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		<title>Saul Alinsky Lives in Ferguson</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/john-perazzo/saul-alinsky-lives-in-ferguson/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=saul-alinsky-lives-in-ferguson</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/john-perazzo/saul-alinsky-lives-in-ferguson/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:46:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alinsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246725</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama has implemented Alinsky's tactics of social revolution to tear a city – and a nation – apart. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Saul_Alinsky_271.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246727" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Saul_Alinsky_271-450x341.jpg" alt="Saul_Alinsky_27" width="355" height="269" /></a>If the late Saul Alinsky—the America-hating godfather of community organizing—had fathered a black son, he&#8217;d look like Barack Obama.[1]  Obama has embraced, revered, and employed Alinsky&#8217;s philosophy and tactics of social revolution <i>for decades</i>. Indeed, he even <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/behind-a-class-warfare-charge-the-shadow-of-saul-alinsky/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">taught</span></a> Alinsky&#8217;s <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/study-saul-alinsky-to-understand-barack-obama/article/243226"><span style="color: #0433ff;">methods</span></a> in community-organizing workshops and seminars in Chicago, when he was a much younger Marxist. As we witness the continuing racial unrest sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown and the Ferguson grand jury&#8217;s subsequent decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, it is vital to understand that <i>everything </i>the protesters/rioters are doing—in Ferguson and elsewhere—is straight out of Alinsky&#8217;s most famous publications, <i>Rules For Radicals</i> and <i>Reveille For Radicals</i>. And Obama has encouraged them, every step of the way.</p>
<p>Obama and Alinsky never actually met in person, as Alinsky died when Obama was just 11 years old. Happily for the future president, by that time he had already been introduced to the man who would mentor him throughout his adolescent years—the America-hating, pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, Communist writer Frank Marshall Davis. Thus, when Obama eventually encountered Alinsky through the latter&#8217;s writings, the young community organizer was well prepared ideologically to soak up Alinsky&#8217;s message.</p>
<p>In his quest to cultivate the type of chaos that would spark social revolution against America&#8217;s capitalist system, Alinsky exhorted activists to constantly “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression”—but to do this in measured tones, so as not to “scare off” middle-class Americans.</p>
<p>Thus did Obama dutifully and blandly call for “unity” and calm in the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown&#8217;s “heartbreaking and tragic” death, even as he repeatedly reminded us that: “police should not be bullying or arresting” anyone without cause; “in too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and left as objects to fear”; “there is no excuse for excessive force by police”; “the justice gap” between whites and nonwhites is unacceptable; “the criminal-justice system doesn&#8217;t treat people of all races equally”; and “too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.” And when the grand jury in Ferguson subsequently chose not to indict Darren Wilson because the officer obviously had shot Michael Brown in self-defense, Obama pronounced the black community&#8217;s indignation to be “an understandable reaction.”</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s carefully chosen words—all delivered in the type of nonthreatening tenor advocated by Saul Alinsky—clearly communicated a single, foundational theme to African Americans: <i>In the racist cesspool known as the United States, black people are routinely treated like second-class citizens, if not subhumans. Oh, and by the way, please remain calm. Wink, wink.</i></p>
<p>Alinsky also taught that in some cases activists must be completely willing—for the sake of the moral principles in whose name they profess to act—to turn up the proverbial heat and watch society descend into chaos and anarchy; to “go into a state of complete confusion and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.”<span style="color: #680900;"> </span>“Wherever possible,” Alinsky counseled, “go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”</p>
<p>Mobs of shouting protesters can accomplish that objective quite effectively—even if, as in the present case, they are oblivious to the irony that the poster-child of their crusade is a multiple felon who tried unsuccessfully to murder a police officer. Such demonstrations tend to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is not only well underway, but may actually be preparing to shift into an even higher gear at any moment. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating. Thus did President Obama recently meet at the White House with Al Sharpton, his leading advisor on race-related matters, and other protest <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/17/obama-told-civil-rights-activists-keep-ferguson-staying-on-course/"><span style="color: #680900;">leaders</span></a> from Ferguson, urging them to “<a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/11/obama-meets-with-ferguson-activists-says-hes-concerned-they-stay-on-course/"><span style="color: #680900;">stay on course</span></a>” with their activism.</p>
<p>Yet another highly noteworthy observation by Alinsky was this: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” “The threat,” he explained, “is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Thus, “if your organization is small in numbers,… raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.”</p>
<p>This can be well achieved by orchestrating a host of simultaneous demonstrations in multiple cities or venues, exactly as the highly organized Gentle Giant crusade has been doing. The stature of these rallies is magnified by the fact that they receive lots of media attention, while scores of millions of ordinary Americans who view them with contempt and dread are busy quietly going about their lives, caring for their families, working at their jobs, and pursuing their personal aspirations as they see fit. Such people are many thousands of times more numerous than the perpetually aggrieved rabble-rousers of the Left, but Alinsky understood—as Obama understands today—that a spraying skunk inevitably gets all the attention when it intrudes unexpectedly upon a picnic.</p>
<p>The America-hating Alinsky also taught that activists, in order to cast themselves as defenders of high-minded principles, must theatrically convey “shock, horror, and moral outrage” whenever any of their demands—however inconsequential—are not met. And no one conveys such emotions more convincingly than Obama&#8217;s aforementioned racial “advisor,” Al Sharpton, who vows to continue the Michael Brown/anti-police brutality crusade until the end of time if necessary. Alinsky understood quite well that even <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1527"><span style="color: #0433ff;">a pathetic moral degenerate</span></a> like Sharpton can be an effective revolutionary if he is skilled in the otherwise worthless arts of bluster and righteous indignation.</p>
<p>Lest anyone think there might be a way to bridge the gap between civil society and the revolutionaries in the vanguard of the current Gentle Giant Brigades, a dose of reality is in order: Alinsky emphasized that the overarching objective of any crusade is <i>never</i> to promote peace or reconciliation, but rather to be unwaveringly “dedicated to an eternal war” in which “there are no rules of fair play” and “no compromise” whatsoever; to mercilessly “pulverize” people with “fear”; and ultimately to “force their capitulation.”</p>
<p>We got a glimpse of this mindset recently when we <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393380/get-ready-super-bowl-outrage-ferguson-deroy-murdock"><span style="color: #680900;">learned</span></a> that two New Black Panther Party members were plotting not only to blow up St. Louis&#8217;s famed Gateway Arch, but also to <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/ferguson-murder-plot-black-panthers-planned-killing-police-chief-prosecutor"><span style="color: #680900;">assassinate</span></a> Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson and the city&#8217;s prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch. And a shrieking Louis Farrakhan, for his part, has been busy <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/29/farrakhan-on-ferguson-well-tear-this-gdamn-country-up-video/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">urging</span></a> black Americans to throw Molotov cocktails at white people in order to fulfill a scriptural “law of retaliation”; condemning whites for allegedly “killing us” in large numbers; and warning that “we’ll tear this goddamn country up!”</p>
<p>Like all Marxists, Obama, Sharpton, Farrakhan, and the rest of their fellow revolutionaries seek to tear society apart by pitting the “races,” the “classes,” and the “genders” against one another—“rubbing raw” their respective “resentments” until hatred abounds in every person&#8217;s heart and mayhem fills the streets. Michael Brown&#8217;s corpse is merely a building block for these rabble rousers. They know that someday another African American will be killed by a white police officer and thus be anointed as their movement&#8217;s next martyred saint. Bit by bit, the inconvenient fact that Brown was a violent, abusive criminal whose death was brought about entirely by his own actions will be airbrushed out of public memory. And the grievance mongers of the “civil rights” movement will wistfully remember him as just another innocent black victim whose life was tragically cut short by white depravity.</p>
<p>Saul Alinsky would be proud.</p>
<p><strong>NOTE:</strong><br />
[1] In March 2012, not long after the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, President Obama famously <a href="http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/03/obama-i-had-a-son-hed-look-like-trayvon-118439.html">said</a>: &#8220;If I had a son, he&#8217;d look like Trayvon.&#8221;</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Dinesh D&#8217;Souza</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discuss the role <strong>Saul Alinksy</strong> plays in Obama&#8217;s ideology and tactics:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/h1DQjj1VxHw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></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>Black People Duped</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/black-people-duped/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=black-people-duped</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/black-people-duped/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:15:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political power]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220221</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why political power hasn't solved black socioeconomic problems. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obamaNAACP2.hero_.reuters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220226" alt="obamaNAACP2.hero.reuters" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obamaNAACP2.hero_.reuters.jpg" width="270" height="221" /></a>People in the media and academia are mostly leftists hellbent on growing government and controlling our lives. Black people, their politicians and civil rights organizations have become unwitting accomplices. The leftist pretense of concern for the well-being of black people confers upon them an aura of moral superiority and, as such, gives more credibility to their calls for increasing government control over our lives.</p>
<p>Ordinary black people have been sold on the importance of electing blacks to high public office. After centuries of black people having been barred from high elected office, no decent American can have anything against their wider participation in our political system. For several decades, blacks have held significant political power, in the form of being mayors and dominant forces on city councils in major cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, Calif., Newark, N.J., and Cincinnati. In these cities, blacks have held administrative offices such as school superintendent, school principal and chief of police. Plus, there&#8217;s the precedent-setting fact of there being 44 black members of Congress and a black president.</p>
<p>What has this political power meant for the significant socio-economic problems faced by a large segment of the black community? Clearly, it has done little or nothing for academic achievement; the number of black students scoring proficient is far below the national average. It is a disgrace — and ought to be a source of shame — to know that the average white seventh- or eighth-grader can run circles around the average black 12th-grader in most academic subjects. The political and education establishment tells us that the solution lies in higher budgets, but the fact of business is that some of the worst public school districts have the highest spending per student. Washington, D.C., for example, spends more than $29,000 per student and scores at nearly the bottom in academic achievement.</p>
<p>Each year, roughly 7,000 — and as high as 9,000 — blacks are murdered.</p>
<p>Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Contrast this with the fact that black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and wars since 1980 (about 8,200) total about 18,500. Young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities. Black political power and massive city budgets have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate this problem of black insecurity.</p>
<p>Most of the problems faced by the black community have their roots in a black culture that differs significantly from the black culture of yesteryear. Today only 35 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households, but as far back as 1880, in Philadelphia, 75 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households — and it was as high as 85 percent in other places. Even during slavery, in which marriage was forbidden, most black children were raised with two biological parents. The black family managed to survive several centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow, to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state. The black family has fallen victim to the vision fostered by some intellectuals that, in the words of a sociology professor in the 1960s, &#8220;it has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes.&#8221; The real issue to these intellectuals &#8220;is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income.&#8221; That suggests that fathers can be replaced by a welfare check. The weakened black family gives rise to problems such has high crime, predation and other forms of anti-social behavior.</p>
<p>The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.</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>Unintended Consequences</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/unintended-consequences/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unintended-consequences</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/unintended-consequences/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Sep 2013 04:02:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Housing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can politicians really "fix" community diversity? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203263" alt="eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3.gif" width="262" height="204" /></a>One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers.</p>
<p>The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer.</p>
<p>The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone&#8217;s home values depend, tends to decline. &#8220;Who&#8217;s going to paint the outside of a rented house?&#8221; one resident was quoted as saying in a recent New York Times story.</p>
<p>Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level than homeowners. They are also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of homeowners that had not had such activities before.</p>
<p>None of this should be surprising. Individuals and groups of all sorts have always differed from one another in many ways, throughout centuries of history and in countries around the world. Left to themselves, people tend to sort themselves out into communities of like-minded neighbors.</p>
<p>This has been so obvious that only the intelligentsia could misconstrue it — and only ideologues could devote themselves to crusading against people&#8217;s efforts to live and associate with other people who share their values and habits.</p>
<p>Quite aside from the question of whose values and habits may be better is the question of the effects of people living cheek by jowl with other people who put very different values on noise, politeness, education and other things that make for good or bad relations between neighbors. People with children to protect are especially concerned about who lives next door or down the street.</p>
<p>But such mundane matters often get brushed aside by ideological crusaders out to change the world to fit their own vision.</p>
<p>When the world fails to conform to their vision, then it seems obvious to the ideologues that it is the world that is wrong, not that their vision is uninformed or unrealistic.</p>
<p>One of the political consequences of such attitudes is the current crusade of Attorney General Eric Holder to force various communities to become more &#8220;inclusive&#8221; in terms of which races and classes of people they contain.</p>
<p>Undaunted by a long history of disasters when third parties try to mix and match people, or prescribe what kind of housing is best, they act as if this time it has to work.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter how many government housing projects that began with lofty rhetoric and heady visions have ended with these expensive projects being demolished with explosives, in the wake of social catastrophes that made these places unlivable.</p>
<p>To those with the crusading mentality, failure only means that they should try, try again — at other people&#8217;s expense, including not only the taxpayers but also those who lives have been disrupted, or even made miserable and dangerous, by previous bright ideas of third parties who pay no price for being wrong.</p>
<p>This headstrong dogmatism and grab for power is not confined to housing. Attorney General Holder is also taking legal action against the state of Louisiana for having so many charter schools, on grounds that these schools do not mix and match the races the way that public schools are supposed to.</p>
<p>The fact that those charter schools which are successful in educating low-income and minority students that the public schools fail to educate are giving these youngsters a shot at a decent life that they are not likely to get elsewhere does not deter the ideological crusaders.</p>
<p>Nor does it deter the politicians who are serving the interests of the teachers&#8217; unions, who see public schools as places to provide jobs for their members, even if that means a poor education and poor prospects in life for generations of minority students.</p>
<p>All this ideological self-indulgence and cynical political activity is washed down with lofty rhetoric about &#8220;compassion,&#8221; &#8220;inclusion&#8221; and the like.</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>Humanitarian Tragedy: Iran&#8217;s Beleaguered Jewish Community</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/humanitarian-tragedy-irans-beleaguered-jewish-community/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=humanitarian-tragedy-irans-beleaguered-jewish-community</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/humanitarian-tragedy-irans-beleaguered-jewish-community/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:20:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discrimination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=202948</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What genuine apartheid looks like. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/3834054413.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-202950" alt="3834054413" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/3834054413.jpg" width="277" height="196" /></a>One of the crucial humanitarian tragedies- that the world and the mainstream media has failed to focus on- is the fate and current living situation of Jewish communities in the Muslim-dominated countries, particularly the Shiite-Islamist country of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Jewish community in the Islamic state of Iran has been subject to little scholarly work and research. Largely due to the fact that the Islamist theocratic regime of Iran has not granted access to scholars, journalists, and other researchers to deeply investigate the conditions of the Jewish community under Islamist rule in Iran.</p>
<p>Although the Jewish community has long faced discrimination, inequality, and intolerance in Muslim communities such as Iran (for example in March 1839 many Jews in Iran were horrifically forced to convert to Islam in what is known as the Allahdad incident), the persecution of the Jewish people exponentially increased since the Shiite-Islamist and Sharia law-based ruling cleric came to power under the rule of the Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini. The Jewish community of Iran is a staple of the nation’s history though, as the Jews of Iran trace their history back 2,800 years, when communities of the tribes of Israel were taken into captivity by the Assyrian king and sent into exile. The Jewish community primarily settled in the Giliard region of Damavand, near Tehran.</p>
<p>When Ayatollah Khomeini began galvanizing the Iranian people against Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, he issued statements on the condition of Iran’s Jewish community. Before ascending to power; Khomeini claimed that he believed the Jewish people in Iran should enjoy the same citizenship rights as every other citizen. This classic Machiavellian strategy was intended to gain the support of influential Jewish social groups in Tehran, which comprised approximately 150,000 members.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, when the Ayatollah Khomeini was capable of overthrowing the Shah’s government, and when the Islamist state of Iran was established, he and the ruling clerics immediately arrested some of the most prominent Iranian-Jewish community leaders and businessmen, including Habib Elghanian. The Jewish community leaders were tortured and executed. Since the onset of the persecution, the Israeli flag has been repeatedly torched, and the Star of David desecrated, in Palestine Square in Tehran. The Jewish community found their survival threatened and humanitarian rights repressed. These actions forced them to flee the area after calling the area home for thousands of years. The Iranian-Jewish population decreased to approximately 10,000 people who chose to remain in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Jewish community that was unwilling to flee from Iran was made up of devout and committed people aiming to protect their sacred places and synagogues regardless of the threats and persecutions, as well as seniors who were unable to resettle elsewhere.</p>
<p>When I lived in the city of Esfahan in Iran— a place where a few hundreds of Jewish people still reside— I met a young intelligent, cheerful, and kind girl called Zahra. After time I realized that her real name, what she was called at home, was indeed Abbey. She explained the reason for having two names:  “I feel as if we live two different lives. We have to keep everything secrets about our faith, religion, and family from the public. We even have to have different names in the public. All my family members have two names. My parents always tell me that these times will pass.”</p>
<p>As the Islamist party of Iran came to power, verses of the Quran claiming the inferiority of the Jewish and Christian peoples became popular slogans for the Shiite-Islamist ruling clerics. The several verses of the Quran include:</p>
<p>“5:51- O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people”,  “4:91- If the unbelievers do not offer you peace, kill them [The Jews] wherever you find them. Against such you are given clear warrant”, “5:59-Jews and Christians are evil-livers”, and “9:30- Christians and Jews are perverse. Allah himself fights against them.”</p>
<p>Disregarding the public persecution, intolerance, and inequality that other religions face, the constitution has been used to safeguard the rights of the Muslim population in Iran. Article 12 of the Iranian Constitution states:</p>
<p>“The official religion of Iran is Islam and the Twelver Ja&#8217;fari school, and this principle will remain eternally immutable.  Other Islamic schools are to be accorded full respect, and their followers are free to act in accordance with their own jurisprudence in performing their religious rites.  These schools enjoy official status in matters pertaining to religious education, affairs of personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance, and wills) and related litigation in courts of law.  In regions of the country where Muslims following any one of these schools constitute the majority, local regulations, within the bounds of the jurisdiction of local councils, are to be in accordance with the respective school, without infringing upon the rights of the followers of other schools”</p>
<p>Currently, Jewish people are not allowed to take key governmental positions in Iran. According to the constitution, the Jews cannot hold decision-making positions such as being a member of the influential Guardian Council, a Commander in the Iranian Army, and serving as the President of the nation, among others. More fundamentally, the Jewish people can neither become judges at any level nor assist in the judicial and legislative systems. Furthermore, Jewish-Iranians are banned from becoming members of parliament (The Consultative Assembly) through general elections.</p>
<p>In addition, <i>qisas </i>or the right to equal retaliation has not been specified in the Penal Code for the Jewish people. Meaning that in the case of murder, the right of a family member to demand execution of the murderer would be totally left to the discretion of the Islamist judges. Furthermore, the <i>diya</i>, or blood money (compensation for the family of a victim) is half for the Jews and women.</p>
<p>These few Islamist rules and laws based on the Quran, Shiite-Iranian clerical and Shari’a law only begin to encompass the deep-rooted religious inequality of the region. Western Muslim scholars who enjoy their lives in the majority Christian societies, must look more closely at how other minorities, particularly the Jews, are being treated in nations such as Iran under majority Islamic and Shiite rule.</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>Larry Elder Confronts Race and the Fatherhood Crisis in America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/larry-elder-at-the-david-horowitz-freedom-centers-2013-west-coast-retreat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=larry-elder-at-the-david-horowitz-freedom-centers-2013-west-coast-retreat</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:23:45 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Keynote speaker at the Freedom Center's 2013 West Coast Retreat calls out the Left's destruction of the black community. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/larry-elder-at-the-david-horowitz-freedom-centers-2013-west-coast-retreat/larry_elder2012-headshot-med-big/" rel="attachment wp-att-179311"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-179311" title="larry_elder2012-headshot-med-big" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/larry_elder2012-headshot-med-big.jpg" alt="" width="277" height="219" /></a>Editor&#8217;s note: Below is the video of keynote speaker Larry Elder&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center&#8217;s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the speech follows. </em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/60536596" frameborder="0" width="500" height="281"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/60536596">Larry Elder</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>Larry Elder:  I was not an aficionado of talk radio and I want to tell you briefly how I got into it before I get into the book.  I was living and working in Cleveland, Ohio, at the time, and I wrote an op-ed piece for the &#8220;Cleveland Plain Dealer,&#8221; my normal libertarian screed that government was too big, we are taxed too much, there&#8217;s too much regulation, and oh, by the way, racism is no longer a major problem in America.  Well, all anybody cared about was my saying that racism was no longer a major problem in America.  So I get a call from a radio host in Cleveland who asked me to come on his show and talk about the column.  I didn&#8217;t listen to talk radio; I knew Howard Stern, I knew who Rush Limbaugh was.  I didn&#8217;t listen to them regularly.  I lived downtown and I worked downtown, so I walked to work.  I was never in my car so I never listened to talk radio.</p>
<p>So this guy was named Merle Pollis.  He had been on the air for something like 30 years in Cleveland.  I lived in Cleveland 17 years and never heard of him, and I went on the show, and Cleveland is about 50% black.  LA is 9% black.  Even though Cleveland is smaller, there are probably more black people living there than here, and every other call was from a black person who called me an Uncle Tom or a boot-licking Uncle Tom or a racist, Sambo, Sambo Tom.  I was called &#8220;coconut,&#8221; as in brown on the outside, white on the inside; Oreo, the same concept, and one person even called me the anti-Christ if and one really tried to hurt, to wound, to scold.  He called me a Republican.  (Laughter).</p>
<p>So I get home and I said to myself &#8220;I&#8217;ll never do that again.&#8221;  I get a phone call from the programming director.  He said &#8220;You were amazing.&#8221;  I said &#8220;I was?&#8221; &#8220;You were funny, you have a very good voice. You took difficult positions, you defended them effectively.  Have you ever thought about doing talk radio?&#8221;  And I said &#8220;No.&#8221;  He said &#8220;My guy is going on vacation next week and I was going to get a pro to sit in for him, but I&#8217;d like you to do it.  Will you do it?&#8221;  And I said &#8220;No&#8221; and he said &#8220;Why?&#8221;  I said &#8220;Talk radio just reminds me of yelling at my little brother Dennis and being yelled back at and I&#8217;m not interested.&#8221;  He said &#8220;I&#8217;ve been doing this 25 years.  I&#8217;ve never seen the like of you.  Are you married?&#8221;  I said &#8220;I am.&#8221;  He said &#8220;Do me a favor, go home to your wife, tell her about the opportunity I&#8217;m extending to you and see what she says.  Call me back tomorrow.&#8221;  I said &#8220;I will, but I assure you, I&#8217;m not going to do it.&#8221;  (Laughter).  So I went on to my then-wife, Cindy, and I told her about the opportunity.  She said &#8220;What do you think?&#8221;  I said &#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t know that much about talk radio.  What little I know about it, it seems shallow, glib and stupid.&#8221;  She said &#8220;It is. You&#8217;d be good at it.&#8221;  (Laughter).  Gives you some idea of what happened to that marriage, Dwight?   (Laughter).</p>
<p>I wanted to write a book about the importance of fathers and I started to write something analytical, maybe a study from the Heritage Foundation showing the link between not having a dad in the house and unemployment and welfare, dependency, and dropping out of school and, yes, homicides.  I could have talked about the book written by Charles Murray, &#8220;Losing Ground,&#8221; arguably one of the most important books in the last 50 years about the damage done to our society because of the welfare state, but I thought I would do something more personal and so I started thinking about my own father.  And I couldn&#8217;t stand the SOB growing up.</p>
<p>My father is what I call a junkyard-dog dad.  You&#8217;ve heard the term &#8220;tiger mom.&#8221;  My dad was a Montford Point Marine; these were the first black Marines.  They were the equivalent of the Tuskegee Airmen.  So my dad was just a rough, tough guy who seemed to get irritable at the slightest little provocation.  I thought he whipped us too long; I thought he whipped us too hard, and when I say &#8220;us,&#8221; I have two brothers, my older brother Kirk, my little brother Dennis, and none of us could stand the SOB.  So I felt it was him, not us.  I didn&#8217;t feel like there was something wrong with me; I thought there was something wrong with them.</p>
<p>And the only reason I didn&#8217;t think he was a criminal is that he was married to my mom, and my mom would not have married him if he was that abusive.  So I sort of felt that there must be some sort of line that he couldn&#8217;t cross because of my mother, but I could count the days when I was going to get physically strong enough to beat the crap out of my father, and I&#8217;m not talking about the kind of thing where you&#8217;re mad at your dad for five minutes or a day or something like that.  I couldn&#8217;t stand him every single day, week, month, year, year, year.</p>
<p>My father was a janitor; he worked two full-time jobs as a janitor.  He cooked for a family on the weekend and went to night school three nights a week to get his GED.  He probably averaged about four and a half of sleep.  I had a vague notion that he worked hard quit; I had a vague notion that he didn&#8217;t get much sleep, but not much &#8212; and my father would come home and my mother would give him the laundry list of bad things that we did, and my father would pull out a belt.  In those days, people from the South used the belt and my father would whip us with the belt.  I thought it was excessive; I thought it was harsh.</p>
<p>So my dad starts a café after he saves up his nickels and dimes. I&#8217;m 15 years old and my father, during rush hour, would just, in my opinion, go ballistic.  He would get intense, he would get angry, he would get distraught, he would start cursing.  We&#8217;re talking about a little diner.  There&#8217;s a picture of it on the cover of the book, so anything that is said to me, anybody in the building could hear it. So my father would often curse and I told myself the next time my father cursed, I was going to confront him.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m 15, my father cursed at me four times that day.  I&#8217;d like to say that I went up to him and I said &#8220;Now, see here, pal.&#8221;  I took off the robe I left out the back door.  My dad is in the restaurant full of people all by himself.  He gets home, he is pissed.  He says &#8220;Why did you leave?&#8221;  I said &#8220;I got tired of the way you spoke to me.&#8221;  My dad paid me $10.00 a day plus tips.  He balled up the $10; he threw it at me.  I was sitting on the bed.  He walked out of the room.  My father and I did not have a conversation for 10 years, and I mean no conversation, not even &#8220;How about those Rams?&#8221; &#8212; not for 10 years.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m now living in Ohio.  I met a man who knew my dad before my dad met my mother.  Now my dad &#8212; in my house we had a no-fly zone over talking about his background.  Nobody ever talked about his background.  I knew that my father probably had a mother and a father because most people do.  (Laughter).  So I meet my uncle in Ohio and he said &#8220;I knew your dad before your dad met your mother.&#8221;  I knew no one who knew my father, let alone somebody who knew him before my mom, and it turned out that my uncle roomed with my dad for a whole year.  And I told my uncle how I felt about my father; he was shocked.  He said &#8220;I think I probably know him better than you know him and either something has happened to change him, which I doubt, or you are misreading him.  I think you ought to rethink that.&#8221;</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t say that I had an epiphany and I then hopped on a plane and went to LA and apologized to my father and everything was wonderful, but my uncle did make me want to at least sit down with the SOB and tell him off, and I figured I would tell him off five minutes, 10 minutes, and he would tell me off, and at least, we would clarify our respective positions.  So I get on the plane to LA.  I didn&#8217;t tell my mother or my father I was even coming.  I walk into the restaurant; it&#8217;s 1:30.  The restaurant closes at 2:30.  My father was kind of surprised.  I said &#8220;I want to talk to you&#8221; and he said &#8220;Fine, wait until we close.&#8221;  We closed in about an hour.  We sat on two stools.  We talked &#8212; except for bathroom breaks, we did not get up for eight hours and in eight hours, the man morphed from this mean, uncaring SOB to this sensitive, kind, caring man who was there all along.</p>
<p>I found out that the name Elder is not the name of his biological father; it&#8217;s the name of the boyfriend who was in his mom&#8217;s life the longest.  He never met his biological father.  My father is 13 years old, comes home from school, makes too much noise for the mother&#8217;s then-boyfriend &#8212; not Elder, a different guy. They start fighting, quarreling.  The mother sides with the boyfriend, throws my dad out of the house at 13 years old, never to return.  We&#8217;re talking about a black kid, Jim Crow South, Athens, Georgia, a year or two before the start of the Great Depression.</p>
<p>My father literally goes door-to-door to find something to do and finds some family that will take him in and let him clean the yard.  He is then promoted to cook.  He then joins the Pullman Porters.  They are the largest private employer of blacks in the country and he travels all around and comes to California on a couple of stops and kind of makes a mental note that maybe, because people seem more friendly, things seem sunnier, things seem racist, &#8220;Maybe I&#8217;ll come here someday.&#8221;  And so my dad made a kind of mental note of that.</p>
<p>World War II breaks out and my father joins the Marines.  I asked why he joined the Marines.  He said &#8220;I liked the uniforms and they went where the action is.&#8221;  They made my father a cook stationed on the island of Guam.  The bombs fell, the war was over.  My father goes back down to the South and now, he&#8217;s an experienced cook with the military. He goes from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant to get a job.  &#8220;Sorry, sir, we don&#8217;t hire any N-words,&#8221; right to his face.  He goes to an unemployment office.  He walks through the door, the woman says &#8220;Sorry, you went through the wrong door.&#8221;  He goes back out, sees the &#8220;Colored-only door,&#8221; goes through that door, back to the very same woman who sent him out.  My father comes home to my mother, whom he just married and said &#8220;This is BS.  I&#8217;m going to California and get a job as a cook.&#8221;</p>
<p>He comes out to California, walks around for two days. &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, sir, you have no references.&#8221; This is in the &#8217;40s now.  &#8220;You have no references.&#8221;  They didn&#8217;t call him an N-word. The same thing, my father would tell them that &#8220;I cooked for the military.  It was a staff sergeant.&#8221; &#8220;Sorry, sir, you have no references.&#8221;  My father went to an unemployment office &#8212; this time, only one door.  They had no openings.  My father said &#8220;What time do you open?&#8221;  She says &#8220;8:30.&#8221; &#8220;What time do you close?&#8221;  They said &#8220;5:30.&#8221;  My dad said &#8220;I will be here in the morning, I&#8217;ll be here until you close. I&#8217;ll be here until I get a job.&#8221;  My father sat on a stool for a day and a half.</p>
<p>They called him up and said &#8220;We have something; we don&#8217;t know if you want it.&#8221; &#8220;What is it?&#8221;  She said &#8220;It&#8217;s a job cleaning toilets.&#8221;  He said &#8220;Of course, I want it.&#8221;  My dad worked for Nabisco cleaning toilets for 10 years, for Barbara Ann Bread cleaning toilets for 10 years, and as I mentioned, went to night school three nights a week to get his GED and cooked for a family on the weekends. So you add how hard he worked with his upbringing.  Okay, he wasn&#8217;t Ward Cleaver.  He wasn&#8217;t touchy, feely, relatey.  He was part of that generation that Tom Brokaw called &#8220;the greatest generation.&#8221;  They did not carry their emotions on their sleeves.</p>
<p>So my book is a 247-page apology to a man whose upbringing, whose attitude towards punishment was not one that I agree with then, nor one I agree with now, but that&#8217;s what he had to work with.  Those were his tools, and to assume that because he judged me harshly, that he didn&#8217;t love me, was insane, and almost an assault to everything he had done.  So it&#8217;s a 274-page apology to the man.  I also wrote it because so many kids today are born in homes without a father.  75% of black kids today are born in homes without a father; 85% of black kids, at some point, will be in a home without a dad.</p>
<p>When I was in college in 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had just written a book called &#8220;The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.&#8221;  At the time, 25% of black kids were born outside of wedlock, a number that Moynihan thought was alarming, and as you know, Moynihan later on became a senator to New York, a Democratic senator.  Fast forward, the number now is 75%.  It is 35% in the white community; it is 50% in the Hispanic community.  Now, if in 1965, 25% out-of-wedlock birth for blacks was a national scandal, what do you call 75% and 50% in the Hispanic community and between 30% and 35% in the white community?  Would do you call that?  How can we ignore that?</p>
<p>As I was telling Mr. Piers Morgan the other day when I was on his show &#8212; (Laughter) &#8212; if you really want to talk about the face of gun violence in America, the face of gun violence in America is not some suburban kid in Newtown, as horrific as that was.  A kid is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed in a school shooting.  The face of gun violence in America is that 15-year-old teenager who performed at Obama&#8217;s inaugural, who was later on shot and killed by one of those &#8220;To whom it may concern&#8221; gang-related bullets.  It&#8217;s the face of that six-year-old Latina girl who was on a porch one March night in Chicago, one of five people killed in one hour in that city because of gang violence.  It&#8217;s the man in Pasadena recently who was killed out here, late 40s, father of two, had founded a youth league in Pasadena, one of those &#8220;To whom it may concern&#8221; errant gang-related bullets killing him.</p>
<p>In Chicago, Obama&#8217;s adopted hometown, there were 500 homicides last year.  They&#8217;re on track for 600 this year, or the equivalent of two Sandy Hooks per month in one city. Demographically, Chicago is about a third black, a third white and a third Hispanic.  However, 70% of the homicides were committed by black people and almost all of the victims were also black people. In New York, about 45% of the city is white, about 17% to 20% black, about the same number of Hispanics. Over 90% of the homicides were committed by black and brown people, and almost always, the victims are other black and brown people.  Now, unless we&#8217;re prepared to say that black and brown people are genetically disposed to commit crime, we have to ask ourselves what the hell is going on here?</p>
<p>Now, there are a couple of culprits.  You could blame racism.  The problem with that is during Jim Crow, when racism was both legal and factual, you didn&#8217;t have this kind of criminality.  You could blame poverty, but during the Great Depression, 50% of black adults were unemployed.  You didn&#8217;t find this kind of criminality.  Where does that leave you?  It leaves you with 50 years of left-wing policies, begun with the best of intentions, when Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty in 1965 and dispatched people to go door-to-door to advise women of their rights to welfare benefits, provided there was no man in the house.  Within three years, welfare rolls increased 100%.  And now we have this kind of pathology.</p>
<p>So what do you do if you&#8217;re a left-wing person?  You blame high-capacity magazines, you blame racism, you blame poverty, you blame global warming.  You do anything at all but look at yourself in the mirror and say &#8220;Good lord, what have I done to this country, 50 years of rewarding people for making slovenly decisions and allowing men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.&#8221;  Bill Cosby calls such men &#8220;unwed fathers.&#8221;  We know what works.  James Q. Wilson from UCLA said &#8220;It&#8217;s very simple. In order to make it to the middle class, you have to do three things &#8212; finish high school, don&#8217;t have a kid before you&#8217;re 20, and get married before you have that kid.  If you do that, you won&#8217;t be poor; if you fail to follow that, you will be.&#8221;  The question is, what are we doing to encourage or discourage people from following that formula?  And the answer is the welfare state.</p>
<p>In 1965, when, over the objections of the left wing of his party, Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act.  John Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther king, told us that this was horrific, that it was an assault on the poor.  What happened?  Welfare rolls declined by 50% without a corresponding increase in abortion.  It turns out there were a whole bunch of able-bodied and able-minded people who were on the couch who got off the catch and got into the market.</p>
<p>In the &#8217;80s, the right wing rag, &#8220;The LA Times,&#8221; had a poll where both poor people and non-poor people were asked the following question.  &#8220;Do young, poor women often have children to get welfare benefits?&#8221;  Not too surprisingly, the majority of non-poor people said no; 44% said that young, poor women often have children to get welfare benefits.  Most did not believe that.  Poor people were asked the same question.  &#8220;Do you believe that young poor women often have children to get welfare benefits?  64% said often.  So they&#8217;re telling us; we&#8217;re just not listening.</p>
<p>I had Kweisi Mfume on my show once, one of the few so-called black leaders who deigned to come on my show.  In 20 years, I haven&#8217;t been able to get Jesse Jackson or Sharpton or Farrakhan, but Kweisi Mfume did come on, and I said &#8220;Mr. Mfume&#8221; &#8212; at the time, he was head of the NAACP &#8212; &#8220;as between the presence of white racism or the absence of black fathers, which poses the bigger threat to the black community?&#8221;  And to his credit, without missing a beat, he said &#8220;The absence of black fathers.&#8221;</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a director named John Singleton.  He&#8217;s from South Central, as am I. He went to Crenshaw High School, as did I.  He did a couple of movies. One was called &#8220;Boyz n the Hood&#8221; about 20 years ago, a very entertaining movie, but I think a lot of people were swept away by the entertainment value of it and didn&#8217;t understand the point of the movie.  There were two families that were profiled.  One was the Cuba Gooding, Jr., family whose father was played by Laurence Fishburne, actively involved in his life, didn&#8217;t even marry his mom, but was actively involved in his life.  And when Cuba Gooding, Jr., was about 12 or 13 in the movie, the father took him in. Across the street lived the Ice Cube family, father AWOL, and the fates of the two families were very different.</p>
<p>If that was too subtle for you, John Singleton did another movie after that one called &#8220;Baby Boy,&#8221; which nobody saw because it wasn&#8217;t as good a movie, but arguably, had a more important message.  It was about the sexually irresponsible behavior of a lot of young men in the inner city, including a character played by Snoop Dogg, another character played by &#8212; I think his name was Tyrese Gibson.  And they both had kids by two different women, outside of wedlock, never married either one of them.  This is John Singleton.  So they&#8217;re telling us; we&#8217;re just not listening.  There are no fathers and there&#8217;s a direct line between this and all the other social problems that I talked about.</p>
<p>So what are we going to do about it?  We have to get rid of federal welfare, &#8220;no questions asked federal welfare,&#8221; and welfare should be done at the state and local level, ideally by individuals or by nonprofits.  I was a loan executive for United Way several years ago.  For three months, I worked for them.  I was amazed at how efficient they were.  You donate $1 to United Way and $0.90 or $0.95 of that $1 gets down to the intended beneficiary.  $1 of government welfare, according to Tom Sowell, Walter Williams, $0.70 is lost in transfer costs, so for every dollar that is supposed to go for welfare at the federal level, the actual beneficiaries get about $0.30 on the dollar.  So forget about even just the morality of it.  Just as far as being more efficient, it&#8217;s more efficient for the private sector to deal with the needy than it is for the government to do it.</p>
<p>One of the many things that I learned when I was growing up was the value of hard work.  My mother often tells the story about how when I was a kid, I wanted a black Schwinn bicycle and you could send away and order a big box of cards, and you had to sell them off, and they were on the back of a comic book.  You could send away for them and I was always sending away for stuff.  So I get this big box of Christmas cards in the mail.  This is May or June, so I&#8217;m stepping around, selling all these cards.</p>
<p>And my dad said he felt sorry for me.  It was hot, it was the summer, and he thought what I will do, Larry, is I will buy the Schwinn bike for you and then you can sell the cards and reimburse me after you sell all the cards.  I said &#8220;Fantastic.&#8221;  So my dad bought all these Christmas cards and he bought the bike for me and told me to resell the boxes and I could reimburse him for all the money that he spent on the bicycle.  How many Christmas cards did I sell after I got my bicycle?  Put it like this.  Manny, if you want a box of Christmas cards, come by my house.  I got a box for you in the closet.  (Laughter).</p>
<p>And it was about initiative; it was about initiative.  My dad said it was a huge mistake that he made.  He had taken away my initiative and now, I&#8217;m somebody who had hustled and worked really hard.  I always had paper routes, did this and did that.  I was always hustling, and my dad said this was a powerful lesson to him about the damage done when you take away people&#8217;s initiative, which gets back to the welfare state.  Laziness is one of the easiest things for people to do; it&#8217;s one of the hardest things for people to avoid.  You give people an excuse, they will take it &#8212; black, white, indifferent, and this is the damage that we&#8217;ve done with the welfare state.</p>
<p>I was lucky enough to have a mother who stayed on me.  She embraced education; she embraced hard work, and she would refuse to allow my brothers and me to ever think of ourselves as a victim.  Whenever we ever came home and told her of some story of some taunt or some slight, she wouldn&#8217;t have it.  It was her position that nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.</p>
<p>So one day in school, we read this poem and it pissed everybody off, including the teacher.  I was angry, everybody was angry, and the poem went like this.  &#8220;While riding through old Baltimore so small and full of glee, I saw a young Baltimorean keep looking at me. Now, I was young and very small and he was no whit bigger, and so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue and he called me nigger.  I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until September. Of all the things that happened there, that&#8217;s all that I remember.&#8221;  As I said, I was upset, the teacher was upset, everybody was upset.  The teacher was talking about the permanent damage this would do to his psyche, the strain of racism, how this kid was never going to be the same</p>
<p>So I went home and my mother was stirring a big period of time of greens on the stove.  I&#8217;ll never forget it.  I said mom, we read a poem in class and I want to run it by you and see what you think.  She says &#8220;Sure, go ahead.&#8221;  I said &#8220;Well, it went something like this.&#8221; &#8220;While riding through old Baltimore so small and full of glee, I saw a young Baltimorean keep looking straight at me. And I was young and very small, but he was no whit bigger, and so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue and called me nigger.  I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until September. Of all the things that happened there, that&#8217;s all that I remember.&#8221;  My mother took the spoon out of the pot,  wrapped it on the side, turned to me and she said &#8220;Larry, it&#8217;s too bad he let something so trivial spoil his vacation.&#8221;  (Laughter).</p>
<p>Thank you very much for having me.  (Applause).  And may God bless you and may God continue to bless the United States of America.  (Applause).</p>
<p>The Democratic Party has a vested interest in letting in as many people who they believe are going to vote Democratic as possible.  I mean, the head of SEIU publicly said it.  He said &#8220;If we have 12 million new voters, 75% of them are going to vote for the Democratic Party.&#8221;  I mean, this is what they&#8217;re doing; this is not something that&#8217;s a secret.  Well, on the question of immigration, which is an issue that is a very important issue, obviously, look, the Democratic Party has no interest in securing the borders first.  They have no interest in making sure that we are doing something about the people who enter the country legally, but overstay their visas.  They have no real intention of going after employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.  They have no intention of really putting down the feet on the ground necessary, and the fencing to deal with the issue.</p>
<p>They want to have a situation where 20 were 30 years from now, we have another debate about amnesty and a bunch of new people are admitted to the country who are going to vote the way they want them to vote.  That&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on here and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s any secret about what&#8217;s going on.  I&#8217;m not sure the shift was as dramatic as you think it was.  Proposition 8 would not have passed without the support of blacks and the Hispanic community.</p>
<p>There is a disconnect between how most black people feel about issues like same-sex marriage and even abortion, and how the so-called black leadership feels.  But I find it remarkable that even the people in California, who voted in favor of Proposition 8, still voted in favor of Obama overwhelmingly.  So they just carved out an issue that they disagree with Obama on and said &#8220;Okay, we&#8217;ll give him a mulligan on that.&#8221;  I think it&#8217;s far more disturbing that you&#8217;ve got neighborhoods in Philadelphia where 100% of them voted for Obama.  Also in Cleveland, there are a bunch of neighborhoods like that.</p>
<p>The problem is deep.  The problem is that people have grown up, K through 12, government education, and then they go to the malls and then they watch movies that are done by the Weinsteins where people like the Koch Brothers are mocked and then they put on the television and they hear anchors like Diane sawyer and Jonathan Karl say that a mechanic making $75,000 a year or more pays a higher effective tax rate than Mitt Romney, which is not even true.</p>
<p>So we are bombarded by all of this and then we&#8217;re surprised that people turn out left wing.  To me, it&#8217;s amazing that anybody like George W. Bush ever went into it at that level, when you have this overwhelming onslaught by the media, by academia, and by Hollywood, to say that big government is good, Republicans are evil, racism remains a major problem in America, homophobia is a major problem in America.  This is the message that kids get every single day, 24/7, in our culture and it&#8217;s a hard battle to fight.  Sir?</p>
<p>Audience Member:   Yes, I&#8217;m just amazed, and have been ever since I first read about you sometime back.  I was on the bench as a judge and what made me start thinking about leaving the bench and running for Congress, other than believing you don&#8217;t legislate from the bench, was that I was having more and more single moms come before me for felony welfare fraud, and the stories were the same, just as you painted.  And it occurred to me that we&#8217;re luring young women out of high school into a rut they can&#8217;t get out of, most of the ones that came before me.  I&#8217;ve talked to different people in Congress and people knowledge it, say &#8220;It&#8217;s an issue.&#8221;  I would ask if you would help me fashion a bill, whether it&#8217;s daycare incentives rather than welfare, something to change the enticement away from having kids from dropping out of school &#8211;</p>
<p>Larry Elder:  Well, obviously &#8211;</p>
<p>Audience Member:  &#8212; toward reaching that potential, and I would love to work with you, if you would, on fashioning a bill that would turn that around.</p>
<p>Larry Elder:  Well, anything I can do to help, of course, I&#8217;d be happy to do it.  (Applause).  Let me give you a story.  It&#8217;s about messaging and talking to people and persuading them.  My father was almost 96 years old when he died and I had the good fortune to be able to spend a lot of time with him the last couple of years, just doing stuff with him, errands, taking him to a doctor appointment.  And my father would go to this barber and he said &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure you want to go with me because she talks a lot and she&#8217;s a liberal and you may find her annoying,&#8221; and I said &#8220;No, let&#8217;s go.&#8221;  So I went and it was a black woman and she was bitching about schools; they were crappy schools.  She was bitching about these kids getting pregnant.  She was just bitching about society.</p>
<p>And finally, she turned to me and she said &#8220;What do you do for a living?&#8221;  And I said &#8220;Well, I&#8217;m thinking about running for office.&#8221;  This is the time I was thinking about running against Barbara Boxer, and she said &#8220;Good, we need more black politicians like Obama.&#8221;  And I said, &#8220;Well, I&#8217;m nothing like the Obama, other than we&#8217;re both black.&#8221;  I said &#8220;I&#8217;m a Republican.&#8221;  (Laughter).  Talk about expelling gas and church &#8212; (Laughter).  And I said &#8220;Now, wait a second.  You were just complaining about the quality of these schools and you were just complaining about the fact that parents had to send their kid to a school that you don&#8217;t like.  Republicans are the ones who want to empower parents to be able to take their kid out of a bad school and put their kid into a good school.  It&#8217;s called vouchers.&#8221;  I said &#8220;You were just complaining about welfare.  Republicans are the ones that pushed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 that caused welfare rolls to decline by 50%.&#8221;  And she said &#8220;Do you have a card?&#8221;  (Laughter).</p>
<p>Audience Member:  Larry, is there any hope for the young black men in prison?  Is there any kind of mentorship programs because the recidivism rate is huge.</p>
<p>Larry Elder:  Right. Her question was, are there any kinds of programs for blacks, including blacks who are in prison?  There are all sorts of programs and that, of course, is a short-term answer.  The short-term answer is mentoring, to get people involved in the community.  The long-term answer is to change our welfare policies and to get people thinking about their relationship between themselves and government differently, but yes, there are all sorts of programs. There&#8217;s Big Brothers and Big Sisters.  I have a number of young people that I have mentored over the years.</p>
<p>I told you the story not long ago about I was invited to speak to a group of young basketball kids in college.  I got a phone call from a coach a few years ago and he said &#8220;Larry, last year, three of my players got girls pregnant, and I&#8217;ve heard you on the air and I know how you feel about that sort of thing.  Would you come down and talk to my kids this year to hopefully get them to avoid this?&#8221;  And I said &#8220;I&#8217;ll do it, but I don&#8217;t want you in the room and I&#8217;m going to use language you probably don&#8217;t want to hear.&#8221;  I said &#8220;If you agree to that, I&#8217;ll talk to your kids, but if not, otherwise, it won&#8217;t be effective.&#8221;  He said &#8220;Okay.&#8221;</p>
<p>So he let me speak to them.  I stood in a room and they were all sitting around me in a circle, maybe 35 of them.  These were members of the team and also, recruits they were trying to get, and I spoke from the heart and I used some pretty salty language to tell these kids what their futures were and how they were jeopardizing them by engaging in irresponsible behavior.  I gave them my home phone number.  I said &#8220;Call me about anything.  If you want to know what the circumference of the earth is, you call me,&#8221; and a couple of them did call me, and I can happily report to you that nobody got anybody pregnant that year.  (Applause).</p>
<p>Well, racism is no longer a major problem in America.  Republicans don&#8217;t say that.  What they do is try to tell people how they feel and that they marched with Martin Luther King or they knew somebody who did, or they knew a gardener who did or they knew a gardener who knew a dentist who did, that kind of condescending kind of thing that I often hear.  I wish Republicans would call out reporters by name.  I mentioned Jonathan Karl from ABC.  He literally went on the air and said that a mechanic making $75,000 a year is paying a higher effective tax rate than Mitt Romney.  It is not even remotely true. Even the left wing National Center for Tax Policy analysis didn&#8217;t agree with that.</p>
<p>I just find it just irritates me that Republicans are just so nice.  (Laughter).  They&#8217;re in a fight.  The other guy brought a knife; you should have brought a gun.  Instead, we&#8217;re trying to let people know how nice we are.  I was talking to Steve about this a moment ago, Steven Miller.  He&#8217;s probably been on my show longer than anybody else.  I met Steve when he was a 17-year-old kid at [SanMo] High.  He then went to Duke.  We&#8217;ve had him on the air at Duke.  He then graduated from Duke and now he&#8217;s working for Senator Sessions in Washington, DC.  And we were talking about this, and about how Republicans are always trying to be nice, and be well liked.  Well, we&#8217;re in a vicious fight; we&#8217;re in a fight for the future of the country and we ought not to be afraid to engage in that fight, but we want to be liked.  We want to be nice and sometimes, you just have to go to [Bump] Street, as my little brother used to say, and that&#8217;s a problem.</p>
<p>It sickens me that Republicans, when they&#8217;re called racist, just stand there and go &#8220;Well, I&#8217;m not really racist,&#8221; instead of fighting back.  I mean, the vicious things the Democrats have said &#8212; Julian Bond, the former head of the NAACP, said &#8220;Republicans have gotten their cabinet appointee from the Taliban wing of the Republican Party.&#8221;  He said that before 9/11; after 9/11, he repeated it.  I remember when Charlie Rangel said, &#8220;George W. Bush is our Bull Connor,&#8221; and if that doesn&#8217;t get you upset, I don&#8217;t know what will.  Do you know who Bull Connor was?  Bull Connor was a southern sheriff who set water hoses and dogs on freedom fighters for Martin Luther King.  He compared George Bush to that and nobody said a word.  Are you kidding me?  Vicious stuff like this is said all the time.  It drives me nuts.  Don&#8217;t get me started.  (Laughter).</p>
<p>Audience Member:  (Inaudible).</p>
<p>Larry Elder:  The other day, Obama was bragging about the stock market, right?  The stock market almost reaches its peak.  This is the same party who thinks you&#8217;re too stupid to take your Social Security money and invest in the stock market.  What am I missing over here?  You are bragging about your policies creating this big equity market; on the other hand, you are refusing to allow people to participate in it because you think they&#8217;re too stupid.  Why aren&#8217;t you making that argument?  I mean, what&#8217;s going on over here?  And the children out-of-wedlock birth rate, you can track welfare spending with that directly.  Why didn&#8217;t mitt Romney do that?  It just drove me crazy.  Anyway, he left so much stuff on the table.</p>
<p>This business about the Republicans engaging in a war on women, let&#8217;s talk a little bit about that.  During the &#8217;08 campaign, Obama paid his female staffers less money than McCain pays his female staffers.  In the White House, Obama pays his male staffers more money than he pays his female staffers.  Anita Dunn, the former White House Communications Director, in a book written by Ron Suskind, a book that was given access to the Obama White House by Obama, he interviewed her.  She said &#8220;This place is so sexist, if this were the private sector, this would be a hostile work environment.&#8221;  The book comes out, she denies it.  Oops, the reporter taped her, he plays the tape.  She admits that she said it.  Romney did nothing with this.  Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director in the White House, that&#8217;s accusing you of a war on women, saying that the White House is so sexist, if this were the private sector, it would be a hostile work environment and you leave it on the floor?  Oh!</p>
<p>Anyway, okay.  I think that&#8217;s it.</p>
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		<title>Europe: A Continent in Flight</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/europe-a-continent-in-flight/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=europe-a-continent-in-flight</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/europe-a-continent-in-flight/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2013 04:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Migration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[population]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=178816</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More and more people are abandoning their communities to escape Islamic tyranny.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/europe-a-continent-in-flight/uk_-_hamza/" rel="attachment wp-att-178858"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-178858" title="UK_-_Hamza" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/UK_-_Hamza.jpg" alt="" width="314" height="239" /></a>Different parts of Europe, same story.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with France, where a new <a href="http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/102640/exodus-uk-french-jews-escape-antisemitism">report</a> by a Jewish community group, Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ), says that anti-Semitism in that country has gotten so much worse in the wake of last year&#8217;s Toulouse school massacre that the number of Jews who are “crossing the Channel to find safe haven in the U.K.” is skyrocketing. One sign of the trend: “St John&#8217;s Wood Synagogue in London has set up a separate French minyan, attended regularly by 120 people on Shabbat,” with new faces showing up every week. A February 21 piece in the <em>Jewish Chronicle </em>about the SPCJ report noted that while anti-Semitic “incidents” in Britain and France are roughly comparable in number, those in France “are far more likely to involve violence.” It also quoted Britain&#8217;s Chief Rabbi as warning that “the position of Jews in Europe today is very difficult&#8230;.Jews in Europe have begun to ask, is there a place for us here?” Perhaps the most telling detail in the <em>Jewish Chronicle </em>article was this: while the SPCJ report “originally stated that in over three-quarters of the antisemitic incidents the perpetrators were reported as being of North African origin,” this fact was later deleted from the text.</p>
<p>While French Jews flee to London, Londoners are scurrying elsewhere. On February 19, the BBC <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21511904">reported</a> that over 600, 000 ethnic Brits have moved out of the capital in the last decade. Predictably, BBC editor Mark Easton spun this on the Beeb&#8217;s website as a positive development, arguing that all this relocation is a sign of “working class aspiration and economic success.” In other words, “in the first decade of the 21st Century, the dream of escaping to the country became a reality for tens of thousands of urban white Britons,” who “prospered from the housing boom and the capital&#8217;s economic growth” and “bought themselves that little cottage in the countryside or by the sea.”</p>
<p>Easton&#8217;s piece garnered over two thousand reader reactions before the BBC shut down comments. A large percentage of them were removed for violating the “house rules.” Of those that were permitted to remain, the following expressed what was by far the majority view:</p>
<p>• “Native Londoners are being driven out because their neighbourhoods are being overrun by cultures that are very different to, and sometimes openly hostile to their own&#8230;.Politicians continue to sell this country&#8217;s future to advance their own political careers.”</p>
<p>• “Labour mis-sold multiculturalism as a pipe dream of diverse, thriving communities enriching each other&#8217;s cultures, when in reality it is much, much different.”</p>
<p>• “I challenge any MP (preferably Labour or Lib Dem) to go live in Peckham for a week, without your drivers or bodyguards, and then come back and tell me that multiculturalism is a good thing.”</p>
<p>• “Only this type of BBC/Guardian liberal could put the gloss of &#8216;success&#8217; and &#8216;aspiration&#8217; on this story&#8230;.People are sick of this social experiment. They are voting with their feet.”</p>
<p>A considerable minority of commenters, to be sure, reliably dismissed such attitudes and concerns as “racist.” Yet when the <em>Daily Mail </em>asked Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think tank, what he made of the situation, he <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281941/600-000-decade-white-flight-London-White-Britons-minority-capital.html">averred</a> that the BBC was making “a very serious mistake in addressing an issue of such importance to the British public in such a trivial and superficial manner,” adding that it was “surely obvious that&#8230;people are not willing to live in an environment which has changed beyond recognition and against their own wishes.”</p>
<p>(One quick note before I move on: how frustrating it is that so many British critics of Islam have been brainwashed by their media into using the terms “white” and “Asian” when discussing subjects that have nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or continent of origin!)</p>
<p>All this fleeing, of course, is nothing new in Europe. Norwegians have been <a href="http://www.osloby.no/nyheter/Ola-og-Kari-flytter-fra-innvandrerne-5313778.html">saying</a> ta-ta to certain east Oslo neighborhoods for years. A couple of years ago the Danish newspaper <em>Politiken </em><a href="http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1181205/kristne-og-joeder-flygter-fra-danske-ghettoer/#.USeGjJ36NpN.facebook">ran</a> an article headlined “Christians and Jews are fleeing from Danish ghettos,” noting that in Vollsmose, a suburb of Odense, Jews and Christians were clearing out because they were being threatened with beatings, while in Muslim-heavy areas of Copenhagen, Jewish kids were being advised to apply to schools in other parts of town. The only surprise was the article&#8217;s appearance in the ordinarily PC <em>Politiken –</em> that, and the willingness of a political scientist at Aarhus University to finger Islam as “a major part of the problem.” Jews, he worried, might well start emigrating from Denmark. A young Jewish man told <em>Politiken </em>that on several occasions Muslim neighbors in Vollsmose had offered him the explicit choice: leave town or get beaten up. He left.</p>
<p>The situation in Denmark has only gotten more and more rotten. Yesterday, the Danish newspaper <em>Jyllands-Posten </em>ran an <a href="http://jyllands-posten.dk/opinion/breve/article5218373.ece">article</a> headlined “Why you can&#8217;t be a Jew in Copenhagen,” in which Martin Henriksen, immigration and integration spokesman for the Danish People&#8217;s Party, bluntly noted that owing to Muslim anti-Semitism, schools in Copenhagen “encourage Jewish parents to find other pastures” for their children. “We haven&#8217;t witnessed anything like this since the Occupation,” he wrote.</p>
<p>As I said at the outset: different places, same story. Danish Christians and Jews are being bullied by Muslim thugs into checking out of their neighborhoods and moving to safer locales. French Jews are taking it on the lam from Paris to settle in marginally less dangerous parts of London. Londoners are leaving their increasingly dodgy city and, literally, heading for the hills. East Oslo is being drained of ethnic Norwegians. And all of them are running scared for one reason, and one reason only: they&#8217;re terrified of getting beaten up by primitive thugs with a primitive religion who, at these European taxpayers&#8217; expense, have been imported from some of the most primitive parts of the world. Years and years ago these cultural hooligans, these religious autocrats, these would-be enforcers of sharia, were welcomed to Europe by clueless, spineless political leaders, and – although the reality of “creeping jihad” has long since set in – they continue to be celebrated by most of those leaders (as well as by craven mainstream-media cheerleaders such as Mark Easton) for purportedly enriching European culture. And all the while, as a result, European culture is quickly going down the tubes.</p>
<p>When you&#8217;re discussing such large-scale phenomena such as this one – hundreds of thousands of Muslims occupying this or that part of this or that city, hundreds of thousands of native Londoners relocating hither and thither in consequence – it can be hard to grasp it all, to reduce the big picture to a comprehensible, human scale. As Stalin put it, one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Yesterday Daniel Greenfield told the terrible <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/9-year-old-uk-boy-commits-suicide-over-muslim-bullying/">story</a> of how relentless harassment by Muslim schoolmates drove a nine-year-old English boy not to flight but to suicide. The other day the Norwegian newspaper <em>Aftonbladet </em><a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/nyheter/lokalt/dalane/Gutt-med-hund-folte-seg-presset-av-bussen-3125140.html">reported</a> on another European boy who found himself in the jihadist crosshairs and was forced to flee.</p>
<p>Here goes. On the evening of February 16, a boy – whose named has been withheld, whether because of his age, or to protect him from reprisals, or both – got on a bus in the town of Egersund in western Norway. He was headed back home to Stavanger, fifty or so miles away, and was carrying his puppy. Upon boarding the bus, he checked with the driver to make sure it was OK to take the dog onboard. The driver said yes: he had no problem with it. Unfortunately, three other passengers, whom <em>Aftonbladet </em>identifies as being “of foreign origin” (another <a href="http://www.fyret.nu/2013/02/20/muslimske-menn-kastet-norsk-gutt-av-buss/#comment-5067">source</a> actually dares to use the word “Muslim”), did have a problem. One of the men walked up to the driver and expressed his strong objection to the presence of the pet; another approached the boy and informed him that if he did not get off the bus with his dog at once, they would beat him up.</p>
<p>What happened next is in dispute. According to the boy, the driver, afraid not to cave in to the men&#8217;s demands, pulled the bus over and ordered the boy and his dog off the bus. The driver, for his part, claims that he knew nothing of the tensions between the boy and the Muslims, and insists that the boy left the bus of his own accord. In any event, the undisputed fact is that the boy exited the bus at a spot on the highway that was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was below freezing; the time, just before midnight. Fortunately he had a cell phone, and was able to phone a friend to pick him up. When she finally got there, some time later, she said, “he was cold and still and it was plain that the incident had had a powerful impact on him.” The national railway system, which operates the bus, has chosen to accept the driver&#8217;s account and will not investigate the boy&#8217;s complaint.</p>
<p>Whatever the specific details of the story, the narrative&#8217;s main point is clear – as is its larger import. The story of that boy and his dog, simply put, is the story of today&#8217;s Europe in miniature –  the story of a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight.</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>Will Gay Marriage Threaten Black Support for Obama?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/larry-elder/will-gay-marriage-threaten-black-support-for-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-gay-marriage-threaten-black-support-for-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/larry-elder/will-gay-marriage-threaten-black-support-for-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 May 2012 04:10:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132223</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What took black church leaders so long to reconsider their near blind support for the Left?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Editorial-Obamas-marriage-shift-mirrors-USA-5J1F0I1B-x-large.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132225" title="Editorial-Obamas-marriage-shift-mirrors-USA-5J1F0I1B-x-large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Editorial-Obamas-marriage-shift-mirrors-USA-5J1F0I1B-x-large.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>President Obama&#8217;s affirmation of gay marriage threatens to undermine the near-monolithic black support Obama enjoyed in 2008. Several members of the black clergy now say they intend to sit out the presidential election. One poll from last November found black opposition to gay marriage at 58 percent, higher than the rest of the country, which is about evenly split.</p>
<p>The real question is this: What took black church leaders so long to reconsider their near blind support for the Democratic Party?</p>
<p>The historical strength of black churches has been that of a moral and spiritual refuge in a once-hostile country of legalized slavery and Jim Crow. This explains why so many civil rights leaders came out of the church. The moral cause was just and clear: Equal rights mean equal rights — for everyone.</p>
<p>But equal rights and equal results are two very different things. The modern civil rights movement lost its way by failing to appreciate the difference. To achieve &#8220;equal results,&#8221; the Democratic Party, among other things, demands redistribution of wealth, a government response to the &#8220;gap&#8221; between the rich and poor, higher minimum wages and higher taxes on the so-called rich.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party opposes education vouchers, despite polls showing that black and Hispanic inner-city parents want them. The Democratic Party is the party of race-based preferences and also opposes privatization of Social Security.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party is the party of the welfare state — a neutron bomb dropped on the intact nuclear family. Author/editor/professor Marvin Olasky, in his book &#8220;The Tragedy of American Compassion,&#8221; traces the growth of welfare. During a mere three-year period in the 1960s, welfare rolls increased nearly 110 percent. President Johnson established &#8220;neighborhood centers&#8221; whose workers went door-to-door, apprising people of their welfare &#8220;rights and benefits.&#8221;</p>
<p>Until the so-called &#8220;War on Poverty,&#8221; the poverty rate declined steadily. At the turn of the century, nearly 70 percent of Americans were poor. But by the time of the &#8220;War on Poverty,&#8221; the rate stood at approximately 13 or 14 percent. What happened? Welfare created dependency and decreased the incentive of the welfare recipient.</p>
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		<title>Free Speech Under Assault at Sinclair Community College</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/arnold-ahlert/free-speech-under-assault-at-sinclair-community-college/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=free-speech-under-assault-at-sinclair-community-college</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2011 04:28:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92717</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education challenges another college speech code.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/NoFreeSpeech.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92720" title="NoFreeSpeech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/NoFreeSpeech.jpg" alt="" width="380" height="270" /></a></p>
<p>Yet another assault on First Amendment rights on college campuses is taking place in Dayton, Ohio. Last October, <a href="http://www.sinclair.edu/" target="_blank">Sinclair Community College</a> (SCC) prohibited a paralegal studies student, Ethel Borel-Donohue, from distributing pamphlets to her fellow students after a class. <a href="http://onemoresoul.com/pdfs/PBCA.pdf" target="_blank">The pamphlets</a> focused on the link between abortion and the use of oral contraceptives to higher rates of breast cancer. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but Judge Michael Brigner, Paralegal Program Chair, banned the distribution after receiving a complaint from a student who had had an abortion, telling Borel-Donohue she “had no right to hand out any materials to students in the classroom.” Borel-Donohue, contacted the <a href="http://thefire.org/" target="_blank">Foundation for Individual Rights in Education</a> (FIRE) for help, claiming she was worried about repercussions from the incident. FIRE has taken up her cause.</p>
<p>Last Friday I spoke with Madeline Iseli, newly-appointed Vice President of the Sinclair College Advancement Division, who explained to me that SCC has restrictions contained in the <a href="http://thefire.org/public/pdfs/8daf60e09b1752ce2e6ddcce82c40584.pdf?direct" target="_blank">Sinclair Community College Campus Access Policy</a> which allows the &#8220;Board of Trustees of Sinclair Community College to regulate access to such property in such a manner that the purposes of the Community College are adequately served.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sounds reasonable enough. Yet in &#8220;Section IV, SOLICITATIONS AND LITERATURE DISTRIBUTION:&#8221; paragraph 3, the restrictions become problematic: &#8220;Literature may not be distributed in working areas, including: classrooms, laboratories, lecture halls, gymnasiums, libraries, offices, work stations, conference rooms, and corridors leading directly thereto which are an integral part of the work areas.&#8221; Ms. Borel-Donohue reveals the Constitutional dubiousness of such restrictions. &#8220;So you can distribute literature, but you just can&#8217;t do it anywhere. I&#8217;ve been to several universities, but Sinclair, it seems, is really totalitarian in their control,&#8221; she said.</p>
<p>Enter FIRE. In February, the organization sent a letter to Sinclair President Steven Lee Johnson, noting that campus policies restricting distribution of literature outside of class time are unlawful. FIRE cited a 1979 federal district court decision, <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6940002100596951157&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=2&amp;as_vis=1&amp;oi=scholarr" target="_blank">Solid Rock Foundation v. Ohio State University</a> to back up its contention. In that case, the court ruled that Ohio State&#8217;s attempt to &#8220;regulate the distribution of plaintiffs&#8217; publication so that the campus will be &#8216;aesthetically pleasurable,&#8217;&#8221; was &#8220;likely not to pass constitutional muster&#8221; and that distribution of [of literature] is not the kind of activity which &#8220;materially disrupts classwork or involves a substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.&#8221; Furthermore, in addressing the issue of complaints as a basis for restricting the distribution of literature, the court noted that  &#8220;[T]here may be complaints from those in the campus community who desire not to be subjected to plaintiffs&#8217; views, such as appear to have prompted the University action in the first place. But the University may not, in the interest of protecting particular persons from an unpopular viewpoint, substitute its judgment for the judgment of the individual, who has a right to determine whether or not he is willing to receive plaintiffs&#8217; message.&#8221;</p>
<p>FIRE president Greg Lukianoff whittled the ruling down to plain language. &#8220;If someone&#8217;s claim to be offended by speech were all it took to overrule the First Amendment, we would all be reduced to silence&#8230; the Constitution does not recognize a &#8216;right not to be offended,&#8217;&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Yet Sinclair College attorney, General Counsel Lauren M. Ross, who is also the state of Ohio&#8217;s assistant attorney general, insists such restrictions do not violate the First Amendment. &#8220;Sinclair embraces the principles of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the right of free speech &#8230;Citizens are free to peacefully share their thoughts and distribute literature on campus in common areas such as atriums, eating areas, and much of the Physical Activities Center and the outdoor plazas,&#8221; she said. She also sent a <a href="http://thefire.org/public/pdfs/f87aca7f8865c7734d5b6145e2e98e8f.pdf?direct" target="_blank">letter</a> to FIRE vice president Adam Kissel citing both the aforementioned College Campus Access Policy and the  <a href="http://www.sinclair.edu/student/leader/pub/handbook/sjh10.pdf" target="_blank">Student Judicial Affairs Code of Conduct</a> as reasons for restricting Borel-Donohue.</p>
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		<title>Fox News Serves Up Taqiyya</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/robert-spencer/fox-news-serves-up-taqiyya/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fox-news-serves-up-taqiyya</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 May 2011 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92566</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A “Muslim-American woman” spreads misinformation about Islam on Fox News.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/taqiyya.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92569" title="taqiyya" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/taqiyya.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="280" /></a></p>
<p>Saima Sheikh is media communications leader for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. The Ahmadiyya, of course, are considered heretics by mainstream Muslims for their belief in &#8220;the Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani&#8221; – the 19<sup>th</sup> century religious leader whom the Ahmadis consider a prophet, in defiance of the Koran’s claim that Muhammad is the “seal of the prophets” (33:40). Saima Sheikh doesn&#8217;t mention this all-important fact in her Thursday <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/05/muslim-american-woman-reacts-obamas-ground-zero-visit-bin-ladens-death/">op-ed for FoxNews.com</a>, &#8220;A Muslim-American Woman Reacts to Obama&#8217;s Ground Zero Visit and Bin Laden&#8217;s Death.” Instead, she gives the impression to unwary and uninformed non-Muslims that some eminent Muslim authority has declared violent jihad un-Islamic. In reality, it is in part for that declaration that Ahmadis are being ferociously persecuted today in Pakistan and Indonesia, and the governing authorities do not even consider them to be true Muslims.</p>
<p>Sheikh begins: “It has been four days since we learned that the infamous Usama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and the most wanted man in the world has been killed. I would like to thank the brave United States Navy SEALS. As an American-Muslim woman, I am happy that justice has finally been served.”</p>
<p>So in the headline Saima Sheikh is a &#8220;Muslim-American,&#8221; and in her first paragraph she is an &#8220;American-Muslim.&#8221; Have you ever seen anyone refer to a &#8220;Christian-American&#8221; or a &#8220;Jewish-American&#8221;? Of course not. There are Americans who are Jews and Americans who are Christians, but neither group uses such terms, because there is nothing about either faith that precludes or qualifies one&#8217;s allegiance to the United States. These hyphenated terms, all of which are corrosive to national unity, as Theodore Roosevelt pointed out long ago, are usually combinations of some other nationality with &#8220;American,&#8221; not a religion with &#8220;American.&#8221; By using these terms, Saima Sheikh, as well as the Hamas-linked Council on <em>American-Islamic</em> Relations, imply that Islam is a kind of nationality, calling for a type of national allegiance, and so one may be a hybrid of Muslim and American, but one cannot be a Muslim and simply an &#8220;American.&#8221;</p>
<p>“I applauded President Bush’s remarks after 9/11,” Sheikh informs us, “and President Obama’s remarks Sunday night that ‘America will never be at war with Islam. Our war is not with Islam. Osama was never a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer.’” She goes on to claim that “the word ‘Islam’ means peace and obedience.”</p>
<p>Actually, no. It means &#8220;submission.&#8221; And that is by no means the end of her deceptions. Sheikh continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>As Muslims we are taught not to create disorder and to respect each other regardless of our faith. No true Muslim can do what Osama Bin Laden had done. There is no place for extremism of any kind in Islam. The Holy Quran clearly states “Whosoever killed a person…It shall be as if he had killed all mankind.” (5:33) and “when he is in authority, he runs about in the land to create disorder in it and destroy the crops and the progeny of man; and Allah loves not disorder.” (2:206)</p></blockquote>
<p>Actually, Qur&#8217;an 5:32 (not 5:33, at least in most versions) doesn&#8217;t say that &#8220;whosoever killed a person…It shall be as if he had killed all mankind.&#8221; It says: &#8220;We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind.&#8221; &#8220;Corruption in the earth,&#8221; or the &#8220;disorder&#8221; that Saima Sheikh decries by invoking Qur&#8217;an 2:206, is punishable, according to the Qur&#8217;an, by crucifixion or amputation of the hands and feet on opposite sides (5:33). Osama made his case among Muslims by charging that the United States was spreading corruption in the earth, and thus was fair game. The jihadist movement rejects the charge that it is creating disorder by pointing out that warfare against unbelievers is mandated in the Qur&#8217;an (cf. 9:5, 9:29, 2:190-193; etc.), and thus to pursue that war is not to create disorder.</p>
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		<title>Professor receives slew of backlash after f-word e-mail – The Daily Iowan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/sara/professor-receives-slew-of-backlash-after-f-word-e-mail-%e2%80%93-the-daily-iowan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professor-receives-slew-of-backlash-after-f-word-e-mail-%25e2%2580%2593-the-daily-iowan</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:12:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[sara]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Professor receives slew of backlash after f-word e-mail BY NINA EARNEST &#124; APRIL 22, 2011 A University of Iowa professor who sent a vulgar e-mail to members of the UI College Republicans has seen an outpouring of negative e-mails from students, graduates, and community members. UI anthropology/women&#8217;s studies Professor Ellen Lewin has received more than [...]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://freedomcenterstudents.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Penn_state_old_main_summer.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-10029" title="Penn_state_old_main_summer" src="http://freedomcenterstudents.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Penn_state_old_main_summer-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>Professor receives slew of backlash after f-word e-mail</p>
<p>BY NINA EARNEST | APRIL 22, 2011</p>
<p>A University of Iowa professor who sent a vulgar e-mail to members of the UI College Republicans has seen an outpouring of negative e-mails from students, graduates, and community members.</p>
<p>{{{*}}}</p>
<p>UI anthropology/women’s studies Professor Ellen Lewin has received more than 370 e-mails in the last two days, expressing strong distaste for the message she sent Monday. The e-mails were obtained by The Daily Iowan through an open records request.</p>
<p>In response to the College Republicans’ universitywide e-mail encouraging students to take part in “Conservative Coming Out Week,” Lewin sent an e-mail saying, “FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS.”</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.dailyiowan.com/2011/04/22/Metro/23036.html">Professor receives slew of backlash after f-word e-mail – The Daily Iowan</a>.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Social Justice Army Spared the Chopping Block</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/michellemalkin/obamas-social-justice-army-spared-the-chopping-block/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-social-justice-army-spared-the-chopping-block</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Apr 2011 04:06:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Goodbye, AmeriCorps. Hello, FoodStampCorps.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/project_americorps_nccc.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90708" title="project_americorps_nccc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/project_americorps_nccc.gif" alt="" width="375" height="299" /></a></p>
<p>So much for the new era of fiscal responsibility. The federal government&#8217;s dependency drones have been spared the chopping block. After vowing to eliminate funding for President Obama&#8217;s bloated $6 billion AmeriCorps social justice army, House Republicans retreated — and will shrink the AmeriCorps budget by a minuscule 6.7 percent.</p>
<p>Politicians originally sold AmeriCorps as an alternative to big government — a program to &#8220;renew the ethic of civic responsibility and the spirit of community throughout the United States.&#8221; With bipartisan support, the program has morphed into an all-purpose progressive slush fund. Instead of reining in the national service boondoggle, Washington has turned taxpayer-subsidized helping hands into a legion of Nanny State handout helpers. Goodbye, AmeriCorps. Hello, FoodStampCorps.</p>
<p>Yes, across the Internet, the feds are recruiting AmeriCorps VISTA (&#8220;Volunteers in Service to America&#8221;) workers to apply for jobs as publicists for the welfare state. Their mission: to sign up as many people to federal food stamp rolls as possible. Because, you know, the record-breaking 12 million that have been added since Obama took office is apparently not good enough.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a typical job ad in Boston: &#8220;AMERICORPS VISTA: FOOD STAMP COORDINATOR (INTERNSHIP) Through this project, the Elderly Commission will be able to provide information, assistance and support to senior citizens of Boston in applying for food stamps. Develop a full knowledge of the Food Stamp program and application process. Assist seniors in senior housing and community centers to fill out Food Stamp applications; assist seniors with gathering necessary proofs together for applications; follow up with the Department of Transitional Assistance to ensure seniors receive awarded benefits. Recruit volunteers to be trained on the application of the Food Stamp program.&#8221;</p>
<p>In New York, Philadelphia and a total of 30 sites across the country, AmeriCorps and the Department of Agriculture are funding the &#8220;National Anti-Hunger and Opportunity Corps&#8221; to &#8220;increase access to food stamps.&#8221;</p>
<p>National Affairs managing editor Meghan Clyne reports that the administration is roping in left-wing churches to aggressively promote food stamps. With institutional support from first lady Michelle Obama, the FoodStampCorps will train church members to apply for food stamps after religious services; and &#8220;&#8216;encourage eligible families to enroll their children in (government-subsidized) school meal programs&#8217;; if organizations operate day-care or after-school programs, they are advised to pursue reimbursement for meals and snacks through the Child and Adult Care Food Program (a federally funded, state-administered welfare program).</p>
<p>Places of worship are asked to serve as feeding sites for the Summer Food Service Program — another federally funded, state-run welfare project.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Fighting for a Free Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/fighting-for-a-free-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fighting-for-a-free-iran</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/fighting-for-a-free-iran/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:10:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[An American daughter of Iranian immigrants speaks of her dream and battle to liberate her homeland. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/lisa.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-61897" title="lisa" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/lisa.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="444" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lisa Daftari, a journalist specializing in Iranian affairs.  She is a guest contributor on Fox News and has been published in Frontpage Magazine, Washington Post, CBS.com, NBC, Voice of America, and PBS.  She communicates with individuals living in Iran and tells their stories.  In 2006, she was invited to show her documentary on bringing regime change to Iran to a subcommittee of Congress.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Lisa Daftari, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Tell us about your work in regards to Iran and what inspires you to engage in it.</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>As a journalist, I am drawn to human stories, particularly ones that demonstrate the effects that society and politics have on ordinary peoples’ lives. In the case of Iran, these stories are quite numerous and revealing. Whether it is a story about a young girl who was arrested for her voicing her political views or a father of two who is forced to work four jobs just to put food on the table, I think these stories are the best ways to understand the struggles of the Iran people right now.  It is a well-known fact that the Islamic Republic is a radical, fundamentalist and unjust government, but through talking to the Iranian people and understanding their lives can we better grasp how this regime plays a role in daily routine of the people.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What has drawn you to Iran?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>Obviously my background, as an Iranian-American, has played a significant role in fostering my passion and interest in the area. Every time I had a research assignment or paper in school, I would find some way to do my project on Iran.  Growing up, I was incredibly cognizant of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, or the <em>Enghelab</em>, the word for revolution in Farsi. I knew that it had changed the fate of my family significantly and that is how we found ourselves living in this country.  My family, like many other Iranian families, shared these conversations and anecdotes at the dinner table. My siblings and I felt a deep nostalgia for a time period we did not live through and yearned to understand and experience that time for ourselves. Later when I became a journalist, I wanted to tell human stories in the backdrop of larger social, political and cultural issues. Clearly, starting with my own people felt most natural, particularly when the Iranian people experienced their most crucial historic moment only 30 years ago.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Tell us a bit about the<strong> </strong>radical, fundamentalist and unjust government that rules over Iranians.</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>The Iranian people see their government as an imported entity; a group of fundamentalists whose beliefs in radical Islam are stronger than their nationalistic ties to the country.  This clashes strongly against a large population of Iranians who consider themselves extremely patriotic. We also have to remember that Iran is made up of a rich cross section of various religions, cultures and dialects. Obviously there is no government that can represent them all, yet they share and celebrate the Iranian culture and old heritage they have in common.</p>
<p>Above all, this regime, cloaked in religious fundamentalism, angers the people with its hypocritical actions. They deny the people so many of their basic rights, yet we have extensive evidence of their own indulgent lifestyles. We know of their lavish vacations around the world, their lucrative real estate portfolios, their international bank accounts storing millions of dollars, and their access to some of the world’s best universities for their children.  The people of Iran are savvy and resent the double standards.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> You have researched the Iranian American community and its evolvement over the last 30 years. Can you enlighten us a bit on your findings and observations?</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>The Iranian American community has developed an extremely unique dual identity. Over the last thirty years, many of these Iranians had lost hope in ever going back to their homeland, and likewise in ever seeing this government change. The result has been an Iranian American community that has emerged quite successfully. They are represented in all types of occupations and areas of business.  They have excelled in politics, music, film, fashion, real estate and technology.  They have raised their American born children to share an unwavering allegiance to the United States. In June however, it was remarkable to see how invested even American born Iranians were in the fate of their inherited homeland.  In large cities across the U.S., Iranians and Iranian Americans gathered by the thousands to stand in solidarity with the protestors in Iran.  They felt a real glimmer of hope with this political impetus that really moved the community.  They had been waiting for such a moment for a long time.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> We know of course that Iranians are still bravely protesting and being tortured every day. The fascists who rule the country are cracked down on the protests and continue to crack down viciously and sadistically. Your thoughts? What’s coming up?</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>Many describe the Iranian people at the time of the protests as a pot that boiled over. The impetus, or better yet, the excuse, was frustration over a fraudulent election, but the reality was that the Iranian people, both in Iran and abroad, had been waiting three decades for such a moment. With every breach of justice, with every hanging, with every whip that slashed down on an innocent woman’s arm, for every stone that was violently hurled at a young Iranian’s head, the grievances had amassed.</p>
<p>Since last June, Iranians came out in protest during holidays and other commemorative days, particularly those momentous to the regime. They came out on these days to show that their grievances are directly against the regime.  By protesting on Islamic holidays and on days special to the Islamic Republic, they made a stand against the government and what it stands for. The people of Iran are incredibly nationalistic. They are patriotic and their Iranian heritage runs deeper and stronger than anything else.</p>
<p>We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of those protests, and Iranians are organizing for smaller demonstrations.  We are seeing an evolving Iranian force, partly as a result of the threats that the regime has made against those who come out and partly because the Iranians realize that to be shot at, beaten and rounded up and taken to prison is not going to be the avenue to freedom. The main issue for the protestors is and has been a lack of leadership and strategy.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Why is it, in your perspective, important to talk about Iran in the context of its people and their experiences and disenchantment?</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>In the case of Iran, it is imperative to get to know the people, their struggles, their experiences and what they really want going forward. The Iranian people are multi-faceted. Iran is such a vast country that has varying religions, dialects and sub-cultures that create a rich cross-section of Iranian culture. In the past, many would erroneously group together the Iranian people together with their regime, but since the elections, I think it has become quite clear that that is not the case.  The people of Iran have a 30-year-old story to tell. Everyone in Iran is and has been dramatically affected by the political landscape in the country; just as the lives of Iranian Americans and Iranians living anywhere else in the world have been remarkably shaped by the political on-goings of the last three decades.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What are the chances that the Iranian people can overthrow the despots who have them imprisoned? How can we best help the Iranian people to do so?</p>
<p><strong>Daftari: </strong>If we were to look at the Iranian dilemma as a social one in addition to a political one, it has become obvious that the people of Iran have and will continue to further out-grow their government. Although this regime has only been around for 30 years, as a result of the Ayatollah Khomeini-backed baby boom following the Iran Iraq War, almost 70% of Iran’s population was born under this regime. That is a very significant statistic. It means that an overwhelming majority of the country is young, modern, and under the age of 30. Even though living under the confines of a theocracy is the only life they know, many of these young people are overtly disenchanted with their government.  Overthrowing, or maybe better stated, shaking this government is inevitable. Their grievances are specific and prevent them from living a normal life on a daily basis.  They just want to live normal lives and be free to blog, to sign onto Yahoo or Google, to walk down the street with their boyfriends and girlfriends, to go to college despite not having any connections to the clergy, etc.</p>
<p>There is a lot of pressure on the youth of Iran, and that is what is propelling them to go out to the streets in demonstration. They want better, and they know it is out there. The Iranian people are smart, savvy, intellectual people who refuse to be represented by fundamentalist, tyrannical leaders who are holding them back. Whether it is through demonstrations or any other way they can voice their frustrations, they will continue to do so until change is brought about.  There’s a lot of hopelessness, and that’s what this struggle is about. <strong> </strong></p>
<p>The question that is frequently asked of the Iranian people is: What can the rest of the world do to support them in this struggle? I think the answer has always been to unconditionally support them. It would mean to educate oneself about what is going on in the region, to ask for Iran stories when the subject suddenly escapes the media, to ask questions of elected government officials, and as taxpayers, to interrogate the United Nations on not taking a serious stance on Iran and its nuclear agenda.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Lisa Daftari, thank you for joining us.</p>
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		<title>Coming of Age Under Qassam Rockets</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/anav-silverman/coming-of-age-under-qassam-rockets/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=coming-of-age-under-qassam-rockets</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 04:00:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anav Silverman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Israeli girls relive their childhood terror on stage.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/anav.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60339" title="anav" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/anav.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a></p>
<p>JERUSALEM 11.5.10: With two months until the end of the school year, several students at the religious AMIT high school of Sderot found themselves fulfilling a lifelong dream.  Rotem Timsit and nine other Sderot girls, high school-aged actresses, who are part of <a href="http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=193&amp;q=3" target="_blank">Sderot Media Center&#8217;s Community Treatment Theater</a>, got to perform in the Knesset this past Tuesday.</p>
<p>In front of a full house which included Knesset speaker and MK Reuven Rivlin, former Defense Minister Amir Peretz and other MKs, as well as students from Boyar High School of Jerusalem, the girls performed <em>Children of Qassam Avenue. </em>A theatrical production that tells the story of teenage girls growing under rocket fire, the play is based on the true life experiences of the Sderot girls, who spent a year undergoing drama therapy to overcome PTSD symptoms resulting from rocket terror. “This is more than just a play,” said Noam Bedein, director of Sderot Media Center. “The idea of this production is to inspire a change in perception of the Sderot-Gaza conflict. The past decade of rocket attacks, and the tremendous psychological damage done to a population of young children and teenagers, is often completely ignored or overlooked by mainstream media both in Israel and internationally.”</p>
<p>&#8220;The first place to begin this change of perception is in the Knesset,&#8221; said Bedein.  &#8220;We hope that our political leaders recognize the powerful advocacy tool we have established in this community theater concept. This is the only platform out there presenting Israel&#8217;s side of the Sderot-Gaza conflict through the voices of Israeli youth who have suffered from Gaza rocket attacks. &#8221;</p>
<p>Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin who invited the Sderot girls to perform in the Knesset stated that he personally appreciated the girls coming to share their painful reality through the art of theater.</p>
<p>&#8220;This production is something that was able to draw us all into a reality that is foreign to most of us. The war that took place in Sderot and the western Negev felt like a war taking place in another country,&#8221; Rivlin stated. &#8220;The girls showed great talent in their performance but even more importantly they demonstrated to us what these Qassam rockets can do, that they are lethal and terrifying.&#8221;</p>
<p>Former Defense Minister Amir Peretz, himself a resident of Sderot, noted that the rocket terror could have impacted the girls in two different ways: &#8220;the situation could have led them to a complete breakdown or generated resilience and strength as demonstrated here today.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;This message of resilience is for the entire state of Israel&#8211;we must remember that Sderot, a city of working class citizens, was able to withstand a terrible test while demonstrating unique courage in the face of continued rocket attacks,&#8221; said Peretz.</p>
<p>Students of Boyar High School of Jerusalem who come from all over Israel, sat quietly during the entire performance, as many for the first time witnessed what life was like for fellow Israeli teenagers growing up in the rocket zone of Sderot and the western Negev. During the question-and-answer discussion after the performance, a Boyar student asked if any of the girls would remain in Sderot to raise their families and children. Sixteen-year old tenth grader, Rotem Timsit answered, &#8220;we still love our city and will continue to live in Sderot, and yes I can see myself raising my kids there.&#8221;</p>
<p>For Rotem, the performance in the Knesset was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which she hopes will continue. &#8220;We came to share our story and show the rest of Israel and especially our political leaders how a decade of rocket terror, condensed in this one-hour show, will not drive us out of Sderot.&#8221;<em></em></p>
<p><em>Special thanks goes to Janet Lehr of New York for providing the funds for the Sderot Community Treatment Theater program. Sderot Media Center is currently looking for sponsors to continue the financial operation of the theater program.</em></p>
<p><em>Photo Credit: Jacob Shrybman, Sderot Media Center</em></p>
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		<title>Silencing the Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/andrew-g-bostom/silencing-the-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=silencing-the-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:00:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew G. Bostom]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA["Moderate" Muslim Tarek Fatah objects to a synagogue holding a discussion regarding Muhammad's child bride. ]]></description>
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<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/">Pajamas</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Samau’ al al-Maghribi converted to Islam from Judaism in 1163 C.E., and shortly afterward wrote an anti-Jewish polemic entitled <em>Silencing the  Jews</em>. Al-Maghribi’s “Silencing” — ostensibly a “philosophical” tract — employs Islamic Biblical criticism to characterize the Jews as ignorant, unreasonable, and hypocritical, complemented by their <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/04/antisemitism-in-the-quran-motifs-and-historical-manifestations.html">Koranic  depiction</a> as accursed prophet-killers who transgress Allah’s will, corrupt his message, and harbor the most intense hatred for the Muslims. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Islamic-Antisemitism-Sacred-History/dp/1591025540/ref=sr_1_3/102-8993833-1476108?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1179229261&amp;sr=1-3">Moshe  Perlmann</a> (d. 2001) translated al-Maghribi’s tract into English and was the preeminent scholar of Islam’s medieval polemic against the Jews. In his introduction to <em>Silencing</em>, Perlmann (in 1964) observed  that this literature was redolent with motifs from the Muslim creed’s  foundational texts:</p>
<blockquote><p>The <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/04/antisemitism-in-the-quran-motifs-and-historical-manifestations.html">Koran</a>,  of course became a mine of anti-Jewish passages. The <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/04/antisemitism-in-the-hadith-and-early-muslim-biographies-of-muhammad-motifs-and-manifestations.html">hadith</a> did not lag behind. Popular preachers used and embellished such  material.</p></blockquote>
<p>In an earlier study (published 1948) of 11th century Muslim  Spain — idealized, falsely, as the paragon of Islam’s ecumenism — <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Islamic-Antisemitism-Sacred-History/dp/1591025540/ref=sr_1_3/102-8993833-1476108?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1179229261&amp;sr=1-3">Perlmann</a> had described how such polemical tracts and sermons incited the mass violence which destroyed the Jewish community of Granada during the catastrophic 1066 pogrom. Its death toll of some 3000 to 4000 Jews exceeded the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade.</p>
<p>Last week, the <em><a href="http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/12/tarek-fatah-from-an-ex-muslim-true-islamophobia.aspx">National  Post</a></em> of Canada published an editorial and subsequent <a href="http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/12/counterpoint-tarek-fatah.aspx#ixzz0i0LuT8v6">comments</a> (see comments section, 7:20 PM) by Tarek Fatah — self-proclaimed “<a href="http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/12/tarek-fatah-from-an-ex-muslim-true-islamophobia.aspx">hardened  secular Muslim</a>” and much-ballyhooed Muslim moderate — addressing Canada’s Jews and the Jewish community at large. Nearly 850 years after al-Maghribi, Fatah’s defamatory screeds abandon any façade of philosophical debate in his transparent effort to silence discussion of Islam by modern Jews.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/silencing-the-jews/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The True Face of J Street</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/moshe-phillips/the-true-face-of-j-street-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-true-face-of-j-street-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:03:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is it really "pro-Israel" to call out for talks with Hamas?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53732" title="heschelgreen" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="329" /></a></p>
<p>J Street, the controversial pressure group, explains on the &#8220;About Us&#8221; page on its official website that &#8220;J Street is the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.” Since its inception in 2008, J Street has undergone growth that must be considered no less than remarkable.</p>
<p>In large part, the success of J Street has occurred without any serious investigations into how this group grew so incredibly fast and just where it came from.</p>
<p>Jeffrey  Goldberg, writing for <em>The Atlantic </em>on October 27, 2009, stated “J Street grew organically, and continues to grow organically.” Goldberg’s essay was published during J Street’s first conference. The conference was held near Capitol Hill and 1,500 delegates attended. An October 29m, JTA news service report stated “activists had meetings in 210 of the 535 lawmakers&#8217; offices on the Hill, including about 100 meetings with the lawmakers themselves…”</p>
<p>Organic? How could such a new group create such a powerful infrastructure and nurture such impressive contacts so quickly? There should be no doubt that J Street came from somewhere. The question is from where?</p>
<p>The  statement on the &#8220;<a href="http://www.jstreet.org/about/about-us">About Us</a>&#8221; page goes on to state:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street was founded to change the dynamics of American politics and policy on Israel and the Middle East. We believe the security and future of Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people depend on rapidly achieving a two-state solution and regional comprehensive peace. Our mission is to promote meaningful American leadership to achieve peace and security in the Middle East and to broaden the debate on these issues nationally and in the Jewish community.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>On J Street  website’s “Myths and Facts about J Street” page, J Street declares:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street&#8217;s Advisory Council consists of over 170 prominent Americans &#8211; including three Former Members of Congress, 28 Rabbis, a number of former Jewish community leaders and professionals, and many others.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Researchers with the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans For A Safe Israel/AFSI initiated a study of the rabbis connected to J Street in order to understand just what the backgrounds of “former Jewish community leaders” involved in J Street are. What light can be shed on J Street’s agenda by examining its structure and organization?</p>
<p>Being Philadelphia based, AFSI researchers had prior familiarity with many of these players. A large number of J Street rabbis have played senior leadership roles in the Pennsylvania based Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the locally headquartered network of Jewish Renewal organizations. A cadre of these individuals were also leaders of the now defunct Philadelphia chapter of New Jewish Agenda, which was specifically noted for its radical stance &#8212; even in that radical group.</p>
<p>The results  of the AFSI research into these rabbis is startling.</p>
<p>A JTA report from October 25, 2009 stated that “The left-wing lobby J Street is absorbing Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom&#8217;s chapters and rabbinic wing.”</p>
<p>The national president of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom at the time of the merger was Steve Masters. Masters is a Philadelphia attorney and a former leader of the Philadelphia Chapter of the New Jewish Agenda. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, was introduced by Masters at a local kick-off event in Philadelphia on February 4, 2010.</p>
<p>Many of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s rabbis were among the founders and key activists of New Jewish Agenda including Rabbi Gerald Serotta, Arthur Waskow, Rabbi Everett Gendler and others. Serotta, Waskow and Gendler are also all involved in a group called Jewish Fast For Gaza – but more on that later. Waskow attended the February 4, 2010 event also.</p>
<p>It is well worth noting that many of these rabbis were first involved in an organization called Breira (meaning alternative) that was universally opposed by almost all sectors of the American Jewish community. I. L. Kenen the founder of AIPAC claimed that Breira &#8220;undermined U.S. support for Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The majority of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom/J Street rabbis hold radical views that go far past anything that even Breira advocated in its hay day.</p>
<p>Half of the  rabbis on J Street’s Advisory Council were members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s  Rabbinic Cabinet &#8211; before the merge.</p>
<p>There is a very significant overlap between the rabbis from Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom and the Jewish Fast for Gaza group. Fast for Gaza made its first public announcement in July 2009. Rabbi Brian Walt was listed as the contact for the group’s initial press release. Walt is a member of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.fastforgaza.net/statement">Fast  for Gaza group purpose</a> is &#8220;To call upon Israel, the US, and the international community to engage in negotiations without pre-conditions with all relevant Palestinian parties &#8211; including Hamas &#8211; in order to end the blockade…&#8221;</p>
<p>Here are  the facts:</p>
<p>More than half of the seventy-eight rabbis listed on the Fast for Gaza website are also members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet. Put another way, about 12.5 % of all of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet are involved with the Fast for Gaza and call for talks with Hamas.</p>
<p>For example, Rabbi Arthur Green is listed by J Street as an Advisory Council member. Green is a former dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and was a prominent member of Breira. Another Advisory Council member is the former president of RRC, Rabbi David A. Teutsch. Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a former director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, is on Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet and is a “Rabbinical Supporter of the Fast for Gaza”. Teutsch too attended J Street’s February 4, 2010 event.</p>
<p>Breira. New Jewish Agenda. Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom. Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Is J Street really just old wine in a new bottle? Has this wine turned to vinegar? Where are the likes of I. L. Kenen among today’s American Jewish leaders to stand up to J Street? An article on the website of the <em>Forward</em> newspaper (December 9, 2009) states that Israel&#8217;s Ambassador Michael Oren recently publicly labeled J Street as &#8220;a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It&#8217;s significantly out of the mainstream&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Ambassador Oren should have been applauded for his statement. And loudly. After all, shouldn’t it be apparent to even the casual observer that forces within the highest echelons of the Obama Administration and/or the Democratic Party are assisting J Street, or perhaps even pulling its strings?</p>
<p><em>Moshe Phillips is a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI. The chapter&#8217;s website is at: <a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/www.phillyafsi.com" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.com</span></a> and Moshe&#8217;s blog can be found at <a href="http://phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com/" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com</span></a>.</em></p>
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		<title>ACORN&#8217;s Shame</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/acorns-shame/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=acorns-shame</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/acorns-shame/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:50:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[DTN Profiles]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51887</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In an effort to distance itself from the massive, shameful scandals of ACORN&#8217;s national organization, the Arkansas chapter of ACORN has announced that it is re-forming itself under the name Arkansas Community Organizations (ACO). Just six weeks ago, ACORN’s California chapter took a similar step, changing its name to the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.  To view [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/acorn-sign.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-51889" title="acorn-sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/acorn-sign.jpg" alt="" width="477" height="359" /></a></p>
<p>In an effort to distance itself from the massive, shameful scandals of ACORN&#8217;s national organization, the Arkansas chapter of ACORN has announced that it is re-forming itself under the name Arkansas Community Organizations (ACO). Just six weeks ago, ACORN’s California chapter took a similar step, changing its name to the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7499">Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. </a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6968"><strong>To view a comprehensive profile of ACORN, its major scandals, and its close connections to Barack Obama, click here.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>Andy McCarthy: Binyam Mohammed: Is That All There Is? &#8211; National Review Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/andy-mccarthy-binyam-mohammed-is-that-all-there-is-national-review-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andy-mccarthy-binyam-mohammed-is-that-all-there-is-national-review-online</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:51:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49692</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Binyam Mohammed is an al Qaeda terrorist who planned, with his would-be partner Jose Padilla the &#8220;Dirty Bomber&#8221; to carry out mass-murder attacks in U.S. cities as part of a 9/11 &#8220;second wave.&#8221; More here. Unlike Padilla, who was prosecuted on tangentially related terrorism charges and is now serving a lengthy albeit not lengthy enough [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Binyam Mohammed is an al Qaeda terrorist who planned, with his would-be partner Jose Padilla the &#8220;Dirty Bomber&#8221; to carry out mass-murder attacks in U.S. cities as part of a 9/11 &#8220;second wave.&#8221;  More here. Unlike Padilla, who was prosecuted on tangentially related terrorism charges and is now serving a lengthy albeit not lengthy enough sentence, Mohammed was released by the Obama administration, under great pressure from British authorities.Mohammed is a cause celebre in the U.K. — where he is living free and clear — because he made &#8220;torture&#8221; allegations against the CIA.  Our military prosecutors wanted to try him for war crimes, but the Brits did not want a public trial — and neither, I imagine, did parts of our intelligence community — for fear that they&amp;apos;d be branded &#8220;torturers&#8221; in the press which, naturally, happened anyway. So we released him, and of course he has had the vigorous support of the ususal suspects in pursuing civil suits demanding that details of his &#8220;torture&#8221; be revealed.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWRlYzg4YzlkYzk5NDIyYzdlZjdhNjhlOTEzZGEyOTk=">Binyam Mohammed: Is That All There Is? &#8211; Andy McCarthy &#8211; The Corner on National Review Online</a>.</p>
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		<title>Organizing Kids for Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/organizing-kids-for-obama-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=organizing-kids-for-obama-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/organizing-kids-for-obama-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:06:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the President is using the public school system as his own private recruiting farm.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/song55.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49639" title="song55" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/song55-300x218.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="218" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog <em>AtlasShrugs.com</em>.. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign. Her op-eds have been published in <em>The Washington Times</em>, <em>The American Thinker</em>, <em>Israel National News</em>, <em>Frontpage Magazine</em>, <em>World Net Daily</em>, and <em>New Media Journal</em>, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon to be released, <a title="http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-Presidency-Obama-Administrations-America/dp/1439189307/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1260121208&amp;sr=8-2" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-Presidency-Obama-Administrations-America/dp/1439189307/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1260121208&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank">The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration&#8217;s War on America</a> (forward by Ambassador John Bolton).</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pamkeller.jpg"><img title="pamkeller" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pamkeller-243x300.jpg" alt="" width="243" height="300" /></a></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong><strong> </strong>Pamela Geller, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about Organizing for America (OFA), formerly Obama for America, and what it is doing in public schools. Tell us about it.</p>
<p><strong>Geller:</strong> Jamie, a reader of my website AtlasShrugs.com, Chuck, has a daughter in the eleventh grade in a public high school, Perry Local in Massillon, Ohio. The teacher in her government class passed out a propaganda recruiting paper – headed with Obama’s distinctive “O” logo — asking students to sign up as interns for Organizing for America. You can see the entire intern recruiting form at <a title="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/01/atlas-exclusive-obama-organizing-for-communism-and-youth-corps-in-the-public-school-1.html" rel="nofollow" href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/01/atlas-exclusive-obama-organizing-for-communism-and-youth-corps-in-the-public-school-1.html" target="_blank">AtlasShrugs.com</a>.</p>
<p>The form indicates yet again that Barack Obama is using our public school system to recruit for his Alinsky-inspired private army. Organizing for America is recruiting in our high schools to<strong> </strong>“build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda” – that is, his agenda of socialism for the United States of America.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>So what would you say to the argument that this is just an internship program and that there’s nothing wrong with it?</p>
<p><strong>Geller:</strong> Yes, Jamie, it is just an internship program, but what will these “interns” be force-fed? The mother’s milk of the left — anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, Ayers, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, soft-on-jihad, and illegal immigration. For starters. Maybe “Ellie Light,” who has in the last few weeks published the same Letter to the Editor supporting and defending Obama in over a dozen newspapers across the country, can give lessons in astroturfing.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Provide some evidence.</p>
<p><strong>Geller: </strong>That’s easy.</p>
<p>The evidence for this is that the very form in question carries a recommended reading list, including <em>Rules for Radicals</em> by the notorious hard left community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky; two <em>Huffington Post</em> articles by Zack Exley, “The New Organizers” and “Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle.” The first of those, published in October 2008, enthuses about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has, “almost without anyone noticing … built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”<strong> </strong></p>
<p>During the 2000 presidential campaign, Exley operated the website <a title="http://www.gwbush.com/" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.gwbush.com/" target="_blank">www.gwbush.com</a>, which was filled with lies about George W. Bush that were designed to kill his chance to become President. The site’s headline was “Just Say ‘No’ to a Former Cocaine User for President.”</p>
<p>Also included on the OFA internship recommended reading list are <em>Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy</em> by the leftist activist Rinku Sen, and sections of Obama’s book <em>Dreams from My Father</em> dealing with his days as a community organizer in Chicago.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What do you think the point is of all this &#8220;community&#8221; organizing?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Geller:</strong> To elect more Democrats, of course. This internship program is geared towards the 2010 elections, using our kids as the Democrats’ goons. The internship form begins with a nakedly partisan and propagandistic appeal: “Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change. OFA is launching a national internship program connecting students all over the country with our organization on the ground – working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond.”</p>
<p>Jamie, can you imagine if the Republicans attempted such a stunt? Obama is using the public school system to help ensure Democratic victories in 2010, 2012, and thereafter.</p>
<p>This is incredible. And it’s profoundly wrong, to say the least. And it is no accident. Obama is poisoning our public school system. He acts as if it’s his own private recruiting farm.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>The Obama camp has done questionable things in public schools before, hasn’t it?</p>
<p><strong>Geller:</strong> Yes, Jamie. In September 2009, all public school students were forced to listen to his creepy speech about working hard in school. During the campaign the Obama camp had “Kids for Obama Parades.” And public school teachers more than once were caught indoctrinating children into the Obama cult.. Remember the uniformed children chanting about how Obama had motivated them to succeed? P.J. Gladnick wrote about that video at <em>Newsbusters</em> in October 2008 that it was “reminiscent of North Korean kids chanting out their praises for the ‘Dear Leader.’” And don’t forget those many videos of public school kids singing brainwashed tunes of Obama praise.</p>
<p>Long before he was President, Obama’s camp had targeted children and started building a cult of adulation around their hero. The children’s book <em>Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope</em> by Nikki Grimes sets Obama up as a demigod: “Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he has held on to Hope. Even as a boy, Barack knew he wasn’t quite like anybody else, but through his journeys he found the ability to listen to Hope and become what he was meant to be: a bridge to bring people together.”</p>
<p>And now once again our perverse public school system abandons academic standards and achievement, replacing them with radical leftist activism from leftwing Alinsky indoctrinators.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What can parents do about this?</p>
<p><strong>Geller:</strong> Be aware and proactive. Children must be advised to expose this propaganda. Children must tell their parents how they are being used and manipulated. Parents, warn your kids. Don’t let Barack Obama recruit his drones from your family.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.</p>
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		<title>The Buffalo Interfaith Bluff</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ilya-feoktistov/the-buffalo-interfaith-bluff/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-buffalo-interfaith-bluff</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ilya-feoktistov/the-buffalo-interfaith-bluff/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:04:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ilya Feoktistov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ahmad Kuftaro]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the Jews taking part in Buffalo "interfaith efforts" were so easily bamboozled. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/muslimrrally3.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49164" title="muslimrrally3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/muslimrrally3-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" /></a></p>
<p>Rabbi Marc Schneier is a leading exponent of Jewish-Muslim dialogue. As founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, he recently <a href="http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/01/jews_muslims_can_defeat_common_enemies.html">described in Newsweek</a> the successes of his second annual “Weekend of Twinning of Synagogues and Mosques.” This interfaith initiative brings together “100 synagogues and 100 mosques” for a weekend of interfaith programming. Unfortunately for the Rabbi, he used, as a local example of mosque-synagogue twinning the case in Buffalo, NY – a case which shows just how easily Jews can be deceived by radical Muslims posing as “moderates.”</p>
<p>“…Coming just days after the horror of extremist violence at Fort Hood ,” wrote Rabbi Schneier, “the Weekend of Twinning was heartening evidence that most Muslims are moderates, and that majorities in both the Muslim and Jewish communities seek better relations…”</p>
<p>It may well be true that most American Muslims are moderate, but the Jews in Buffalo seem to have got themselves snookered.</p>
<p>As the Research Director of an organization that investigates and scrutinizes radical Islamic groups, I was approached last fall by concerned members of the Buffalo Jewish community who asked us to help them understand the recent local efforts to forge Muslim-Jewish interfaith relationships. We were told that some of the groups and individuals behind this initiative are known for being sources of viciously anti-Israel activity and rhetoric. Together, we began a long effort to collect information on the Twinning. What we found was that the entities behind the Buffalo interfaith effort are anything but moderate.</p>
<p>As Rabbi Schneier describes in his Newsweek article, the event was conceived and coordinated by Robert Stall and Othman Shibly – a Jewish geriatrician and a Muslim dentist who worked to provide free health screenings to people in the community without health insurance. The doctors became close after jointly attending a medical conference in Damascus, Syria. During a break in the conference, Dr. Shibly took Dr. Stall to a Damascus mosque and introduced him to a respected Syrian cleric, Sheikh Rajab Deeb. Sheikh Deeb had been the top disciple of Dr. Shibly’s own spiritual mentor, the recently deceased Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro.</p>
<p>In his efforts to convince Buffalo Jewish leaders to join the Twinning, Dr. Stall has characterized Dr. Shibly and his Syrian spiritual leaders as moderate and peace-loving men of faith. Writing to a concerned community member, Dr. Stall said that, “Dr. Shibly’s efforts to improve the world by having different faiths work together, side by side, competing to outdo one another in good works, is to a large extent based in [sic] the teachings of Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, a Syrian imam who was in many ways ahead of his time.”</p>
<p>As proof of Kuftaro’s progressiveness, Dr. Stall provided links to Kuftaro’s English language articles with titles like “Spirituality in the 21st Century.” Jewish leaders who participated in the Twinning Weekend must have been convinced – Kuftaro’s disciple, Rajab Deeb, was linked in via Skype to address the interfaith event participants through an interpreter.</p>
<p>It is unfortunate that Dr. Stall and the Jewish participants didn’t consult an interpreter earlier, for while the Sheikhs’ English-language websites are full of new-age fluff about interfaith spirituality, the Arab-language sections contained something different.</p>
<p>A video recording of Kuftaro’s August 18, 2003 sermon on “Islam and Terrorism” posted on his website began with a section on, “The control of the Jewish lobby on world opinion,” where he insisted that American claims of Syrian support for terrorism were, “suggested to them by the Jewish lobby, who are the killers of prophets.” Kuftaro has also said that “ Israel is a dagger in the heart of the Muslim nation” and in a meeting with Hamas leaders insisted that “all Muslims are obligated to do jihad upon the Zionists.”</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seoiIzPpwzc">video taped on July 5, 2002</a>, Kuftaro turned over his pulpit to Luis Farrakhan, who was visiting his mosque as an honored guest. On November 8, 2002, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5IO8-GYQ0">he gave the same honor</a> to the neo-Nazi preacher William Baker. In online video of both events, Kuftaro looks on from the dais while both anti-Semites give lectures denouncing America and Israel in front of his congregation.</p>
<p>On the personal website of Sheikh Rajab Deeb, together with the audio of the sermon he gave at the Buffalo event, is a May 15, 2005 sermon titled, “Jerusalem is Ours.” In the sermon, Deeb claimed that the Holy Land is undergoing a so-called, “process of desecration through the delirious allegations of the presence there of the Jewish Temple .” About Jews, he said: “They want to remove and destroy every trace except for their footsteps and pollute every creed except their faith, and eradicate every race except their race, and they claim to be God’s Chosen People…”</p>
<p>In a position statement on Syria’s army, Deeb said:</p>
<p>“You must set up sophisticated weapons, which are appropriate to the times. The saber and spear were good predecessor weapons, which then evolved into the catapult. This development is still ongoing to the present age, where the weapons became firearms, then artillery, missile and aircraft, and then, with increased development, came the atomic and hydrogen bombs… His eminence [Sheikh Deeb] encourages the development of the national weapons industry; when the State possesses the secrets of these weapons, no enemy can resist it.”</p>
<p>Deeb’s support for Syria ’s national weapons industry is not surprising – in fact both he and Kuftaro have served as top clerics in Bashar Assad’s totalitarian government, known for spreading virulent Jew-hatred. Until Kuftaro’s death in 2003, he was the Grand Mufti of Syria and Deeb is currently the Chief Scholar in the Syrian Ministry of Religion. Considering that Syria has expelled all its Jews, hosts the top leadership of Palestinian terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and arms Hizbullah, the tenor of Deeb and Kuftaro’s sermons about Jews is also not surprising.</p>
<p>The Shibly family has promoted a similar pro-terror ideology in Buffalo . Dr. Shibly’s son Hassan Shibly is a prolific blogger who has written that Hizbullah should not be considered a terrorist organization. In a high-profile incident at the Rainbow  Bridge in 2004, Hassan and Dr. Shibly’s wife Sawsan Tabbaa, were detained at the border after returning from the controversial “Reviving the Islamic Spirit” annual conference in Toronto . Responding to a discrimination lawsuit filed by the Shiblys against it, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6225-2005Apr20.html">the Department of Homeland Security said</a> that: “In this instance, we had credible intelligence that conferences similar to the one from which these individuals were leaving were being used by terrorist organizations to fundraise and to hide the travel of terrorists themselves.” In 2007, <a href="http://nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/Tabaa_v_Chertoff_Opinion.pdf">the courts rejected the Shibly family’s claims of discrimination</a> and judged that the terror threat associated with the conference justified their detention.</p>
<p>What’s stunning here is that finding this information was not that hard. How is it possible that the Jews taking part in Buffalo interfaith efforts were so easily bamboozled? Surely, no one involved in this “twinning” business would have signed a contract to renovate his bathroom without such minimal due diligence. The answer is the deep obsession with politically correct ideology that pervades many liberal Jewish communities: “It just can’t be true that Islamic radicals would try to take advantage of our good will. If anyone even thinks of this as a possibility, he must be a “racist!”</p>
<p>And why would Islamic radicals pretend to be moderate in order to establish interfaith relationships with Jewish community? I believe that this and many other similar “Twinning Initiatives” around the country have an ulterior purpose. Already, the interfaith relationship as it currently exists in Buffalo is being exploited to intimidate local Jewish groups into forfeiting their freedom to vigorously advocate for Jews everywhere, including Israel . Shortly after the twinning, Dr. Shibly denounced a lecture by Israeli General Effie Eitam at the University of Buffalo . Writing to the event organizers, Dr. Shibly said: “It is so sad as we are trying to bring our communities together and make a historical step to join the national efforts of twinning mosques and Synagogues projects for common good, we get a slap in our face.” Likewise, when the Jewish community wanted to screen “Farewell Israel ,” a thoroughly-researched film about the dangers Israel faces, Shibly again invoked the interfaith threat: “This movie and other programs presented before were misleading and promote islamophobia. They destroy all the bridges and dialogues that we are building to promote peace, love and understanding.”</p>
<p>This type of disingenuous interfaith dialogue with Jewish leaders is also a strategic force-multiplier for extremists. The rest of American society tends to look to Jews on the topic of extremist bigotry and intolerance as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. By embracing radical Islamists in an official interfaith relationship, Jewish leaders give them a ticket into American institutions.</p>
<p>Interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims can be valuable. Yet dialogue is only productive when it occurs with partners who are honest about their true intentions. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Dr. Shibly and his Syrian government clerics. Instead of promoting peace and tolerance, legitimizing such entities through interfaith partnerships will only promote the hatred they preach when they think the Jews aren’t paying attention. Rabbi Marc Schneier and Dr. Richard Stall should be apologizing to the Buffalo Jewish community instead of congratulating themselves on a job well done.</p>
<p><strong>Ilya Feoktistov is Research Director of <a href="http://www.peaceandtolerance.org/">Americans for Peace and Tolerance</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Gerard Alexander: Why are liberals so condescending? &#8211; Washington Post</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/gerard-alexander-why-are-liberals-so-condescending-washington-post/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gerard-alexander-why-are-liberals-so-condescending-washington-post</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/gerard-alexander-why-are-liberals-so-condescending-washington-post/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:09:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[1950s]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49037</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.</p>
<p>It&amp;apos;s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation &#8212; as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a &#8220;Bolshevik plot&#8221; &#8212; and the country&amp;apos;s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. &#8220;We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,&#8221; the president told ABC&amp;apos;s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).</p>
<p>This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government &#8212; and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.</p>
<p>Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling&amp;apos;s 1950 remark that conservatives do not &#8220;express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.&#8221; During the 1950s and &amp;apos;60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to &#8220;the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.&#8221;</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020403698_pf.html">Why are liberals so condescending?</a>.</p>
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