defines this elusive and slippery term. Without a definition it is hardly worth discussing or taking seriously. I do not think that there is, in fact, a definition that would turn this word into a methodologically helpful concept. It is, in fact, a tired old cold-war slogan, not an intellectually respectable or useful heuristic device.</p>
<p>I do not find the final chapter of &#8220;Origins&#8221; nearly as persuasive as Satter. I would indeed maintain, as he suggests, that she was guilty of gross over-simplification. He defends her as an essentializer. But that is precisely the problem. She discounted the role of contingency in history and tried to fit everything into one overall pattern to which she claimed to have discovered the key. Nor did she succeed even there in the sense that Marx and Marxists (or, to take another example, Christians), certainly did so. That is to say, they at least succeeded in creating an internally coherent system of thought and interpretation of social reality. One may argue against it on empirical and other grounds. I would certainly do so very strongly.</p>
<p>But Marxism (like Christianity) at least has the virtue of internal consistency. Of course, that is also its vice: it sees the whole of reality within a supposedly unifying theory. Isaiah Berlin, in his life&#8217;s work exposed the fallacy and the dangers of such a view of the world. Arendt attempted something similar to Marx, though she was certainly no Marxist &#8211; this notwithstanding her celebration of Rosa Luxemburg and the workers&#8217; councils movement of 1918-19 in Germany and Italy &#8211; which she falsely equated with the phenomenon of that name in Hungary in 1956.</p>
<p>The reasons for her mouthing of certain Marxist slogans probably had something to do with her relationship to her Communist husband &#8211; from whom she derived many of her ideas &#8211; and perhaps explains her attractiveness to some neo-Marxists today &#8230; but that is another hare that I shall not pursue here.</p>
<p>Where the Marxists produced a theory that is wholly self-contained and sustainable within its own logic which, like Christianity, claims universal and total validity, Arendt produced nothing comparable.  Her supposed theoretical framework (at any rate as presented in the &#8220;Origins&#8221;) is, in fact, a mishmash. There is no &#8216;analytical model&#8217; here worthy of the name. As Berlin put it: ‘She produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical associations.’</p>
<p>There is a lot of sound and fury, most of it hollow rhetoric, but no sustained argument worthy of serious attention.  The closest parallel in modern thought is, in my view, L. Ron Hubbard, another thinker who claims to have discovered the key to a totalizing universally valid idea but whose work, like Arendt&#8217;s, is a hotchpotch of slogans and semi-digested pap that, again like Arendt, Said, and Foucault, impresses weak minds, especially on the old/new left in search of intellectual crutch on which to lean because they are tired of thinking for themselves. I am surprised, to put it mildly, to find Satter in such company.</p>
<p><strong>Satter: </strong>I think Arendt made three important contributions to our understanding of totalitarianism. First, she described the totalitarian movement as a series of concentric circles spreading out from an ideological core. Second, she defined ideology as the logic of an idea pursued without reference to external reality and, finally, she defined totalitarianism itself as the combination of ideology and terror, in effect, the use of total terror to remake reality.</p>
<p>Regarding the first point, she identified that lack of moral grounding and escalation of cynicism that allowed fanatical movements to attract followers and sympathizers among wide segments of the population. The followers provided the ideological hard core with vital support and made it seem more reasonable than it really was. In fact, the ability of an ideological hard core to attract persons who share their values but may balk at their methods is an important reason why small groups of fanatics can pose such a lethal threat.</p>
<p>In her discussion of ideology, Arendt defines a word that is widely used but little understood. The search for truth is a dialogic process in which a person must always be ready to test his conclusions against a changing reality. Ideology interrupts this process. It takes a single proposition and applies it to all aspects of reality. It is, as Arendt wrote, the “logic of an idea” but a logic which is never tested against empirical reality but, on the contrary, re-envisages reality in accordance with its own internal requirements.</p>
<p>With Arendt’s definition in mind, we are equipped to understand the monomaniacal core of modern ideologies, their contempt for reality and emancipation from, “all the plausibilities of the world,” (Burke). We can also see the ways in which ideological thinking pervades political discourse even in a democratic society.</p>
<p>Finally, Arendt defines totalitarianism as the combination of ideology and terror. Observers have often been mystified by the apparent irrationality of totalitarian behavior, the decision of Hitler to destroy the European Jews instead of putting them to work on behalf of the German war machine, the decision of Stalin to destroy the Soviet officer corps on the eve of war or annihilate the country’s most productive farmers. But the objectives of a totalitarian regime, as Arendt shows, have nothing to do with practical concerns but only the realization of a deranged ideology. Since reality inevitably resists the imposition of irreality, this can only be accomplished through the use of massive force.</p>
<p>Arendt does not enunciate a new universal theory. She is a political theorist concerned to describe and illuminate a new political phenomenon. Did she do this accurately? At this point, I need to refer to my personal experience. I wrote a graduate thesis at Oxford on Hannah Arendt and then was posted to Moscow as the correspondent of the Financial Times. As a result, I had the rare opportunity of studying a theory and being able, immediately afterward, to test its conclusions against reality. What I witnessed in the Soviet  Union was an entire society organized to act out a view of reality contained in Marxist-Leninist ideology, including a population that supposedly demonstrated voluntary unanimity, rulers who were supposedly infallible and a guiding ideology that was as inarguable as the axioms of geometry. All of this was supported by mirage-like pseudo democratic institutions: courts to which there was no recourse, trade unions that were part of management and a parliament that always supported the government. It goes almost without saying that such a system of massive and continuous lying could only be held together by force.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Wasserstein: </strong>I have no substantial quarrel with Satter&#8217;s description of Arendt&#8217;s propositions. What I reject is his evaluation of them. Arendt&#8217;s &#8216;totalitarianism&#8217; is primarily an attempt to explain Nazism, not Communism, as she herself admitted. Yet she brings in lengthy discussion of both Communism and Imperialism in an effort to conflate all three within what appears to be her understanding of the totalitarian phenomenon.  The effort at conflation is central to her approach and indeed the chief reason for its attractiveness to such a varied and contradictory set of constituencies. But her attempt falls flat, however much rhetorical huffing and puffing she funnels into it.  Lawrence, Rhodes, and Disraeli, to whom she devotes considerable space in the first section of her magnum opus, were no doubt exemplary imperialists but to see their thought or historical role as related in any way to totalitarianism is far-fetched. Arendt does not in fact argue this: she rather lets it be understood implicitly &#8211; which is why her work has such an uncanny attraction for anti-imperialists of various hues. As for the attempt to conflate Nazism and Communism, allow me to refer to what I wrote in my recent book &#8220;Barbarism and Civilization:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Both Nazism and Communism became deeply attractive belief systems for millions. Both in their day offered emotional comfort and to the disoriented, reassurance to the bewildered.  Both demanded surrender of self to the mass, offering in return the comfort of suspension of individual moral responsibility. Both dispensed with the rule of law, elevated the secret police to the highest authority in the land, constructed vast systems of slave labour, and killed millions of their subjects. Yet in the supreme test of total war both sustained the morale and adhesion of their followers at least as well as the liberal democracies. Both succumbed on battlefields of their own choosing: Nazism by defeat in war, Communism by its failure to create a classless society free from material want. Yet so long as they could plausibly claim success, most of their subjects willingly did as they were told.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;We should not, however, fall into the common error trap of imputing a false parallelism between the two great warrior ideologies. Nazism, for all its revolutionary jargon, represented in its essence a reaction against the nineteenth-century faith in human progress. It was an attempt to seize history by the collar and frog-march it in a direction determined primarily by the selfish interests and obsessive beliefs of those in power. From the outset it was an anti-intellectual movement, offering its adherents the spurious solidarity of the street gang and the prospective enjoyment of stolen booty.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Communism, by contrast, was a sophisticated and internally coherent framework of thought. It was not, as it is sometimes portrayed, a manic delusion of the intelligentsia but rather a modern transformation of the utopian chiliasm of the most enlightened elements in European thought since the seventeenth century. As distinct from the cave-man morality of Nazism and from the individualist ethic of liberalism, Communism sought to achieve a higher collective good that derived from Rousseau’s concept of the general will and Gerard Winstanley’s idea of the common weal. The source of its special appeal to several generations of European intellectuals, perhaps also one of the reasons why it survived in power so much longer than Nazism, was its (ultimately self-falsified) claim, derived from Marx, to be able to discern and to accelerate the underlying motive forces of history. That both Communism and Nazism developed into mechanisms of brute force and thuggery should not blind us to their distinctive origins and aspirations.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Nor is the view that Soviet Russian Communism or Nazism (or for that matter British or French imperialisms) were held together only by force borne out by historical research. In the case of Nazism (let us again recall, Arendt&#8217;s primary concern), Ian Kershaw and others have shown the very broad degree of support that the regime maintained among the German people at least until Stalingrad and the continuing general acquiescence that it retained until near the end of the war. As for the USSR, Sheila Fitzpatrick&#8217;s work has shown how the rapid social mobility that Communism offered to the incipient &#8216;New Class&#8217; helped create a not inconsiderable constituency of willing collaborators who profited from Stalinism and even more perhaps from post-Stalinism. Imperialism too depended on what Gallagher and Robinson in their &#8220;Africa and the Victorians&#8221; termed the &#8220;collaborative equation&#8221; between rulers and important sections of the ruled. To see these systems, as Arendt did, simply as regimes of blind terror is to fall into an ahistorical trap.</p>
<p>Which brings us to Arendt and the Jews. The passages in &#8220;Origins&#8221; on anti-semitism and its supposed origins are absolutely central to Arendt&#8217;s argument about totalitarianism &#8211; though that very purported centrality in itself robs her argument of any validity since anti-semitism patently had very different valencies and functions in the Nazi, Soviet and imperial contexts. I should be interested to hear how Satter proposes to defend Arendt&#8217;s position here. Perhaps he does not wish to come to her defence on this &#8211; but in a sense he must, since this if he gives way here he dismantles a flying buttress on which the entire edifice of the &#8220;Origins&#8221; depends. I therefore await his response with interest.</p>
<p><strong>Satter: </strong>Let’s consider Arendt’s attitude toward the Jews. This attitude is expressed principally in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where the relation of the Jews to the nation state is invoked as an important factor in the rise of totalitarianism and in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” where Arendt’s discussion of the role of the Jewish councils under the Nazis led to accusations that she was unfair to her own people and to charges that she was a “self-hating Jew.”</p>
<p>In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt argued that because of the Jews’ identification with the state, every social group that came into conflict with the state became anti-semitic and the anti-semitic parties became murderous because, unlike other parties, their goal from the start was not to change the state but rather to take it over and dominate it. Arendt makes this argument at considerable length and it does shed some light but I have never found it convincing as an explanation for the origins of Nazism much less communism. Arendt herself acknowledged that the title “The Origins of Totalitarianism” was inappropriate and that in her historical sketches of anti-semitism and imperialism she was describing the elements that crystallized into totalitarianism rather than its causes. Arendt, however, also analyzes totalitarianism and describes it. It is this part of her theory that is most valuable.</p>
<p>Because it placed European Jewry in a social context and did not view Jews purely as victims, Arendt’s discussion of anti-semitism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” led to unease about Arendt’s attitude toward her own people which was greatly increased by her treatment of the Jewish councils in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Oddly, Arendt’s understanding of the impossible moral choices that are forced on the victims under totalitarianism does not always lead her to view with informed sympathy the choices faced by those victims who, I would like to believe, should have been closest to her.</p>
<p>In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt describes the roles of the Jewish councils and the Jewish police in facilitating the deportations of Jews to the death camps. She argues, as did Bruno Bettelheim in a different context, that non-cooperation and armed resistance would have saved many more lives and at least would have forced the Nazis to pay a price for their barbarity. But her solution begs the question that her analysis describes. In a situation of total terror and robotically organized masses, it is only rare exceptions who have the will to resist. And this applies not just to Jews but to any victims of totalitarianism who are deprived of any means of collective action that is not outright suicidal.</p>
<p>In this respect, however, it does not pay to accuse Arendt of anti-semitism or self-hatred as some have done. Such a charge suggests that Jewish people cannot be self critical and do not seek to be and clearly indicates that, since there are self-hating Jews, there is something to hate. In the early 19<sup>th</sup> century, the Russian writer Pyotr Chaadaev had this to say about the Russian people:</p>
<p>We are an exception among people. We belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson… Alone in the world, we gave the world nothing and have taken nothing, we have in no way contributed to the progress of human reason and everything that came to use as a result of this progress, we distorted. (First Philosophical Letter)</p>
<p>Was Chaadaev (who was thrown in a mental hospital for his writing) a self-hating Russian? Or did he want more for his people than they themselves envisaged? With regard to Arendt and the accusations against her, I think that her arguments about the Jewish councils, with which I don’t agree, are nonetheless a valuable contribution. They also convey the implicit message that Jews should be open to the widest possible discussion no less than anyone else. The choice is clear. If we wish for the world to believe in the positive contribution to humanity of the Jewish spirit we must first of all believe in ourselves.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Well gentlemen, we have entered our final round.  Concluding thoughts please.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Wasserstein: </strong> I did not accuse Arendt of being ‘a self-hating Jew.’ That term is not part of my vocabulary. What I do, however, maintain is that when she refers to Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial as ‘a typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic’ or when she enthusiastically adopts the virulent vocabulary and imagery of anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont and J. A. Hobson in denouncing Jewish capitalists, it is surely a rather strained reading that sees such borrowings as evidence of Arendt’s desire to appeal to the better instincts of her fellow-Jews. A more plausible interpretation is that Arendt herself internalized the attitudes of many of the anti-Semitic writers, including the Nazi historians on whom she relied.</p>
<p>Arendt&#8217;s interpretation of modern Jewish history rests on crude reductionism, on a primitive taxonomy of Jewish society, on a simplistic and exaggerated ascription of social roles to Jews as a collectivity, and on the lumping attribution to certain groups of Jews such as the wealthy ‘parasites’ in the Third Republic of a coherence and semi-criminal agency that Arendt was later, with equal ahistoricity, to pin on the <em>Judenräte </em>in occupied Europe. Much of this she got directly from her Nazi and other anti-semitic authorities.</p>
<p>As regards the question of Jewish resistance and the &#8216;Jewish Councils&#8217; during World War II, it seems Satter and I agree that Arendt&#8217;s wild pronouncements on this issue were both ahistorical and morally misconceived. The question remains, therefore, why a writer with such a perverse view of the role of Jews in the world should be regarded as any sort of authority on modern Jewish history.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Satter: </strong>Ultimately, Arendt is not regarded as an authority on modern Jewish history although she wrote a great deal on this subject. She is seen as a profound investigator of totalitarianism and it on this that her reputation depends.</p>
<p>I think that Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism as the combination of ideology and terror and her understanding of ideology as a substitute for empirical reality is very important to us today. The totalitarian worldview is deeply counter-intuitive. There is a tendency to treat it as a joke and to underestimate its murderous potential. We therefore need to understand, as Arendt shows us, that what is at stake is an attempt to destroy what is human under the overwhelming pressure of a deluded view of reality.</p>
<p>Arendt’s work, along with that of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz, and many others helped to turn the West against communism and against the Soviet Union. But this should be seen as their great achievement. We excluded a consideration of Islamic fanaticism from our discussion but the relevance of Arendt’s definitions for an understanding of radical Islam is striking. A man made ideology is again trying to impose itself with the help of unlimited terror. The West can and will make many mistakes in its struggle with totalitarianism but we have the means to understand what it is that threatens us. For this, we owe a great deal – despite its shortcomings – to the work of Hannah Arendt.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Satter and Bernard Wasserstein, our time is up, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The New Cold War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-new-cold-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-cold-war</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-new-cold-war/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:01:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William R. Hawkins]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ambassador Jon Huntsman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american initiative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Beijing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bennett]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chinese]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chinese ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chinese vice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate conference]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Copenhagen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dalai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dalai Lama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[December]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic island]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Department]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DoD]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[draft]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[February]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Foreign]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign ministry spokesperson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[formal protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John T. Bennett]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jon huntsman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meeting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear weapons program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offensive weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pentagon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PRC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[province]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[qdr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Quadrennial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[renegade province]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ruling communist party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sanctions against iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secretary of State Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secretary Robert Gate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taiwan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[territorial integrity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tibet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TIME]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51760</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Chinese leaders believe they can stand up to America anywhere, anytime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/us-china-yin-yang1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51769" title="us-china-yin-yang" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/us-china-yin-yang1.jpg" alt="" width="480" height="476" /></a></p>
<p>The People’s Republic of China has denounced the meeting of Tibet’s Dalai Lama with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Feb.18. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu <a href="http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t659091.htm">said</a> the meetings:</p>
<blockquote><p>“have severely violated the basic norms governing international relations….The Chinese Government and people stand steadfast in their resolve to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Any attempt from any person to interfere in China&#8217;s internal affairs under the Dalai issue is doomed to failure.”</p></blockquote>
<p>For Beijing the issue is not just about the oppression in Tibet, but the Dalai Lama’s larger message that it is the responsibility of the outside world to bring Communist China into the mainstream of global democracy,</p>
<p>Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai called in U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman for what were called “solemn representations.” This was the second time in recent weeks that the ambassador has been summoned. The previous time was after the Obama administration announced on January 29 that it would fulfill the commitment made by the Bush administration to sell $6.4 billion worth of defensive arms to Taiwan. Beijing has massed offensive weapons opposite the democratic island. The PRC considers Taiwan to be a renegade province despite its de facto independence for over sixty years.</p>
<p>The U.S. did not summon the Chinese ambassador in Washington for a formal protest after Beijing blocked an American initiative to strengthen sanctions against Iran for its nuclear weapons program. As <em>Global Times</em>, an official publication of the ruling Communist Party, stated<em> </em>in a Feb 10 <a href="http://opinion.globaltimes.cn/editorial/2010-02/504906.html">editoria</a>l, “China has economic stakes in Iran, and China is determined to protect its interest through diplomacy.”</p>
<p>U.S.-PRC relations have soured steadily since the confrontation between the two powers at the UN Climate conference in Copenhagen in December. At that meeting, President Obama came face to face with Chinese intransigence and saw his year long attempt to cooperate with China come to nothing.</p>
<p>While the White House and State Department were rethinking engagement with China, the Defense Department was finishing its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the blueprint for how the U.S. military will meet threats to national security. The February 8 issue of the weekly <em>Defense News</em> had a disturbing sidebar by John T. Bennett to its lead <a href="http://defensenews.com/story.php?i=4489193&amp;c=FEA&amp;s=CVS">story</a> about the QDR. Bennett reported,</p>
<blockquote><p>As the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review moved from a December draft to the February final version, Pentagon officials deleted several passages and softened others about China’s military buildup.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>Gone is one passage, present in the Dec. 3 draft, declaring that “prudence requires” the United States prepare for “disruptive competition and conflict” with China.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>Altered are passages about Russian arms sales to Beijing and China’s 2007 destruction of a low-orbit satellite.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>Why the changes? One Pentagon official said department and Obama administration officials worried that harsh words might upset Chinese officials at a time when the United States and China are so economically intertwined.</p></blockquote>
<p>Trade policy is not, however, in the DoD’s province. It is more likely that the QDR reflects Secretary Robert Gate’s often articulated view that future wars will be like the current small, irregular combat in Afghanistan rather than large-scale conventional warfare against a rival nation-state.</p>
<p>In his joint <a href="http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1416">announcement</a> of the QDR and the 2011 budget on Feb. 2, Gates summarized his vision as, “Rebalanc[ing] our programs in order to institutionalize and enhance our ability to fight the wars we are in today, while at the same time providing a hedge against current and future risks and contingencies.” The “hedge” is not of sufficient concern to justify continuing programs like the F-22 air superiority fighter, or a capability to mount large-scale Marine amphibious assaults, or an expanded national missile defense system. Shipbuilding plans will also see the Navy continue to shrink, with an emphasis on smaller warships.</p>
<p>The QDR states, “successfully balancing requires that the Department make hard choices on the level of resources required as well as accepting and managing risk in a way that favors success in today’s wars.” Obviously, winning in Iraq and Afghanistan are the current top priorities, but Gates has also emphasized his desire to “institutionalize” DoD planning, meaning his vision of avoiding confrontations with a rising “peer competitor” like China or even a major regional power like Iran.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.defense.gov/qdr/QDR%20as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdf">QDR</a> did not completely ignore China, though the country was mentioned only a handful of times in 105 pages. Its most complete statement is on page 60.</p>
<blockquote><p>China’s military has begun to develop new roles, missions, and capabilities in support of its growing regional and global interests, which could enable it to play a more substantial and constructive role in international affairs. The United   States welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a greater global role. The United   States welcomes the positive benefits that can accrue from greater cooperation. However, lack of transparency and the nature of China’s military development and decision-making processes raise legitimate questions about its future conduct and intentions within Asia and beyond. Our relationship with China must therefore be multidimensional and undergirded by a process of enhancing confidence and reducing mistrust in a manner that reinforces mutual interests.</p></blockquote>
<p>A bit tougher review of China’s military buildup is on p. 31, before the ludicrous statement about welcoming the “constructive role” of a “strong, prosperous and successful China.”</p>
<blockquote><p>As part of its long-term, comprehensive military modernization, China is developing and fielding large numbers of advanced medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles, new attack submarines equipped with advanced weapons, increasingly capable long-range air defense systems, electronic warfare and computer network attack capabilities, advanced fighter aircraft, and counter-space systems. China has shared only limited information about the pace, scope, and ultimate aims of its military modernization programs, raising a number of legitimate questions regarding its long term intentions.</p></blockquote>
<p>The notion that American military leaders and defense analysts don’t know what Beijing is trying to do and need to find out more before determining if there is a danger is disingenuous. Every advanced weapon is being designed to attack and defeat U.S. forces. In Chinese documents, the new anti-ship ballistic missile being developed is shown in artwork as attacking U.S. aircraft carriers.</p>
<p>None of the issues currently roiling U.S.-PRC relations are new. What has changed over the last decade is the wealth and industrial power Chinese leaders now have at their command. Economic growth is being turned into diplomatic influence and military strength. President Hu Jintao built his career as a hard-liner and has centered his leadership position on a close alliance with the People’s Liberation Army. Looking at the turmoil in America, Chinese leaders believe that the balance of power is shifting and they can now stand up to America on issues across the board. Such a change, whether real or imagined, makes for a much more dangerous world whether the Pentagon wants to admit it or not.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-r-hawkins/the-new-cold-war/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>19</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>St. Louis U&#8217;s Inverted Values</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/st-louis-us-inverted-values/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=st-louis-us-inverted-values</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/st-louis-us-inverted-values/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:08:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Angela Davis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[association]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Catholic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conference]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dan Laub]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dean Scott Smith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dean Smith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dulles airport]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Cantor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocides]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holocaust deniers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jon Kyl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leadership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lunch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minority whip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nelson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norman Finkelstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[republican senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[return]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[return flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[saint louis university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scott smith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[senate leadership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Speaker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[st louis university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[St. Louis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Subject]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TIME]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time dean]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tuesday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university administrators]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Values]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wednesday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[week]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Whip]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48033</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Islamists are welcome, their critics are not. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48063" title="slu_pic" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/slu_pic1.jpg" alt="slu_pic" width="500" height="376" /></p>
<p>On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week I was in Washington, where I visited with three U.S. Senators and three Congressmen, including the whips of both houses. I was meeting Eric Cantor for the first time, but all the others had appeared at events I had hosted or provided blurbs for my political books. Jon Kyl, the Minority Whip in the Senate invited me to a lunch to address the Republican Senate leadership lunch on my next trip to Washington. I mention this because while I was waiting for my return flight in Dulles airport I received a call from my office informing me that a speech I had been invited to give at St. Louis University two weeks later would be cancelled because of conditions that had been set by university administrators that could not be met.</p>
<p>In particular, the administrator in charge, Dean Scott Smith, had told the student whose group had invited me that “Horowitz would never be allowed to speak on a platform alone at Saint Louis University. He could be invited only if there was another speaker on the program to oppose his point of view.” Moreover, the dean continued, while my speaking fee had to be paid by the College Republicans who had invited me, my designated opponent would have his fees and expenses paid by the university. The clear message was that the St. Louis University would not allow its own funds to be tainted by such an unwelcome speaker.</p>
<p>This was the second attempt by the students to invite me, and the second time Dean Smith had thrown a roadblock on their invitation. In October, he had said I could not speak unattended because I would “insinuate that all Muslims are fascists,” something I have never done. In fact, there are videos of my speeches all over the web in which I say just the opposite.</p>
<p>It should be said that while administrators apply these restrictions to critics of radical Islam, no such rules are invoked for Holocaust deniers or supporters of communist genocides. Both Norman Finkelstein and Angela Davis have been invited as standalone speakers at St. Louis University, without anti-communists and defenders of Israel on stage to refute them.</p>
<p>I decided to call Smith’s bluff and suggested that I debate Cary Nelson, the well-to-the left president of the American Association of University Professors, on the subject of academic freedom. I called Cary and he agreed. Smith didn’t like this because he was aware that Nelson had responded to his attempt to bar me from speaking by saying that St. Louis University was a “university in name only.” So Smith asked the student host Dan Laub why the subject had changed from Islamo-fascism to academic freedom. Why indeed!</p>
<p>But again I decided to test his mettle and told Dan that the subject we would debate would be Academic Freedom and Islamo-Fascism. Curve ball. Smith came back with a new caveat. There would have to be a third speaker to mind Cary and me and put our discussion in the framework of “Catholic Values.” Some joke. What Catholic Values did the communist Angela Davis or the atheist Norman Finkelstein express when they spoke alone?</p>
<p>Better yet, this weekend Dean Smith and the Catholics at St. Louis University hosted a three day conference put on by the Muslim Student Association, a well-established front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The <a href="http://docs.google.com/View?id=dsks9tx_14hnw4jvf9">conference dealt with</a> religious themes such as why requiring two women to be a witness or letting them inherit only half of what a man does or requiring them to submit to their husbands represents “the perfection of our religion.”</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/st-louis-us-inverted-values/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>24</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>After Brown victory, Obama struggles to control message &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:52:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[address]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apparent attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[child nutrition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conversation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Department of Homeland Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[discretionary spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eating contest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farmers child]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal entitlement programs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freeze]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[goal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care Reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house minority leader john boehner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Boehner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leader John Boehner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Massachusetts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[medicare medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minority leader john boehner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national conversation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scott Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state of the union address]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surprise victory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trillion deficits]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United States of America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[victory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wednesday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[week]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47826</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With the president&#8217;s State of the Union address coming up on Wednesday, the White House appears to be struggling to find its feet. Republican Scott Brown&#8217;s surprise victory in liberal Massachusetts has dominated the national conversation in the last week and made Obama&#8217;s goal of signing health care reform impossible before the big speech. Now, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100126/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1077"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/videolthumb.95fe3d629eea0a4327b7ee7a232edfac.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>With the president&#8217;s State of the Union address coming up on Wednesday, the White House appears to be struggling to find its feet. Republican Scott Brown&#8217;s surprise victory in liberal Massachusetts has dominated the national conversation in the last week and made Obama&#8217;s goal of signing health care reform impossible before the big speech.  Now, even Obama&#8217;s apparent attempt to soothe voters&#8217; budget-deficit concerns by proposing a three-year freeze on some federal spending is being met with ridicule from both the right and the left.</p>
<p>The plan Obama will propose breaks down as follows:</p>
<p>- Freeze discretionary spending on non-security-related programs and government agencies whose budgets are set annually by Congress. Affected programs could include subsidies for farmers, child nutrition, and national parks.</p>
<p>- Exempt from the freeze would be budgets for federal entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as well as the budgets for the Pentagon, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign aid.</p>
<p>The administration claims this will save the country $250 billion over the next decade, or about 3% of the $9 trillion deficits the U.S. is expected to accumulate over that period.</p>
<p>Conservatives have mocked the freeze as not doing nearly enough to get to the root of the country&#8217;s economic problems. The right-leaning blog RedState.com chided the effort, saying that it would have &#8220;virtually no impact on the financial standing of the United States of America.&#8221; On her Twitter page, right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin compared the freeze to &#8220;promising to slow down from 250 mph to 249.9.&#8221; House Minority Leader John Boehner likened the plan to &#8220;announcing you&#8217;re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest.&#8221;</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100126/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1077">After Brown victory, Obama struggles to control message &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Bin Laden endorses bomb attempt on US plane &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/bin-laden-endorses-bomb-attempt-on-us-plane-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bin-laden-endorses-bomb-attempt-on-us-plane-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/bin-laden-endorses-bomb-attempt-on-us-plane-ap/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:25:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[A U.S. State]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[advance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airliner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Al]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Al Qaida]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anything]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempted attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[audio message]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cairo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christmas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[command]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[core]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[core leadership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crowley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Department]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[group]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[guidance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[indication]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leadership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[message]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offshoots]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Osama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osama bin laden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[P.J. Crowley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Qaida]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Qaida-inspired]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spokesman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state department spokesman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sunday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorist groups]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[top lieutenants]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[US]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yahoo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yemen-based]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47493</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[CAIRO – Osama bin Laden endorsed the failed attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day and threatened new attacks against the United States in an audio message released Sunday that appeared aimed at asserting he maintains some direct command over al-Qaida-inspired offshoots. However, U.S. officials and several researchers who track terrorist groups [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_al_qaida_airline_attack;_ylt=AmnqGbEY3YZmj9olsnMy9e9v24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTNma2NrMGphBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMTI1L21sX2FsX3FhaWRhX2FpcmxpbmVfYXR0YWNrBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMwRwb3MDMwRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2JpbmxhZGVuZW5kbw--"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/videolthumb.61541e8cf560e398e43b76371a0c7dcd.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>CAIRO – Osama bin Laden endorsed the failed attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day and threatened new attacks against the United States in an audio message released Sunday that appeared aimed at asserting he maintains some direct command over al-Qaida-inspired offshoots.</p>
<p>However, U.S. officials and several researchers who track terrorist groups said there was no indication bin Laden or any of his top lieutenants had anything to do with or even knew in advance of the Christmas plot by a Yemen-based group that is one of several largely independent al-Qaida franchises.</p>
<p>A U.S. State Department spokesman said al-Qaida&#8217;s core leadership offers such groups strategic guidance but depends on them to carry it out.</p>
<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s trying to continue to appear relevant&#8221; by talking up the attempted attack by an affiliate, the spokesman, P.J. Crowley, said.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_al_qaida_airline_attack;_ylt=AmnqGbEY3YZmj9olsnMy9e9v24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTNma2NrMGphBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMTI1L21sX2FsX3FhaWRhX2FpcmxpbmVfYXR0YWNrBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMwRwb3MDMwRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2JpbmxhZGVuZW5kbw--">Bin Laden endorses bomb attempt on US plane &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/bin-laden-endorses-bomb-attempt-on-us-plane-ap/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Massachusetts Miracle?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/a-massachusetts-miracle-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-massachusetts-miracle-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/a-massachusetts-miracle-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:00:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[advantage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Attorney General Martha Coakley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[campaign]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic establishment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic stronghold]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[distant memory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eastern Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[edward brooke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fact of life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[general martha coakley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gerald Ford]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[independent voters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[initial advantage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[legislative agenda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[line]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Massachusetts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[percent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poll]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[position]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rasmussen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[republican opponent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scott Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[senator]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[senator scott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state attorney general]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state senator]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[statistical dead heat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suffolk university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[support]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Kennedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thoughtless decision]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[today]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university poll]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46816</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can Republican Scott Brown pull an upset in the Bay State?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46820" title="APTOPIX Kennedy Successor Brown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/alg_brown1.jpg" alt="APTOPIX Kennedy Successor Brown" width="485" height="364" /></p>
<p>The big news about today’s special election in Massachusetts is that it is big news.</p>
<p>The contest between state Attorney General Martha Coakley and her Republican opponent, once-obscure state senator <a href="http://www.brownforussenate.com/">Scott Brown</a>, was never supposed to be much of one. Early forecasts posited that Ted Kennedy’s former seat would be easily reclaimed by a Democratic successor. Instead, Republicans stand poised to score a major upset in the Democratic stronghold – and with it the irony-rich possibility that Kennedy’s seat could become the GOP’s last line of defense against much of the legislative agenda championed by the late liberal lion.</p>
<p>None of this was in the script. Massachusetts has long been friendly Democratic territory. The last Republican to serve as senator of the state – <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Brooke">Edward Brooke</a> in 1978 – is a distant memory. It has been 16 years since the state sent a Republican to Congress. Democratic domination is such an accepted fact of life that in 2008 Republicans chose not to run candidates for six House races. It was not a thoughtless decision: In the four competitive races, Republicans were thumped by margins of least 40 percent. Today, Democrats control all ten of the state’s House seats. Democrats outnumber Republicans three-to-one. If ever there was a place for Republicans to strike a blow against the Democratic establishment, the Bay State was not it.</p>
<p>For a while, indeed, the Senate race seemed to conform to old patterns. But in recent days the race has tightened dramatically. Last week yielded a series of surprise polls that showed Coakley’s initial advantage crumbling and the race in a statistical dead heat. Some polls even give Brown the advantage: A recent Suffolk University poll showed Brown leading Coakley by 50 percent to 46 percent, while a <em>Politco</em> <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31621.html">poll</a> conducted this Monday had Brown with a staggering 9-point lead. Even more worryingly for Democrats’ fortunes, independent voters have been breaking for Brown. In a state where 51 percent of the electorate is unaffiliated with either of the two major parties, the significance of that statistic can not be overstated.</p>
<p>What’s behind Brown’s rise? In part, he has benefited from the insipid and complacent campaign that Coakley has run. Having taken victory for granted, she has spent little time making her case to the voters. The campaign’s desperate last-minute scramble to drum up support – capped by a rescue attempt this weekend by a visiting President Obama – underscores the bankruptcy of that strategy.</p>
<p>With Coakley failing to define herself, Brown has proven adept at demonstrating just what she stands for. One of those things is giving legal rights, including prosecution in civilian courts, to terrorist captives – a position that Brown has had some success exploiting. As a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard, Brown not only has credibility on the war in terror; he also has the support of most Americans. A recent <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/december_2009/58_favor_waterboarding_of_plane_terrorist_to_get_information">Rasmussen poll</a> found that 71 percent of all voters think that would-be Christmas Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow-up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Just 22 percent take Coakley’s view that such plots should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act. Coakley’s retort has been to link Brown with what she has called the failed policies of “the Bush-Cheney administration.” Unpromisingly for this line of attack, however, the Rasmussen poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with the original Bush-Cheney view that terrorist captives should be subjected to aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding.</p>
<p>Coakley hasn’t shored up her national security credentials with her opposition to President Obama’s surge of troops in Afghanistan. More damaging to the campaign has been her defense of that position. In an unfortunate bit of military analysis, Coakley has said that U.S. forces should withdraw from Afghanistan because “we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists.” But now, according to Coakley, “They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.” In fact, there is widespread evidence of strategic cooperation between Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda elements – a reality highlighted with the recent murder of seven CIA agents by al-Qaeda double agent and Taliban sympathizer Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi in Khost, Afghanistan. In this context, Coakley’s claim that al-Qaeda is no longer a threat in Afghanistan seems about as astute as Gerald Ford’s blundering <a href="http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/ford/essays/biography/3">assurance</a> in a 1976 presidential debate that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”</p>
<p>Healthcare is another issue that has worked in Brown’s favor. If elected, Brown would deny Senate Democrats the 60-vote supermajority they need to override a GOP filibuster of the health care bill. That makes Brown the man who could stop ObamaCare. The issue has special resonance in Massachusetts, whose increasingly unpopular “universal” health care law is seen as a model for the federal legislation. Once widely supported, the state’s health care program is now a source of voter discontent. Massachusetts families pay <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/08/22/bay_state_health_insurance_premiums_highest_in_country/">the country’s highest health insurance premiums</a>, according to the Commonwealth Fund, and more than a third of state residents consider the law a failure. Strange though it may seem, the fact that Brown may be the critical vote to block the health care bill – Ted Kennedy’s favorite piece of legislation – may actually help him win Kennedy’s seat.</p>
<p>It helps that the telegenic and well-spoken Brown is also an attractive candidate in his own right. His shining moment came during a recent debate, when moderator David Gergen asked if Brown wanted “to sit in Teddy Kennedy’s seat” in order to stop ObamaCare. Brown <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJEEQHOnI2Q">took memorable issue</a> with that description. “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy’s seat. It’s not the Democrats’ seat. It’s the people’s seat.” “<a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31579.html%20">People’s Seat</a>” has since become campaign supporters’ unofficial rallying cry.</p>
<p>Brown still faces an uphill battle. State Democrats have a larger and more effective political structure in place. And while special elections are generally low-turnout affairs, the prospect of losing a seat so long under Democratic control could propel enough frightened Democrats to the polls.</p>
<p>Even if Brown comes up short, however, the fact that a race many expected to be a Democratic coronation has been so hard-fought sends a clear warning to the Democratic leadership: the Democrats’ domestic policy agenda is now a political liability and could cost them come next fall’s midterm elections. Then there is the more immediate concern. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was the Democrats’ to lose. Now lose it they could.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/a-massachusetts-miracle-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>25</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Victory for Free Speech in Texas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/victory-for-free-speech-in-texas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=victory-for-free-speech-in-texas</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/victory-for-free-speech-in-texas/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:19:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arlington texas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[article]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bodyguard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[case]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college campuses]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservative voices]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cynical attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dallas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dallas area]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dutch politician]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom of speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fundamental right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geert Wilders']]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global assault]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[human rights activist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infidels]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[initial decision]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intimidation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic circle of north america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic groups]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic organizations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic society]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[January]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Kaufman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[magazine writer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[petition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politician]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[standstill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[supremacism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Texas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[texas supreme court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the Netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tommy Trojan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. Ironically]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. Supreme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[victory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[writer joe]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46636</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But the war to defend it is just heating up.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46638" title="judge-gavel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/judge-gavel.gif" alt="judge-gavel" width="450" height="266" /></p>
<p>In a major victory for the increasingly embattled freedom of speech, the Texas Supreme Court has just denied a petition by the Islamic Society of Arlington, Texas and six other Texas-based Islamic organizations to review their case against human rights activist (and FrontPage Magazine writer) Joe Kaufman. The case has already gone against the Islamic groups in the initial decision as well as on appeal, but they seem determined to silence Kaufman, and could conceivably try now to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The suit itself is a manifestation of the global assault on free speech that is picking up steam more quickly than ever now, with conservative voices shouted down and physically threatened on college campuses, and warriors for free speech such as the Dutch politician Geert Wilders facing trial for exercising this fundamental right.</p>
<p>The Islamic groups’ suit against Kaufman is a cynical attempt to silence him and prevent his dissemination of truths about them that they would prefer unwary Infidels didn’t know – specifically, the terror ties of Islamic groups in the U.S. Ironically, however, none of the groups that sued Kaufman were actually mentioned in the article they claimed libeled them. Kaufman explains: “In October 2007, I had a lawsuit and a restraining order brought against me by seven Dallas-area Islamic organizations, who objected to an <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28292">article that I had written for <em>FrontPage</em></a>. Not one of the groups was mentioned in the article. It was concerning information I had personally discovered linking the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) to the financing of terrorism abroad. My allegations regarding this were and are backed up by irrefutable proof.”</p>
<p>As frivolous as their charges against Kaufman manifestly were, their implications were ominous. Leftists and their Islamic supremacist allies, unable to refute the evidence and arguments their opponents present, are resorting to intimidation both legal and physical. While Kaufman has been harassed in the courtroom for over two years now, conservative speakers at campuses all over the country routinely face the specter of being physically attacked simply for expressing views out of sync with politically correct dogma. Speaking at the University of Southern California on November 4, 2009, David Horowitz noted that this was a relatively recent development: “It used to be a pleasure for me to speak on a college campus like USC.  I can remember the days when I could stroll onto the USC campus and walk over to the statue of Tommy Trojan where College Republicans had erected a platform for a rally to support our troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 at which I was to speak.  Now, however, I can’t set foot on this campus – or any campus – without being accompanied by a personal bodyguard and a battalion of armed campus security police to protect me and my student hosts.” He said this while protected by a bodyguard and twelve armed campus security officers.</p>
<p>Both of these forms of intimidation are being directed now at Geert Wilders, the Dutch Parliamentarian who produced the film <em>Fitna</em>, which shows how Islamic jihadists use violent passages of the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism. For this and other alleged acts of “hate speech,” Wilders goes on trial in the Netherlands on January 20, for charges including having “intentionally offended a group of people, i.e. Muslims, based on their religion.”</p>
<p>It is a sad day for the freedom of speech when a man can be put on trial for causing another man offense. If offending someone were really a crime warranting prosecution by the civil authorities, the legal system would be brought to a standstill. But of course what Dutch authorities and Muslim groups in the Netherlands really want to bring to a standstill by trying Wilders is his truth-telling about the nature of Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism – an honesty that has made his party one of the most popular in the Netherlands. The trial is an attempt by the nation’s political elites to silence one of their most formidable critics.</p>
<p>Wilders delineates the implications of his trial: “On the 20<sup>th</sup> of January 2010, a political trial will start. I am being prosecuted for my political convictions. The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing. If a politician is not allowed to criticise an ideology anymore, this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom. However I remain combative: I am convinced that I will be acquitted.”</p>
<p>Even if he does prevail, however, Wilders is still not free. “I would not qualify myself as a free man,” he has explained. “Four and a half years ago I lost my freedom. I am under guard permanently, courtesy to those who prefer violence to debate.”</p>
<p>Will American defenders of the freedom of speech also soon have to be under permanent guard, and spending thousands of hours defending themselves in court from frivolous charges that are intended only to silence them? We have already started down that road. Joe Kaufman has won another victory this week, but the Islamic supremacist machine in the United States has by no means given up its larger jihad against free speech and free thought. Those who are determined not to be silenced must settle in for a long, hard fight.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/victory-for-free-speech-in-texas/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>33</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama takes steps to bolster security &#8211; latimes.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obama-takes-steps-to-bolster-security-latimes-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-takes-steps-to-bolster-security-latimes-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obama-takes-steps-to-bolster-security-latimes-com/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:17:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[advance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Agency]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Airlines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amsterdam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bombing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[breakdowns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[buck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cabinet officials]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christmas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[counter terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[explosives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extremist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gaps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intelligence reorganization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intelligence system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[internal investigation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Investigation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[john brennan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nigerian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest airlines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest airlines flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[official]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reluctance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[responsibility]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security chiefs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[series]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[share information]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thursday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[warning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[warning signs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[way]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=45313</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Declaring that &#8220;the buck stops with me,&#8221; President Obama on Thursday released the results of an internal investigation into the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt and ordered a series of incremental measures meant to close gaps in the U.S. intelligence system that failed to detect it in advance.The president avoided blaming any particular agency or [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Declaring that &#8220;the buck stops with me,&#8221; President Obama on Thursday released the results of an internal investigation into the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt and ordered a series of incremental measures meant to close gaps in the U.S. intelligence system that failed to detect it in advance.The president avoided blaming any particular agency or official for the breakdowns that allegedly allowed a Nigerian extremist to board a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit armed with explosives, leaving a series of warning signs along the way.&#8221;As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people. And when the system fails, it is my responsibility,&#8221; Obama said.The remedies he ordered in a memo to Cabinet officials and security chiefs mostly were modest steps. And the report, conducted by Obama&#8217;s counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, concluded that another round of sweeping intelligence reorganization &#8220;is not required.&#8221;&#8221;Before 9/11, there was often a reluctance or refusal to share information between departments and agencies,&#8221; Brennan said. &#8220;That is not what happened here.&#8221;</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-obama-terror8-2010jan08,0,2657238.story">Obama takes steps to bolster security &#8211; latimes.com</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obama-takes-steps-to-bolster-security-latimes-com/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Terror in the Skies Requires Real Action on the Ground &#8211; by Michael Reagan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/terror-in-the-skies-requires-real-action-on-the-ground-by-michael-reagan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=terror-in-the-skies-requires-real-action-on-the-ground-by-michael-reagan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/terror-in-the-skies-requires-real-action-on-the-ground-by-michael-reagan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:00:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Reagan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abdulmutallab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airport]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american authorities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blatant act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bombing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chief Janet Napolitano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christmas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas in afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CIA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cia headquarters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cia station chief]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[counterterrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[courage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extremist views]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farouk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[God]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grace of god]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[headquarters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[high priority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homeland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janet Napolitano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[john brennan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minor victory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mr. President. You]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[proper communication]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[real war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[retraction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security chief]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self protection]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[show]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TIME]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war against terror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[way]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=45269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Mr. President, we can’t afford any more of your on-the-job training.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-45273" title="obama2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/obama2.jpg" alt="obama2" width="450" height="325" /></p>
<p><span><span>This country is on alert now in a way it has not been for almost nine years. Between the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack, the bombing of the CIA headquarters in Yemen, and near-daily airport scares, we have been forcefully reminded that a real war against terror continues to be waged here at home and abroad.</span></span></p>
<p>And even as I applaud Americans for not letting recent events unduly disrupt their lives and thereby giving the terrorists a minor victory, I remain deeply concerned about the current state of our homeland security.</p>
<p>Shortly after the incident on Northwest Flight 253, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano first insisted that “the system worked” regarding the Christmas Day attempt. This particularly blatant act of defensive self-protection was such an obvious falsehood that Counterterrorism Czar John Brennan has had to go from news show to news show offering a retraction. This bumbling effort is not exactly the type of first response that Americans should expect from those tasked with protecting our country.</p>
<p>Indeed, as the days progress, we are beginning to see just how great a retraction was needed. American authorities knew, before he ever boarded that plane, that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had extremist views and received training from Al Qaeda. In an act of tremendous courage, Abdulmutallab’s own father apparently had reported him as a person of concern to the U.S. embassy and CIA station chief. Abdulmutallab was on a government watch list. He had been spending time in a country with known terrorist activity.</p>
<p>With proper communication between security and counterterrorism agencies and proper scrutiny, this young man would have been put on a high-priority list. At the airport, he would have been flagged, he would have been searched, and he would have been caught. Instead, it is only through the grace of God and the courage of a passenger that the lives of over 200 were saved this Christmas.</p>
<p>In Afghanistan, we were not so fortunate, and seven American operatives were killed.</p>
<p>We do not have to live in fear in order to be smart about the dangers. We do not have to be an international bully to rightfully assert our position and interests around the world. The Obama administration, however, cannot seem to get a handle on the wide middle ground between “fear-mongering” and cowering in submission.</p>
<p>In many ways, this Christmas Day attempt is a great opportunity for the president. With no loss of life, systemic and human errors were revealed and can now be fixed. And they must be fixed.</p>
<p>We need to move forward with a comprehensive strategy to connect our intelligence dots. We can already see that tremendous strides have been made since the disastrous intelligence failure of 9/11, but we learned two weeks ago that we have not come far enough. Whatever motivation or resources are required, we need to improve our intelligence and make full use of it, rather than letting cases like Abdulmutallab’s fall through the cracks.</p>
<p>It would be all too easily to blame this on poor screening at airports here and overseas, and to reactively devote all our energies to bigger and better checkpoint technologies. To some measure, some of these recommended upgrades may be appropriate. But the greatest challenge will be for the president to take a step back and look at the entire system with all its moving parts and streamline the process. In doing, he must act with the conviction that the threat is imminent and real.</p>
<p>It’s time to step up to the plate, Mr. President. You signed up for this job, and we can’t afford any more of your on-the-job training.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/terror-in-the-skies-requires-real-action-on-the-ground-by-michael-reagan/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>14</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;Shock&#8221; U.S. report due on attempted airline attack &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/shock-u-s-report-due-on-attempted-airline-attack-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shock-u-s-report-due-on-attempted-airline-attack-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/shock-u-s-report-due-on-attempted-airline-attack-ap/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:22:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[airline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airline security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airliner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airliners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempted attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bombing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christmas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[committee reviews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[congressional committee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[December]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit-bound]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EST]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[explosives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farouk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GMT]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nigerian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nigerian man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reuters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security lapses]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[September]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[september 11 2001]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thursday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[top aides]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[umar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[underwear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White House]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yahoo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=45234</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[WASHINGTON Reuters – The White House was poised to release a report on Thursday that top aides said will shock Americans about security lapses that allowed a Nigerian man to come close to blowing up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25.President Barack Obama, in remarks scheduled for 4:30 p.m. EST 2130 GMT, was set to [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>WASHINGTON Reuters – The White House was poised to release a report on Thursday that top aides said will shock Americans about security lapses that allowed a Nigerian man to come close to blowing up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25.President Barack Obama, in remarks scheduled for 4:30 p.m. EST 2130 GMT, was set to outline steps the U.S. government is taking to try to shore up airline security, mindful of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States involving hijacked airliners.The White House was due to release a declassified review of what went wrong to allow the Christmas Day bombing attempt in which Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is accused of trying to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear.By releasing the review, Obama may be seeking to limit the political damage to his administration ahead of expected congressional committee reviews of the attempted attack.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_security_airline_usa;_ylt=AncWv6RtifurfruGLItWwras0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNuZzlyMG1xBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTAwMTA3L3VzX3NlY3VyaXR5X2FpcmxpbmVfdXNhBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMgRwb3MDNwRwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDb2JhbWF0b3JlbGVh">&#8220;Shock&#8221; U.S. report due on attempted airline attack &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/shock-u-s-report-due-on-attempted-airline-attack-ap/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Charles Krauthammer: Hollow Words on Terrorism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/charles-krauthammer-hollow-words-on-terrorism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=charles-krauthammer-hollow-words-on-terrorism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/charles-krauthammer-hollow-words-on-terrorism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:19:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[air]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airliner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arizona]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arizona governor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attacker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[authorities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brownie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cash]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detonator]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[father]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Governor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Heck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heck of a job]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heck of a job brownie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homeland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Homeland Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janet Napolitano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jihadist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[job]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[luggage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quick actions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[RealClearPolitics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secretary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secretary of homeland security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Son]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tendencies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[transoceanic flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44605</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[WASHINGTON &#8212; Janet Napolitano &#8212; former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security &#8212; will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: &#8220;The system worked.&#8221; The attacker&#8217;s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son&#8217;s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>WASHINGTON &#8212; Janet Napolitano &#8212; former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security &#8212; will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: &#8220;The system worked.&#8221; The attacker&#8217;s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son&#8217;s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.</p>
<p>Heck of a job, Brownie.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/02/war_what_war_99742.html">RealClearPolitics &#8211; Hollow Words on Terrorism</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/charles-krauthammer-hollow-words-on-terrorism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Panic room saved artist Kurt Westergaard from Islamist assassin &#8211; Times Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/panic-room-saved-artist-kurt-westergaard-from-islamist-assassin-times-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=panic-room-saved-artist-kurt-westergaard-from-islamist-assassin-times-online</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/panic-room-saved-artist-kurt-westergaard-from-islamist-assassin-times-online/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:07:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Aarhus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aarhus denmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[alarm button]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[artist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assailant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attacker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bathroom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon of the prophet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon of the prophet muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoonist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crude words]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death threats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drawing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[explosive impact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extremist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Friday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fury]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[granddaughter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[home]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[impact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ink]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kurt westergaard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[night]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[panic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[panic room]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prophet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[riots]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[room]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[second city]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stephanie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[turban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44597</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Just when Denmark thought the worst was over, Islamic fury has come back to haunt it with an assassination attempt on the artist whose cartoon of the prophet Muhammad as a suicide bomber had an explosive impact four years ago on the Muslim world.An axe-wielding Somali extremist broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Just when Denmark thought the worst was over, Islamic fury has come back to haunt it with an assassination attempt on the artist whose cartoon of the prophet Muhammad as a suicide bomber had an explosive impact four years ago on the Muslim world.An axe-wielding Somali extremist broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on Friday night as the 75-year-old cartoonist was looking after Stephanie, his five-year-old granddaughter.Westergaard, whose little ink drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban sparked riots throughout the Middle East in 2006, has received numerous death threats. He pressed an alarm button to summon police when the attacker entered the house in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, by breaking a window.He did not have time to collect the child from the living room before locking himself into a “panic room”, a specially fortified bathroom. He said the assailant had shouted “swear words, really crude words” and shrieked about “blood” and “revenge”, as he smashed the axe in vain against the bathroom door.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6973966.ece">Panic room saved artist Kurt Westergaard from Islamist assassin &#8211; Times Online</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/panic-room-saved-artist-kurt-westergaard-from-islamist-assassin-times-online/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Preventing the Next Terrorist Attack – by Andrew Cline</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/andrew-cline/preventing-the-next-terrorist-attack-%e2%80%93-by-andrew-cline/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=preventing-the-next-terrorist-attack-%25e2%2580%2593-by-andrew-cline</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/andrew-cline/preventing-the-next-terrorist-attack-%e2%80%93-by-andrew-cline/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:05:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Cline]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abdulmutallab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[access]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[additional security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[additional security measures]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aftermath]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Cline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[central security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christmas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deploy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detonate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[explosive device]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farouk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hawaii]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international passengers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mid flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[naught]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nothing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[operational standpoint]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[problem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[puffers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seat cushions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security officials]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security procedures]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[swabs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[takeoff]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time and money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[toilet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43895</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the new airport security measures won’t stop future bombing attempts. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43896" title="through-airport-security" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/through-airport-security1.jpg" alt="through-airport-security" width="470" height="301" /></p>
<p>Additional <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27security.html">security measures</a> reported in the aftermath of the Christmas bomber’s failed attempt to down a U.S. airline will amount to naught because they don’t address the central security failure.</p>
<p>Keeping international passengers in their seats for <a href="http://www.shoppingblog.com/blog/1226099">the last hour of a flight</a> will do nothing but create wet seat cushions, as those who need “to go,” including children, are prohibited access to the toilet. Any terrorist who sneaks an explosive on a plane will simply detonate it mid-flight or after takeoff.  Limiting passengers to a single carry-on bag will have no effect.  <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6969645.ece">Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab</a> had only one carry-on, and apparently strapped the explosive device to his leg.</p>
<p>Will additional pat-downs work? Not if a terrorist hides the explosive in his underwear.</p>
<p>Measures that might have prevented Abdulmutallab from getting his explosive aboard Flight 253 – air puffers and swabs that detect traces of the explosive he reportedly used, and full-body scanning – take time and money to deploy and won’t be used on all passengers. If security officials are not screening the terrorists, these measures will fail, too.</p>
<p>And that’s the central issue. The security system failed to screen out the terrorist.</p>
<p>“We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable,”  President Obama said in his brief press conference from his vacation in Hawaii on Monday. “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face.”</p>
<p>That’s important, but it misses the point. The White House has announced a review of all security procedures. But based on what we already know, it is obvious that the United States effectively ignores, from an operational standpoint, the vast majority of intelligence it receives regarding terror suspects.</p>
<p>According to the administration, the government receives 18,000 tips a day. When Abdullmutallab’s father reported him to the U.S. embassy as a potential Muslim terrorist, it was treated as just another bit of “noise” in the system. It was just one of 18,000 bits received that day, the administration has said. And that is the problem.</p>
<p>Before 9/11, the government collected enough information on the plot to stop it, had anyone put the pieces together. “Connecting the dots” became a buzz phrase in the next year. We would not rest until we had the ability to do that. But in 2009 we still don’t, in part because we don’t have enough resources devoted to doing so.</p>
<p>A dedicated group of suicide bombers can beat even the beefed up security measures now being slowly put into place. For all of his flaws, President Bush understood that when dealing with terrorists, the best defense is a good offense. We shouldn’t be waiting until a terrorist gets to the airport. We should be going after them aggressively.</p>
<p>That means putting more resources into intelligence gathering and “connecting the dots” so we find them before they find us. Unfortunately, this president doesn’t seem interested in taking the war to the terrorists. He seems dedicated to the proposition that this is not a war at all, but a diplomatic problem first, a criminal justice problem second. That approach will work just as well as it did before 9/11.</p>
<p><em>Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.</em></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/andrew-cline/preventing-the-next-terrorist-attack-%e2%80%93-by-andrew-cline/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Security reviews under way after airliner attack &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:44:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[abundance of caution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airliner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[airport]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aviation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aviation security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bathroom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[body]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brazen attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[concoction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[equipment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Explosive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Friday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[investigators]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jitters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[material]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nigerian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nigerian man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northwest flight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security reviews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[smuggling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[success]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sunday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suspect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trans atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yahoo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43706</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Investigators piecing together a brazen attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic airliner said Sunday the suspect tucked a small bag holding his deadly concoction on his body, using an explosive that would have been easily detected with the right airport equipment. His success in smuggling and partially igniting the material on Friday&#8217;s flight to Detroit [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Investigators piecing together a brazen attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic airliner said Sunday the suspect tucked a small bag holding his deadly concoction on his body, using an explosive that would have been easily detected with the right airport equipment.</p>
<p>His success in smuggling and partially igniting the material on Friday&#8217;s flight to Detroit prompted the Obama administration to promise a sweeping review of aviation security.</p>
<p>Adding to the airborne jitters, a second Nigerian man was detained Sunday from the same Northwest flight to Detroit after he locked himself in the plane&#8217;s bathroom. Officials reported that he was belligerent but genuinely sick, and that, in an abundance of caution, the plane was taken to a remote location for screening before passengers were let off.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_on_go_ot/us_airliner_attack;_ylt=AsFZ7PiETVkdlpYCigRZHzqs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNpN3EwOWxiBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMjI4L3VzX2FpcmxpbmVyX2F0dGFjawRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3NlY3VyaXR5cmV2aQ--">Security reviews under way after airliner attack &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 2725/2882 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 11:32:47 by W3 Total Cache -->