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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; book</title>
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		<title>More to &#8216;Hard Choices&#8217; than Benghazi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/more-to-hard-choices-than-benghazi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=more-to-hard-choices-than-benghazi</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hard choices]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Huma Abedin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234358</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton's delusions on North Korea, Cuba, Islamists and more. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #1a1a1a;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/140617_hillary_clinton_hard_choices_ap_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234359" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/140617_hillary_clinton_hard_choices_ap_605.jpg" alt="HiIlary Rodham Clinton" width="259" height="209" /></a>Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book has been in the spotlight over what she says about Benghazi. That chapter, which starts on page 382, is not the only fascinating passage in Hard Choices. Consider, for example, what Hillary says about Islamists.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">“The term Islamist generally refers to people and parties who support a guiding role for Islam in politics and government. It covers a wide spectrum, from those who think Islamic values should inform public policy decisions to those who think that all laws should be judged or even formulated by Islamic authorities to conform to Islamic law. Not all Islamists are alike. In some cases, Islamist leaders and organizations have been hostile to democracy, including some who have supported radical, extremist, and terrorist ideology and actions. But around the world, there are political parties with religious affiliations – Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim – that respect the rules of democratic politics, and it is in America’s interest to encourage all religiously based political parties and leaders to embrace inclusive democracy and reject violence. Any suggestion that faithful Muslims or people of any faith cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous and wrong.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Here readers see the straw man at his finest. Nobody is contending that people of any faith “cannot thrive in a democracy.” The issue is whether Islam itself has a problem with democracy, multi-party elections, free speech, women’s rights, gay rights, diversity, co-education and so forth. The evidence suggests that it does.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Islamists want more than a “guiding role” for Islamic law. They want an exclusive, dominating role. In Islamist regimes non-Islamic groups are second- or third-class citizens. In more than 600 pages Hillary includes nothing on the Islamist group Boko Haram, fond of kidnapping hundreds of girls and burning boys alive.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Some readers will be familiar with Huma Abedin, Hillary’s deputy chief of staff and her ties to Islamic supremacism. Consider how Hard Choices handles the matter.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">In one meeting in Cairo, an agitated participant brought up an “especially outrageous canard. He accused my trusted aide <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/huma-abedin-islamist-connections-and-willful-blindness/">Huma Abedin</a>, who is Muslim, of being a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. This claim circulated by some unusually irresponsible and demagogic right-wing political and media personalities in the United States, including members of Congress. . .” Hillary includes no background information on Abedin and her main argument is that Sen. John McCain has publicly defended her.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">So has president Obama, who calls Abedin “an American patriot and an example of what we need in this country.” The president issued that praise “at the White House’s annual Iftar dinner to break the Ramadan fast.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Readers of Hard Choices are told that in North Korea the political oppression is “nearly” total. Actually, the oppression is total. “Famine is frequent,” she writes, and many of the people “live in abject poverty” but she does not tie that poverty to oppressive Marxist rule and a command economy, or compare the forced famines in China and Ukraine.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Hillary writes that “for fifty years Cuba had been ruled as a Communist dictatorship by Fidel Castro.” Fidel and brother Raul “continue to rule Cuba with absolute power.” As Humberto Fontova notes in The Longest Romance, Castro’s rule is as bad as it gets, comparable to Stalin’s. But Hillary offers no detail about the regime’s political prisoners and persecution of homosexuals. Chile, on the other hand suffered the “brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.” And the coup that brought Pinochet to power, says Hillary, is “a dark chapter in our involvement in the region.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">The author provides no details about the coup and fails to note that the brutal Pinochet, unlike the non-brutal Castro, stepped aside to allow free elections. But readers will observe the first response to blame the United States. Hillary Clinton describes none of the episodes on her watch as Secretary of State, including the Benghazi attack, as a dark chapter in American diplomacy.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">It took a village of handlers to produce Hard Choices, dumbed down to the point of explaining that winter in the southern hemisphere occurs at a different time of year. The book is highly autohagiographical, bulked with gossipy filler such as half a page on Benazir Bhutto’s shalwar kameez, “a long flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive. . . We wore it for a formal dinner. I wore red silk and Chelsea chose turquoise green.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">On page 595 Hillary says she has yet to make the decision to run for President of the United States. If Hard Choices unsettles readers about her suitability for that office, they might also read Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 1999 book by the late Barbara Olson, a victim of the Islamist terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Readers might also consult Peter Collier’s Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Hillary Clinton nowhere mentions Ambassador Kirkpatrick but deciding which woman is the tougher, more intelligent and more successful diplomat should not be a hard choice.</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>
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		<title>Deceptions of a Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/confessions-of-an-anti-american-liar/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=confessions-of-an-anti-american-liar</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:25:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Ayers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fugitive days]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Larry Grathwohl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mccain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[memoir]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Sarah Palin]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209394</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Exposing the lies in Bill Ayers' new "memoir." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Untitled.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209400" alt="Untitled" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Untitled.jpg" width="231" height="245" /></a>Bill Ayers’s latest “memoir,” <i>Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident</i>, like all his writings, is not worth reading, except to keep up with the lies he is spreading.</p>
<p>Ayers, like his 1960s terrorist comrades, counts on the ignorance, gullibility, and tender emotions of the youth. Given the way the history of the 1960s is taught today, young people just might believe the Weatherman terrorist&#8217;s claims of being censored and persecuted, and a victim of a McCarthy-ite witch hunt.  He even likens himself to Galileo.</p>
<p>In the Bill Ayers ego, Galileo was right about the solar system, and Bill Ayers was right about the Vietnam War.  It was a genocidal war, and Bill Ayers represented the resistance.</p>
<p>In Ayers&#8217; world, Sarah Palin and John McCain (a “war criminal” for having served in Vietnam) led the witch hunt against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. He claims that Sarah Palin’s supporters chanted “Kill him” in response to her charges that Obama was “palling around with a terrorist.” Ayers felt like</p>
<blockquote><p>“Goldstein from George Orwell’s <i>1984</i>—the public enemy projected onto a large screen in the ritual ‘two minutes hate’ scene when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing, chanting ‘Kill him!’”</p></blockquote>
<p>This, of course, is false, but Ayers does not feel the need to provide evidence.</p>
<p>Ayers goes out of his way to try to diminish the late Larry Grathwohl, who employed strategies learned in Vietnam to survive infiltrating the Weather Underground. A suspected infiltrator had been beaten to within an inch of his life by the Weatherman terrorists.  Ayers calls Grathwohl, “a paid police informant who hung around SDS briefly back in the day,” but was “dragging himself out of retirement and rebooting his career as a right-wing warrior” in 2008, addressing St. Mary’s College, in a “nationally organized” campaign to “demonize and blacklist” Ayers.  Ayers alleges that Grathwohl spread a “double fiction”: that he had once been an “’FBI agent and that he had infiltrated the Weather Underground.  Neither was true.”</p>
<p>The facts: Grathwohl never claimed to be an FBI agent; <em>he was</em> an FBI informant. There is a public record and no denying that Grathwohl infiltrated the Weather Underground.  He testified before the U.S. Senate and several grand juries, and wrote <a href="http://bringingdownamerica.com/?p=1">a book</a> about his experience.  Grathwohl talked to San Francisco police in 2009 about a statement Ayers made to him implicating Dohrn in the bombing death of Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell.  The case is still open.</p>
<p>Ayers claims that the police, whom he called pigs and tried to kill back in the day, are now his friends. Having cleared the record through a coffee shop conversation with Ayers, the Chicago cops have, according to Ayers, started a book club to discuss his memoir, <i>Fugitive Days.</i><i><br />
</i></p>
<p>Ayers is particularly skilled at lying by omission and diversion.  He spends a considerable amount of space discussing his encounter with a blogger at the Ronald Reagan Airport in 2009, and “confessing” that he did indeed write Obama’s memoirs.  What he fails to mention, though, is <a href="http://www.aim.org/special-report/terrorist-professor-bill-ayers-and-obamas-federal-school-curriculum/">his purpose</a> for being in Washington, and it was to share the stage at an education conference with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Under Secretary Martha Kanter, and a representative from Achieve, the group that designed the federal Common Core standards.</p>
<p>In memoir #2, Ayers claims to have never participated in bombings &#8212; with bombs that were ever intended to harm or kill anyone. Richard Elrod, the city attorney paralyzed in the Days of Rage riot led by Ayers, is forgotten.  Instead, Ayers would have readers believe that he has been a fully committed teacher and family man, a liberated husband who brought his sons to meet wifey Bernardine Dohrn during her lunch hour.</p>
<p>This may fly for a fully indoctrinated college freshman, but those of us who slogged through <i>Fugitive Days</i> might see a contradiction, like when Ayers in several passages describes details about the days that bombs were set:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue.  The birds were singing.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But then again Ayers is careful to say that this is a memoir, <i>not</i> a history.  And the opening line of <i>Fugitive Days </i>is “Memory is a motherf&#8211;ker.”</p>
<p>Bill Ayers, the trickster, taunts “catch me if you can,” as he prepares to schmooze the latest group at a public college or festival, crying censorship whenever anyone objects to student and tax funds being used to host a terrorist and <a href="http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/GrabarChicagoWayUpdated.pdf">quack professor</a>.</p>
<p>Ayers sees himself as an “unlikely academic at a research university” (indeed), someone respected by the academic community, jetting from one public lecture, dissertation committee, teacher workshop, and academic conference, to another.  But then, beginning in 2008, Ayers complains that he was being disinvited as a result of pressure from right-wing zealots.</p>
<p>At the University of Wyoming he was disinvited in 2010 from giving two lectures, one pompously titled, “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action.”</p>
<p>Along came his heroine, student Meg Lanker (now Meg Lanker-Simons). Ayers presents her as “a fighter on every level”:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote><p>“I’m going to sue the university in federal court,” she told me during our first conversation.  “And I’m claiming that it’s <i>my </i>free speech that’s been violated—I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you.”  She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used—no fear, no regret.  I liked her immediately.</p></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>It gets funnier, because Bill Ayers then writes, “Meg’s approach struck me as brilliant—students (and not I) were indeed the injured party.”</p>
<p>Someone forgot to mention, however, that the “young and unafraid, smart and sassy” Meg Lanker was charged with and admitted to making false threats of sexual assault against herself by posting a comment that said she would become a “good Republican b**tch” in retaliation for running her “liberal mouth.”  This was reported in the Laramie <a href="http://www.laramieboomerang.com/articles/2013/04/30/breaking_news/doc518002170be89677502843.txt"><i>Boomerang</i></a><i> </i>on April 30, 2013.  It was reported again on May 3—five months before the release of Ayers’s book—in the pages of the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/meg-lanker-simons-hoax-university-wisconsin_n_3210326.html"><i>Huffington Post</i></a><i>.  </i>Furthermore, this was another “hate” hoax that disturbed liberals like to promote, especially on college campuses.</p>
<p>Ayers quotes anonymous emails at length&#8211;with no proof that they were ever sent.  Alas, perhaps there is a commonality between the obviously disturbed Ms. Lanker-Simons and the professor.</p>
<p>Consider this purple passage about the Republican “thugs” who had prevented Ayers from spreading his goodness to University of Wyoming students:</p>
<blockquote><p>We should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize and mostly to suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue.  After all, a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors can’t be permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters.  We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a howling mob gathers at the gates with flaming torches in hand; in fact, that’s when standing up and pushing back become absolutely necessary.  I wouldn’t force myself on the university, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works.  It would be the equivalent of a book burning, and would be one more step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society. . . .</p></blockquote>
<p>And on and on. You get the idea: Bill Ayers glorifies himself. It is up to those of us who know the truth to continue exposing the deceitful narrative on which his personal mythology has been built.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Book of Lies Tour by Privileged Bill Ayers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/the-book-of-lies-tour-by-privileged-bill-ayers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-book-of-lies-tour-by-privileged-bill-ayers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/the-book-of-lies-tour-by-privileged-bill-ayers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 04:40:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Ayers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Larry Grathwohl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Weathermen]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208254</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America's entitled terrorist and his real record. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Screen-shot-2012-05-08-at-5.37.56-PM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208255" alt="Screen-shot-2012-05-08-at-5.37.56-PM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Screen-shot-2012-05-08-at-5.37.56-PM.png" width="250" height="194" /></a>In his memoir about infiltrating the Weather Underground, <a href="http://bringingdownamerica.com/?p=1"><i>Bringing Down America</i></a><i>: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen, </i>Larry Grathwohl described his frustrations with having to be at two places at once: at his job on the loading dock and at the meetings organized by Weatherman, the domestic terrorist group cofounded by Bill Ayers.  It was 1969, and Grathwohl had recently returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam.  He was 22 years old and had a wife and baby to support.  After the group tried to recruit him (they had been ordered by communist higher ups to recruit from the working class), Grathwohl, with the encouragement of his father-in-law, a retired police officer, decided to infiltrate the group.</p>
<p>It’s hard to be a working class radical—or to even pretend to be one, as Grathwohl learned.  Russell Kirk in <i>Decadence and Renewal in Higher Education </i>recalls that “the higher the students’ background of prosperity, the more radical their rebelliousness.”  Mark Rudd’s attempts to shut down Brooklyn College were rejected by the students there.  But he found success at elite Columbia University.</p>
<p>Like many of the violent troublemakers during the 1960s and 1970s, Bill Ayers was the son of privilege, specifically of the politically powerful and wealthy Thomas Ayers.</p>
<p>After admittedly bombing police stations and government buildings and spending a decade in reasonable comfort on the run from the law, Bill Ayers earned two graduate degrees in education in record time, immediately obtained a teaching position in his hometown of Chicago, and swiftly rose up the tenure ladder to “Distinguished Professor.” He used his time as a professor at the public university to proselytize for the communist revolution, filling up over 40 pages of a curriculum vitae with regurgitated nonsensical agitprop.  He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bennington College (taking a leave from his teaching on the taxpayers’ dime) and turned his creative dissertation into the book <i>Fugitive Days</i>.  Now he is being given a public platform to promote his second memoir <i>Public Enemy</i>, speaking at public colleges as well as public events like the <a href="http://www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/events/public-enemy">Wisconsin Book Festival</a>.  <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2013/10/14/morning-joe-cant-stand-gingrich-welcomes-radical-bomber-bill-ayers-who-h">MSNBC</a> gave him a platform last week with a spin worthy of the old Soviet Union, with a lead-in of clips of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign accusing Barack Obama of “palling around” with terrorists, namely Ayers.</p>
<p>Dressed in his customary pseudo-proletariat chic, Bill Ayers presented himself simply as a retired professor, a concerned grandfather, who had led an “antiwar group.”  There is a “collective responsibility” for the excesses of the era, he said in his fake conciliatory voice.  “We all should apologize,” he said, naming Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, Bob Kerry, Angela Davis, and Jane Fonda.  He had no regrets for destroying government property “in opposition to a genocidal war.” Presenting himself as a victim of “guilt by association,” Ayers distanced himself from Obama—no doubt making Obama very happy. The interview ended with stories about his grandchildren’s bedtime hour.</p>
<p>Ayers was given the floor on national television to lie about his terroristic past.  Larry Grathwohl, who passed away in July, <i>testified</i> in 1974 before the United States Senate subcommittee on internal security.</p>
<p>Grathwohl told the committee, “Bill [Ayers] was the person who directed the ‘focle’ that I was part of to place the bomb at the DPOA [the Detroit Police Officers Association] Building.  He designed the bomb and told me that he would get the necessary materials, the dynamite, et cetera, and 4 days later Bill broke that focle that I was part of up . . . and we were directed to go to Madison, Wis.”  This was in 1970.</p>
<p>A focle was a four-person task force, small in size to evade detection.</p>
<p>Grathwohl talked about the case again at a 2012 conference sponsored by America’s Survival:</p>
<p>“during the meeting with Bill Ayers [in 1970] we were told that our objective would be to place bombs at the Detroit Police Officers Association . . . and at the 13<sup>th</sup> precinct.  Furthermore, Bill instructed us to determine the best time to place these explosive devices that would result in the greatest number of deaths and injuries. . . .”</p>
<p>When Grathwohl pointed out to Ayers that a Red Barn restaurant next door would most likely be destroyed and the customers killed during the explosion, Ayers replied “sometimes innocent people have to die in a revolution.”</p>
<p>At the 1974 Congressional hearing, Grathwohl described another meeting where “Bill [Ayers] started off telling us about the need to raise the level of the struggle and for stronger leadership inside the Weatherman ‘focles’ and inside the Weatherman organization as a whole.  And he cited as one of the real problems was that someone like Bernardine Dohrn had to plan, develop and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco. . . .”  That bomb killed Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970.</p>
<p>Larry testified that Ayers had said that the bomb was placed on the window ledge.  Ayers described the kind of bomb it was “to the extent of saying what kind of shrapnel was used in it.” That case is still open.</p>
<p>Last week, On MSNBC Ayers said, “we [Weatherman] made a decision while we were willing to engage in extreme tactics, we would not harm human life. . . . We never hurt or harmed anyone.  We destroyed property.”</p>
<p>Bill Ayers, the privileged professor, was allowed to lie on television.  Larry Grathwohl did what most working class Vietnam vets did: he worked.  His story was nearly forgotten, until Cliff Kincaid started inviting him to America’s Survival conferences a few years ago.  That was where I met Larry.  This spring my writing partner Tina Trent republished Grathwohl’s memoir and the three of us <a href="http://www.dissidentprof.com/latest-dispatches/152-the-bill-ayers-weatherman-road-show.html">toured Florida</a> in May, speaking about Grathwohl’s book, Bill Ayers, and the terroristic Weatherman.  We found a receptive audience at tea party groups, many of them military veterans.</p>
<p>On his MSNBC stage, Ayers “confessed” to past “self-righteousness.” But Ayers is such a product of privilege that he cannot see his own disregard for those not of his elite class of communists.  In 1970, he conveyed contempt for the mostly black patrons who would have been killed at the Detroit restaurant by his bomb.  During his teaching career, he cheated thousands of “urban school” students of a legitimate education.  In his self-righteous first memoir <i>Fugitive Days</i>, he presented “Celeste,” the black family maid, as a cudgel with which to beat up his parents and their generation.  He brags about kissing a black girlfriend. He writes about dining at the St. Petersburg in San Francisco, while on the run from the FBI.  The owner is described as a “cheery old lady whose family had escaped the Bolsheviks and gone to China, only to flee the Maoists en route to Cuba, and then to run from Fidel, landing right here in the U.S., where, we hoped, if the pattern held, she was merely awaiting another revolution.”</p>
<p>Larry Grathwohl repeated the story, always with amazement and disbelief in his voice, about how the well-off young adults of the Weatherman would discuss what they would do after the “revolution”: order the reeducation of an estimated 100 million Americans and the execution of the estimated 25 million who would resist reeducation.</p>
<p>Bill Ayers has Larry Grathwohl to thank to sabotaging at least one of his bombs in Detroit.  Larry Grathwohl prevented the Weathermen from doing more harm than they did.</p>
<p>But as we can see by the way Ayers is feted by the liberal media, it is those from the upper classes still who are given the stage.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Bomber Bill Ayers&#8217; College Tour</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/bomber-bill-ayers-college-tour/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bomber-bill-ayers-college-tour</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:50:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Ayers]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205496</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Weather Underground terrorist tries to erase his history -- and universities help him do it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/100924-ayers-vmed-5a.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205497" alt="Image: Bill Ayers" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/100924-ayers-vmed-5a-404x350.jpg" width="242" height="210" /></a>Bill Ayers has a new book coming out and is doing the lecture circuit on college campuses.  He was invited to speak on “<a href="http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20130920/news/709209755/">Democracy and Education</a>: Teaching for Liberation” at Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois, on September 26, and on Tuesday, October 1, he will be speaking at Gettysburg College on “<a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=5103">Queering Education</a>.”</p>
<p>Some people remember Ayers’s real past and are objecting.  ECC alumni Robert and Barbara Haase, in a <a href="http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20130923/discuss/709239849/">letter to the editor</a>, wrote: “William Ayers’ viewpoint should not be included in the ‘variety of viewpoints’ in the marketplace of ideas you propose to expose. . . .”</p>
<p>They said that he deserved jail time for setting bombs at a time when their “friends and relatives in Vietnam [were] defending Ayers’ right to express his views without fear.  Some of them never made it home.  They were not there to defend anyone’s right to commit acts of terrorism.”</p>
<p>They are quoting an administrator who used the old saw of “variety of viewpoints” to justify inviting Ayers.</p>
<p>But college students, immersed in romanticized versions of 1960s history, will have little against which to challenge Ayers’s revised history. His new book, <i>Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident</i>, appears to be an attempt to wipe away charges against him in 2008 with a series of lies, lies that are evident from his own blog promoting the book:  “In the heat of the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s opponents were spinning a chilling narrative that cast him as an enigmatic figure with a group of shadowy associates, including a Black Nationalist preacher, a Palestinian professor, and an ‘unrepentant domestic terrorist.’ That imagined terrorist was Bill Ayers, a one-time leader of the Weather Underground. . . .”</p>
<p>He claims that he is “a dedicated teacher, father, and social justice advocate.” His “‘shady past’” is actually “the story of an ardent antiwar activist.”</p>
<p>Is he really just an “ardent antiwar activist” demonized by the McCain campaign, as he claims?</p>
<p>Ayers himself in several passages in his earlier memoir <i>Fugitive Days </i>admits to participating in bombings.  He posed for the book’s publicity photo by standing on an American flag.</p>
<p>The Weather Underground’s 1974 manifesto <i>Prairie Fire</i>,<i> </i>stated, “We are a guerilla organization.  We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years,” and “Our intention is to disrupt the empire . . . to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.”</p>
<p>In <i>Fugitive Days</i>, Ayers also describes hopes of a world communist revolution:</p>
<blockquote><p>The world is in flames, we thought, the people of the world rising against the octopus of imperialism and cutting off its tentacles one by one.  It was a compelling image, apocalyptic: Cuba, one, Korea, two, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Algeria, Ghana, and Viet Nam, of course, number eight, where the monster had overextended itself once and for all.  National liberation movements active in Chile, Panama, Argentina, Guatemala, the Philippines, Jamaica, South Africa, Mexico—<i>dos, tres, muchos Viet Nams</i>—had heated up and the world’s aggressive policemen were pinned down in Southeast Asia.  A pitiful, helpless giant.</p></blockquote>
<p>The U.S. is the “pitiful, helpless giant” in the face of a communist world revolution.</p>
<p>None of that is mentioned in his blog, nor was it mentioned last February when he spoke at the <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/bill-ayers-in-retirement/">Association of Teacher Educators conference</a>.  Instead, he repeated lines from his nonsensical writings about education, like “We are finite beings plunging through infinite space,” and we are “world changers, one person at a time.” He advised fellow educators and graduate students on “how to survive till the revolution” by doing “anarchist calisthenics.” He had nothing to say about improving the performance of students in the “urban schools” for which he has trained teachers.</p>
<p>Colleges now are simply giving Ayers a forum to promote his upcoming book and his revisionist, self-glorifying history that was promoted to his college students, <a href="http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/GrabarChicagoWayUpdated.pdf">even on his syllabi</a>. Consider this quotation from “Social Conflicts of the 1960s, Honors 201” for Spring semester 2006:</p>
<blockquote><p>In 1965, just as the American catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition, I was arrested along with 38 others for disrupting the normal operations of the Ann Arbor draft board, part of the bureaucratic machinery for sorting soldiers from civilians, the living from the dead, issuing we thought, warrants to kill and to die.</p></blockquote>
<p>U.S. political leaders on this syllabus are described as having been “blind and arrogant and cocksure as they took over the failed French colonial mission.”  The U.S. enemy was “a poor peasant nation” that “refused their assigned role in Washington’s script . . . the National Liberation Front wouldn’t quit—they retreated when necessary, holed up underground as required, and reemerged suddenly to beat back the invaders.”</p>
<p>In a 19-page essay on the syllabus for a seminar called Conceptions of Teaching and Schooling (CIE 576), Ayers claimed that teachers are “cogs,” and students are “prisoners,” “compelled by the state to attend, handed a schedule, a uniform, and a rule book, sent to specific designated space of cell blocks, monitored constantly….”</p>
<p>The idea of schools as prisons was promoted by American communists in the 1930s.</p>
<p>The Weather Underground’s document “Bring the War Home” similarly stated, “Young people all over the country go to prisons that are called schools,” and “No longer will we tolerate ‘law and order’ backed up by soldiers in Vietnam and pigs [police] in the communities and schools.”</p>
<p>Now Bill Ayers’s own words, are being used in a K-12 curriculum put out by a non-profit called, ironically, “<a href="http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/">Americans Who Tell the Truth</a>.” These supposed truth-tellers are mostly radicals, like Ayers, Medea Benjamin, and Howard Zinn.  Gettysburg College even used the original oil portrait of Ayers produced by the non-profit in its <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/img/CROBlog/5103/ayersgettysburg.jpg">poster</a> for their event.  Students in some schools today are reading such self-serving, heart-tugging prose by the bomb-setter, Bill Ayers: “I held tight to the romance that ordinary people have the capacity to eliminate the agony of exploitation and the intolerable suffering of the poor and the despised—to achieve justice in the public square and establish a beloved community.”</p>
<p>Has Bill Ayers changed his stripes?  Is he simply someone who was an antiwar activist, but then became a respectable professor, as he would like naïve students to believe?</p>
<p>Bill Ayers failed in bringing about a revolution with the terrorist organization Weatherman he co-founded, so he tried to do it <a href="http://www.dissidentprof.com/bookstore/150-bill-ayers.html">through education</a> and by lying to the most vulnerable.</p>
<p>This is not about free speech, as Ayers’s allies, like the administrators at Elgin Community College, would like to make it.</p>
<p>Bill Ayers has not changed a whit.</p>
<p>He is still as arrogant as Weatherman informant <a href="http://bringingdownamerica.com/?p=1">Larry Grathwohl</a> described him and as anti-intellectual as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-A-Generational-Odyssey/dp/0684840057">David Horowitz</a> described him.</p>
<p>He’s not even smart enough to disguise the ideas expressed from his days in the Weather Underground.  But given what they’re taught, students wouldn’t know this.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Problem With Reza Aslan&#8217;s Book About Jesus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/the-problem-with-reza-aslans-book-about-jesus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-problem-with-reza-aslans-book-about-jesus</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Jul 2013 04:21:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[dishonest]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Reza Aslan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198727</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The issue is not who the author is, but who he isn't. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/aslan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198728" alt="aslan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/aslan.jpg" width="280" height="207" /></a>The Leftist media is in an uproar over Reza Aslan&#8217;s recent interview on Fox News &#8212; see the Huffington Post&#8217;s account <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/27/reza-aslan-fox-zealot_n_3665211.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Many people have sent me tweets and emails skewering Fox&#8217;s supposed inconsistency for giving Aslan trouble for writing about Jesus as a Muslim but welcoming me writing about Muhammad as a Christian.</p>
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<p>This is not actually the case, but I am getting so many emails about this that I thought I&#8217;d make it clear: I have no problem whatsoever with Reza Aslan writing about Jesus as a Muslim. I do not believe that one has to be a Muslim to write about Islam, or a Christian to write about Christianity, or a Hindu to write about Hinduism.</p>
<p>I did put up one Jihad Watch post that touched on the fact that his Muslim religion was not being mentioned in the media, but my emphasis was on his dishonesty, as well as his links to the bloody mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran. On July 25, I posted this: &#8220;<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/07/liberal-media-love-new-jesus-book-zealot-fail-to-mention-author-is-muslim----and-member-of-lobbying-.html" target="_blank">Liberal media love new Jesus book Zealot, fail to mention author is Muslim &#8212; and member of lobbying group for Iranian mullahs</a>,&#8221; commenting on a Fox News commentary by John S. Dickerson. In his article, Dickerson noted: &#8220;Media reports have introduced Aslan as a &#8216;religion scholar&#8217; but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim.&#8221; This is true. In <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/07/14/200844275/zealot-tells-the-story-of-jesus-the-man-not-the-messiah" target="_blank">this NPR interview</a> a section entitled &#8220;On his religious affiliation&#8221; has Aslan responding, &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t call myself a Christian&#8230;&#8221; and going on and on from there, but he never gets around to mentioning that he is a Muslim.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s not exactly an honest answer when the question was put to him directly, and so I thought Dickerson&#8217;s piece had merit. The emphasis of my post, however, was on Aslan&#8217;s affiliation with a lobbying group for the Iranian mullahs and other unsavory connections to jihadists and Islamic supremacists, and the general fact that the mainstream media overlooks Aslan&#8217;s superficiality, numerous errors of fact, and obnoxious demeanor because he reflects their ideological perspective.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s more, in the notorious Fox interview, Aslan lied about his scholarly credentials. Matthew J. Franck explains in <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/07/29/scholarly-misrepresentation/" target="_blank">First Things</a> that it was Aslan, not Fox&#8217;s Lauren Green, who steered the interview into a discussion of himself rather than of the book:</p>
<blockquote><p>In fact, it is Aslan who immediately turns the interview into a cage match by reacting very defensively to Green’s first question. And here is where the misrepresentations begin. For roughly the first half of the interview Aslan dominates the exchange with assertions about himself that seem intended to delay the substance of the discussion:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am a scholar of religions with four degrees including one in the New Testament . . . I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions . . . I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually . . . To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.</p></blockquote>
<p>Later he complains that they are “debating the right of the scholar to write” the book rather than discussing the book. But the conversation took that turn thanks to Aslan, not Green! By the final minute he is saying of himself (and who really talks this way!?) that “I’m actually quite a prominent Muslim thinker in the United States.”</p>
<p>Aslan does have four degrees, as Joe Carter has noted: a 1995 B.A. in religion from Santa Clara University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and wrote his senior thesis on “The Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark”; a 1999 Master of Theological Studies from Harvard; a 2002 Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa; and a 2009 Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.</p>
<p>None of these degrees is in history, so Aslan’s repeated claims that he has “a Ph.D. in the history of religions” and that he is “a historian” are false. Nor is “professor of religions” what he does “for a living.” He is an associate professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside, where his terminal MFA in fiction from Iowa is his relevant academic credential. It appears he has taught some courses on Islam in the past, and he may do so now, moonlighting from his creative writing duties at Riverside. Aslan has been a busy popular writer, and he is certainly a tireless self-promoter, but he is nowhere known in the academic world as a scholar of the history of religion. And a scholarly historian of early Christianity? Nope.</p>
<p>What about that Ph.D.? As already noted, it was in sociology. I have his dissertation in front of me. It is a 140-page work titled “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework.” If Aslan’s Ph.D. is the basis of a claim to scholarly credentials, he could plausibly claim to be an expert on social movements in twentieth-century Islam. He cannot plausibly claim, as he did to Lauren Green, that he is a “historian,” or is a “professor of religions” “for a living.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Here again, the problem is Aslan&#8217;s dishonesty. I don&#8217;t care about his scholarly credentials. Even if everything he had said about his degrees had been true, it would confer on his book no presumption of accuracy or truth. I am constantly assailed for lacking scholarly credentials, but as it happens, when it comes to writing about religion I have exactly the same credentials as Aslan, a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. in Religious Studies. His other two degrees are in other fields.</p>
<p>But anyway, it doesn&#8217;t matter: there are plenty of fools with degrees, and plenty of geniuses without them. My work, and Aslan&#8217;s, stands or falls on its merits, not on the number of degrees we have. Aslan&#8217;s pulling rank on Lauren Green and starting to reel off (inaccurately) his degrees was a sign of insecurity: it implied that he didn&#8217;t think his book could stand on its merits, and had to be accepted because he had a lot of degrees. And in fact, his book doesn&#8217;t stand on its merits. Marvin Olasky notes in <a href="http://www.worldmag.com/2013/07/fawning_over_falsehood" target="_blank">World Magazine</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Aslan states as fact, not theory, that “the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’ life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith written many years after the events they describe.” That’s what theologically liberal commenters propose, but Aslan either skipped or banished from his consideration the theologically conservative half, which states that Matthew, Mark, and Luke reported eyewitness accounts and emerged during the lifetimes of other eyewitnesses.</p></blockquote>
<p>And indeed, there is no scholarly consensus that the Gospels were not meant to be historical or eyewitness accounts. Whether or not they really are historically accurate is a question that has been debated for centuries and will be debated until the end of time, but Aslan&#8217;s claim that they were not &#8220;ever meant to be a historical documentation of Jesus&#8217; life&#8221; is false on its face. Luke&#8217;s Gospel begins: &#8220;Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.&#8221; (Luke 1:1-4)</p>
<p>That sounds like a document that wants to be taken precisely as &#8220;a historical documentation of Jesus&#8217; life.&#8221; So does John&#8217;s Gospel when it says, &#8220;He who saw it has borne witness &#8212; his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth &#8212; that you also may believe&#8221; (John 19:35) and &#8220;This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true&#8221; (John 21:24). Again, whether these claims are true or not is another question, but the fact that the claims were made at all completely refutes Aslan&#8217;s claim. As a scholar of the New Testament he thus stands as incompetent or &#8212; here again &#8212; dishonest.</p>
<p>Likewise his statement in the NPR interview: &#8220;I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God.&#8221; In the Gospels, Jesus takes upon himself the name &#8220;I am,&#8221; the Holy Name of God according to Exodus 3:14, at least four times: see Mark 6:50, Matthew 14:27, John 6:20, and John 8:58. Aslan may, as a practicing Muslim, believe that the Gospels have been corrupted and that Jesus never actually made these statements, but not even to note that they (and others) exist is, yet again, dishonest.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s the problem with Aslan&#8217;s book: not that he is a Muslim, but that he is not an honest man or a reliable scholar, no matter how many degrees he has. But after all, as his prophet said, &#8220;War is deceit.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>A Christian Looks At Horowitz&#8217;s &#8216;A Point in Time&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:49:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jim Fletcher]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A compelling examination of the most pressing questions that theists and atheists alike must confront. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time/pointintime-6/" rel="attachment wp-att-181872"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-181872" title="pointintime" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pointintime-226x350.jpg" alt="" width="226" height="350" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2011/11/370293/">World Net Daily</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8216;A Point in Time,&#8217; click <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>One of life’s greatest blessings is watching a leftist figure things out. When the person also elevates us all by sharing newfound wisdom, it’s even better.</p>
<p>That’s just one reason David Horowitz is one of my favorite writers/thinkers. His elegant-but-deadly destructions of leftist thought have now melded with thoughtfulness in later life and make him one of the most compelling commentators of our time. His new book is a true triumph.</p>
<p><a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next”</a> is simply wonderful. It represents the musings of a man looking at his own mortality, wondering just what is the meaning of our existence.</p>
<p>Horowitz opens by describing the progressive thinking of his parents and his father’s atheism. His father seems to have believed in a hoped-for utopia of justice, but Horowitz remembers the irony of pulling a book from the family shelf and reading the realism of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. One can see that Horowitz was influenced by this, and presumably, after his formative years spent pursuing leftist policies and dreams, he came back to that realistic look at the sad old planet we inhabit.</p>
<p>It seems probable that Horowitz will not leave this life as his father did, still hopeful for a world that does not exist.</p>
<p>Some would say that this very slim volume by Horowitz is too dark, too morose. But I say that it is exhilarating. Listen to this: “Unlike my father, I do not look down my nose at the ancients but am impressed by their understanding of our case. How they were able to put a finger on the source of our distress: that alone among creatures we know our fate, and learn sooner or later that the world has no interest in it.”</p>
<p>Well. Although Horowitz’s new book will not meet with approval by all, particularly some conservative Christians, I ask that you give it a try.</p>
<p>For Horowitz’s ideological enemies today, I challenge you to give a nod to his courage in making himself vulnerable as he contemplates our lives as individuals. This is a man of great thought and feeling, and for one who has seen so much ideological savagery, he realizes what I believe to be basically a biblical truth: One day our arguments will not matter.</p>
<p>We learn halfway through the book that Horowitz has been forced to reflect on the meaning of life, due to his health concerns: diabetes and prostate cancer. But I don’t want to misrepresent the book. Horowitz does not share the hope many find in faith: “I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator. I wish I could look on my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot. And so I am left to ponder the pointlessness of our strivings on this earth and to ask impossible questions and receive no answers.”</p>
<p>Horowitz, you see, shares more in common with a man who has lost a daughter – because he has – than some of history’s figures he marvels at, men of faith like Mozart and Dostoevsky. He wants to believe in something greater than himself, but he struggles with the questions asked of all men since the species first appeared on the earth.</p>
<p>At the end of this wonderful book, Horowitz says: “My steps have slowed and my passions are dimmed.”</p>
<p>I hope not, because the world could use a thinker like David Horowitz. Interestingly, the last pages of <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time,”</a> he points to a mystery that I think is a key to understanding everything, and I think the reader will pick up on what I mean. I hope Horowitz is able to pull that veil back enough to see that there is a world to come.</p>
<p>I dare say <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time”</a> is a modern version of the book of Ecclesiastes, with observations that are particularly relevant for us in our time. You will not be disappointed if you dare to think deeply by reading this profound little book; I honestly believe <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time”</a> will be good for you.</p>
<p>Let me end this review by saying something that a few of my friends might consider blasphemous: Horowitz has figured out a good bit of life, late in life – and he’s done it as well as Solomon.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Andrew G. Bostom]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[John Esposito]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163391</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Andrew G. Bostom masterfully unveils the true story of the "religion of peace" and its war on human freedom. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/picture-1-50/" rel="attachment wp-att-163416"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163416" title="Picture-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Picture-1-415x350.gif" alt="" width="291" height="245" /></a>The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior––whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad––is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Our main mistake has been the belief that al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are outliers among Muslims, a tiny minority of fanatics who have “hijacked” the faith that under both Republican and Democratic administrations has been called the “religion of peace,” and so we must reach out to that majority of moderate Muslims and convince them how much we admire and respect their religion. But this desperate search for these moderates has lead to dangerous policies, such as considering the Muslim Brotherhood “moderate Islamists,” an oxymoron that blinds us to the Brotherhood’s long-term goal to recover the global dominance that is Islam’s divinely sanctioned birthright.</p>
<p>Andrew Bostom, a professor of medicine at Brown University, has for a decade relentlessly exposed the distortions of history and Islamic theology that have accompanied these policies. In <em>The Legacy of Islamic Jihad</em>, he exposed the lie that jihad is merely a spiritual struggle to be a good Muslim, amassing evidence from Islamic theology, scripture, and jurisprudence to show that jihad has in fact predominantly denoted the use of violence to subject unbelievers to Muslim hegemony. In <em>The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism</em>, he swept away the rationalizations for widespread Jew-hatred among Muslims that blamed it on imported Western anti-Semitism, once more letting Islamic texts speak for themselves to show that since the 7<sup>th</sup> century, Jews have been hated, despised, massacred, and subjugated in both Islamic theology and practice. Now Bostom, in the 43 essays collected in his new book, <em>Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism</em>, has turned to the totalitarian foundations of Islam codified in shari’a law, the totalizing system that controls every dimension of human life––political, economic, civic, familial, and personal.</p>
<p>The great virtue of Dr. Bostom’s work is the collection of primary documents and secondary commentary that taken together provide a more accurate picture of Islam than the fantasies concocted from ignorance or political expediency, or the postmodern propaganda manufactured by Edward Said and his followers. The notion of jihad, for example, has been distorted by apologists like Georgetown professor John Esposito, who wrote in the <em>Washington Post</em> that in the Koran jihad “means ‘to strive or struggle’ to realize God’s will, to lead a virtuous life, to create a just society and to defend Islam and the Muslim community.” Under the Bush administration, the National Counterterrorism Center similarly advised its employees never to use the term “jihadist,” since “jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” But these assertions cannot stand next to the abundant evidence Bostom collects, such as Al-Tabari’s 10<sup>th</sup> century “Book of Jihad,” which shows that for 14 centuries jihad refers to war waged against the unbelievers, the “harbis” (denizens of Dar al Harb, the “House of War”) whom it is legal to kill, enslave, and plunder.</p>
<p>Even those, like the influential scholar Bernard Lewis, who accept the martial meaning of jihad sometimes assert that such wars are conducted under limitations similar to the Western laws of war, limitations so-called Islamist extremists ignore. Yet Islamic jurists such as the 8<sup>th</sup> century founder of the Hanifi school of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifa, Bostom writes, affirm “the impunity with which non-combatant ‘harbis’––women, children, the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled––may be killed.” According to Hanifa, there is nothing wrong with using catapults against “the polytheists’ fortresses . . . even if there are among them a woman, child, elder, idiot” or anyone suffering from a physical disability.</p>
<p>Illustrating the continuity of modern Islamist ideology with traditional Islamic theology and jurisprudence, Bostom quotes Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the “spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Jazeera television star whose program reaches 60 million people: “It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb . . . is not protected . . . in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in war.” Hence even those not actually fighting are fair game, an argument similar to the one bin Laden made after 9/11 when he justified attacking civilians. These traditions give the lie to the “religion of peace” claim made by apologists, and also explain why, as Bostom quotes Samuel Huntington, “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” Moreover, jihadist raids and attacks across those borders were, Bostom writes, “designed to sow terror” in order to make future conquests easier by breaking the spirit of the enemy, as recorded by the 17<sup>th</sup> century historian al-Maqqari when discussing such attacks: “Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.” Such passages suggest how the Islamists interpreted Obama’s 2009 groveling Cairo speech: as the supplications of the infidel begging for peace.</p>
<p>Bostom provides a similar correction to the oft-repeated claims that anti-Semitism is not inherent in Islam. On the contrary, Bostom writes, “There is voluminous evidence from Islam’s foundational texts of theological Jew hatred: virulently Antisemitic Koranic verses whose virulence is only amplified by the greatest classical and Muslim Koranic commentaries . . . the six canonical hadiths collections, and the most respected sira,” biographies of Muhammad. In this tradition Jews are minions of Satan, cursed because they resisted Islam, killed prophets, and transgressed the will of Allah. They are destined to be transformed into apes and swine, and to be humiliated, abased, and eternally damned for their deceit and treachery.</p>
<p>Again demonstrating the continuity of this 14-century-long tradition with the anti-Semitic calumny of modern Islamists, Bostom quotes from a sermon given by an Egyptian-government appointed cleric delivered at a mosque at Al Azhar, the most prestigious and venerable institution of Sunni learning: “Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61/3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth [Koran 5:33/5:64]. They are the most evil on Earth [5:62/63].” And Bostom reminds us that Muhammad’s jihadist career began with the conquest and massacres inflicted on the Banu Qurayza, Banu Khaybar, and Banu Nadir Jews. As Bostom summarizes, “Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar Jews and their subsequent expulsion” by the “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar “epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews.”</p>
<p>Given this theological sanction, we should not be surprised to find the grimly consistent record of Muslim pogroms and massacres of Jews that Bostom documents from the Middle Ages to the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Nor should we be surprised that Jew-hatred continues to dominate the modern Middle East, and is foundational to the Arab hatred of Israel. Hence the quotation of the apes and swine Koranic verse in the charter of the terrorist Hamas organization, or the quotation of Koran 5:64, which calls Jews the sowers of corruption, by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007 during a speech urging Muslims to “aim their rifles at Israel.”</p>
<p>The exposure of these “Islamophilic” distortions of Islam provides the necessary backdrop for the discussions of Islamic shari’a law that follows. Our misunderstanding and downplaying of the threat to liberal democracy represented by a legal code that subjects every facet of human life to its strictures have been facilitated by the same political and ideological prejudices. Meanwhile, the imposition of shari’a is the highest goal of the various Islamist organizations, whether actively violent or not, roiling the Middle East and North Africa today. Bostom’s essays remind us what history also teaches: that totalitarian threats to our freedom and way of life will not be neutralized by the refusal to see clearly the illiberal ideology driving the Islamist agenda.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Michelle Obama&#8217;s &#8220;Civilian&#8221; Act Is Hard To Swallow</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/michellemalkin/michelle-obamas-civilian-act-is-hard-to-swallow/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=michelle-obamas-civilian-act-is-hard-to-swallow</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 May 2012 04:12:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=133400</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The First Lady conveniently publishes new book in time for election season.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/120529_michelle_obama_book_ap_328.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-133410" title="120529_michelle_obama_book_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/120529_michelle_obama_book_ap_328.gif" alt="" width="375" height="241" /></a>The first lady of the United States is on a whirlwind publicity tour for her hefty new food and gardening book ($30), which the White House hopes will bolster Team Obama&#8217;s favorability ratings. I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s a classic recipe for rank campaign hypocrisy and media double standards.</p>
<p>While journalists savor chummy chitchats with Mrs. Obama about beets and Beyonce, FLOTUS is once again escaping hard questions about her cronyism, junk science and generous junkets at taxpayer expense.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama&#8217;s 2012 campaign media blitz has already brought her to daytime airwaves (&#8220;The Ellen DeGeneres Show&#8221;), prime-time reality TV (&#8220;The Biggest Loser&#8221;) and children&#8217;s programming (&#8220;iCarly&#8221;). This week, she&#8217;s hitting up &#8220;Good Morning America,&#8221; &#8220;The View,&#8221; Rachael Ray&#8217;s cooking show, &#8220;LIVE! with Kelly (Ripa)&#8221; and Comedy Central&#8217;s &#8220;The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.&#8221; Out: Let&#8217;s Move! In: Let&#8217;s Move &#8230; in front of the TV cameras!</p>
<p>My prediction? As soon as the fawning media frenzy dies down and Mrs. Obama&#8217;s book rises to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, POTUS will go back to claiming that FLOTUS is a &#8220;private citizen&#8221; who should be left alone. The Obamas&#8217; Chicago strategists have long enjoyed invoking selective immunity for the first lady without challenge. Lapdog reporters have assisted in creating an impenetrable bubble of political protection around the profligate, policy-meddling first lady.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve seen it before.</p>
<p>When conservatives challenged Mrs. O&#8217;s caustic 2008 campaign trail statements disparaging America and fear-mongering for votes, her hubby invoked the &#8220;civilian&#8221; shield. He threatened Republicans to &#8220;lay off his wife,&#8221; arguing that political spouses should not be subject to public scrutiny because they didn&#8217;t choose public life.</p>
<p>When Mrs. O&#8217;s lavish vacation in Spain — accompanied by an entourage of 70 Secret Service agents and 250 Spanish law enforcement officers — provoked a massive public backlash in 2010, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs argued that the first lady was a &#8220;private citizen&#8221; who should be off-limits to tough questions about her behavior.</p>
<p>Horse-hockey.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s outspoken bitter half conscientiously and deliberately inserted herself into the public square long before the family moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — whether it was organizing a Woods Fund panel with her husband and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, taking a publicly subsidized government job with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, or parlaying her relationship with political mentor Valerie Jarrett into a cushy public job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she oversaw a patient-dumping scheme that benefited her political cronies.</p>
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		<title>Geert Wilders: Marked for Death</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/geert-wilders-marked-for-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=geert-wilders-marked-for-death</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2012 04:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Mark Steyn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marked for Death]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=131756</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The story of a man hunted for the beliefs he holds and truth he speaks.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Picture-6.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-131757" title="Picture-6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Picture-6.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>The courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders released his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marked-Death-Islams-Against-West/dp/1596987960/"><em>Marked for Death</em></a><em>: Islam’s War Against the West and Me</em> in May 2012. The foreword to this title was written by the eloquent Canadian-born political commentator and cultural critic <a href="http://www.steynonline.com/">Mark Steyn</a>, who has a special talent for writing about serious topics in a humorous way. He has published several books and written essays for publications ranging from the <em>Jerusalem Post </em>and the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em> to the <em>National Review</em>, <em>The Australian</em> and Canada’s <em>National Post</em>.</p>
<p>Steyn is honest enough to admit that when he was first asked to contribute to Wilders’ new book, his initial reaction was to say no. The main reason for this is the potentially high cost of being associated with a man who lives with constant death threats.</p>
<p>Yet, after taking a stroll in the woods, Mark Steyn felt ashamed at the ease with which he was caving in to the enemies of freedom, and decided to accept the offer after all. He recalled how the Canadian Islamic Congress boasted that their attempts by legal aggression to silence Steyn’s critical writings about Islam had cost his magazine substantial sums, and thereby attained their “strategic objective” of increasing the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.</p>
<p>In the case of Geert Wilders, that cost is not merely limited to money. Despite being an elected Member of Parliament in what used to be one of Europe’s freest and most tolerant countries, he is regularly vilified by Western mass media. When trying to enter Britain, a nation that once was a champion of liberty, he was detained by plainclothes border guards on arrival at London’s Heathrow airport in <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/4603182/Dutch-anti-Muslim-politician-turned-away-from-Britain-at-Heathrow.html">February 2009</a> and deported from the country.</p>
<p>The democratic Dutch MP had been invited to the House of Lords, where Baroness Cox and Lord Pearson wanted to show his 17-minute Islam-critical film <em>Fitna</em>. The Home Office refused him entry on the grounds he “would threaten community security and therefore public security,” not because he threatened to use violence, but because Muslims might use it.</p>
<p>Lord Ahmed from the Labour Party, Britain’s first Muslim member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament, pledged to bring a 10,000 strong force of angry Muslims to lay siege to Parliament. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain claimed that Wilders has been an open and relentless preacher of “hate.” At the same time, London has become a notorious intentional center for Islamic militants, who spew hate on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Geert Wilders accused the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown of being “the biggest bunch of cowards in Europe.” He was later allowed entry to the UK, however. He was also put on trial in the Netherlands accused of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups. Wilders was eventually found not guilty in 2011, but the entire process took several years.</p>
<p>As Mark Steyn puts it, “He is under round-the-clock guard because of explicit threats to murder him by Muslim extremists. Yet he’s the one who gets put on trial for incitement. In twenty-first century Amsterdam, you’re free to smoke marijuana and pick out a half-naked sex partner from the front window of her shop. But you can be put on trial for holding the wrong opinion about a bloke who died in the seventh century. And, although Mr. Wilders was eventually acquitted by his kangaroo court, the determination to place him beyond the pale is unceasing: ‘The far-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders’ (the <em>Financial Times</em>)… ‘Far-right leader Geert Wilders’ (the <em>Guardian</em>)… ‘Extreme right anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’ (AFP) is ‘at the fringes of mainstream politics’ (<em>Time</em>). Mr. Wilders is so far out on the far-right extreme fringe that his party is the third biggest in parliament.”</p>
<p>Maybe those who are out on the fringe are the ones who think that disliking Islam is “far-right.”</p>
<p>Yet it’s not just Wilders himself who is being attacked in this fashion. Those who dare to meet him or support some of his views could find themselves attacked by the mass media and the political elites in a comparable manner. Cory Bernardi, born and raised in Adelaide and currently representing the state of South Australia for the Liberal Party in the Australian Senate, in 2011 came under fire not only from members of other parties but also from his own — allegedly conservative — party when he wanted to facilitate a trip to Australia by Wilders.</p>
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		<title>No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/no-they-can%e2%80%99t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-they-can%25e2%2580%2599t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:50:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[no they can't]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129624</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[John Stossel’s new book tells why less government is more.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/no-they-cant.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129627" title="no they cant" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/no-they-cant.jpg" alt="" width="265" height="403" /></a>Editor&#8217;s note: John Stossel will be speaking about his new book in a Freedom Center event at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills on Monday, April 23. <a href="http://jstossel.eventbrite.com/">Click here for details</a>.</em></p>
<p>In his television specials and in books like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myths-Lies-Downright-Stupidity-Everything/dp/0786893931/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b"><em>Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel &#8211; Why Everything You Know is Wrong</em></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Give-Me-Break-Hucksters-Media/dp/0060529156/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c"><em>Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media</em></a>, reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/They-Cant-Government-Fails-But-Individuals/dp/1451640943/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1334644904&amp;sr=1-1"><em>No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed</em></a>.</p>
<p>The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in <em>No They Can’t</em> as well.</p>
<p>The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me: Individuals should act, not government.”</p>
<p>Other examples of What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: “If we just elect the right politicians, we can reinvent government and balance its books.” “Individuals are selfish, so we need government to ‘level the playing field’ and make life ‘fair.’” “The Food Police want to help us make better choices.” “It’s nice for people to have their say, but some speech is so hateful and offensive that we must limit it.” “Education is too important to be left to the uncertainty of market competition.” Chapter by chapter, Stossel systematically lays out his case for why these assumptions and many, many more about our government’s problem-solving capabilities are wrong on all counts, and why the truth is actually counter-intuitive.</p>
<p>The overarching, “most socially destructive” assumption of all, writes Stossel, is “the intuitively appealing belief that when there is a problem, government action is the best way to solve it.” For him, “Good government has to mean less government.” One would think that this sentiment would put Stossel squarely in the Tea Party camp. But he believes that even many Tea Party activists don’t want to cut the big government tether entirely (“61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe free trade has hurt the United States,” for example). And he notes that even Tea Party politician favorites can’t be trusted once they’re in office.</p>
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		<title>The Muslims Next Door</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-muslims-next-door/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-muslims-next-door</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-muslims-next-door/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:12:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the muslim next door]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A community-wide reading program whitewashes Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/must1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-120622" title="must" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/must1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, <a href="http://www.siliconvalleyreads.org/2012-13/default.asp">Silicon Valley Reads</a> is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.</p>
<p>The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers <a href="http://www.siliconvalleyreads.org/2012-13/calendar.asp">several dozen free public events</a> at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,</p>
<blockquote><p>between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…</p></blockquote>
<p>And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:</p>
<blockquote><p>Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.</p></blockquote>
<p>The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.</p>
<p>One of the program’s two book selections is <em>The Muslim Next Door</em>, sporting the cutesy subtitle<em> The Qur&#8217;an, the Media, and That Veil Thing</em> and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,</p>
<blockquote><p>I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.</p></blockquote>
<p>In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.</p>
<p>The other book selection is <em>The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman&#8217;s Journey to Love and Islam </em>by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim convert who struggled to come to grips with “that veil thing” and ended by proclaiming that a woman in the Middle East “is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated.” The book comes with a front cover blurb by the rock star of academic apologists for Islamic supremacism, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/11/the-incredible-reza-aslan-automated-insult-generator.html">Reza Aslan</a>. Ms. Wilson writes on the Silicon Valley Reads site that</p>
<blockquote><p>the topic of Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and only through open and honest communication can Muslims and non-Muslims come to a better understanding of one another.</p></blockquote>
<p>I couldn’t agree more. Indeed Islam <em>is</em> loaded with emotional and political baggage, and I hope that, in the spirit of that “open and honest communication,” she will openly and honestly acknowledge the reasons why.</p>
<p>The 2012 Silicon Valley Reads program also features a panel discussion called “Paranoid Politics – Islamophobia, McCarthyism and the Yellow Peril,” described thusly:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims are not the first group in America to be targeted by paranoid people who are afraid and looking for someone to blame. This will cover three periods in U.S. history when groups who are “different” – Muslims since 9/11, Jews during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, and Asians during World War II – were persecuted in politics and the media.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, American Muslims are <em>not</em> being targeted, and non-Muslims outraged about sharia and jihad are not “paranoid people looking for someone to blame.” Any reasonable person who follows the news is justifiably concerned about Islam not because Muslims are “different” but because Muslim fundamentalists have openly declared war on Western civilization and are waging global jihad, including on our own soil. Real-world Islamic terrorism and creeping sharia are the issues, not the phantom red herring “<a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=OGTAUUU8UWRC">Islamophobia</a>.”</p>
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		<title>Obama Rebuffs &#8216;Bridge-Building&#8217; with Gov. Brewer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/obama-rebuffs-bridge-building-with-gov-brewer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-rebuffs-bridge-building-with-gov-brewer</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/obama-rebuffs-bridge-building-with-gov-brewer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:17:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arizona]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jan Brewer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=120717</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The thin-skinned Obama can't stand up to his own rhetoric. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/brewer_obama_AP120125065769_620x350.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-120722" title="brewer_obama_AP120125065769_620x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/brewer_obama_AP120125065769_620x350.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>Apparently a better relationship between Democrats and Republicans is in the eye of the beholder. One day after his State of the Union speech, where he told Americans that genuine reform can&#8217;t happen unless we &#8220;end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas,&#8221; president Barack Obama had what might be charitably described as a less than cordial <a href="http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3.htm">encounter</a> with Arizona&#8217;s Republican governor, Jan Brewer.</p>
<p>&#8220;He was a little thin-skinned,&#8221; Brewer <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/25/day-after-call-for-political-truces-obama-visibly-snubs-arizona-gop-governor/%23ixzz1kauUfCJd">said</a> during a later interview on local radio station News/Talk 92.3 KTAR. &#8220;I was a bit taken aback by his stance and his attitude [on the tarmac],&#8221; she added. noting that Obama walked away from her &#8220;[as] I was trying to make a point that I thought that my book was right and correct.&#8221; The book in question is &#8220;Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border,&#8221; about Brewer&#8217;s approach to dealing with Arizona&#8217;s illegal alien problem. According to the governor, the president was &#8220;a little disturbed&#8221; regarding her description of a previous meeting between the two in the Oval Office on June 3rd, 2010.</p>
<p>At a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NVEn3iqHBM&amp;feature=results_video&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL75162E90A28376AD">press conference</a> after that meeting, she described their talk as &#8220;very cordial, very very cordial.&#8221; Yet as one watches the video of that presser, one gets the impression that Ms. Brewer is carefully measuring her words. Apparently she was. In a <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/10/20/20111020arizona-governor-Brewer-book-touts-immigration.html">review</a> of the book published by the <em>Arizona Republic,</em> Brewer reportedly described the get-together as &#8220;one that started with some chitchat,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;But after a few minutes, the president&#8217;s tone got serious&#8211;and condescending.&#8221; She further noted that Mr. Obama &#8220;has repeatedly made fun of those of us who want to see the law enforced, saying we want a ‘moat’ with ‘alligators’ in it around our country. The reason he has resorted to these failed attempts at humor, I think, is that he supports a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic, and he knows it.&#8221;</p>
<p>Thus, what should have been a routine exchange of greetings between a visiting president and a state governor got testy. Brewer offered Obama a letter, which she later said was an invitation to sit down with her to discuss Arizona’s economic &#8220;comeback&#8221; and to join her for a tour of the U.S.-Mexican border. A brief exchange followed with Brewer pointing her finger at the president, and Mr. Obama apparently walking away before the Governor could finish what she was saying. A White House official seemingly <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/a-frosty-meeting-for-obama-and-brewer/">confirmed</a> Brewer&#8217;s account of the incident. &#8220;The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her,&#8221; the official noted. &#8220;The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book. The president looks forward to continuing taking steps to help Arizona’s economy grow.&#8221;</p>
<p>This media-orchestrated kerfuffle obscures the larger political picture, one that was also addressed by the president in the State of the Union speech. &#8220;I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration,&#8221; said Mr. Obama. &#8220;That&#8217;s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That&#8217;s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office. The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Revelations of Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/raymond-ibrahim/revelations-of-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=revelations-of-time</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/raymond-ibrahim/revelations-of-time/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[a point in time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marcus  Aurelius]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new book offers an honest and moving reflection on life and death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dh.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-110971" title="dh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dh.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="513" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/">American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p>David Horowitz&#8217;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159698290X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=amerithink-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=159698290X">book</a> <em>A Point in Time</em> is at root an exposé on the nature of Time, that double-edged sword  which, by obliterating all in its path, highlights the precious from the  superfluous in our lives.</p>
<p>In  structure, the book consists of Horowitz&#8217;s reflections &#8212; from his  childhood and father to his deceased daughter and own mortality &#8212; not  unlike the approach of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom the author  quotes at length and has apparently learned much from (and a better  instructor can scarcely be found).</p>
<p>But this is not an abstract or theoretical book; Horowitz often begins with the mundane and concludes  with the profound.  So chapters starting with anecdotes concerning his  pets progressively develop into philosophical reflections.  Nor does  Horowitz merely quote the great men; he participates in and synthesizes  their thoughts, showing their applicability to modern times.</p>
<p>For  instance, the stoic emperor asserts that things outside us &#8220;do not  touch the soul, for they are external and immovable; our perturbations  come only from our opinion of them, which is within&#8221; &#8212; words to be  echoed well over a millennium later by Shakespeare&#8217;s Hamlet: &#8220;Nothing  good or bad but thinking makes it so.&#8221;  Horowitz simplifies: &#8220;You cannot  alter the world, so do not make yourself miserable trying.&#8221;</p>
<p>Considering  that the author has spent a great deal of his career as an activist,  his musings &#8212; all of which lead to the inevitable conclusion that our  lives are but a tiny speck in the spectrum of time, soon to be forgotten  &#8212; make his reflections especially poignant; for here we have a man  whose profession wholly revolves around &#8220;making changes&#8221; coming to the  realization that &#8220;[t]his is nature&#8217;s way, to come and go.  Let it go.&#8221;   He even confesses to wondering whether, &#8220;knowing what I do now [i.e.,  the temporalness of life,] I would have been able to go forward at all.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/revelations_of_time.html">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Gaddafi&#8217;s Little Green Book</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/gaddafis-little-green-book/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gaddafis-little-green-book</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/gaddafis-little-green-book/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:10:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Little]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mid seventies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[more than three decades]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muammar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muammar gaddafi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muammar qaddafi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nato campaign]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91295</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The egomaniac wrote a book; it wasn’t a bestseller.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/qaddafi-green-book.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91435" title="qaddafi-green-book" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/qaddafi-green-book.jpg" alt="" width="387" height="302" /></a></p>
<p>“America can wage war against us, the West can torment us, it doesn’t matter: the world has my <em>Green Book</em>,” Muammar Gaddafi held in a 1979 interview. “All we need to defend ourselves is <em>The Green Book</em>.” More than three decades later, Qaddafi remains a pariah—and his <em>Green Book</em> is as irrelevant as it was the day he proclaimed its importance. He boasted then that “my <em>Green Book</em> has resolved man’s problems.” In fact, fidelity to it has multiplied Libya’s problems.</p>
<p>Penned in 1975, <em>The Green Book</em> reads as Qaddafi’s imitation of Mao’s Little Red Book, updated for the ’70s and tailored for the Muslim world. Whereas Black Panthers far from China peddled Mao’s Little Red Book long after it was written, Qaddafi’s little green book has transcended neither Libya’s borders nor its Marx-on-the-march, mid-seventies publication date. Children still study <em>The Green Book</em> in Libyan schools. Elsewhere, the slim volume is read rarely—and only then as a curiosity.</p>
<p>The second month into a NATO campaign that hoped to oust the Libyan strongman in days, it’s clear that Westerners don’t understand Muammar Qaddafi. Reading his <em>Green Book</em> is a good place to start. Though it isn’t particularly germane to the world, the work sheds light on the personality that has repeatedly drawn the ire of the world.</p>
<p>Unlike Osama bin Laden, whose religious-laced rants leave secular Westerners perplexed, Qaddafi speaks our language. Ruling in a region overflowing with mullahs, monarchs, and murderers, Qaddafi curiously looked West, instead of around him, for inspiration in lording over Libya.</p>
<p><em>The Green Book</em>’s opening pages offer a half-clever critique of Western democracy. In a parliamentary system, when 51 percent captures the legislative body, then “49 per cent of the electorate is ruled by an instrument of government they did not vote for,” Qaddafi points out. “Plebiscites are a fraud against democracy,” he subsequently writes. “Those who vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ do not, in fact, express their free will but, rather, are silenced by the modern conception of democracy as they are not allowed to say more than ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”</p>
<p>For several pages, Qaddafi adeptly highlights the shortcomings of various aspects of Western democracy. The crescendo of criticism grows, and the reader anxiously awaits the punchline—and quite a joke it is. “Popular conferences are the only means to achieve popular democracy,” Qaddafi, presumably straight-faced, asserts. “Any system of government contrary to this method, the method of Popular Conferences, is undemocratic.” After all that buildup a letdown naturally followed. All of the pointed-out drawbacks of Western-style governance appear more glaringly in the proposed “Popular Conferences.” This sophist’s lapse in logic could only emanate from an emperor whose votaries are afraid to tell him that he wears no clothes.</p>
<p>The opening sections rationalize the few controlling the many by demeaning the governmental systems where the many possess a check on the few. The control-freak mentality that inspires <em>The Green Book</em>’s advocacy of one-man rule—called “Popular Conferences”—also inspires its section on economics. There, the state is as all-powerful as it is in the political realm.</p>
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		<title>Egypt: Muslims Riot Over Appointment of Christian Governor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/robert-spencer/egypt-muslims-riot-over-appointment-of-christian-governor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=egypt-muslims-riot-over-appointment-of-christian-governor</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/robert-spencer/egypt-muslims-riot-over-appointment-of-christian-governor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:06:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christian residents]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[government corruption]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mainstream]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mainstream Media]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[railway line]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secular democracy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90954</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If your looking for a secular-democratic revolution, Egypt's not for you.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/egypt_protest.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90958" title="egypt_protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/egypt_protest.gif" alt="" width="375" height="283" /></a></p>
<p>In the new modern, moderate, secular, democratic Egypt of the Arab Spring, Muslims in Qena are enraged and protesting because a Christian governor has been appointed for them. It was yet another indication that the Egypt that will emerge from this season of revolution and upheaval is much more likely to be an Islamic state than a secular democracy, no matter how much the mainstream media fantasizes about the latter.</p>
<p>The protests have been vehement, if not violent. <a href="http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE73G0CH20110417?sp=true">Reuters reported Sunday</a> that “thousands rallied outside the governor’s office in Qena and prevented employees from entering, blocked highways leading to the town and sat on a railway line into the province demanding that the appointment of Emad Mikhail be reversed.” A local resident added: “They started out by camping at the local government’s office. Then they set up a tent on the railroad tracks. They also tried to block the road and stopped buses to separate men and women passengers.” And “tensions were so high that the local Christian residents had to stay inside and couldn’t go to church to celebrate Palm Sunday.”</p>
<p>Reuters suggested that the protesters were angry about government corruption, claiming  that the protesters were outraged because the last Christian governor in the area “left a negative impression of Christian officials,” but <a href="http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16020/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=9QI9sDDv">AP let the cat out of the bag</a> on Monday when it noted that “many” of the protesters were “from the ultraconservative Salafi trend of Islam.”</p>
<p>For the mainstream media, one is “ultraconservative” for adhering to Islamic law and wanting to impose it on others, and likewise “ultraconservative” for resisting the imposition of that law. But anyway, why would “ultraconservative” Islamic supremacists be outraged over a Christian governor? Because Islamic law forbids non-Muslims to hold authority over Muslims. This is in accord with the Qur’anic command that Muslims fight the People of the Book – the Qur’an’s term for primarily Jews and Christians, until they “feel themselves subdued” (9:29).</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Summer of Corruption</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/obamas-summer-of-corruption-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-summer-of-corruption-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/obamas-summer-of-corruption-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:03:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What new dirty secrets will be exposed in the coming months? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Obama_I_had_no_contact_with_Blagojevich.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-62506" title="Obama_I_had_no_contact_with_Blagojevich" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Obama_I_had_no_contact_with_Blagojevich-300x242.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="242" /></a></p>
<p>In Chicago politics, there&#8217;s an old term for the publicly subsidized pay-offs and positions meted out to the corruptocrats&#8217; friends and special interests: boodle.</p>
<p>In the age of Obama, Hope and Change is all about the boodle. So it was with the stimulus. And the massive national service expansion. And the health care bill. And the financial reform bill. And the blossoming job-trading scandals engulfing the White House.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s always been an ageless, interdependent relationship between Windy City politicos and &#8220;goo-goos&#8221; (the cynical Chicago term for good government reformers). Chicago-style &#8220;reform&#8221; has always entailed the redistribution of wealth and power under the guise of public service. And it has inevitably led to more corruption.</p>
<p>In March 2010, this column first took note of allegations by Democrats Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff that the White House had offered them jobs in exchange for dropping their respective bids against Obama-favored incumbent Sens. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Michael Bennet in Colorado. White House legal counsel Bob &#8220;The Fixer&#8221; Bauer&#8217;s attempt to bury questions about the Sestak affair with a Memorial Day weekend document dump failed. So has the attempt to make Rahm Emanuel-enlisted former president Bill Clinton the sole scapegoat.</p>
<p>Bauer&#8217;s memo mentions &#8220;efforts&#8221; (plural, not singular) to woo Sestak. But the White House refuses to divulge what offers besides Clinton&#8217;s were extended to Sestak. Moreover, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has now denied that Team Obama was involved in the one Clinton offer that has been publicized — an unpaid appointment on an intelligence board for which Sestak was ineligible.</p>
<p>After months of silence, Romanoff finally stepped forward last week to acknowledge that the White House had dangled several positions before him, too. He released e-mails detailing not one, not two, but three different paid positions offered by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina — whose boss, Emanuel, was subpoenaed this week by impeached former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois to testify in his Senate pay-for-play corruption trial.</p>
<p>So, can I say &#8220;I told you so&#8221; now?</p>
<p>In July 2009, when &#8220;Culture of Corruption&#8221; was first released, liberal critics scoffed:</p>
<p><em>How could you possibly write a 400-page book about Barack Obama&#8217;s rotten administration when he&#8217;s only been in office six months?!</em></p>
<p>When I proceeded to rattle off case after case of Chicago-style back-scratching, transparency-trampling and crooked special interest-dealing in the new White House, liberal critics such as &#8220;The View&#8217;s&#8221; Joy Behar interjected:</p>
<p><em>B-b-b-but what about Bush? Why don&#8217;t you write a book about Bush? Wha-&#8217;bout-Bush? Wha-&#8217;bout-Bush? Wha-&#8217;bout-Bush?</em></p>
<p>When I pointed out that I had reported extensively on cronyism in the Bush era (see Harriet Miers, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security), and when I further pointed out that while the Bush-bashing market overflowed, there remained a massive vacuum of critical analysis of Obama, liberal critics sputtered:</p>
<p><em>So what? Doesn&#8217;t every administration have corruption?</em></p>
<p>When I patiently explained that no other administration in modern American history had set itself up as loftily as the Hope and Change reformers had done, or when I cited endless examples of Obama&#8217;s broken promises on everything from lobbyists to transparency to Washington business as usual, liberal critics changed the subject again:</p>
<p><em>RACIST FASCIST EVIL FOX NEWS RIGHT-WING HATE MONGER!</em></p>
<p>Two major job-trading scandals plus the start of the Blago trial this past week — on top of a year&#8217;s worth of uninhibited White House wheeling and dealing, broken transparency pledges, Justice Department stonewalling and brass knuckle-bullying of political opponents — have finally turned the once-derided thesis of my book &#8220;Culture of Corruption&#8221; into conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>Obama sold America a Chicago-tainted bill of goods. A nation of slow learners is finally figuring it out.</p>
<p><em>Michelle Malkin is the author of &#8220;Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks &amp; Cronies&#8221; (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com</em></p>
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		<title>Jerusalem Is Not a Settlement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/joseph-puder/jerusalem-is-not-a-settlement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jerusalem-is-not-a-settlement</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/joseph-puder/jerusalem-is-not-a-settlement/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:00:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the sacred city has kept the Jews united through exile and beyond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/jerusalem-1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-61794" title="jerusalem-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/jerusalem-1-300x197.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="197" /></a></p>
<p>Israel celebrated “<a href="http://www.knesset.gov.il/holidays/eng/jer">Jerusalem Day</a>” last week, which commemorates the 1967 reunification of the city following the Six Day War.  The celebrations and speeches were especially poignant in view of the <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/64535">Obama Administration’s decree that Israel must cease building in Jerusalem. </a></p>
<p>For Jews, Jerusalem is, has been, and always will be the symbol and the heart and soul of their national identity.  Jerusalem is mentioned almost 900 times in the Bible (767 in the King James Version and not a single mention of the city in the Koran) including Psalms (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning” &#8211; Psalm 137:5) and in the Passover Haggadah with the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” concluding the Passover service.  Through pilgrimages and prayers, Jews have demonstrated their love and yearning for Jerusalem for more than two millennia.  Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, is derived from Zion, another name for Jerusalem.</p>
<p>King David made Jerusalem his capital in 1000 BCE and unified the nation around it.  The city became the political and spiritual center of Jewish life, with the Temple at its heart.  But it took one of King David descendants, King Josiah, crowned 2650 years ago, to fortify the Jewish nation with a memory of Jerusalem that has kept the Jewish people united together during the Babylonian exile and beyond.</p>
<p><a href="http://associate.com/library/www.christianlibrary.org/authors/john_L_Katchelman_Jr/kings-ot">At the age of twenty, King Josiah</a> understood that the assimilation of Jews into the idol-worshipping cultures that surrounded them might doom his kingdom and his people. He, therefore, enacted religious and political reforms aimed at establishing a unified national and religious worship.</p>
<p>The struggle between Jewish particularism and universalism is as long as Jewish history itself.  On one side, there were those who sought to assimilate into the neighboring (or prevailing) culture and on the other side, there were those who were dedicated to preserving the Jewish particularistic nature. We all know the story of Hanukkah and the Maccabean revolt against Greek rule and their agents from within. It was King Josiah, whose father King Amon was an idol-worshipper, who helped to create a Zion-oriented, national and religious Jewish particularism.</p>
<p>Following King Solomon’s death, the unified kingdom of Israel split up.  The Kingdom of Israel turned its back on Jerusalem and adopted the idol-worshipping universalist culture of the surrounding lands.  It did not survive.  Conversely, the Kingdom of Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, survived for almost a century-and-a-half thereafter.  Josiah’s particularistic Jewish kingdom prepared the Judeans and future generations against ultimate defeat and exile by rededicating the lost Book of Deuteronomy to the people.</p>
<p>Josiah’s revolutionary actions were based on shifting the focus of religious worship from the physical domain (sacrifices) to the spiritual domain with the reading of the Torah.  Josiah did in his time what Martin Luther did in 16<sup>th </sup>century Europe.  By removing the exclusivity of the priests (in sacrifices) and the scribes, who read for the entire community, the common people were now compelled to learn how to read, altering their role as passive participants.</p>
<p>The Book &#8211; The Torah, which maintained a unitary focus on Zion, had a centralizing impact on Judaism.  Whereas sacrifices could be made at any place and for all “gods” or sovereigns, Josiah provided the Jews with a particularistic culture that is eternal and accessible to all the people.   Josiah was in a sense fulfilling Moses’ command in the Book of Deuteronomy 31:19, “Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it to the Children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the Children of Israel.”</p>
<p>Josiah’s great achievement is in facilitating the rise of the synagogue as a replacement for the destroyed Jerusalem Temple.  The practice of reading from the Torah began with Josiah and continues to this day among all Jews. King Josiah was greatly aided and strengthened by the Prophet Jeremiah who preached during his reign.  Jeremiah tied together the notion that worshipping God in the City of David (Jerusalem) and the freedom from foreign oppressors the city afforded them, are connected by an unbreakable chain.  It was an essential Zionist message.</p>
<p>The full extent and meaning of Josiah’s revolution is seen with the returnees from the Babylonian exile, Ezra and Nehemiah.  While they were dedicated to the rebuilding of the Second Temple, they understood that the essence of public worship was concentrated in public prayer.  Ezra stood on top of a wooden platform and opened the book while the masses of Jews rose to their feet; he read from the Torah and translated it to the masses (many of whom had lapsed in their practice of Judaism in the absence of strong Jewish leadership following the general expulsion to Babylon.)</p>
<p>The sacrificial alters (used by Jews and idol-worshippers alike) were replaced by a new institution, namely the synagogue, where Jews assembled for worship without the sole orchestration of priests who came from Aaron’s lineage (Moses’ brother). Instead, they were led by scribes from all walks of life and from any tribe.</p>
<p>Josiah’s contribution to Judaism and Zionism is in having forged an intellectual revolution based on three elements: Concentrating the kingdom (nation) around Jerusalem or Zion, from which all spirituality emanates; abolishing the foreign idol-worshipping and foreign cultural influences that erode the national and religious strength; and transferring the centrality of religious worship from the physical (sacrifices of animals) to a spiritual and intellectual worship.</p>
<p>Modern celebrations of Jerusalem serve a two-fold purpose: to remember that 2000 CE Jerusalem marked its 3000 birthday and 2010 marked the 43<sup>rd</sup> anniversary of the reunification of city.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s attempted imposition of a building halt in Jerusalem and his anticipated division of the city is once again pitting universalist Jews (those who seek to be accepted and liked by the world) against particularistic Jews, (who see Jerusalem as the heart and soul of Jewish sovereignty and faith).  The Netanyahu government is currently in the midst of a debate on the building freeze.  In Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “Jerusalem Day” speech he vowed never to allow the division of Jerusalem. It remains to be seen, however, whether Netanyahu will follow the particularistic actions of King Josiah or succumb to the universalist culture and accept Obama’s foreign idols.</p>
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		<title>Dancing With Devils</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/bill-muehlenberg/dancing-with-devils/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dancing-with-devils</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 04:04:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bill Muehlenberg]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why leftists bow to the torturers of mankind.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/dancing.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-61517" title="dancing" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/dancing.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="233" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from the <a href="http://www.nationalobserver.net/default.htm">National Observer</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.</p>
<p>Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including <em>Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78</em> (1981) and <em>Anti-Americanism</em> (1995).</p>
<p>Here, in his recent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1275279756&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr"><em>United in Hate</em></a>, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.</p>
<p>Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.</p>
<p>They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.</p>
<p>Back in the Soviet Union they had risked their lives to campaign for the millions who were being tortured and killed in the Gulag slave labour camps and psychiatric hospitals simply because of their political and religious beliefs. Yet in America they were being viciously attacked by an intelligentsia that loathed America while idolising communist barbarism.</p>
<p>It was a shock the young Glazov never really recovered from, and here he seeks to assess and understand this most bizarre feature of Western life. And with the onset of militant Islam, he sees the whole scenario again being played out before his eyes.</p>
<p>The first half of this important book covers the earlier cases of Western fascination with, and blindness to, totalitarian nightmare states. The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China were all objects of wide-eyed leftist veneration and adoration.</p>
<p>Glazov reminds us of the words of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, uttered during the height of Stalin’s murder of millions. He waxed eloquent in his love of Stalin with these words: Stalin’s &#8220;brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.&#8221;</p>
<p>French writer Jean-Paul Sartre could say this about another murderous thug, Fidel Castro: &#8220;Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle and the earth. He is the whole island.&#8221; And Father Daniel Berrigan, another longstanding apologist for tyrants, could say this of Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong: he is an individual &#8220;in whom complexity dwells: … a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion …&#8221;</p>
<p>Or consider the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who after capturing power in 1979 managed to carry out 8,000 political executions in the following three years. They made the nation a place of torture, repression and dictatorship. Yet plenty of Western leftists fell at their feet in worship.</p>
<p>German writer Günter Grass, who was shown a &#8220;prison&#8221; which the Sandinistas wanted political pilgrims to see — not the actual prisons where inmates were beaten, starved, tortured and killed — came back with euphoric exhilaration: &#8220;The humane way in which sentences are carried out!&#8221;, he gushed, along with other sentimental mush.</p>
<p>Of course, the Soviets had done just the same with the Gulag decades earlier, to fool gullible Westerners who came over for a look. Western left-wingers were just as ignorant and easily deceived in the 1930s or ’50s as they were in the ’80s.</p>
<p>And they still are. The second half of this book looks at Islamic terrorism, and its Western apologists. There are plenty of leftists in the West who are convinced that Islamic terrorism either does not exist, or is all America’s fault.</p>
<p>Again, Glazov offers plenty of examples. The September 11 atrocity provides plenty of quotes. Norman Mailer called the suicide-hijackers &#8220;brilliant.&#8221; He excused the attack by saying, &#8220;Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Susan Sontag assured us that the terrorist attack was the result of &#8220;specific American alliances and actions.&#8221; Film-maker Oliver Stone affirmed that 9/11 was a &#8220;revolt&#8221; and said the ensuing Palestinian celebrations were comparable to those seen in the French and Russian revolutions.</p>
<p>Christian leader Tony Campolo could argue that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the medieval Crusades. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as &#8220;the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.&#8221; On and on the apologists for terror and tyranny go. And then there is the inherent anti-Semitism in so much of this as well.</p>
<p>For many left-wingers, Israel is always the enemy, and the Muslim and Arab populations can do no wrong. Consider the remarks of Mike Wallace concerning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the annihilation of Israel: &#8220;He’s an impressive fellow this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell. … You’ll find him an interesting man.&#8221;</p>
<p>These leftists offered more support for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they did for George W. Bush. Film-maker Michael Moore denounced the US while extolling the terrorists: &#8220;The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.&#8221;</p>
<p>Glazov devotes a chapter to seeking to examine the psychological makeup of these leftists whose romance with tyranny and terror seems so hard to fathom. They are alienated from their own homelands, although seldom realise it. They espouse a secular religion, a secular utopian vision which speaks much of humanity but is happy to see individual humans crushed in the attempt to create their coercive utopia.</p>
<p>The West-hating Left seems to be a permanent feature of modern Western life. Now that the communist revolution has lost its momentum, other causes must be found. The Islamist cause nicely does the trick. The same enemies are there, such as America, freedom and affluence.</p>
<p>As this book reminds us, we really have two enemies to contend with: murderous totalitarian ideologies of every stripe, and their Western leftist support base. It is an insidious alliance of which we all must be aware. This book does a fine job of making that very clear indeed.</p>
<p><em>Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website, CultureWatch is at: <a href="http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/" target="_new">www.billmuehlenberg.com</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>To order a copy of <em>United in Hate</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1275279756&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Apologist for Gender Apartheid</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/reut-cohen/apologist-for-gender-apartheid/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=apologist-for-gender-apartheid</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 04:01:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Reut Cohen]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Middle Eastern women want to be subjugated and abused, says Prof. Suad Joseph.
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/joseph.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60774" title="joseph" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/joseph.gif" alt="" width="375" height="245" /></a></p>
<p>On May 7, 2010, UCLA’s <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4420">Center for Near Eastern Studies</a> (CNES) and the <em>Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies</em> co-sponsored the lecture, “<a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events/showevent.asp?eventid=8062">Rethinking Arab Women as ‘Subjects</a>.’” The talk was delivered by <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=suad+joseph&amp;sa=Search">Suad Joseph</a>, a Lebanese-born professor of anthropology and women’s studies at UC Davis, and president-elect of the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/38">Middle East Studies Association</a> (MESA), the principal professional organization for scholars of the region. Joseph, who has <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/3645">co-edited a book</a> with CNES director <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=slyomovics&amp;sa=Search">Susan Slyomovics</a>, is considered a pioneer in the field of Middle East women’s studies, accolades which—as is, sadly, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2442">often the case</a>—translates into <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_why_feminism.html">apologetics</a> for the oppression of Middle Eastern women.</p>
<p>Joseph announced she was perturbed about the title of her lecture; she couldn’t decide whether “Arab” was an appropriate term to use for identification purposes. Yet, she contradicted herself (and followed the Arabist practice of her discipline) by referring to the Middle East exclusively as the “Arab world” and by questioning the identities of Jews, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other distinctive, regional minorities. She wondered why these groups perceive themselves as separate from Arabs when the answer is readily apparent both in the distinctive histories of theses peoples and in their persecution at the hands of Arab Muslim majorities. The very term “Arab”—often used arbitrarily to describe anything Middle Eastern—is loaded with a perilous and extreme nationalism that has made ethnic minorities such as <a href="http://www.reutrcohen.com/2009/01/1000000-middle-eastern-jews.html">Mizrahi Jews</a> and <a href="http://www.christiansofiraq.com/Lewis.html">Assyrians</a> victims of the majority.</p>
<p>Joseph questioned, and at times denounced, studies examining the status quo of women in the Middle East. She argued that the representation of Arab women as subjects is a “problematic category and necessary one,” and that there is serious fault with characterizations—particularly in Western research and media—of Arab women as the victims of patriarchy, culture, politics, and religion. Instead, Joseph contended, notions of self are changing and malleable.</p>
<p>Predictably for contemporary Middle East studies, Joseph paid tribute to Edward Said’s deeply flawed book <em>Orientalism</em>, which helps explain her rejection of any implied Western superiority regarding women’s rights. In asserting that Westerners shouldn’t assume women in the Middle East wish to imitate secular, Westernized women, she encapsulated the ideology widespread on college campuses: multiculturalism, a form of cultural relativism that denies the ability to judge non-Western cultures on their merits, and which, in practice, judges all non-Western cultures as superior. She made no reference to universal human rights or to the <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw10/FIW_2010_Tables_and_Graphs.pdf">possible reasons for rising Arab immigration</a> to secular European nations and to North America.</p>
<p>Joseph asserted that Arab women are the “most relationship-driven” of any with which she has worked. She described Americans, in contrast, as less “relationship-driven” and American women as having fewer expectations than their Arab counterparts. Joseph offered no factual evidence for either of these preposterous claims. Given the grave circumstances under which many Arab women live, one would think it is they who are forced to have fewer expectations and not, as Joseph contended, Western women.</p>
<p>Incredibly, Joseph theorized that Arab women want to be claimed by men, and therefore have no objection to being subjects of a patriarchal and theocratic society in which their individual rights are abridged. The audience, which appeared to consist mostly of Center for Near Eastern Studies and Women’s Studies faculty, nodded their heads in agreement with this troubling statement. In fact, those gathered reacted favorably to the lecture overall and asked no challenging questions of the speaker. Overwhelming (if understated) evidence of the systematic and institutionalized abuse of Middle Eastern women didn’t seem to factor into the equation.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw10/FIW_2010_Map_MENA.pdf">In many regions of the Middle East, the basic standing of women and the attitude of men towards them are pre-modern. </a>Were this not so, there would be no honor killings, female genital mutilation, child marriage, or legitimized wife-beating. Moreover, the West should consider the disturbing social implications for its societies as these barbaric customs are imported through Muslim immigration.</p>
<p>If I may end on a personal note: As a woman of Middle Eastern origin, the situation of women in the Middle East has always fascinated and troubled me. Although I come from a very traditional Middle Eastern family—albeit Jewish—the women in my family have always been empowered and independent. Therefore, I find it extremely difficult to come to terms with the theory that Middle Eastern women are a different breed who welcome abuse for some twisted concept of maintaining a “relationship-driven” society.</p>
<p>If one believes, as I do, in fundamental human rights, there are moral principles that define our basic freedoms. Middle Eastern women’s rights activists such as Shirin Ebadi and Ayaan Hirsi Ali do not excuse the misogynistic and theocratic elements in their native countries. Instead, they demand freedom, even in the face of their abusers and of Western apologists.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Joseph’s lecture belongs in the latter category, demonstrating yet again that Middle Eastern women who seek intellectual and moral support from Western professors of Middle East studies will come away disappointed.</p>
<p><em>Reut Cohen is a journalist, researcher, and the publisher of </em><a href="http://www.reutrcohen.com/"><em>ReutRCohen.com</em></a><em>. She wrote this article for </em><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><em>Campus Watch</em></a><em>, a project of the </em><a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><em>Middle East Forum</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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		<title>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/the-only-thing-worth-dying-for/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-only-thing-worth-dying-for</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 04:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How eleven Green Berets forged a new Afghanistan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59992" title="blehm" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/blehm.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="517" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228" target="_blank"><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For:<br />
How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan</em><br />
By Eric Behm<br />
Harper, $25.99, 375pp.<br />
Review by David Forsmark</a></p>
<p>If you Google “Karzai” and “corruption,” you are given somewhere around 6,650,000 results.  In fact, when you Google the name “Karzai,” Google’s autocomplete function gives you “Karzai corruption” as the 4<sup>th</sup> choice.</p>
<p>But you can complete the search parameter for “Karzai courage” without Google’s autocomplete ever kicking in&#8211; even when you get as far as, “Karzai courag.”  And the search results tend to be either articles that encourage the President of Afghanistan to show some, or are at least 5 years old.</p>
<p>But as Eric Behm’s terrific new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228" target="_blank"><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan,</em></a> illustrates, the warriors of the Special Forces A-Team ODA 574 would offer a completely different assessment.</p>
<p>It’s also hard to find a good word from President Obama about Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.  Before his visit this week, the Administration treated Karzai with the contempt they usually reserved for right of center Israeli Prime Ministers.   But while Hillary Clinton had kind words for the Afghan leader, Obama, in the <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/05/grinning-through-clenched-teeth-the-white-house-rolls-out-the-red-carpet-for-karzai.html">words of ABC’s Jake Tapper</a>, delivered his smiles through “clenched teeth.”</p>
<p>Obama’s media microphone have picked up the refrain, using words like “puppet” and acting as though Karzai played no role in the liberation of his country other than acting as our surrogate after we did all the hard work.  Chris Matthews, (ever on the lookout for the Vietnam or Watergate comparisons which are the touchstone of his life) recently compared Karzai to South Vietnamese President Diem.</p>
<p>I wonder if any of the cavalier commentators have a clue that Hamid Karzai went into the Kandahar region solo&#8211; while the Northern  Alliance and Special Forces A-Teams waged war in the north&#8211; to rally tribes and towns against the Taliban.  Or that Karzai put himself in such danger that Delta Force had to rescue him; and later assured victory in the south and probably headed off a civil war in Afghanistan by going back with an 11-man Special Forces team and routing the Taliban while uniting the tribes to the liberation cause.</p>
<p>More importantly, I wonder if <em>Barack Obama</em> knows it.</p>
<p>Behm does a nice job with the warrior camaraderie of the Special Forces Team in the book’s subtitle; but the central relationship in <em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> is between Hamid Karzai and Army Captain Jason Amerine, commander of OD-574.  Together, they form an almost (but not quite) Washington and Lafayette team, as Karzai rallies the populace and Amerine calls in the heavy firepower.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, thanks to the success of the <a href="Downloads/For%20more%20detailed%20commentary%20on%20the%20trial,%20check%20out%20Navy%20Chiefs%20running%20commentary%20here.">Horse Soldiers</a> in the North, the same Army brass who had to be cajoled&#8211; if not tricked&#8211; into letting the Special Forces handle the war in Afghanistan, decided it was time to get involved and share in the glory.</p>
<p>Just as victory was almost in hand, Amerine was saddled with a dozen rear-echolon types who arrived in camp, outnumbering the members of OD-574, themselves.  The Pentagon was nervous at just how much the War in Afghanistan in general&#8211; and the effort concerned with Karzai who was on track to be the next leader of Afghanistan in particular&#8211; was being managed by captains and non-coms.</p>
<p>All the while assuring Amerine that he still had control over the operation on the ground, the brass couldn’t resist taking their own turn at calling in air strikes, while the frustrated Amerine tried to decide if it was worth the trouble—or even possible—to reign them in.</p>
<p>The devastating result, however, gives new insight into why Hamid Karzai might have a particular aversion to collateral damage and misguided airstrikes.</p>
<p>The book also puts the Karzai presidency in context.  By showing the fragility of the alliance among the tribes, and the light touch required from Karzai to make it happen, one can’t help think that the very qualities that the Obama Administration is ripping Karzai for today are what make a central government in Afghanistan—for all its admitted weakness&#8211; even remotely possible.</p>
<p>Karzai was selected by the international community and a coalition of Afghans precisely <em>because</em> of his light touch, along with his credibility on the ground.   A heavy-handed effort at “reform” is likely to not only fail, but lead to a splintering of the coalition, if not outright rebellion in the wild outlying regions.  One could argue that Karzai has been exactly what we needed him to be, rather than what utopian perfectionists pretend he should be.</p>
<p>Some might perceive some irony in the title, as the heavy price paid by OD-574 was not caused by the enemy.  The press and politicians seem to treat “friendly fire” casualties as somehow more of a waste than a noble sacrifice.  But professional soldiers know they are an inevitable part of the chaos of combat—no matter how avoidable they seem in hindsight.  Behm—and the Green Berets—appropriately honor their dead in the same way they would had they been killed in a massive Taliban counter-attack.</p>
<p>Victor Davis Hanson regularly writes that one of the great strengths of the United States military is the ability of the soldier on the ground to make combat decisions.  A Special Forces master sergeant has more authority to call in an airstrike, for instance, than a Russian full bird colonel.  <em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> offers a prime example of that attribute—and a cautionary tale of what happens when the warriors on the scene are not given <em>enough</em> autonomy.</p>
<p><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> is not as action-packed as <em>Horse Soldiers</em>, or <em>Kill bin Laden</em>, nor is it as controversial as <em>Jawbreaker</em>; but it stands with those three fine books as a must read for anyone who wants to understand the war in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Best of all, it’s also a terrific story of valiant men at arms, and exceedingly well told.</p>
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