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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; death</title>
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		<title>Who&#8217;s Really Responsible for Violent Crime in St. Louis?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/colin-flaherty/whos-really-responsible-for-violent-crime-in-st-louis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whos-really-responsible-for-violent-crime-in-st-louis</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:23:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Colin Flaherty]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beaten]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hammers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[St. Louis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zemir Begic]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246716</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Denying the reality can be fatal.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/crime.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246795" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/crime-450x253.jpeg" alt="crime" width="270" height="152" /></a>Violent crime in St. Louis is a black thing. And like the t-shirt says, we wouldn’t understand it.</p>
<p>But we can observe it.</p>
<p>And this much we know: The level of black violent crime is astronomically out of proportion. So is the denial. Not just in St. Louis, but also in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland: This is a very long list of cities big and small across the country.</p>
<p>Pick a crime: Black violent crime is 6, 10, 30, 50, 100 times greater than white crime. And if you want to throw Asians into the mix, multiply that by 10 times.</p>
<p>This is hardly a surprise to readers of <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">FrontPageMag.com</span></a> or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067061/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_lc?tag=10grebooforme-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=1938067061&amp;adid=1CSGX3303WSHKNEXMZXN&amp;&amp;ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwhitegirlbleedalot.com%2Fasians-bleed-lot-rochester-media-apologizes-noticing%2F"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>White Girl Bleed a Lot:</i></span></a><i> The return of racial violence to America and how the media ignore it</i>.</p>
<p>But as we saw in Ferguson, talking heads insist the opposite is true: That black people are the victims of racial violence, not the perpetrators.</p>
<p>“Open season on black people,” anyone?</p>
<p>The recent murder of the immigrant from Bosnia by a group of hammer-wielding black people is just the latest example.</p>
<p>When the mayor and police chief of St. Louis rushed to tell us the killing of Zemir Begic was “not racially motivated,” they meant the killers were not carrying signs that said “Down with Whitey.”  Nor did they issue a press release. Or start quoting Louis Farrakhan during interrogation.</p>
<p>Absent that, public officials insist, there is no evidence of this thing they call “racial motivation.” (Even that is not true, more on that in a minute.)</p>
<p>And besides, they say, crime is color blind, blah, blah, blah.</p>
<p>This is how mayors, police chiefs and editors around the country alternately deny, then explain, the elevated levels of black mob violence and black criminality: They ignore the evidence. Then say the evidence does not exist.</p>
<p>And there is no stronger piece of evidence than the pattern. Recent immigrants are especially vulnerable to this pattern of black violence, though some may not realize it.</p>
<p>If all they knew about racial violence in America came from local or European media, then they would know that black people are constant victims of relentless white racism and violence.</p>
<p>But even a stream of stories and videos showing black mob violence (though not acknowledging it) does not prevent the talking heads at CNN and MSNBC from constantly repeating this false claim.</p>
<p style="color: #0433ff;"><span style="color: #000000;">Oh yeah, <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/asians-bleed-lot-rochester-media-apologizes-noticing/">that is called lying</a>.</span></p>
<p>In Rochester, New York, earlier this year, the local media broke a five-year embargo to report that <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/asians-bleed-lot-rochester-media-apologizes-noticing/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recent Asian refugees were victims of more than 1000 cases of black mob</span></a> violence and black on Asian crime.</p>
<p>The black former police chief said that was no big deal: All new immigrants experience violence. A black community activist agreed, saying the “naivete” of the newcomers explained how they could become victims of so much black crime.</p>
<p>In San Francisco, <em>The Chronicle</em> called a wave of black-on-Asian violence that town’s “dirty little secret.”</p>
<p>In New Jersey and New York, police say illegal aliens are the victims of hundreds of such attacks on day laborers, who do not report the violence because they fear deportation.</p>
<p>In St. Louis, local media refuses to connect the dots and report on dozens and dozens of examples of black mob violence and black crime directed at immigrants from Bosnia.</p>
<p>A few minutes before the group of black people surrounded the car of Zemir Begic, another immigrant from Bosnia was sent to the hospital after suffering a similar hammer attack.</p>
<p>St. Louis police may be mystified, but Bosnians say black crime is a regular feature of life in their neighborhoods. Reporters and mayors want us to believe it is random.</p>
<p>“In the last few weeks, there were several crimes against Bosnians,” said <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/hammer-attack-not-1st-violence-against-st-louis-bosnians/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Sadik Kukic, a Bosnian business leader, to WND</span></a>. “All the crimes were by the black community.”</p>
<p>Curiously missing from most of the local coverage was a video account of the aftermath, showing the dead man being wheeled away on a gurney and loaded into an ambulance.</p>
<p>Prior to the attack, said the person making the video, large groups of black people had been rampaging up and down that street, <a href="http://youtu.be/fqTRV-z5J68?list=UUkffs7dlQWuM3HKUM4LeMVA"><span style="color: #0433ff;">saying, “F* the white people, kill the white people.”</span></a></p>
<p>In St. Louis, black mob violence happens regularly in the downtown, it happens near the arch and near the Delmar Loop entertainment district. It even happened the other night in a cop bar when three black people tried to rob it. Six people were shot and one is dead.</p>
<p>Random?</p>
<p>You might want to ask a mathematician about that. Or any high school student of statistics.</p>
<p>One last thing about St. Louis: Racial violence has been happening there a long time. You don’t have to understand it. But denying it can be downright fatal.</p>
<p><strong>Colin Flaherty is the author of the top selling civil rights book in America, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067061/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_lc?tag=10grebooforme-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=1938067061&amp;adid=1CSGX3303WSHKNEXMZXN&amp;&amp;ref-refURL=http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/asians-bleed-lot-rochester-media-apologizes-noticing/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">White Girl Bleed a Lot.</span></a> For a FREE video and preview chapter from <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/ebook3november202104"><span style="color: #0433ff;">his next book, click here</span></a>.</strong></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don’t miss <strong>Colin Flaherty</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang’s</strong> discuss <strong>White Girl Bleed a Lot</strong>: </em></p>
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		<title>Bureaucracy Clouds Justice on Veterans Day</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/bureaucracy-clouds-justice-on-veterans-day/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bureaucracy-clouds-justice-on-veterans-day</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/bureaucracy-clouds-justice-on-veterans-day/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2014 05:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Va.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veterans affairs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Veterans Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wait]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244985</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The red tape nightmare of firing those responsible for putting our nation's heroes on death lists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/veteras-affairs.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244986" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/veteras-affairs.jpg" alt="veteras-affairs" width="299" height="263" /></a>In a long-overdue effort, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/10/politics/va-reforms-and-restructuring/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">announced</span></a> yesterday that the scandal-plagued agency would undergo the &#8220;largest reorganization of the Department of Veterans Affairs since its establishment,” as he told CNN.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">McDonald took charge of the VA three months ago following the resignation of his predecessor, Eric Shinseki.  Shinseki’s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-va-shinseki-seeks-to-tackle-disability-claims-backlog-homelessness/2013/11/10/a5909a66-34eb-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">tenure</span></a> at the VA lasted over five years, longer than any previous Secretary, and under his watch an enormous backlog of claims reached a peak of 900,000 in March 2013. Even as the backlog lessened, more than 100,000 veterans were left waiting nearly a year to get treatment.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The scandal reached its zenith last June, when an <a href="http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&amp;File_id=577d9e90-ee2a-4eee-a52d-2cf394420761"><span style="color: #1255cc;">oversight report</span></a> from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) revealed the combination of malpractice and bureaucratic ineptitude was far deadlier than the agency had previously acknowledged. “Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance, and the VA has paid out nearly $1 billion to veterans and their families for its medical malpractice,” the report stated, far surpassing the 23 deaths for which the VA initially took responsibility. The report further noted that the &#8220;waiting list cover-ups and uneven care are reflective of a much larger culture within the VA, where administrators manipulate both data and employees to give an appearance that all is well.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is that culture McDonald is finally getting around to addressing—sort of. In an <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-mcdonald-cleaning-up-the-veterans-affairs-hospitals/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">interview</span></a> that aired Sunday on CBS’s &#8220;60 Minutes,” McDonald revealed a decidedly underwhelming number of potential terminations at an agency that employs more than 330,000 people, second only to the Defense Department in size. The Secretary told Scott Pelley that &#8220;the report we&#8217;ve passed up to the Senate Committee and House Committee” names 35 people who should be fired, and a second report recommends terminating as many as 1000 more employees &#8220;who violated our values.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet even those paltry totals have bureaucratic baggage attached to them. &#8220;Bob McDonald can&#8217;t punish or fire a thousand people right now,” he admitted, referring to himself in the third person. &#8220;He&#8217;s discovering how different the Capitol is from capitalism. To fire a government manager he has to put together a case and prove it to an administrative judge….So we propose the action, the judge rules and the individual has a time to appeal. That&#8217;s why we have a lot of people on administrative leave. We&#8217;ve moved them out because we don&#8217;t want any harm to our veterans,” he added.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That would be apparently be <i>paid</i> administrative leave, a reality <a href="http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-seeks-details-administrative-leave-over-veterans-affairs-scandal"><span style="color: #1255cc;">addressed</span></a> last May by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). He wanted to know how many employees were on administrative leave due to the scandal, and what the policies were regarding the length of paid administrative leave. Last month the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/thousands-of-federal-workers-on-extended-paid-leave/2014/10/20/c1c963bc-53e3-11e4-ba4b-f6333e2c0453_story.html?hpid=z1"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> the big picture of such abuse, part of which undoubtedly includes the VA. During a three-year period ending last fall, a whopping 57,000 employees were put on administrative leave for <i>at least</i> a month, costing taxpayers more than $775 million, just for their salaries alone.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Thus, when McDonald told CNN Monday that the VA has undertaken &#8220;disciplinary action&#8221; against 5,600 employees in the past year, he is taking about a process that could yield far different numbers of people who are actually terminated, terminations the <i>Post</i> explains that could take &#8220;a year or more” to realize in some cases.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Adding insult to injury, the paper also reveals that employees who stay home can not only collect paychecks, but build up their pension accruals, vacation and sick days, and continue climbing the federal pay scale ladder.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">McDonald acknowledged those disturbing realities at a breakfast with reporters in Washington last Thursday. “The law didn’t grant any kind of new power that would suddenly give me the ability to walk into a room and simply fire people,” he admitted. “Our Constitution provides for due process, and we are following the due process.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">McDonald’s heart seems to be in the right place. After his Senate confirmation in July, he promised to take “immediate action” to reform the VA. Since then, more than 100 investigations of VA facilities have been undertaken, according to the agency. But once again bureaucracy rears its byzantine approach to such investigations, with separate entities, such as the VA Office of the Inspector General, the FBI, the Department of Justice and others, conducting their own efforts.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Those efforts are hardly encouraging. As of today <i>only one </i>senior VA leader has been fired: James Talton, who was director of the central Alabama VA. The termination process was undertaken against four other senior leaders, but two of them, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer Susan Taylor, and John Goldman, Director of the Dublin, Georgia VA, retired in the interim—with their pensions intact. The other two are Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix VA hospital, where 1,700 patients were <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/28/316712039/report-finds-evidence-of-secret-wait-lists-at-va-hospital"><span style="color: #1255cc;">put</span></a> on secret wait lists delaying their treatment for more than 115 days; and Pittsburgh VA director Terry Gerigk Wolf, who is being <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/va-ejects-4-executives-over-scandal.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fired</span></a> for “conduct unbecoming a senior executive,” following a department review of a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak that sickened 16 and killed six at that facility.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Helman has been on paid administrative leave for more than six months, Wolf for more than five. The restructuring announced by McDonald is occurring a full year after the abuses of America’s veterans reached critical mass—and more than <i>five years</i> after the Obama administration was <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/18/obama-warned-about-va-wait-time-problems-during-20/#ixzz32C3f"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warned</span></a> by VA officials that VA facilities were playing it fast and loose with waiting times and appointment scheduling.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly that inconvenient reality, discovered via a Freedom of Information Act filed by the <i>Washington Times</i>, didn’t stop our president from doing what he seems to do best when faced with a scandal: feign surprise. &#8220;If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it, period,” he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/21/politics/va-waiting-lists/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> last May, adding that he needed more time to find out what was going on.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Everyone in America knows what’s going on: a giant, inept and callous bureaucracy that failed thousands upon thousands of veterans, even as hacks like Sharon Helman were <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-veterans-waited-for-medical-treatment-va-executives-got-bonuses/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">getting</span></a> bonuses, has been revealed for the fraud it truly is.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">McDonald has acknowledged as much, insisting that restoring trust is his first priority. Aside from working to terminate the bad actors, he will move to hire as many as 28,000 medical professionals, including 2,500 mental health workers, to join the VA hospitals and clinics nationwide. He will also restructure the VA’s “too confusing” Web sites, aimed at giving veterans a single point of contact for getting care. Ultimately he promises to make the VA an organization &#8220;centered on the veteran.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It remains an uphill battle. Despite moving against 40 senior officials, including 30 case referrals made by the VA&#8217;s inspector general to the Justice Department, the DOJ has declined to prosecute at least 17 of them. And despite Obama <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/08/07/president-obama-signs-bill-give-va-resources-it-needs"><span style="color: #1255cc;">signing</span></a> the Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014 in August, the first batch of <a href="http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/how-choice-card-and-15b-will-help-veterans-get-care-1.296110"><span style="color: #1255cc;">“choice cards&#8221;</span></a> allowing veterans to use non-VA healthcare providers to shorten waiting times and get to more conveniently located health facilities, weren&#8217;t mailed out until <i>this month</i>. And they were mailed only to veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA facility.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Apparently the government still can’t fathom the idea that serious health problems don’t go into remission waiting for bureaucracy to catch up. And despite McDonald’s seemingly good intentions, there is the uneasy sense that more veterans will pay a deadly price for additional delays that are virtually inevitable.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">For decades, the American left has promoted the idea that ever-increasing bureaucracy, especially one centralized in Washington, D.C., is the ultimate answer to the nation’s needs. The VA scandal explodes that myth, revealing such bureaucracy as a labyrinth of calculated unaccountability with layers upon layers of unseemly protection, designed to insulate thousands of freckles bureaucrats from the consequences of their ineptitude at best, and outright malfeasance at worst. In short, over 1000 dead veterans over the course of a decade, courtesy of that bureaucracy, is <i>not</i> an administrative problem. It’s a national disgrace. More is <i>not</i> better. It’s just more.</p>
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		<title>Belgium’s Death Spiral</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/belgiums-death-spiral/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=belgiums-death-spiral</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[agenda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[belgium]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[euthanasia]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241718</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Only months after giving children the right to ask to die, euthanasia claims yet another category of victims.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/eut.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241720" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/eut.jpg" alt="eut" width="292" height="219" /></a>Europe’s descent to self-annihilation and a holocaust of its own making continues unabated as a court in Belgium this month granted a convicted rapist and murderer the right to die under Belgian euthanasia laws. This latest destructive blow to Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian moral order comes only months after Belgium’s King Philippe signed into law last March a bill allowing euthanasia for children of any age and dementia sufferers upon request.</p>
<p>With this highly disturbing piece of legislation becoming law, Belgian opponents of euthanasia questioned who would be next after children were granted the barbarism to request their own deaths. They did not have to wait long for an answer. This month, Frank van Den Bleeken, 50, who has been incarcerated for 30 years for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old student, received the right to be euthanized from a court after claiming “unbearable suffering.” Intolerable physical or psychological pain is accepted as a grounds for euthanasia in Belgium.</p>
<p>Van Den Bleeken is not the first Belgian convict to ask to be put to death. Fifteen others have made the same request. But van Den Bleeken is the first to receive legal permission, thus establishing a new euthanasia category.</p>
<p>“I am a human being, and regardless of what I’ve done, I remain a human being. So, yes give me euthanasia,” said van Den Bleeken in a recent television documentary.</p>
<p>The convicted murderer, who is currently serving his sentence in a prison’s psychiatric wing, first requested euthanasia three years ago. Inadequate help from the state for the problem that, van Den Bleeken says, caused him to commit his crime and the chance he will reoffend if released constitute other reasons for his having asked to die.</p>
<p>The Belgian commission responsible for euthanasia stated it would not examine van Den Bleeken’s request until “all therapeutic possibilities had been exhausted.” But a court of appeal blocked the commission’s attempt to transfer van Den Bleeken to an institution for specialized treatment, after which he successfully fought the justice ministry in court for the right to be euthanized.</p>
<p>“My client can be transferred to a hospital for 48 hours to say his goodbyes to his family and can then die in a dignified manner,” said van Den Bleeken’s lawyer. “I am not able to say when nor where this will happen.”</p>
<p>Opinion on this specific case, on granting van Den Bleeken the right to be euthanized, is, as expected, divided and emotional. Since it involves incarcerated criminals, some of whom have committed terrible crimes, this case does not garner the same sympathy and support that the children’s did when the euthanasia right was extended to them, Belgium becoming the first country in the world to do so.</p>
<p>Some of those in favor of granting van Den Bleeken’s death request, for example, believe society would benefit economically from his demise, as taxpayers would no longer have to support him in prison, and would like to see the euthanasia right extended to other prisoners for the same economic reasons. Others are of the opinion that van Den Bleeken deserves death for the horrendous crime he committed, but only wish it was the state demanding an end to his life rather than the murderer (Belgium does not have capital punishment).</p>
<p>Many of those opposing van Den Bleeken’s request also do not do so on the grounds that euthanasia is morally wrong. Some maintain murderers like him forfeited all their rights when they committed their crimes, including the right to be euthanized. And if they are suffering in prison, then that’s too bad, since their victims, and the victims’ families, are also still suffering. Besides, the student van Den Bleeken murdered didn’t get to choose whether she wanted to die, so why should he? The justice system, some opponents argue, also prescribes a punishment for the crime committed, and some view van Den Bleeken’s request to die as an attempt to escape his punishment, thus undermining the rule of law.</p>
<p>But these arguments appear to have overshadowed the bigger issue in the van Den Bleeken case in that the boundaries for euthanasia in Belgium have once again been expanded. And in this case, a scant three months after their last enlargement.</p>
<p>Originally, Belgium’s euthanasia law, passed in 2002, was meant for gravely ill adults suffering unbearable physical pain.  Now, as mentioned, it includes those experiencing “unbearable psychological suffering.” So relatively healthy people suffering mental stress or disorders are now being killed, among them a 44-year-old person who had undergone a failed sex change operation. So it is no wonder the number of euthanasia victims in Belgium has grown from 24 people in 2002 to 1,807 in 2013, an average of five per day and a 27 percent increase from 2012. All of which proves that early Belgian opponents of euthanasia were right when they claimed its parameters would constantly expand, becoming a slippery slope.</p>
<p>“Can one truly believe that there was really such a strong rise in incurable illnesses in Belgium?” asked the coordinator of a Belgian civil organization that wants stricter control of euthanasia. “When the criteria become more and more flexible, one clearly sees that there is a drift.”</p>
<p>The trailblazer in modern-day euthanasia is actually Belgium’s neighbor, Holland. Holland was the first European country to betray its Judeo-Christian heritage regarding the sanctity of life when it legalized euthanasia in 2001. Holland also has the dubious distinction of leading the way in killing babies, as the Dutch euthanasia policy was expanded in 2006 to babies born with severe birth defects. But while killing children under 12 is still technically illegal, as long as doctors follow a certain protocol, the Dutch justice system leaves them in peace.</p>
<p>It therefore should not surprise that Holland is another country where euthanasia appears out of control. In 2011, 3,695 people were reported medically killed, including 13 psychiatric patients, while 4,188 were euthanized in 2102, accounting for three percent of all Holland’s deaths that year. And like in Belgium, the number continues to rise, setting a new record every year.</p>
<p>“The Dutch experience shows that euthanasia becomes routine,” said one British anti-euthanasia activist.</p>
<p>One would have to go back to Nazi Germany to find a European country where euthanasia was so triumphant. In October, 1939, Adolph Hitler signed an authorization on his own personal stationary allowing German doctors to murder ill and physically and mentally handicapped children. This authorization launched the infamous Nazi euthanasia program, T-4 (for Tiergarten 4, the Berlin address of the program’s headquarters), in which several hundred thousand disabled minors and grownups, classified as ‘<em>leben lebensunwert</em>’ (life unworthy of life), were eventually killed simply because of the way they were born. Their murder was the beginning of the Nazi genocide and was to be followed by the Jewish Holocaust. More than seven decades later, modern-day Belgium and Holland are reviving the nightmare.</p>
<p>A new and frightening part of this nightmare is the mobile euthanasia units a Dutch pro-euthanasia organization created in 2012. In their eagerness to kill, these supporters of death on demand send a medical team, equipped with a lethal injection, to the homes of people who legally qualify for euthanasia but whose family doctors refuse to do it. These ‘death on wheels’ teams are called, appropriately, “<em>Levenseinde</em>” (Life End) units.</p>
<p>This is quite a reversal of the traditional doctor’s house call.</p>
<p>The reason for Belgium’s ever-expanding euthanasia legislation that now even includes children is that Western civilization is in the grips of a death cult, like the Nazi, Communist and Islamist ones. As Judeo-Christian values recede in Western European countries, the more such abominations associated with death worship, such as abortion, pedophilia, bestiality and euthanasia, will appear, as the continent reverts back to a pre-Christian paganism (which was also a Nazi goal). It is therefore no coincidence that Holland and Belgium, two of Western Europe’s most secularized and de-Christianized societies, have legalized euthanasia. They and Luxembourg are the only ones &#8212; so far.</p>
<p>Belgian euthanasia opponents, who are once again left asking ‘who’s next?’ after the van Den Bleeken legal decision, will, again, probably not have to wait long for a possible answer. The Belgian Intensive Care Society released a document requesting authorization to euthanize without a patient’s permission, “even in the absence of discomfort.” It claims non-requested euthanasia is already being regularly practiced.</p>
<p>“These patients are not sufficiently conscious to make an explicit request. It’s not about increasing the medication to prevent pain but so to precipitate death when the quality of life has become deficient,” wrote Jean-Louis Vincent, a former society head, in a Belgian newspaper.</p>
<p>Already, doctors have such control over life or death in Belgium that sometimes they do not even tell family members that a loved one has requested to be euthanized. The relatives of the deceased are told only after the fact. Now, if the Belgian Intensive Care Society gets its way, they won’t even have to inform their victims.</p>
<p>But such a frightening, downward trajectory is not unexpected when a country progressively gives up its traditional religious faith and allows Marxist socialism to heavily influence its society and culture. By abandoning its morality, losing its sense of eternity and living only in the here and now, oblivious of past and future generations, Belgium has created a moral and spiritual vacuum conducive to euthanasia’s growth. And its expansion is now occurring with such speed that it no longer resembles a slippery slope but rather a steep drop off a cliff into a beckoning abyss.</p>
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		<title>The VA Scandal Gets Deadlier</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/va-scandal-far-worse-than-imagined/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=va-scandal-far-worse-than-imagined</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:55:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[1000 vets]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A report by Sen. Tom Coburn reveals the disturbing truth.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/pic_giant_052514_SM_The-VA-Hospital-Scandal.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234927" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/pic_giant_052514_SM_The-VA-Hospital-Scandal-450x262.jpg" alt="pic_giant_052514_SM_The-VA-Hospital-Scandal" width="309" height="180" /></a>A devastating <a href="http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&amp;File_id=577d9e90-ee2a-4eee-a52d-2cf394420761"><span style="color: #1255cc;">oversight report</span></a> from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) reveals that the combination of malpractice and bureaucratic ineptitude infesting the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is far deadlier than previously acknowledged. &#8220;Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance, and the VA has paid out nearly $1 billion to veterans and their families for its medical malpractice,” the report states.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The death total dwarfs the 23 fatalities for which the VA has taken responsibility. Coburn, a physician and three-time cancer survivor, notes the problems at VA facilities go “far deeper” than the phony scheduling schemes that brought this scandal to the national stage. &#8220;The waiting list cover-ups and uneven care are reflective of a much larger culture within the VA, where administrators manipulate both data and employees to give an appearance that all is well,” the report reveals.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">According to Coburn, that culture is one in which veterans &#8220;are not always a priority.” Much of that is attributable to the reality that even as the VA suffers from a shortage of healthcare providers, VA nurses are paid to perform union duties and doctors are allowed to leave work early rather than care for patients. The report further explains that good employees who try to bring attention to the Department’s shortcomings &#8220;are punished, bullied, put on &#8216;bad boy&#8217; lists, and transferred to other locations.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report also blows away the VA’s fallback excuse, namely that it suffers from a lack of funding. Coburn notes that spending has increased rapidly in recents years, an assertion backed up by federal budget figures. Inflation-adjusted federal spending shows that the VA budget has <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/vas-spending-922-one-decade"><span style="color: #1255cc;">increased</span></a> 92.2 percent over the last decade, skyrocketing from $73.3 billion in FY2003 to $140.9 billion last year, measured in constant 2014 dollars. According to <a href="http://military.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Military.com</span></a> the VA spends more in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did following WWII and the Vietnam war, when millions of troops were returning home from the battlefield.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Coburn reveals that as much as <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/us/senator-va-report/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">$20 billion</span></a> of that spending over the last dozen years has been on “junkets, generous salaries, bonuses, and office renovations for its employees,” even as the Department ends every year with billions in unspent funds. He further notes that most of the construction projects undertaken by the VA are over budget and behind schedule. And even when state-of-the-art facilities are finally constructed, the VA is unable to staff them with a sufficient number of doctors. This reality has forced them to spend millions of dollars sending veterans to clinics in other cities and states, wasting veterans’ time and taxpayers’ money.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Some of the details of patient care illuminated by the report are truly disturbing. One Navy veteran, forced to wait months to see a doctor, died of Stage 4 bladder cancer. He had been rushed to the hospital in September 2013, but was sent home despite a medical chart saying his situation was “urgent.” His daughter made effort after effort to get him an appointment but was constantly rebuffed. He finally got an appointment on December 6—one week after he died. Another veteran <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/24/poor-care-va-hospitals-cost-1000-veterans-their-li/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS"><span style="color: #1255cc;">received</span></a> a tooth extraction, despite having dangerously low blood pressure. On his way home, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed. In another case, doctors never spotted a growing lesion on a veteran’s lung during an annual chest x-ray. He died as the result of that carelessness.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report also seems to validate accusations made by Texas VA whistleblower Dr. Richard Krugman. Last month Krugman <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/16/more-whistleblowers-detail-va-abuses-suffer-retaliation/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">alleged</span></a> the Department was delaying life-saving colonoscopies. The report cites at least 82 vets who either died or suffered serious injuries because of delayed diagnosis or treatment for colonoscopies or endoscopies at the VA. It noted that an investigation by CNN could not determine whether anyone had been reprimanded or fired due to these failures—even as the possibility remains that some of the people responsible may have received bonuses.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At a news conference last week, the VA <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/va-65-percent-senior-executives-got-bonuses-001646637--politics.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admitted</span></a> that approximately 65 percent of senior VA executives were paid a total of $2.7 million in bonuses last year. That number doesn’t include tens of million of additional bonuses awarded to doctors and other VA medical providers. Both totals are part of the $3.9 million doled out to 650 workers at the Phoenix VA Health Care System. The Phoenix facility is the one where it has been confirmed that dozens of vets died awaiting treatment, even as waiting times were being manipulated.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Other parts of the report bordered on the bizarre. Coburn found that five female veterans in Kanas received “inappropriate&#8221; pelvic and breast exams from Colmery-O&#8217;Neil VA Medical Center physician Jose Bejar. Bejar subsequently <a href="http://m.cjonline.com/news/2013-09-28/sexual-abuse-and-suspicious-prescriptions-va-hospital"><span style="color: #1255cc;">pleaded</span></a> no contest to two charges of sexual misconduct, in order to avoid a trial on nearly two dozen counts. Richard Meltz, the chief of police, United States Department of Veterans Affairs, at the Bedford, NY VA Medical Center <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2014/former-veterans-affairs-police-chief-pleads-guilty-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-participating-in-kidnapping-conspiracies"><span style="color: #1255cc;">pleaded</span></a> guilty in January to charges arising from two kidnapping, rape, and murder conspiracies. A VA inspector general <a href="http://www.va.gov/oig/pubs/VAOIG-13-01488-86r.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">investigation</span></a> determined that a Nashville, TN VA employee racked up $109,000 in unauthorized travel expenses. And Maria Kelly Whitt, a former nurse at the Lexington, KY Veterans Affairs Medical Center <a href="http://www.kentucky.com/2011/01/11/1594160/nurse-pleads-guilty-to-involuntary.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">pleaded guilty</span></a> to involuntary manslaughter for administering an unauthorized dose of morphine to a 90-year-old World War II veteran. At least two other veterans cared for by Whitt also died “under suspicious circumstances” after receiving morphine.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Other examples of overt lawlessness include a VA employee in charge of supervising patients with substance abuse problems turning out to be a cocaine dealer; another VA employee stealing a patient’s personal information and re-directing compensation benefits to himself; an employee sharing veterans’ personal information in exchange for crack cocaine; and employees accessing child pornography using VA resources.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report also details the unconscionable delays in scheduling veterans with serious psychological problems. Dr. Margaret Moxness, formerly employed at the Huntington VA Medical Center in Charleston, WV, alleged that supervisors instructed her to delay treatment even when she reported patient needs were immediate. She says she saw at least two veterans commit suicide in the interim. Another whistleblower alleged “serious patient neglect&#8221; at the VA health care system in Brockton, MA, including one individual diagnosed with a service connected schizo-affective disorder and drug-induced Parkinsonism who failed to receive appropriate psychiatric treatment and specific lab monitoring required by VA regulations for more than <i>11 years.</i></p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And then there were the delays. As of March 638,000 veterans were awaiting a decision on disability claims, with 360,000 of them waiting more than 125 days. The report blisters VA schedulers, revealing that half of the 50,000 employed by the Department “did not even know how to accurately report the information needed to determine wait times.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, Coburn lays the blame for the VA’s problems on Congress, which micro-manages decisions at the VA because &#8220;Washington politicians are more interested in claiming credit for establishing new benefits or VA centers than making sure veterans are getting the care they were promised and earned.” He explains that passing laws is meaningless if those entrusted with implementing them can ignore them, even as they remain immune from any serious consequences. He insists that Congress must ensure that the VA delivers timely, quality care to veterans &#8220;while at the same time stop micro-mismanaging efforts by the VA to improve.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Part of the solution Coburn advocates is to make every hospital in the country a VA hospital, “so when the VA cannot provide treatment it will provide coverage for a veteran to receive medically necessary care elsewhere.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Healthcare expert Betsy McCaughey takes that idea <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/06/24/a-cost-free-rx-to-end-the-va-backlog/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">one step</span></a> further, noting that the VA should encourage vets who have Medicare coverage in addition to VA coverage to use civilian doctors and hospitals that could cut the VA’s backlog in half. She further advocates that the $5 billion wasted by the VA on an annual basis could be used to buy older veterans a &#8220;medi-gap card.” This would offset the cost for veterans who stick with the VA because they can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs associated with civilian doctors. An added bonus is that procedures performed more often on older veterans, like bypass surgery and angioplasty, have higher survival rates at private facilities than at most VA centers. Moreover as the backlog shrinks, VA hospitals will be better able to treat younger veterans in a more timely manner.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Coburn offers several other recommendations. They include enhancing the transparency of VA performance measures, prioritizing vets with combat-related injuries, upping the patient load for VA doctors, reading vets their healthcare rights, ending abuse of whistleblowers, ensuring doctor quality, and having Congress ensure that promises made to veterans are kept.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report ends on a somewhat somber note, admitting that the shocking findings contained in it are “not all-encompassing” and that further Congressional investigations are necessary. Vietnam War veteran J.R. Howell undoubtedly expresses the sentiments of his fellow soldiers in that regard. “We’ve seen battle. We’ve seen combat,” he explains before asking, “why do we have to &#8230; fight when we come back home just to get proper medical care?”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s a question for which acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson and members of Congress must continue to demand answers. America&#8217;s veterans deserve nothing less.</p>
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		<title>Horror in Pakistan: Pregnant Woman Stoned by Family</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/horror-in-pakistan-pregnant-woman-stoned-by-family/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=horror-in-pakistan-pregnant-woman-stoned-by-family</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2014 04:40:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honor killing]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The latest in a rash of atrocities against women in the Muslim world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/02.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226389 alignleft" alt="0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/02-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Those looking for the real war on women&#8211;as opposed to the one promoted by the American left and their media enablers—should focus their attention on Pakistan and Sudan. In the former nation, a 25-year-old pregnant woman has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2640632/Stoned-death-marrying-man-loved-Woman-attacked-sticks-bricks-20-members-OWN-family-broad-daylight-Pakistan.html">stoned to death</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by members of her own family, with her father dubbing the atrocity an “honor killing.” In the latter nation, a 27-year-old woman has been sentenced to death for refusing to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/05/27/sudanese-woman-sentenced-to-death-for-apostasy-reportedly-gives-birth-in-prison/">renounce</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> her Christian faith. She was also pregnant, and has given birth while awaiting her sentence to be carried out. The common thread in both cases is as predictable as it is disturbing: the religion of Islam and the endemic mistreatment of women practiced by far too many of its followers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Farzana Parveen was killed in broad daylight by nearly 20 members of her family before a crowd of onlookers outside the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore, Pakistan. As she walked up to the court’s main gate with her husband Mohammad Iqbal, relatives waiting for the couple’s arrival fired shots in the air and attempted to snatch her away. When she resisted, the attackers, who included her father, two brothers and her former fiancé, started beating her and her husband, before escalating the attack with bricks obtained from a nearby construction site.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Parveen subsequently sustained severe head injuries and was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to police.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All of the attackers but her father, Mohammad Azeem, escaped. He surrendered to the police and admitted taking part in the killing. He had no remorse. &#8220;I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,&#8221; the father was quoted as saying by police investigator Rana Mujahid. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Parveen had been engaged to her cousin, but married Iqbal instead, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/05/27/pregnant-pakistani-woman-stoned-to-death/9628161/">following</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an engagement of several years. In response, her family </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/27/us-pakistan-honourkillings-idUSKBN0E711A20140527">registered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an abduction case against Iqbal, and Parzeen was to appear in court to argue that she had married him of her own free will, according to her lawyer Mustafa Kharal. Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis. Marrying for love is a transgression that ostensibly dishonors the family.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Iqbal, who started seeing Parveen following the death of his former wife with whom he had five children, claimed the couple was “in love.” He further alleged that her family wanted to extract money from him before allowing the marriage to take place. Instead, “I simply took her to court and registered a marriage,” Iqbal explained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Parveen’s murder is hardly an anomaly. According to Pakistani rights group the Aurat Foundation, as many as 1,000 Pakistani women are killed </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">every year</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by their families in such honor killings. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan released a report last month revealing that 869 women were murdered in honor killings in 2013, but the Aurat Foundation insists the number could be far higher because the totals are based solely on newspaper reports. The Pakistani government does not compile any honor killing statistics.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite that ongoing reality, Zia Awan, a prominent lawyer and human rights activist, expressed shock at the brutal and public nature of the crime. &#8220;I have not heard of any such case in which a woman was stoned to death, and the most shameful and worrying thing is that this woman was killed in front of a court,” he said. He further noted that those who commit such violence against women are either acquitted outright, or handed light sentences, due to inadequate police work and improperly handled prosecutions. Even those convicted may eventually walk free as Pakistani law permits a victim&#8217;s family to forgive the victim’s killer. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even more appalling, though most honor killings are committed by family members, they can instead nominate someone else to commit the murder&#8211;and subsequently forgive him. &#8220;This is a huge flaw in the law,” said the Aurat Foundation’s Wasim Wagha. &#8220;We are really struggling on this issue.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In Sudan, the law has produced an equally despicable outcome. Yesterday, Meriam Yehya Ibrahim </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-27/sudan-woman-facing-execution-for-apostasy-gives-birth-in-prison.html">gave birth</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to a baby girl in the hospital wing of a prison in Omdurman, where she awaits execution for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and embrace Islam. Ibrahim, who has been imprisoned since February has her 20-month old son with her as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The 27-year-old doctor had a Muslim father, but was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/sudanese-apostasy-woman-sentenced-to-death-meriam-yahya-ibrahim-gives-birth-in-prison-9439331.html">raised</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> as a Christian by her mother. On May 11, a court in Khartoum convicted Ibrahim, who was eight months pregnant at the time, of apostasy and adultery and sentenced her to death by hanging. The verdict was reached after she refused to renounce her Christianity during a three-day &#8220;grace period.” In addition, the court annulled her marriage and sentenced her to receive 100 lashes for the crime of “zena” (Arabic for illegitimate sex) because she had sexual relations with a &#8220;non-Muslim man” who happens to be her husband Daniel Wani. Wani, who is an American citizen, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2014/05/26/husband-pregnant-christian-woman-sitting-death-row-sudan-shes-not-converting-islam-they-c">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Fox News his wife would not convert, and spends her time “shackled” in prison with her son.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Her daughter has now joined them.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And once again, as in the case of Farzana Parveen, Ibrahim’s family is part of the equation. She was arrested in August of 2013 when men claiming to be from her father’s side of the family charged her with adultery. They claimed her real name was Abrar al-Hady, according to the Khartoum-based al-Taghyeer newspaper, who cited their lawyer, Abdel Rahman Malek. Malek claimed they presented a Sudanese nationality document to the court with both that name and her fingerprints. The complaint further alleged she had been missing for several years and her family was shocked to discover she had married a Christian. Under Sudan’s version of Sharia Law, any marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man constitutes adultery. The apostasy charge was added in February 2014.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wani claimed he never met anyone from her family because Ibrahim’s mother was an Ethiopian refugee who had no relatives in Sudan. He was introduced to his wife by his sister who attended the same church. “She was never a Muslim, she was always a Christian,” Ali said. “And even if she renounced Islam, she should not be punished for that.&#8221; Wani, who has been unable to see his new daughter despite making a request to prison authorities, illuminated his hope for the future. “We call on the world to ask the Sudanese government to drop the verdict and just let us live our normal lives,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That is not likely at this juncture. Sudanese officials have refused to allow Wani to take his son because the law forbids a Christian man from raising a Muslim child, as the court has so designated him. According to Amnesty International, the law also requires the postponement of Ibrahim’s execution until she has raised her newborn child for at least two years. Moreover, on May 18, the judiciary asserted that Ibrahim “enjoyed all the necessary requirements for a fair trial as a constitutional right,” according to a statement published by Suna, the state news agency. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a twist to the story, the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Daily Mail</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is reporting that lawyers hired by the US-based human rights organization Justice Centre Sudan have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2635862/EXCLUSIVE-The-jealous-family-pregnant-mother-sentenced-death-Sudanese-jail-got-charged-dastardly-plan-STEAL-successful-business-claims-American-husbands-legal-team.html">alleged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that Ibrahim’s “half brother and half sister” tracked her down so they could take over her successful general store. &#8220;We believe the family filed the lawsuit because they want to gain control of the business. If Meriam stays in jail she could lose everything and they could be the ones to benefit,” said a spokesman for the organization.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All well and good in terms of sensationalism, but it doesn’t negate the reality that Sharia Law is the vehicle that has enabled the outrage that has a mother and her two children languishing in prison—until such time as Meriam Ibrahim is beaten and hanged.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus the ongoing and very real war against women in the Muslim world continues. It is a war largely ignored by the American left and their feminist cohorts, who have managed to largely ignore the real and present danger of Sharia Law. It is Sharia Law that relegates millions of women to second-class status at best&#8211;and honor killings, whippings and the hangman’s noose at worst. That the left&#8217;s so-called war against women extends only as far as the nearest member of the GOP and his or her position on abortion is myopic. So myopic that someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali must be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/09/brandeis-university-withdraws-planned-honorary-degree-for-islam-critic-ayaan/">stripped</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of an honorary degree by Brandeis University, lest she use her acceptance speech to remind her audience where the most virulent aspects of the war against women originate. Islam is the tip of the spear, and no amount of politically calculated obfuscation by the American left will alter that reality.</span></p>
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		<title>Veterans Affairs and Death by Bureaucracy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/veterans-affairs-and-death-by-bureaucracy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=veterans-affairs-and-death-by-bureaucracy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2014 04:19:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Healthcare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secret list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Va.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veteran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veterans affairs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225837</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One scandal the Left won't be able to shake? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/600x3968.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-225838 alignleft" alt="600x3968" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/600x3968-450x297.jpg" width="315" height="208" /></a>There may finally be a scandal engulfing the Obama administration that even Democrats and their media collaborators can’t obfuscate. What happened at the VA facility in Phoenix, AZ, where employees created two sets of waiting lists to make it seem patients were being treated in a timely manner—and as many as 40 veterans allegedly died while languishing on the secret list—is an anomaly. Six more whistleblowers from around the nation have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/05/15/va-shinseki-tells-second-biggest-lie-year-will-congress-obama-take-action/">stepped forward</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, alleging the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities they worked at also “cooked the books.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The despicable subterfuge, allegedly occurring in at least seven VA Medical Centers in Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina and Illinois is as simple as it was heartless. The official waiting list is the one that ostensibly met the VA’s policy, implemented by Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki in 2010. It set a 14-day time limit to provide care for a veteran making an initial application for an appointment. Yet by the agency’s own admission, only </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://triblive.com/usworld/nation/6057295-74/veterans-medical-collins#axzz31oGcR6Xl">41 percent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of new VA medical patients were seen within that period in 2013, down from 90 percent in 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hence, the secret lists, which contained the names of veterans waiting to get on the official list. In Phoenix, as many as 1,400 to 1,600 veterans were forced to wait for months before they could see a doctor. &#8220;The scheme was deliberately put in place to avoid the VA&#8217;s own internal rules,&#8221; said Dr. Sam Foote, a 24-year </span>Phoenix VA physician who blew the whistle on the scam in that facility. He and other sources further noted that VA officials instructed the staff to avoid using the computer system to make appointments. When a veteran requested an appointment, staff were instructed to do a screen capture, print out the info, and dump the computer file &#8220;so there&#8217;s no record that you were ever here,” Foote explained.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A second VA in Fort Collins, CO also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/04/va-healthcare-delays-treatment-phoenix-cheyenne-deaths/8602117/">falsified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> their lists, according to findings by the VA&#8217;s Office of Medical Inspector. But there, where as many as 6,300 veterans waited months to be seen, if clerical staff allowed records to reveal veterans waited longer than 14 days for an appointment, they were placed on a &#8220;bad boy list” as punishment.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sadly, none of this is new. During last Thursday’s Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) quoted from a previously undisclosed nine page </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://archive.azcentral.com/ic/pdf/va-memo-gaming-system.pdf">memo</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> written in 2010. In it, a VA administrator described the various ways healthcare officials “gamed the system” to hide delays in medical treatment. And according to an </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Army Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.armytimes.com/article/20140516/NEWS01/305160046/Editorial-Army-Times-says-VA-s-Shinseki-must-step-down">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a December 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that &#8220;four VA medical centers nationwide hid wait times, fudged data and backdated appointments for the purpose of fabricating compliance with department timeliness goals.” The paper further notes in the 18 months since that report was released, the VA &#8220;is still widely failing in its charge to provide timely medical care for the nation’s veterans as demand for those services grow.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">AT</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial also called on Shinseki to “step down,” noting that despite his selfless service to the nation, his “behind-the-scenes” leadership style makes him the wrong person to engineer the &#8220;comprehensive, system-wide rebuild” the VA desperately needs. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last Thursday, in his own testimony before the Committee, Shinseki </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/05/15/va-shinseki-tells-second-biggest-lie-year-will-congress-obama-take-action/">buttressed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the paper’s contention, characterizing the current state of VA healthcare as “a good system,” and denying the link between long waits and the deaths of veterans. &#8220;It&#8217;s one thing to be on a waiting list, and it&#8217;s another thing to conclude that as a result of being on the waiting list, that&#8217;s the cause death,&#8221; he contended.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Perhaps so, but mathematical probability suggests otherwise. Over 300,000 claims to the VA have been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/obama-has-every-reason-to-fix-the-va-why-hasn-t-he-20140514">pending</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">125 days or longer,</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> meeting the VA&#8217;s official definition of “backlogged.” Nonetheless, the VA, and the White House as well, are apparently staying with the “no causal connection” motif for now. Thus, Shinseki’s assistant, Dr. John Daigh, echoed his boss’s contention, insisting the &#8220;conclusion between patient harm and death has so far been a tenuous connection.” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was equally skeptical regarding the Phoenix scandal. &#8220;You&#8217;re saying there&#8217;s a suggestion that something terrible happened in Phoenix, and that&#8217;s under investigation; all we know is it’s a suggestion,” he said </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/veterans-affairs-official-resigns-as-white-house-says-theres-just-a-suggestion-of-scandal/article/2548546">during</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a Friday press briefing. &#8220;We should just accept allegations as true without investigating them?”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even as Carney was speaking, it was announced that Under Secretary for Health in the Department of Veterans Affairs Dr. Robert Petzel had tendered his resignation. Some in the media tried to portray that resignation as a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/328546c0-dd10-11e3-8546-00144feabdc0.html#axzz31v4TsE8W">“political casualty,”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> but a 2013 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2483">press release</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the VA’s website revealed Petzel was due to retire this year, “as planned.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That’s probably a good thing. Like Shinseki, he also refused to commit to firing anyone responsible for maintaining the secret waiting lists, telling Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) at Thursday’s hearing that he didn’t know &#8220;whether that’s the appropriate level of punishment or not.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">His and Shinseki’s contentions were seemingly at odd with those of Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general. He admitted that a review of the VA’s seeming indifference towards veterans could lead to criminal charges. &#8220;My staff is working diligently to determine what happened in Phoenix and who should be held accountable,&#8221; Griffin </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/15/shinseki-testifies-at-va-hearings/9123189/">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, adding that the investigation is expected to be completed sometime in August.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Veterans groups have no interest in </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/16/Vets-Blow-Whistle-Negligent-VA-Management">waiting</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to see what unfolds. On Thursday, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) took matters into their own hands. They launched </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://vaoversight.org/">VAOversight.org</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a website aimed at giving VA officials and veterans the opportunity to expose any other scandalous behavior occurring in the system. “It takes a lot of courage to step forward and put one’s career at risk,” said POGO’s executive director Danielle Brain in a statement. “Whistleblowers shouldn’t have to go it alone. We can help whistleblowers hold the VA accountable, and keep the focus on solutions rather than attempts to hunt down those who voiced concerns.”  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The site contains </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/veterans-group-will-launch-whistleblower-project-after-va-ho">detailed training</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> regarding how to get around the Obama administration’s intense anti-leak efforts. POGO communications director Joe Newman explained the necessity for such training. “What we’ve seen with the Obama administration is the lengths they will go to try to keep things in house,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Newman continued. &#8220;The thing that makes the Obama administration really stand out is the use of the Espionage Act. They’ve invoked it seven times [against leakers] and that’s more than every other administration combined when it comes to going after people who have leaked to the media,” he explained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In fairness to the VA, the problems it is dealing with are monumental in scope. It has 152 hospitals and 817 outpatient clinics attempting to service an unprecedented amount of claims resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Obama administration’s 2010 expansion of eligibility criteria for veterans of all wars. A record-setting 1 million new claims were filed in Obama’s first year in office, a number that climbed to 1.3 million in 2011, before falling to 1.04 million claims received last year. The more than 970,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have filed disability claims have taken the total number of veterans enrolled in the VA system to 8.57 million, and the number of outpatient visits at its facilities has increased from 46.5 million in 2002 to 83.6 million in 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the other hand, budget outlays appear to have kept pace with the surge, rising from $73.1 billion in 2006 to $153.8 billion this year.</span></p>
<p>“I am amazed this is still happening, given the big increase in resources that the department has received,” said Phillip Carter, a former army officer who researches veterans’ issues at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What hasn’t kept pace is the bureaucracy itself, especially with regard to technology. Until last year, it had no way to process claims digitally. And as U.S. News and World Report </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://rare.us/story/what-the-veterans-administration-scandal-tells-us-about-obamacare/">revealed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the same kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that has dogged ObamaCare was in play here as well. “Since 2008, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have spent over $1 billion to create an integrated electronic health record. Four years and $1 billion later, not a single line of code has been implemented,” the magazine revealed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moreover, the coding system they </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">do</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> have for processing claims is unnecessarily complex. Ronald Abrams, joint executive director for the National Veterans Legal Services Program gave lawmakers a hint how complicated last year. &#8220;The regulation dealing with [traumatic brain injury] is so complicated that some people call it the &#8216;Da Vinci Code,’” he said. More workers were hired to address the issue, but training them takes two years—due to the complexity of the process.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And then, there are the bonuses. In this case, there’s a strong possibility that bonuses based on performance created a perverse incentive to lie. Germaine Clarno, employed as a VA social worker and employee representative in Chicago, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/va-bonuses-tied-to-secret-waiting-lists-whistleblower-says/">alleges</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> there are multiple secret waiting lists at the Hines VA Medical Center used by officials there &#8220;to make numbers look better for their own recognition and for bonuses.” In Phoenix, $843,000 in bonuses was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/15/phoenix-va-workers-pocketed-bonuses-hefty-salaries-despite-allegations/">awarded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to approximately half the system&#8217;s 3,170 workers from 2011 to 2013, despite the aforementioned deaths of veterans unable to get treatment in a timely manner. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If two Democratic senators are any indication, that party is fully intending to distance itself from any obfuscation by the VA or the Obama administration. At Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, (D-CT), said there was “solid evidence of wrongdoing within the VA system,” and Patty Murray (D-WA) told Shinseki that “the standard practice at the VA seems to be to hide the truth.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Republicans are even blunter. Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/16/new-gop-legislation-accuses-obamas-va-secretary-of-poor-oversight-and-failed-leadership/">filed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a resolution urging President Obama to fire Shinseki, due to his “poor oversight” and &#8220;an unwillingness or inability to change the culture of falsifying documents at the Department of Veterans Affairs.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What the president plans to do is unknown at this point, but if Attorney General Eric Holder is any indication, the administration seemingly believes it can weather yet another burgeoning scandal. Last Tuesday, Holder </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/eric-holder-no-plans-doj-investigate-secret-waiting-lists-and-veteran-deaths-va-hospitals_792719.html">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> he has no plans to investigate the allegations against the VA. &#8220;Well, obviously these reports if they&#8217;re true are unacceptable, and the allegations are being taken very seriously by the administration. But I don&#8217;t have any announcements at this time with regard to anything that the Justice Department is doing,&#8221; Holder told reporters at a press conference.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the meantime, two more whistleblowers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/16/more-whistleblowers-detail-va-abuses-suffer-retaliation/">came forward</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Friday. &#8220;What really bothered me was that this delay was a direct result of this extremely low sense of caring for the patient,” said Dr. Jose Mathews, chief psychiatrist for the VA Medical Center in St. Louis starting in Nov 2012. He alleged that doctors treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorders and other acute mental health issues were only working a few hours a day, even as the facility was reporting that its productivity was the highest in the nation. “They all got bonuses &#8212; that&#8217;s the sad part. Because in reality we were not really doing a good job, but it shows up on paper as if we are,” Mathews told Fox News. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Dr. Richard Krugman accused the VA facility he oversaw in southeast Texas of cutting costs—by delaying life-saving colonoscopies. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Both men were fired from their jobs. </span><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">“</b><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I was treated like an animal. I was treated like a leper. I was treated like, how dare you attack me, or how dare you say what you&#8217;re saying,” said Krugman. The Office of Special Counsel found none of Krugman&#8217;s claims to be substantiated, but noted that they were forced to rely on an internal investigation—conducted by the VA itself.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the end, one reality cannot be denied: while the political machinations, the hearings, the media stories and the investigations play themselves out, men and women who served this nation—and in many cases paid an extremely heavy price for that highly honorable commitment—are getting the short end of the stick. The very </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">least</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> this nation owes our veterans is timely healthcare, not a litany of excuses and stonewalling from a dysfunctional and very likely corrupt bureaucracy. One like every other government bureaucracy, where self-preservation matters above all else. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If there is little else Americans learn form this scandal, it should be noted that this is the true face of government-run healthcare, in all its “individual be damned” glory. If the government can treat 8.57 million veterans this shabbily, imagine how they will treat Americans forced to enroll in ObamaCare.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Pregnant Christian Woman Married to U.S. Citizen Sentenced to Death in Sudan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/christian-woman-married-to-u-s-citizen-sentenced-to-death-in-sudan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christian-woman-married-to-u-s-citizen-sentenced-to-death-in-sudan</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2014 04:21:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Meriam Yahya Ibrahim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sentenced]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225628</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Meriam Yahya Ibrahim pleads for help from America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/jk.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-225635" alt="jk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/jk.gif" width="320" height="469" /></a>Sudanese doctor Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, a graduate of the University of Khartoum Medical School, is the beautiful wife of an American citizen, Daniel Wani, originally from South Sudan. Their 20-month old son, Martin, whose sweet smile shines from a recent photograph, is soon to be joined by a baby brother or sister, as Ibrahim is nine months’ pregnant. Soon after Ibrahim and Wani were wed, in December 2011, Wani applied to his government, the United States government, for a spousal visa to bring his wife to America. If there were justice in the world, today the Wani family would be awaiting the birth of a new baby while enjoying the gradual coming of spring in New Hampshire.</p>
<p>There is, however, no justice in the world. Wani and Ibrahim remained in Khartoum and waited for Ibrahim’s visa to be approved, but up until today, this American citizen has not received permission to bring home his wife – and now also his son, who is by virtue of his father a U.S. citizen.  “I have tried to apply for papers to travel to the USA with my wife and child, but the American Embassy in Sudan did not help me,” Wani <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/pregnant-woman-in-sudan-could-be-executed-for-apostasy-whipped-for-adultery/">told</a> <i>Morning Star News. </i>And on Thursday, May 15, Ibrahim was sentenced to be hanged for apostasy.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/yh.gif"><img class=" wp-image-225637 aligncenter" alt="yh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/yh.gif" width="320" height="455" /></a></p>
<p>Ibrahim has been a Christian her whole life. She was brought up, first in western Sudan, and then in Khartoum, in the Ethiopian Orthodox faith of her Ethiopian mother. But she had the misfortune of having a Sudanese Muslim father. Even though her father abandoned the family when she was 6 years old, in the eyes of Shariah, she is a Muslim. Therefore, she is an apostate for not practicing Islam. Unbelievably, she and little Martin, have been incarcerated since February at Omdurman Women’s Prison in Khartoum.</p>
<p>While Ibrahim was waiting for the U.S. government to grant her a spousal visa, Amnesty International, which is highlighting Ibrahim’s case, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR54/006/2014/en">says</a> that a distant relative accused her of adultery and reported her to the authorities in August 2013. Ibrahim’s marriage to Wani, a South Sudanese Christian, is not recognized under Shariah. Ibrahim then attempted to defend herself by explaining that she was not a Muslim. This past February she provided to the court her marriage certificate that listed her as a Christian, and the location of the wedding as a church in Khartoum. But this resulted in the young wife and mother being charged with apostasy. The charges fall under Sudan’s Shariah-based Criminal Code, Articles 126 (apostasy) and 146 (adultery). The apostasy sentence carries a punishment of flogging – 100 lashes.</p>
<p>Because of his infidel status, Wani is not recognized as the father of his own children. It’s bad enough that Wani’s parental rights have been violated by the Islamist regime in Khartoum, but less expected has been the lack of support that he has received from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. He <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/pregnant-woman-in-sudan-could-be-executed-for-apostasy-whipped-for-adultery/">revealed</a> to <i>Morning Star News</i> that the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum expressed “no interest” in helping the family when his wife was arrested and that they have demanded a DNA test from Wani to prove he is the father of Martin before they will attempt to help the toddler.</p>
<p>“I will have to take a DNA sample in Khartoum, then send it to the USA for testing,” Wani said. “I have provided wedding documents and the baby’s birth certificate, and doors were closed on his face. My son is an American citizen living in a difficult situation in prison,” he declared sadly.</p>
<p>Wani has been prevented from seeing his wife and child since her incarceration, but reports that she has not received proper medical care for complications for her pregnancy. According to <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/pregnant-woman-in-sudan-could-be-executed-for-apostasy-whipped-for-adultery/"><i>Morning Star News</i></a>, “Ibrahim’s nightmare has included denial of bail, insufficient medical care for both her and her unborn child, beatings in prison, and a U.S. Embassy that has offered little help.” <i>Morning Star News </i>added that a prison guard has mistreated Ibrahim and not allowed visitations or medical help, and Wani informed them that “a Muslim woman in the jail has incited other Muslims to make life difficult for her.”</p>
<p>According to Sudanese human rights activist Safwan Abdalmoniem of the <a href="http://www.hardwiredglobal.org/">Hardwired organization</a>, the Christian woman’s death sentence, pronounced by Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa, came after a three-day period given to her by Khartoum’s criminal court to attempt to persuade her to renounce her Christian faith and convert to (or as they phrase it “return to”) Islam, a process referred to as <i>istitabah</i> in Arabic. The African Center for Justice and Peace Studies <a href="http://www.acjps.org/?p=1857">revealed</a> that the court sent representatives of several Islamic organizations, including Munazzamat al-Da’wa al-Islamiia, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, to ‘counsel’ Ibrahim on her faith.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.meconcern.org/index.php/en/prayer-requests/755-sudan-update-on-believer-sentenced-to-death">Middle East Concern</a>, the constant harassment and pressure of the Muslim groups proved fruitless, though. Like untold martyrs before her, on Thursday Ibrahim calmly told the judge that she would not renounce her faith, that she was a Christian and always had been. <i>Independent Online </i><a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/woman-to-be-hanged-for-shunning-islam-1.1688618#.U3TmkMsU9Mz">noted</a> that Judge Al-Khalifa addressed Ibrahim by the Muslim name Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah, “We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death.”</p>
<p>Reports from the sentencing indicate that the judge instructed that her execution be carried out two years after the birth of her child. The flogging, however, will take place soon after she gives birth. <i>Morning Star News </i><a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/judge-in-sudan-confirms-death-sentence-whipping-for-pregnant-christian-woman/">reported</a> that Ibrahim’s attorneys will file an appeal of the sentence on Sunday (May 18). This will put off execution of any part of the sentence, including the flogging, until there is a ruling.</p>
<p>At the news of the death sentence given to the wife of an American citizen because of her Christian faith, the U.S. State Department’s deputy spokesperson, Marie Harf, released a <a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2014/05/226201.htm">statement</a> indicating that the U.S. was “deeply disturbed” by the court’s ruling in the Sudan “Apostasy Case.” The rest of the statement is equally tepid. And the statement matches, almost word for word, including the pathetically passive “we understand that the court sentence can be appealed,” a <a href="http://sudan.usembassy.gov/">statement</a> issued by the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum on Monday, following the initial pronouncement of the death and flogging sentences.</p>
<p>Both the State Department and U.S. Embassy statements “call upon the Government of Sudan to respect the right to freedom of religion.” They also appear to appeal to the Islamists’ better angels, calling on the Sudanese legal authorities, “to approach this case with the compassion that is in keeping with the values of the Sudanese people.” Good luck with that.</p>
<p>What is needed immediately is for pressure on the Obama Administration, particularly the State Department, and on the U.S. Congress, to respect not only Ibrahim’s right to freedom of religion, but to respect the rights of Wani and his son, and the coming baby, American citizens all. The U.S. government must act now to reunite Ibrahim and her son with Wani and to bring the family back to the United States.</p>
<p>Ibrahim’s attorney said today, “Meriam is very encouraged by the international support she is receiving from the international community. She hopes that people stand with her and her family until she gets her freedom.”</p>
<p>Perhaps if the United States government will approach this case with the compassion that is in keeping with the values long held by <i>its </i>citizens, this little family can finally get to their home in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.”</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>50% Taxes When Alive, 50% Taxes When You Die</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/50-taxes-when-alive-50-taxes-when-you-die-and-taxes-for-plastic-bags/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=50-taxes-when-alive-50-taxes-when-you-die-and-taxes-for-plastic-bags</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:05:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plastic bags]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[property]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223011</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New York: the "Must-Leave State." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/taxes_Flickr_401K.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223013" alt="taxes_Flickr_401K" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/taxes_Flickr_401K-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>I, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://insights.wired.com/profile/RonnTorossian">Ronn Torossian,</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> am a born and bred New Yorker, who raises a family here, owns a business – and loves all this city has to offer.  Yet I would be among the first to advise people not to live or move to New York if they don’t have to.  If they have ambition or drive, New York isn’t the place to be. From the non-stop energy to the culture, indeed, this city deserves its title as capital of the world.  Yet from a business perspective, there are so many obstacles for living – and dying – in New York that one shouldn’t do it unless they absolutely have to. Why? The issue is really quite simple – while you are alive, if successful, you will pay 54% taxes as a resident of New York City.  And if you are successful, your heirs will be taxed on the monies which you kept after the government took their share.</span></p>
<p>The latest report from the Tax Foundation notes yet again in 2014, New York ranks as the highest taxed state in America. New Yorkers spend 12.6% of their per capita income on state and local taxes, the highest percentage of any state in the nation. 2014 marked the third consecutive year that New York had the highest tax burden in the nation. And New York ranks 50th in the Tax Foundation&#8217;s State Business Tax Climate Index. The Index compares the states in five areas of taxation that impact business: corporate taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, and taxes on property, including residential and commercial property.</p>
<p>Of course, there was a much ballyhooed change of the law for estate-taxes. As of January 1, 2019, the exemption will jump to the inflation-indexed federal level, which by then will be about $5.8 million.  Anyone who goes over that amount will see their family pay more than half of it out to the government.  Given those facts, it should come as no surprise that New York has indeed become the Must-Leave State. Census Bureau estimates show that 104,470 more people moved out of New York than moved into it during the 12 months ending July 1.  This comes off a decade where more than 1.6 million New Yorkers moved out of state between 2000 and 2010. (And if the awful winter which we saw in 2014 continues next year, I am sure the trend will only further increase).</p>
<p>Against this backdrop, The New York City Council introduced a bill that would impose a 10-cent fee on plastic and paper bags. While sane people review and consider this, one may wonder if New York City can possibly get any more expensive – <i>or absurd.</i> With all the issues that exist, is this really something for New York government to be involved with? <i>(And as an aside, won&#8217;t these costs be passed along to consumers? How about all the companies who make these bags – how many people will be fired because Americans stop using bags?)</i> Do politicians need another tax?</p>
<p>New York cost of living is very high &#8211; as are individual income taxes and property taxes. Despite all that New York has to offer, between cost of living and taxes, this is increasingly becoming the State not to live in. (And it has long been &#8211; and remains &#8211; the State not to die in.) As a 39-year-old born and bred New Yorker, I work very hard for my money, and I must ask, when is enough enough? Why does this government insist on putting so much strain on hard-working, successful people? New York taxes energetic people who sacrifice every day to create opportunities for others as well as themselves.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rest assured, however, I am standing now in my </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR Firm New York</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> office– and the good news is there are no longer people drinking Big Gulps – and soon people will not be carrying plastic bags in the Land of the Free.  They will, however, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">between life and death,</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> pay the majority of their income in taxes.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin&#8217;s Litany of Vows</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/a-farewell-to-lenin-stalins-litany-of-vows/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-farewell-to-lenin-stalins-litany-of-vows</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jan 2014 05:30:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trotsky]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217003</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ninety years since a monster's death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217038" alt="lenin45" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg" width="277" height="358" /></a>Ninety years ago, on January 21, 1924, the founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet Union, the undisputed coryphaeus of world communism, passed away. Lenin&#8217;s last year was nothing but an endless agony. Isolated in a mansion turned into a sanatorium of sorts, a former artistocratic residence located outside Moscow, Lenin was in fact a prisoner of  information strictly filtered by the Bolshevik leadership&#8217;s emissary, the Politburo member and the head of the party&#8217;s department of cadres, the Georgian-born revolutionary Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and also, for his close friends, as Koba.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; dictated in December 1922 and January 1923 to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva, Lenin requested Stalin&#8217;s replacement as general secretary. Politburo members read the document but decided to keep it secret. Lenin&#8217;s demands were ignored, denied, forgotten. The old leader&#8217;s power had vanished. Paeans were of course dedicated to him, he was lionized in poems and songs, his name was frantically chanted, but he had ceased to be the real decision-maker regarding the great strategic choices and bureaucratic appointments. By that moment, all the key institutions of the totalitarian system had been set in place and made to function in order to preserve the Bolsheviks&#8217;  absolute hold on power. In the following years, the epigones, and Stalin more than anybody else, did their utmost to radicalize them and to exacerbate the exclusionary, genocidal logic of  Leninism.</p>
<p>Lenin&#8217;s disciples preferred to maintain Stalin in a crucial position. With very few exceptions, they failed to realize that he who controls the cadres controls the party and thereby the whole system. When they became aware of this situation, it was tragically late. They had lost the battle. The Old Bolsheviks had been eliminated from crucial positions, politically emasculated, replaced by robot-like creatures totally subjugated by the supreme leader, the <i>vozhd </i>(the Bolshevik equivalent of what the Nazi would call the <i>Fuhrer</i>). Among those, some became utterly influential as members of Stalin&#8217;s entorurage: Lazar Kaganovich, Georgi Malenkov, Lev Mekhlis, and Nikolay Yezhov.</p>
<p>In 1929, Stalin unleashed the &#8220;revolution from above&#8221; and implemented Lev Trotsky&#8217;s militaristic program minus the proposals to observe a modicum of intra-party democracy. Lenin&#8217;s final opposition to the bureaucratic elephantiasis and his critique of the mendacious propaganda system were totally discarded. The Leninist creed was sacralized and mummified in order to legitimize the power appetite of a profitocratic nomenklatura, a parasytical caste claiming to represent the proletarian interests and values.</p>
<p>At the moment of Lenin&#8217;s demise, the party elite was beset by a well-camouflaged, yet fierce struggle between those who wanted to inherit his mantle. Stalin established an alliance with Lev Kamenev, the head of the Moscow party organization and Lenin&#8217;s deputy at helm of the Council of People&#8217;s Commissars, and with Grigory Zinoviev, the leader of the Petrograd  (soon to be baptized Leningrad) organization and chairman of the Third International, also known as the Comintern, a supra-national institution created in 1919 to promote Leninist revolutionary ideas globally.</p>
<p>Thus, a troika emerged made up of Lenin&#8217;s epigones: Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin. They shared a common hostility to Lev Trotsky, a Politburo member, the first commander of the Red Army, and a firebrand revolutionary apostle. In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; in fact his political testament, Lenin had called Trotsky &#8220;the most brilliant member of the Central Committee.&#8221; The triumvirs hated Trotky&#8217;s revolutionary extravaganzas, his undisguised sense of superiority, and his presumed Bonapartist inclinations. As early as 1923, when Lenin was still alive, Zinoviev had launched a furious campaign in defense of  Bolshevism against the mortal peril, the extremely dangerous Trotskyist deviation. This was in fact a fabrication, a political chimera, a fantasy meant to vilify and demonize Trotsky. The Leninist cult found support also among the members of Nikolay Bukharin&#8217;s faction.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Bukharin, much younger than other Bolshevik luminaries, was the editor of  &#8220;Pravda&#8221; and widely seen as the paty&#8217;s main theorist. Trotsky&#8217;s alleged sins included his pre-1917 non-Bolshevism, his internationalist ardour perceived as irresponsibly adventurous, and a lack of trust in the capacity of the Soviet people to buld up socialism in one country. During those battles for power, Stalin postured as sober, modest, reliable, and non-vindictive. Zinoviev and Kamenev foolishly thought that they could control or at least guide him with their advice. They were dismally wrong. The troika disintegrated in 1925. Eleven year later, in the summer of 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged with surreal crimes, confessed their guilt, and were executed as &#8220;rabid dogs.&#8221; A former Menshevik, chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski, exulted in publicly humiliating these two former closest associates of the party&#8217;s founder.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-217004 aligncenter" alt="lenin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg" width="528" height="397" /></a><strong>Stalinist mythologies: Lenin and Stalin, a painting by Aleksei Vasiliev.</strong></p>
<p>Stalin&#8217;s  funeral oration remains as an antological piece in the history of world communism. It was Koba&#8217;s opportunity to affirm himself publicly as the defunct leader&#8217;s genuine successor. Lenin&#8217;s cultic divinization became the foundation for the emerging communist logocracy. In this theocracy, Stalin acted as pontifex maximus, the only legitimate interpreter of the revolutionary gnosis. The myth of the infallible party, owner of truth, found its counterpart in the myth of the omniscient genius, the visionary leader inspired by the universally purifying, redemptive doctrine bequeathed by Lenin. Any attempt to undermine the ironclad unity of the party leadership represented a political crime and needed to be smashed ruthlessly. Factionalism was a lethal disease.</p>
<p>All these themes were saliently featured in Stalin&#8217;s oath delivered in that frigidly cold January in Moscow. That text contained, <i>in embryo</i>, the Stalinist gospel. In spite of its monotonous discursive repetitions, the litany evolved in a crescendo of quasi-mystical devotion. Each paragraph begins with the magical words: &#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us&#8230;&#8221; Lenin emerges from this hagiographic apotheosis as eternally alive, unperishable, immortal. Lenin has become the vivid presence of a fallacious, temporary absence. Medieval superstitions did thus triumph within a political and ideological movement proudly dedicated to materialist philosophical principles. One doesn&#8217;t need to endorse Isaac Deutscher&#8217;s approach to Bolshevism in order to agree with him that Stalinism was a blending of Marxism and primitive magic.</p>
<p>Far away from Moscow, undergoing medical treatment in the Caucasus, Leon Trotsky did not attend the funerals. The triumvirs telegraphed him that the ceremony could not be postponed until he could get back. In reality, they wanted to make sure that the symbolic transfer of the Leninist charisma would take place in the absence of the arch-rival, a political enemy that had to be compromised and neutralized.</p>
<p>For Stalin, Trotsky embodied the opposite of his own vision of the professional revolutionary: cosmopolite, multi-lingual, with immense literary and philosophical readings, a brilliant journalist, a masterful stylist, and an electrifying orateur. Antipodically situated, Dzhugashvili was dark, dull, somber, a taciturn introvert, pathologically suspicious of everyone and everything. Like Lenin, Trotsky belonged to an international fraternity of Central Europeans socialists. He had known Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and many others. He had read Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lassale, and Marx in German. Yet, this superiority was misleading and did not help him in the terrible, unsparing competition with Stalin.  He committed a huge mistake by calling Dzhugasvili &#8220;the Central Committee&#8217;s most notorious mediocrity.&#8221; Narcissistic arrogance was Trotsky&#8217;s main weakness for which he was to finally pay with his life.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Oath,&#8221; Stalin forcefully highlighted the themes that were to energize him in his endeavor to demonstrate that he outdid all his rivals in terms of deep dedication to Lenin&#8217;s desires:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the Party. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill your behest with honor! &#8230; Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall spare no effort to fulfill this behest with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen with all our might  the alliance of the workers and peasant. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and extend the union of republics. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to remain faithful to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the working people of the whole world&#8211;the Communist International!&#8221;</i> (see T. H. Rigby, editor, “Stalin”, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966, p. 40). It is noteworthy that Stalin addresses Lenin in present tense, thus suggesting that, as a famous slogan put it, &#8220;Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Dzhugashvili&#8217;s funeral oration consecrated, codified, and petrified the hegemonic narrative about Lenin&#8217;s immortality. It became the premise for the new myth of Stalin&#8217;s boundless genius and allowed him to masquerade as the only legitimate interpreter of the infallible Leninist doctrine. In brief, as long as the movement follows the Leninist compass, its members will be able to distinguish between North and South, between good and evil, between the road to triumph and the path to disaster. The banner of Leninism is invincible, as Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev, Castro, Che Guevara, Dolores Ibarruri, Nicolae Ceausescu, etc. would have it.</p>
<p>There is a consensus among Stalin&#8217;s great biographers, from Boris Souvarine and Robert Conquest to Robert C. Tucker and Robert Service, that all these pledges, uttered with truly religious intensity, were later abandoned, betrayed, abjured. Yet, this does not mean that at the moment he delivered his farewell address, Stalin was lying. In his mind, most likely, he remained faithful, until his very last day, to the creed he proclaimed in that January of the great separation, to the mystical absolutism of the vanguard party, the predestined instrument Reason did invent in order to achieve its goals in History and rescue humanity from the valley of tears.</p>
<p><i>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author, most recently, of  ”The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century” (University of California Press), a book dedicated to the memory of Leszek Kolakowski, Tony Judt, and Robert C. Tucker. More on this book in the </i><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/"><i>dialogue with Jamie Glazov</i></a><i>.   </i></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><i><br />
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		<title>Sharon’s Final Road</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/sharons-final-road/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sharons-final-road</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2014 05:12:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Judea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Samaria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sharon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Withdrawal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216517</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The only path to peace. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ariel.sharon.headshot.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216518" alt="ariel.sharon.headshot" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ariel.sharon.headshot.jpg" width="306" height="234" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Sharons-final-road-338059">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>During his long career, Ariel Sharon built a lot of roads. As housing minister in the early 1990s and as national infrastructures minister in the late 1990s, Sharon played a key role in building everything from the Trans-Israel Highway to access roads to isolated communities.</p>
<p>Since he passed away on Saturday, his role in building Israel’s national infrastructures has been widely noted. But no mention has been made of the final and most important road that he paved. That is the road to Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>Sharon’s most controversial – and damaging – act was his decision in late 2003 to surrender the Gaza Strip to Palestinian terrorist organizations. The action, which involved not only withdrawing Israeli military personnel and transferring control over the international border with Egypt to the Palestinian Authority, but also forcibly removing 8,000 law-abiding, patriotic Israelis from their homes and farms and the bulldozing of their flourishing communities, was carried out in August 2005.</p>
<p>Just before Sharon was felled by a stroke in January 2006, he was running for reelection on a platform calling for reenacting the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in large swathes of Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>Sharon decided to surrender the Gaza Strip due to massive pressure from abroad and at home. The Bush administration, which launched the so-called Middle East Quartet’s road map for peace, was quickly losing patience with Sharon, who rightly noted that the PLO had no intention of making peace with the Jewish state.</p>
<p>At home, the leftist-dominated media and legal system were applying heavy pressure on Sharon, intimating that due to bribery allegations, Sharon would likely end his career behind bars – and that his two sons would share his cell.</p>
<p>There are only three options for dealing with the dispute over Palestinian-majority territory now administered by Israel. The first option is to negotiate a settlement with the PLO . Israel adopted that policy in 1993. Sharon owed his rise to power to the abject failure of the negotiated settlement policy at Camp David in July 2000.</p>
<p>The PLO ’s refusal to accept statehood and peaceful coexistence, and its subsequent turn to terrorist warfare in September 2000, demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to the vast majority of Israelis that the negotiated settlement policy was a dead end.</p>
<p>As US Secretary of State John Kerry’s flailing attempt to resuscitate the peace process makes clear, 14 years later, the PLO has not changed. Like Arafat before him, Mahmoud Abbas continues to reject coexistence and statehood. The PLO remains far more interested in destroying Israel than in establishing a Palestinian state.</p>
<p>The second possibility for contending with the disputed territory is for Israel to pick up its marbles and go home; to simply disengage, and depart with the Jews and the IDF in tow. This is the policy Sharon adopted in Gaza, and hoped to implement in Judea and Samaria after the 2006 elections.</p>
<p>Whereas it took seven years for the full dimensions of the failure of the negotiated solution to become evident to most Israelis, it took less than six months for the failure of the unilateral withdrawal policy to become obvious. Hamas’s January 2006 victory in the Palestinian elections demonstrated that the critics of the unilateral withdrawal policy had been right.</p>
<p>In the months and years following Israel’s withdrawal, Gaza was transformed. Hamas terrorists, controlling territory within striking distance of Israel’s population centers, turned what had been a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat.</p>
<p>In less than a year, the number of Israelis within range of rockets, missiles and mortars from Gaza rose from 25,000 to a million. By 2012, the number of Israelis living within range of Gaza’s missiles topped 3.5 million.</p>
<p>With control over the border with Egypt, Hamas turned Gaza into a hub for global jihadists. And according to Egyptian prosecutors, Hamas played a key role in elevating the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt and effectively remilitarizing the Sinai, thus undermining the key component of Israel’s peace deal with Egypt. It was only the swift action of the Egyptian military in toppling the Brotherhood government that stemmed – for now – the seemingly inevitable demise of the peace between the two countries.</p>
<p>By the time Hezbollah launched its attack on Israel in July 2006, Sharon’s policy of unilateral withdrawal was dead in the water.</p>
<p>And so we are left with one last option: for Israel to remain in Judea and Samaria indefinitely, and end its self-destructive embrace of the PLO .</p>
<p>There are two ways to pursue this last option. Israel can openly assert authority and apply its laws, as it has done in formerly Jordanian-occupied parts of Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Or it can maintain the status quo of partial PLO rule and partial Israeli military administration.</p>
<p>The past 20 years of shared rule with the PLO have shown that the so-called status quo weakens Israel, to the PLO ’s benefit. With each passing year, Israel’s failure to assert its legal right to sovereignty over the areas causes the false Palestinian narrative of indigenous rights to the cradle of Jewish civilization to become more and more ingrained in the international psyche.</p>
<p>The price for Israel of asserting its sovereign rights and applying its laws to Judea and Samaria is a change of 13 to 14 percent in the proportion of Palestinian Arabs entitled to the legal status of permanent residents – citizens and otherwise – in Israel. In particular, the Muslim population of Israel would rise from about 18% today to roughly 32% if all the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria are accorded permanent residency status with the right to apply for Israeli citizenship.</p>
<p>My colleague at The Jerusalem Post, Martin Sherman, argues that if Israel grants permanent residency status to the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, we will be overwhelmed by ungovernable Muslims who will transform the Jewish state into an incoherent morass of crime and unsustainable welfare, along the lines of Sweden and Norway.</p>
<p>That could happen. But it is far from clear why it would happen.</p>
<p>Were Israel to grant permanent residency status to the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria – and offer them the right to apply for citizenship – it would not increase the Muslim population west of the Jordan.</p>
<p>Israel would only change their legal status. And along the way, Israel would safeguard its Jewish majority by preventing the immigration of millions of foreign- born Muslims to a future Palestinian state.</p>
<p>In the past, Sherman rightly noted that if Israel applies its laws to Area C only, as Economy Minister Naftali Bennett recommends, significant numbers of Palestinians will move to Area C to live under Israeli jurisdiction, just as thousands of Palestinians have moved to Jerusalem over the years.</p>
<p>But if everyone in Judea and Samaria enjoys permanent residency rights, far fewer people will feel motivated to move west. They can stay at home and enjoy the same status.</p>
<p>Until Sharon adopted the unilateral withdrawal policy, he always said that two things protect Israel – Jewish settlement and the IDF.</p>
<p>The failures of both the negotiated settlement policy and the unilateral withdrawal policy proved him right.</p>
<p>Sharon’s true legacy is that he left only the path of Israeli sovereignty untried. And so, his last act on the public stage was to pave the way for Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.</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>Nelson Mandela 1918-2013</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/nelson-mandela-1918-2013/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=nelson-mandela-1918-2013</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2013 05:51:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apartheid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nelson Mandela]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212506</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mess he left behind.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Nelson-Mandela’s-Top-Five-Contributions-to-Humanity.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212509" alt="Nelson-Mandela’s-Top-Five-Contributions-to-Humanity" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Nelson-Mandela’s-Top-Five-Contributions-to-Humanity.jpg" width="314" height="230" /></a>Mandela began as a terrorist and never turned his back on monsters like Arafat and Castro, whom he considered brothers in arms. When he was released from prison by de Klerk, he showed unexpected statesmanship, counseling reconciliation rather than revenge, no small achievement in a country in which the “liberation” movement (led by Mandela’s wife and party) placed oil filled inner tubes around the necks of former comrades and set them on fire.</p>
<p>But if a leader should be judged by his works, the country Mandela left behind is an indictment of his political career, not an achievement worthy of praise – let alone the unhinged adoration he is currently receiving across the political spectrum.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/south-africa-in-the-shadows/">South Africa today</a> is the murder capital of the world, a nation where a woman is raped every 30 seconds, often by AIDs carriers who go unpunished, and where whites are anything but the citizens of a democratic country which honors the principles of equality and freedom.</p>
<p>Liberated South Africa is one of those epic messes the Left created and promptly forgot about.</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>The BBC&#8217;s Christian Persecution Denial</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/the-bbcs-christian-persecution-denial/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-bbcs-christian-persecution-denial</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:33:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[annual]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BBC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[martyr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210723</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Would the British media agency actively minimize the death toll from any other religion?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/egypt-christians_2023209c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210752" alt="egypt-christians_2023209c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/egypt-christians_2023209c.jpg" width="214" height="169" /></a>While it is no secret that the so-called mainstream media habitually fails to report on the international phenomenon of Christian persecution, few are aware that they sometimes actively work to undermine the efforts of those who do expose it.</span></b></p>
<p>Consider a new report by the BBC titled “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24864587">Are there really 100,000 new Christian martyrs every year?</a>” by Ruth Alexander, who asks:</p>
<blockquote><p>So how widespread is anti-Christian violence?</p>
<p>“Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that every year an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are killed because of some relation to their faith,&#8221; Vatican spokesman Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi <a href="http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/archbishop-silvano-tomasi-s-address-to-the-un-human-rights-council-interactive-dialogue">announced in a radio address</a> to the United Nations Human Rights Council in May.</p>
<p>On the internet, the statistic has taken on a life of its own, popping up all over the place, sometimes with an additional detail—that these 100,000 lives are taken by Muslims.</p>
<p>The number comes originally from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the US state of Massachusetts, which publishes such a figure each year in its <a href="http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/StatusOfGlobalMission.pdf">Status of Global Mission</a> (see line 28).</p>
<p>Its researchers started by estimating the number of Christians who died as martyrs between 2000 and 2010—about one million by their reckoning—and divided that number by 10 to get an annual number, 100,000.</p>
<p>But how do they reach that figure of one million?</p>
<p>When you dig down, you see that the majority died in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo….</p>
<p>If you were to take away the 90,000 deaths in DR Congo from the CSGC&#8217;s figure of 100,000, that would leave 10,000 martyrs per year.</p></blockquote>
<p>Later, after arguing that, “while violence continues in DR Congo, it’s less extreme today than it was at its height,” Alexander quotes approximately 7,000-8,000 Christians worldwide dying for their faith (the CSGC projects 150,000 dead by 2025).</p>
<p>Regarding the statement—“how do they [CSGC] reach that figure of one million?  When you dig down, you see that the majority died in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo”—it is unclear where Alexander got this information.  She does provide a link to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity’s <a href="http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/StatusOfGlobalMission.pdf">Status of Global Mission</a>, telling readers to “see line 28,” which indeed confirms the average number of 100,000 Christians martyred per year.  However, nowhere in this CSGC report does the word “Congo” appear, prompting one to wonder where Alexander went to “dig down” for information.</p>
<p>If it is true that the number 100,000 is primarily based on the Congo, and that the annual number of martyred Christians around the world is 7,000-8,000, the total number of Christians killed specifically because of their faith would seem to be reduced by a whopping 93%.</p>
<p>Of course, many human rights activists do assert that <a href="http://www.persecution.org/2012/12/10/rebel-group-in-democratic-republic-of-congo-targets-christians/">Christians are specifically targeted in the Congo</a>.  Moreover, as Alexander indicates, the CSGC counts only 20% of the millions of Christians killed in the Congo as martyrs, meaning some set of standards or qualifications distinguishing those killed for their faith from those killed in general was relied on.  Finally, regarding the all-important question of how many Christians around the world are killed, Alexander herself later quotes another source saying “there is no scientific number at the moment. It has not been researched and all experts in this area are very hesitant to give a figure.”</p>
<p>And this seems to be the real point.  Of all the questions and aspects of Christian persecution that objective researchers and reporters can explore and expose, why did the BBC pick the very one that 1) cannot be answered and 2) is ultimately irrelevant—at best academic, at worst cold and callous?</p>
<p>(The issue is less whether 100,000 Christians around the world are killed annually for their faith, but rather that <i>any</i> Christian, <i>any</i> human—even Alexander’s “paltry” 7,000—is being killed for their faith.)</p>
<p>The BBC naturally picked this “numbers” question because it best serves to minimize the specter of Christian persecution, specifically by prompting the casual reader to conclude, “Oh, well, things are certainly nowhere near as bad as I thought for Christian minorities outside the West—indeed, they’re 93% better!”</p>
<p>More importantly—<a href="http://protectthepope.com/?p=2374">and here we reach BBC policy</a>—this number-crunching approach serves to exonerate <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621570258/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621570258&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=uhurnetw-20">the chief persecutor of Christians, the Islamic world</a>, or, as Alexander is quick to conclude: “[t]his means we can say right away that the internet rumours of Muslims being behind the killing of 100,000 Christian martyrs are nonsense.”  (Meanwhile, there’s <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2013/">this ongoing monthly series</a> to deal with.)</p>
<p>Incidentally, since when do numbers matter to the supposedly “humanitarian-conscious” BBC and other “liberal” media where one life (provided it’s the “right” life) often gets nonstop coverage?  Would the BBC ever write a report dedicated to trying to show that the number of Palestinians killed in the conflict with Israel is actually 93% lower than widely believed?</p>
<p>Of course not.  When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, far from minimizing anything, the BBC regularly exaggerates to demonize Israel.</p>
<p>And therein lies the main lesson.  The BBC is not in the business of reporting facts but rather creating smokescreens, building and knocking down straw men, and chasing red herrings—all to further its narratives, in this case, that “only” 7,000-8,000 Christians are killed  annually for their faith, and that the Islamic world is largely innocent—so what’s all the fuss about?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;</strong>s video interview with <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> about how Obama enables Islam&#8217;s new war on Christians:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/i-UBjuUOBHw" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></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>The Iranian Hostage Crisis: 34 Years Later</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/the-iranian-hostage-crisis-34-years-later/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-iranian-hostage-crisis-34-years-later</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:15:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Islamic Republic of Iran's chilling commemoration of the occasion. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/13920813144849231468654.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209838" alt="13920813144849231468654" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/13920813144849231468654-450x313.jpg" width="270" height="188" /></a>As the Obama administration stays determined to push for domestic and foreign policies that would prevent further pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran, attempting to diplomatically and pleasantly reach out to the Islamists in Iran, just this week Islamist Iranian leaders responded to Obama’s outreach and foreign policies with a robust reaffirmation of their antagonism towards the United States and Israel.</p>
<p>This Monday marked the 34<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the American Embassy takeover in Iran, which led to 52 Americans being held hostage for several months in Tehran during the Carter administration. Contrary to what many liberal policy analysts in the Obama administration thought, and despite their recent portrayal of the constructive ties between the Islamists in Iran and United States, several powerful political Iranian institutions called for one of the biggest rallies this week.</p>
<p>Tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators packed the streets outside the former US embassy in Tehran. Hundreds of thousands also demonstrated against Israel and the US in various cities across the country. This call to rally against the United States and Israel created one of the most unprecedented demonstrations in size and scope. Many Western and Eastern media outlets reported that these gatherings were the biggest anti-US and anti-Israel rally in years. Even according to Iran&#8217;s official media, millions of people participated in the protests around the country, resulting in the largest anti-US and anti-Israel demonstration turnout in years.</p>
<p>Additionally, the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran declared November 4th as the “National Day against Global Arrogance.” While this week, tens of thousands of Iranians shouted &#8220;Death to America&#8221; and &#8220;Death to Israel.&#8221; The burning of American and Israeli flags took place throughout Iranian cities. Furthermore, effigies of US President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and US Secretary of State John Kerry were held up high by protestors.</p>
<p>The more the Obama administration pushes for a weakening of policies towards Iran &#8212; such as compromising and calling the ruling party “moderate” &#8212; the more the Islamic Republic of Iran is sending formidable signs to the United States that it will not put away its antagonizing policies towards the United States.</p>
<p>For 34 years, the United States and the international community have tried—through unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral talks, diplomatic initiatives, and later through sanctions, political, and economic pressure— to persuade the leaders of the Islamist state of Iran to change their extremist domestic and foreign policies, and to respect the modern standards of the international community, the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency, Amnesty International, and other human rights watch groups.</p>
<p>None of these political and diplomatic approaches have yielded a positive result. Not only have extremist Iranian leaders not scaled down their aggressive foreign policy and their support for terrorist proxies, but they have also increased their domestic repression, human rights abuses, imprisonment and execution of political and human rights activists, along with their persecution of Christians, Jews, and Baha’is.</p>
<p>After all the efforts undertaken by the international community, the Obama administration is, in a sense, restarting its foreign policy from a clean slate. President Obama is attempting to use pleasant diplomatic language with Iranian leaders to ease sanctions on the nation. According to Iranian media, Eastern mainstream news, and some Western outlets, President Obama has repeatedly and desperately begged President Rouhani to speak with him on the phone.</p>
<p>In the arena of international politics taking such initiatives a crucial issue arises, President Obama is significantly weakening the geopolitical position of the United States and emboldening the power of the hardliners and extremists in Iran.</p>
<p>Recently, one of the most powerful military and ideologically hardlined institutions in Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/iran-guards-want-keep-death-america-chant-164840915.html">stated</a> on the Persian Sepah News <a href="http://www.sepahnews.com/">website</a>, that the slogan &#8220;Death to America&#8221; was a sign, and manifestation, of the Iranian people&#8217;s will, determination, and robust resistance against &#8220;the dominance of oppressive and untrustworthy America.&#8221; Hardliners even announced a few days before the protests that they composed several new anti-American Islamist songs to be played next to the American embassy.</p>
<p>Additionally, during the opening session of Iran’s parliament (Majlis), all members of the Majlis joined the hardliners’ call, stating that they will proudly carry the slogan “Death to America.”</p>
<p>Beside all these foreign policy gaffs, the Obama administration is currently pushing to invite Iran to the Geneva II conference. Kerry has repeatedly called to engage Iran in the upcoming Geneva Conference.</p>
<p>The matter of fact is that the key political institutions of Iran- such as the IRGC, the paramilitary Basij militia, the ministry of intelligence and security, the Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution (which owns and manages approximately 350 subsidiary and affiliate companies in fields including industry, transportation, commerce, agriculture, and tourism), the Supreme National Security Council, the army, and the Expediency Council- have made it clear that their antagonism towards the United States and Israel is an unalterable part of their policies. The reason that these institutions exist is based on their fundamental ideology to act against Washington and Tel Aviv. Their existence, and Islamic legitimacy, will be endangered if they change this fundamental Islamic ideology.</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>Obituary for a Beloved Egyptian Terror Supporter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joe-kaufman/obituary-for-a-beloved-egyptian-terror-supporter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obituary-for-a-beloved-egyptian-terror-supporter</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:30:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Kaufman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amir Bedier]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201534</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amir Bedier’s death wish finally becomes a reality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/gh1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201536" alt="gh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/gh1.jpg" width="280" height="158" /></a>Few outside of Egypt and <i>FrontPage Magazine</i> readership know the name Amir Bedier. Any knowledge of this man, save for his family, is by extension of his two semi-famous brothers, Ahmed, a Muslim activist based in Florida, and Osama, a once high-ranking executive of Paypal and Google. This past week, though, Amir finally made the network news, but unless there were any television sets in hell, he probably wasn’t able to watch.</p>
<p>Amir Bedier had already escaped death once. He was shot in the face outside Egypt’s presidential palace, during the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. An x-ray taken of his head showed the bullet lodged in his neck.</p>
<p>Of the incident, his brother Ahmed wrote, “Last night my younger brother Amir was shot in the head outside the presidential palace… He went there, not to protest, but to help the injured… When we asked him who he thinks shot him, he did not blame opponents or supporters of [Mohamed] Morsi… WHEN THE MEDIA CAME TO INTERVIEW HIM TODAY AT THE HOSPITAL, because he was the only critically shot but survived, he refused to see them. Because he does not want the media to use his story to fuel more hate. Amir represents the good people of Egypt, the heroes. I’m proud of him…”</p>
<p>In reading Ahmed’s kind words about his brother, one might come away thinking that Amir Bedier was a courageous man with an altruistic soul. But when they discover who the real Amir Bedier was and what he supported, there can be no mistaking him for anything good or generous. Indeed, Amir Bedier was a follower of al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>Evidence of this was revealed on his Facebook page, when a little over three months ago, Amir changed his Facebook profile picture to that of the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. He soon <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/8dbxp0l8k3qsg3z/Amir_Bedier_profile_pics.jpg">followed that up by changing the picture to that of Abdullah Azzam</a>, the deceased mentor of bin Laden who is known as the father of global jihad.</p>
<p>Following an <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joe-kaufman/ahmed-bediers-egyptian-family-jihad/">article written by this author about Amir and his family’s extremism</a>, Amir changed the profile name of his Facebook site but kept all the old material. The new name of the site was/is “Accountant Ma,” which is his profession and what seems to be a much less extreme alter ego. As well, he changed his profile picture from Azzam to that of one featuring Mohamed Morsi, who had been removed from power by the Egyptian military only days earlier.</p>
<p>Morsi, apart from being a President of Egypt, was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement whose headquarters happens to be located in the capital of Egypt, Cairo. While serving as President, Morsi and his fellow Islamists in power instituted Sharia law, which, to the dismay of many secular and Christian Egyptians, moved Egypt towards becoming an Islamic state. This, in turn, brought massive protests, which culminated in Morsi’s removal.</p>
<p>Amir would use his Facebook page to promote Brotherhood protests and to post Brotherhood communiques. As well, he posted gruesome photos to his site, including that of dead bodies and a young boy with his arm torn off.</p>
<p>He did this up until the afternoon of August 14, when he was shot and killed by Egyptian police at Nasr City’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, which is considered to be the epicenter of the pro-Morsi protest camp.</p>
<p>According to his brother Ahmed, Amir had been attending protests at Rabaa for the past month. He would do his accounting job during the day and join the demonstrations at night. According to Ahmed, on the day Amir died, he had been protesting since early in the morning. He had left to see his wife around 1:00 pm, after sustaining injuries. He later went back to protest and was <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/115gz5ials5l3zd/Amir_Bedier_dead_neck.jpg">shot and killed soon after, ironically in the neck</a>, where the other bullet remained.</p>
<p>Ahmed and his parents discovered the body at the local mosque, amongst possibly 200 other bodies. A video shows the father, Mostafa, who is himself a supporter of the Brotherhood and Sharia law, <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ljtfjekv36dj2l/Mostafa_%26_Ahmed_Bedier_pita.jpg">give Ahmed what appears to be a pita bread to eat</a> as they stand by the lifeless body. Prior to the body arriving at the mosque, Amir had been left in the street by his fellow protesters to die, according to Ahmed, for twelve hours.</p>
<p>Both Osama and Ahmed described the protests Amir took part in as strictly peaceful ones; Ahmed labeled them sit-ins. Question: How do you call something “peaceful,” when it is being organized by a terrorist organization?</p>
<p>According to the BBC, “Before the security forces attacked, many Muslim Brotherhood supporters talked about martyrdom,” so they were more than ready to give up their lives. And when these “sit-ins” were dispersed by police, the protesters went on a rampage, attacking police stations and burning down dozens of area churches and Christian-owned shops, some of which had been marked previously by pro-Morsi forces with red graffiti.</p>
<p>Two days later, the Brotherhood called for a ‘Day of Rage,’ where many more lives were lost.</p>
<p>Today, the profile picture on Amir Bedier’s Facebook site is that of <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/b8s8fd42cnx2mnx/Amir_Bedier_dead_profile.jpg">himself post-mortem in a white shroud</a>. He’ll be remembered by his Islamist family, who distort reality and cannot describe him in anything except glowing terms, painting Amir as a saint. But to the rest of the world that knows the truth, he’ll be nothing more than just another dead bin Laden-supporting jihadi.</p>
<p><i>Beila Rabinowitz, director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.</i></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Death and Taxes Economy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-death-and-taxes-economy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-death-and-taxes-economy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198216</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Masquerading social policies as economic policies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/obamad.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198234" alt="obamad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/obamad.jpg" width="322" height="202" /></a>It&#8217;s an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about global warming: every time Obama gives a speech, a thousand businesses go out of business.</p>
<p>On July 24th, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from green energy and illegal immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn&#8217;t on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.</p>
<p>An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto &#8220;Vero Possumus” (which can be translated very loosely as &#8220;God Help Us All&#8221;), is an entirely familiar breed.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year&#8217;s leftovers.</p>
<p>There are the warnings about all the old bridges threatening to fall down and kill the trolls living under them. Despite a second term in office, a stimulus plan, a plan to stimulate the stimulus plan and years of assorted pork, there are apparently now more Damocles bridges in the land than there ever were before.</p>
<p>In 2009, Obama promised to fix all the crumbling roads and bridges with a $787 billion stimulus plan full of &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; Two years later he joked to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whose company is the 15th biggest government contractor, that the shovel-ready jobs were not shovel-ready. It would have been nice to know that before we spent the $787 billion.</p>
<p>And then there are the promises that we can fix all our problems with a green energy revolution that drives up electricity rates for everyone in order to buy windmills and solar panels from China. The green energy revolution has done a lot for Red China&#8217;s middle class while further eviscerating the standard of living for American middle class families who are just trying to keep the lights on.</p>
<p>And no Obama speech on the economy would be complete without urging us to invest more in education in order to get our hands on tomorrow&#8217;s jobs. &#8220;If you think education is expensive,&#8221; Obama said, borrowing his line from a bumper sticker, &#8220;wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century.&#8221;</p>
<p>But we don&#8217;t have to choose. As Detroit shows us, we can have both. Detroit has 5,000 teachers to 88,000 students. Its biggest challenge has been trying to win back another 5,000 students who escaped to charter schools to justify not laying off all the extra teachers. Its billion-dollar school budget is all the more shocking in a city that is deep in debt and suffers from a 47 percent illiteracy rate.</p>
<p>The education system fosters incredibly expensive ignorance. And that ignorance can not only be found in public schools in Detroit&#8217;s ghettos, but in the Ivy League alma maters of Obama and his financial advisers.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s 6 trillion dollar debt is a testament to the high price of ignorance; as are his economic speeches calling for more green energy, more education and more taxes to solve all of our ills. In his latest speech, he vowed that making &#8220;preschool available to every four year-old in America&#8221; would make America competitive in the &#8220;ocean of tomorrows&#8221; and &#8220;a sky of tomorrows.&#8221;</p>
<p>About the only thing in Obama&#8217;s entire 5,000-word speech that was at all interesting was in its opening as he pivoted from discussing the loss of middle class jobs to inveighing against the income inequality of the 1 percent. It was a convenient dodge that his average supporter was incapable of noticing, but it&#8217;s at the heart of what&#8217;s wrong with Obama&#8217;s economic logic.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s speech stayed in familiar class warfare territory. Its implication was that if the wealthy were made to pay their fair share, the lost manufacturing jobs would somehow come back. The economic logic of that is absurd. Even if we assume that the wealthy are the villains of the piece, taxing them at Hollandaise rates seems as likely to bring back the jobs as constructing cardboard factories in a cargo cult ceremony to summon the spirits of the lost jobs would.</p>
<p>But Obama, like most of his Socialist brethren, isn&#8217;t really interested in repairing the broken relationships of the economy. The logic running through his speech is that forcing the rich, or at least those of their class who haven&#8217;t written their timely checks to Organizing for America, to pay more will allow the government to create more jobs.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s perpetual motion tax machine is offering the same empty social welfare promises that more social services, more preschools, more free Internet, more green energy, more Obamacare, will turn the economy around, while shamelessly claiming that it has already done as much.</p>
<p>There are still the occasional nods to all the nation&#8217;s broken bridges that are just about to fall down, but mostly it&#8217;s the same empty Socialism that proposes to tax a country to death because it&#8217;s right and just to do so.</p>
<p>&#8220;In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,&#8221; Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French correspondent around the time that the United States Constitution took effect. Some two centuries later, government has combined death and taxes into one by taxing the economy to death.</p>
<p>Taxing economies to death is one thing that we have in common with the French. President Hollande began his disastrous term in office with a proposed 75% tax rate. France&#8217;s move to tax its economy to death hit a snag when its budget minister, a member of the Socialist Party in good standing, who was supposed to lead the crusade to make the rich pay their fair 75 percent share, admitted to hiding some $790,000 in a secret Swiss bank account.</p>
<p>Obama has squandered money like Louis XVI and then pledged to lead a revolution to find where the rest of the money is. Surrounded by some of the most corrupt billionaires in the country, whose think-tanks help write the policy proposals that the teleprompter feeds into his brain, he inveighs against the 1 percent. And he tops it all off by claiming his disasters as successes.</p>
<p>Obama taxes Americans. He taxes their incomes, their lifebloods and their patience. He has put his entire faith in taxes, in grubbing up enough money to serve as collateral for his latest scheme. And the road that his paradise of amnesty for illegal aliens, green energy for electric poverty and more government employees to administer the whole mess leads to is Detroit.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Celebrating Rachel Corrie: Israeli Tax Dollars at Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/celebrating-rachel-corrie-israeli-tax-dollars-at-work/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=celebrating-rachel-corrie-israeli-tax-dollars-at-work</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:05:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The state-funded adoration of a terror-supporter who committed suicide for the "right" of Palestinian terrorists to murder Jews.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/corrie01.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195402" alt="corrie01" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/corrie01.jpg" width="261" height="198" /></a>I doubt there are any people who are not aware of the fact that Rachel Corrie committed suicide as part of her campaign for the &#8220;right&#8221; of Palestinian terrorists to murder Jewish civilians in Israel.  Corrie was part of a team sent to Gaza by the <a href="http://www.israelnewsagency.com/internationalsolidaritymovementterrorism9330405.html">openly pro-terror</a> <a href="http://stoptheism.com/">International Solidarity Movement</a> (ISM).  There they assisted terrorists, stored weapons for them, hosted and hid them, and attempted to interfere with Israeli military anti-terrorist operations.  In one such incident Corrie herself decided to play &#8220;chicken&#8221; with a massive military earth mover.  The driver of the bulldozer could not see her and struck her as she was trying to stop his destruction of hidden terrorist smuggling tunnels.  She was taken by a Palestinian ambulance to a Gaza Hamas medical facility, where she died of her injuries, possibly as a result of medical incompetence.</p>
<p>Rachel herself was an America-hating, <a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5864">flag-burning</a>, anti-Jewish extremist.  Her death was <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/08/28/rachel-corrie-was-no-peace-activist-israel-palestinians-terrorism/">clearly an ideologically-motivated suicide</a>, a bit like someone running in the center lanes of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles as a protest against global warming who gets struck down by an 18-wheeler.  Corrie and her ISM comrades want to protect the right of Hamas terrorists to infiltrate Israel and blow up school buses and cafes.  As a result Corrie became the <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4200056,00.html">matron saint of the pro-terror Left</a>.  She is <a href="http://www.davidduke.com/?p=35987">celebrated by David Duke</a> and <a href="http://www.codoh.com/library/document/1779">the neo-Nazis</a>, as well as <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/15/rachel-corrie-and-palestine/">neo-Stalinists</a>.   Corrie&#8217;s <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7117">own parents</a> went on a jihad against Israel, publishing bash-Israel materials on the worst jihadist anti-Semitic web sites on earth. They also tried to file a civil suit for damages against the Israeli government, but <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/a-just-verdict-in-the-rachel-corrie-case/">their suit was tossed out</a> as frivolous.</p>
<p>As part of the beatification of Corrie, an idiotic &#8220;play&#8221; was staged, &#8220;<a href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/culture/article/rachel_corrie_on_stage_agitprop_or_art_20110823">My Name is Rachel Corrie</a>,&#8221; which attempted to deconstruct the young terrorist as a golden-haired lover of peace and poetry, striving for love and beauty in a world beset with pain.  It was first performed in the UK in 2005, after two Londoners, actor/director Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, edited Rachel&#8217;s &#8220;diaries&#8221; into a 70-minute propaganda play.  The play&#8217;s pro-jihad agitprop was about as morally compelling as would be a <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/9346">similar play about Horst Wessel</a>.  Can a play entitled &#8220;My Name is Osama&#8221; be far behind?  One that protests the criminal execution of Bin Laden, the peace activist?  How about a play about the sufferings and moral ponderings of the bloke who shot up the school in Newton, Connecticut?</p>
<p>The &#8220;Rachel play&#8221; then metastasized to other countries.  In New York and in some other cities, protests against the pro-terror and anti-Semitic theme of the &#8220;play&#8221; <a href="http://www.jewlicious.com/2006/03/my-name-is-rachel-corrie-cancelled/">resulted in cancellations</a>.</p>
<p>All of the above just makes the newest development even more mind boggling.  After all the years of exposing the true nature of ISM, the Corries, and the &#8220;play&#8221; that promotes them, along comes the Israeli radical Left and stages a performance of &#8220;My Name is Rachel Corrie,&#8221; smack in the holy city of Jerusalem in a national theater, one funded by taxpayers.</p>
<p>Let me step back for a moment.  The radical leftist fringe in Israel might as well call itself the Jews for a Second Holocaust.  These are leftist extremists who simply hate their own country and seek its annihilation.  Some of them cheer on Arab terror attacks against Jews.  Some of them endorse the so-called &#8220;Palestinian right of return,&#8221; meaning the right to annihilate Israel in a deluge of millions of Arabs from various countries pretending to be &#8220;returning Palestinian refugees.&#8221;  Some of them collaborate with open anti-Semites. Almost all of them oppose freedom of speech for critics of the Left.</p>
<p>The radical Left in Israel is led by the daily newspaper <i>Haaretz</i>, which I consider to be a Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew.  It is anti-Zionist and only uses the word &#8220;terrorist&#8221; to refer to Jewish teenage vandals who write anti-Arab graffiti on walls, while Arab suicide bombers are &#8220;activists.&#8221;  Hamas rockets fired at Jews are symbolic protests.  A few days ago <i>Haaretz </i>insisted that imprisoned Palestinian mass murderers were the moral equivalents of Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben Island.   MSNBC in the US is a balanced professional news agency when compared with <i>Haaretz</i>.  Sure, MSNBC makes &#8220;Rev Al&#8221; Sharpton into one of its regular correspondents, but he is a towering intellectual and moral giant compared to most of the columnists at <i>Haaretz</i>.</p>
<p>Israel has long wrestled with what to do with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish manifestations in the &#8220;arts.&#8221;  Leftist film producers regularly churn out bash-Israel movies in Israel, some that accuse Jews of being the new Nazis, and these are seen by almost no one while the films get made thanks to governmental subsidization.  The anti-Israel agitprop gets funded even when the conservative Likud is in office and in charge.</p>
<p>Bash-Israel propaganda is of course protected speech in Israel, even when it is openly treasonous.  Unlike criticism of leftist traitors, which is libel.  The matter becomes a question of public policy the moment the arts use public funds.   You can stand on a corner in Israel and scream all you want that Israel is an apartheid regime in need of annihilation.   But the moment my taxes are used to pay for your doing so, I want heads to roll.</p>
<p>In a very different controversy, but one having some lessons for us here, there has long been harsh opposition in Israel to performances of the works of composer Richard Wagner.  The problem is not their musical quality or even the fact that Wagner was an anti-Semite.  Almost all musical and literary figures in Germany were anti-Semites.  But Wagner was the grand promoter of racialist anti-Semitism, claiming that Jews were racially sub-human and deserving of extermination as vermin.  And for that reason he was the inspiration of Adolf Hitler.</p>
<p>Ever since its independence, the music of Wagner has not been performed or broadcast in Israel by state-supported institutions.  The world-class Israel Philharmonic Orchestra does not play Wagner, and his music is not played on state-run radio and television channels.  Anyone who wants to listen to Wagner in the privacy of his home or car can do so, and music stores have plenty of Wagner disks and records for sale, as do some bootleggers.  But national institutions deny Wagner the legitimacy he does not deserve.  Only a leftist moron would consider this &#8220;censorship.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now along comes the radical Left in Israel and stages an Israeli theater presentation (in Hebrew) of &#8220;My Name is Rachel Corrie.&#8221;  That <a href="http://myrightword.blogspot.co.il/2013/06/rachel-corrie-resurrected-in-jerusalem.html">play is to be performed</a> in the <a href="http://www.khan.co.il/about_eng.php">Jerusalem Khan Theater</a>, a sort of national theater owned by the Jerusalem Municipality.   Note the caveat on the <a href="http://www.khan.co.il/about_eng.php">page of the theater</a> that reads: &#8220;The Khan Theatre is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, The Jerusalem Municipality.&#8221; This means Israeli tax money is being used to pay for the propaganda.  For its poster, the producers of the theatrical atrocity even use the now-notorious photoshopped hoax photo that shows Rachel in her orange vest standing in clear sight in front of the bulldozer (see <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=206564926164014&amp;set=pb.156503024503538.-2207520000.1372691452.&amp;type=3&amp;theater">it here</a>).  The problem is that it is not a real photo of Corrie but an ISM fabrication.</p>
<p>The &#8220;star&#8221; of the theater performance is an airheaded Israeli bimbette named <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4361692,00.html">Sivan Krechner</a>, who has been active in a lesbian-homosexual theater in Tel Aviv (she says she is straight).<b>  </b>  She denies with a straight face that <a href="http://www.nrg.co.il/online/47/ART2/484/348.html#.Uc0eAJUv3qg.facebook">the show has a political message at all</a>.  &#8220;I am innocent just like Rachel was innocent,&#8221; she bleats, and she openly identifies with Corrie&#8217;s persona and &#8220;mission.&#8221;  She sees nothing wrong with prettifying a pro-terror activist, while at the same time she insists she would never be part of any theatrical production that presented in a positive light the &#8220;Price Tag&#8221; vandals, that small group of Jewish teenagers who paint anti-Arab graffiti on buildings we mentioned above, the kids dubbed &#8220;terrorists&#8221; by <i>Haaretz</i>.   After all, <em>they</em> are evil.  Krechner tells about how flattered she is that her friends in Gaza support the staging of the play.  She is very critical of the Israeli court for tossing out the lawsuit by the Corrie parents.</p>
<p>As Israelis learn that their taxes are being hijacked to finance pro-terror agitprop in Jerusalem, increasing demands are being heard to defund the show.  Members of parliament, the Jerusalem mayor, and some journalists are livid with anger and demanding that Israel&#8217;s Minister of Culture, who is from the Likud party, stop national funding for the &#8220;play&#8221; immediately.   Jerusalem&#8217;s Deputy Mayor called for a consumer boycott of the theater if it stages the &#8220;show,&#8221; the same theater his own municipality props up.</p>
<p>And predictably, the fascist Left, which has never met a non-leftist it believes should be allowed to exercise freedom of speech, is running around the globe screaming about this new round of Israeli censorship and suppression of democracy.  A <a href="http://972mag.com/jerusalem-deputy-mayor-defund-theater-showing-rachel-corrie-play/74840/">far-leftist website in Israel funded by</a> European anti-Israel forces denounced the &#8220;censorship,&#8221; moaning that &#8220;Hatred for Rachel Corrie knows no limits, as a Jerusalem municipal official demonstrates by trying to ban a play about the ‘Israel-hater tourist.’&#8221;</p>
<p>In Israel, like most other places, the self-proclaimed cultural elite is predominantly leftist.  And in Israel, like other places, ordinary consumers cannot go to see any play that commemorates any of <a href="http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/TheForgottenRachels.html">those <em>other</em> Rachels</a>, the Israeli Jewish women named Rachel who were brutally murdered by the Palestinian genocidal terrorists so beloved by Rachel Corrie, the ISM, and the radical Left.</p>
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		<title>Showdown in Egypt</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/egyptian-military-vs-morsi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=egyptian-military-vs-morsi</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:40:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Morsi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Egypt's military issues Morsi a 48-hour ultimatum.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Death-toll-up-to-14-in-massive-Egypt-protests-Morsi-given-deadline.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195284" alt="Death-toll-up-to-14-in-massive-Egypt-protests-Morsi-given-deadline" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Death-toll-up-to-14-in-massive-Egypt-protests-Morsi-given-deadline-450x346.jpg" width="252" height="194" /></a>Millions of Egyptians participated in protests all over the country on the first anniversary of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi&#8217;s inauguration this past weekend, including in areas where his Muslim Brotherhood has traditionally had strong support. Morsi&#8217;s increasingly authoritarian style of government, worsening economic conditions since he assumed office and Islamist power grabs, rising fears of an Iran-type Egyptian theocracy have fueled the historic protests. In fact, more demonstrators have poured into the streets demanding Morsi&#8217;s resignation than came out during the final days of the uprising that led to former President Hosni Mubarak&#8217;s overthrow in 2011.</span></b></p>
<p>Although the protests have been largely peaceful, they were marred by some violence. At least 16 people were killed, including an American, and more than 780 were wounded during the last several days. Protesters have also ransacked and set fire to Muslim Brotherhood offices in Cairo and elsewhere in the country.</p>
<p>&#8220;Egypt,&#8221; the government-run newspaper Al-Akhbar said, &#8220;is on the brink of a volcano.&#8221;</p>
<p>To avoid anarchy and a collapse of Egyptian society into civil war like Syria, the Egyptian military has issued a stern warning to the Morsi regime. In a statement, read over state television on July 1st, the military presented Morsi with a stark choice &#8211; relent to the people&#8217;s will or face military intervention. General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the head of the Egyptian military, said that the armed forces would move ahead to impose its “own road map for the future” if Morsi does not pay heed within 48 hours to the “unprecedented” expression of anger in the streets against his regime. It did not expressly call for Morsi to immediately resign, although that appears to be the principal unifying theme of the protesters.</p>
<p>The problem for Morsi is that Egypt&#8217;s military has managed to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people, many of whom would welcome its intervention to move Egypt away from the theocratic Islamist direction the Muslim Brotherhood and its fundamentalist Salafi allies are taking the country. Some protesters chanted, “The army and the people are one hand!” when they heard the military&#8217;s announcement.</p>
<p>The military has been careful to emphasize its temporary role, if needed, in facilitating a peaceful path to a more inclusive government. It wants to stay in general favor with the masses by re-assuring those in the opposition who worry about trading an authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood-led regime for another military dictatorship. However, to avoid a backlash from the country&#8217;s Muslim Brotherhood supporters who would feel disenfranchised if Morsi were to be forced out of power, the military&#8217;s roadmap might consist of some sort of coalition government in which Morsi would still play a role until new elections can be scheduled.</p>
<p>“The armed forces will not be party to the circle of politics or ruling, and the military refuses to deviate from its assigned role in the original democratic vision that flows from the will of the people,” the military&#8217;s statement said. Its roadmap would include “the participation of all the sincere national factions and trends.”</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood is not appearing to back down just yet. “We understand it as a military coup,” one adviser to Mr. Morsi was quoted by the <i>New York Times</i> as saying, speaking on condition of anonymity. “What form that will take remains to be seen.” The adviser went on to say that the Muslim Brotherhood should not be expected to necessarily “take this lying down.”</p>
<p>Morsi, who is close to Hamas leaders, is believed by opposition members to be seeking help from the Hamas militia in order to stay in power. Shades, perhaps, of Hezbollah fighting to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power.</p>
<p>Amidst the most serious crisis facing Egypt since the fall of Mubarak, whom President Obama strongly pressured to step down in the face of the street protests that Obama audibly supported, Obama has been conspicuous by his virtual silence on the current revolt. Shades, perhaps, of Obama&#8217;s turning his back on the dissidents in Iran in 2009 who were in the streets protesting the fraudulent &#8220;re-election&#8221; of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>With good reason, the anti-Morsi demonstrators believe that the Obama administration is standing by the Muslim Brotherhood-led government against the wishes of the people. “America and the Brotherhood have united to bring down the Egyptian people,” said Hassan Shahin, a member of the Tamarod, or “rebel,” movement.</p>
<p>For example, U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson angered many Egyptians planning to take part in the protests when she said last week at a seminar organized by a Cairo research center:</p>
<blockquote><p>Some say that street action will produce better results than elections. To be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical. Egypt needs stability to get its economic house in order, and more violence on the streets will do little more than add new names to the lists of martyrs.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/u-s-asks-egypts-christians-not-to-oppose-morsi/">Patterson also reportedly asked that Copt Christians</a> not participate in any street demonstrations against the Morsi regime, even though this religious minority has suffered more persecution while Morsi has been in power than they did during Mubarak&#8217;s rule.</p>
<p>George Ishaq, a prominent Egyptian Christian, expressed the anger that many of his fellow Christians must have felt against Ms. Patterson. He said on the talk show “The Issue” on Al Hayat, a popular satellite channel, that Ambassador Patterson was &#8220;an evil lady who is creating divisions. How is this any of her business? If I saw her walking down the street I would tell her, ‘shut up and mind your own business.&#8217;”</p>
<p>Christians are not the only minority group being persecuted in Morsi&#8217;s Islamist Egypt. Sunni Salafist fanatics attacked members of Egypt&#8217;s tiny Shiite minority late last month. Morsi did condemn the mob attacks, which led to the deaths of four Shiites. However, only a week earlier he had sat on stage with Salafist clerics and did not object to their hate-filled speeches against Shiites.</p>
<p>The Obama administration apparently believes that the elections alone, which brought Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood comrades to power, are sufficient to insulate them against the will of the people until the next election. While in a truly functioning democracy that would normally be true, Egypt is being run by a government that has used the elections as cover to seize all levers of power and trample on the rights of religious minorities and women.</p>
<p>Despite its paying lip service to protection of such rights, the Obama administration has placed no conditions to speak of on the aid it has given to the Morsi regime. Secretary of State John Kerry just released $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt, for example. Despite criticizing the Islamist government from time to time for suppressing free expression and not adhering to other fundamental precepts of a genuinely pluralistic democracy, the Obama administration decided to waive any human rights conditions on its $1.3 billion of aid to Egypt. After all, the Morsi regime has been helping to smooth over some conflicts in the Middle East, the Obama administration reasoned, and building viable democratic institutions takes time.</p>
<p>The Morsi regime has no intention of building the foundations for real democracy any time soon. To the contrary, it has been removing them brick by brick, such as an independent judiciary and any semblance of freedom of the press or speech.</p>
<p>However, even if Egypt were slowly but surely becoming a truly functioning democracy where elections are not used as mere justifications to harshly suppress the Egyptian people&#8217;s freedoms, the current protests seeking Morsi&#8217;s removal from power have an apt model to follow in this country. Remember the union attempts to oust the duly elected Republican governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker through their mass (sometimes violent) protests and successful petition for a recall election? Walker won the recall election, but the people of Wisconsin &#8211; with the backing of the Obama administration &#8211; were given the opportunity to reconsider their initial choice.</p>
<p>In Egypt, anti-Morsi activists were reported to have gathered 15 million signatures in a drive for the people to express no-confidence against President Morsi, more than the number of votes Morsi received in last year&#8217;s presidential election. Why are mass protests and a signature drive good enough to force states like Wisconsin to hold a recall election but not good enough for Egypt to do the same? Apparently, the Obama administration and its union supporters think a popularly elected Republican in Wisconsin was so dangerous that he needed to be recalled, but not so for a popularly elected Islamist in Egypt who is turning into an autocrat.</p>
<p>In any event, Morsi may not have any choice but to listen to the will of the people whom he supposedly was elected to serve.</p>
<p>Tamarod (the &#8220;rebel&#8221; campaign) <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Tmrood/posts/599836323389856">posted a demand</a> on its official Facebook page demanding that Morsi step down within 24 hours or face strikes, massive civil disobedience and a march on the presidential palace:</p>
<blockquote><p>The first statement of the revolution in the name of God in the name of the people in the name of revolution on behalf of more than 22 million Egyptian citizens signed a form of rebellion to withdraw confidence on behalf of the Egyptian people, announce today that Mohammed Morsi Issa ayat is no longer a legitimate President of the Republic of Egypt Arabic&#8230; it is no longer possible to accept any compromise and there is no alternative to the peaceful termination of the authority of the brothers and of the guidance office delegate Mohammed Morsi Federal Palace and call early presidential elections.</p></blockquote>
<p>Five ministers from Morsi&#8217;s government reportedly met in secret and decided to resign, although Morsi is said to be trying to convince the ministers to stay.</p>
<p>Finally, as mentioned above, the Egyptian army is poised to intervene if necessary.</p>
<p>It will be ironic indeed if the Obama administration&#8217;s recent release of $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt ends up, against the wishes of the Obama administration, being used to free the Egyptian people from the iron grip of the Islamists seeking to convert Egypt into a theocracy.</p>
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		<title>Islam: Libido Unleashed?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-yeagley/islam-libido-unleashed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islam-libido-unleashed</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 04:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Yeagley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libido]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sex]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Religion of Peace under the Freudian microscope.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/anger1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189588" alt="anger" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/anger1.jpg" width="252" height="189" /></a>Islam is Freudian <i>libido</i> unleashed. Under the robes of dark religion, the system of Islam glorifies the most naked, destructive passions of human nature. Libido&#8211;undefined sexual energy—is expressed in gruesome death.  Among civilized people libido finds more tolerable expression through creative sublimation, such as art; but in Islam, sublimation is removed.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud">Sigmund Freud</a> (1856-1939), the famous Viennese Jewish psychologist, father of the “couch,” or “confessional” talk therapy, introduced a profound sexual theory in which <i>libido</i> explained what was formerly called <i>mayhem</i> and <i>cannibalism</i>.  In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Illusion-Sigmund-Freud/dp/0393008312"><i>The Future of an Illusion</i></a> (1927), Freud suggests cannibalism, along with incest, was an <i>instinct</i>.  Cannibalism, always involving mayhem, is directly linked to <i>libido</i>.  In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Totem-Taboo-Sigmund-Freud/dp/1609421205"><i>Totem and Taboo</i></a> (1918), Freud describes various cases of incest, and suggests that sexual taboos develop precisely around the most powerful but self-destructive desires.  (Civilization simply harnesses or re-channels these dreadful desires.)</p>
<p>But Islam glories in removing sexual taboos. The brutality of Islam, so unprecedented in modern times, is the studied absence of civilized inhibition.</p>
<p>What inspires such horrid Islamic acts of bodily dismemberment—the beheadings, the chopping off of body parts, the compulsive delight in <a href="http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/blogs/white-coat-notes/2013/04/15/marathon-medical-tent-transformed-into-trauma-unit/gUAgQIMwTYqwzRkcIDs5PJ/blog.html">blowing to pieces</a> the human body, and the ghastly acts of cannibalism?</p>
<p><i>Libido</i>.</p>
<p>Barbarity we thought characterized more primitive man, in more primitive times.  Tribal people have always relished the grotesque.  Indulgent violence is part of what it means to be “heathen.”</p>
<p>But, according to Freud, <i>barbarity is man</i>, at any time, primordial, bizarre, and even mystical.</p>
<p>Cannibalism, as sexual desire, is the ultimate <i>union</i> of two separate entities.  Union, the coming together of separate entities, is the object of all sexual desire.  By cannibalism, two entities become one in the most literal way.  (This union accounts for the thinly sublimated cannibalism of the vampire legend, and the everlasting popularity of the Dracula story.)</p>
<p>Mayhem is only the foreplay of cannibalism.  <a href="http://newsrescue.com/maryland-us-man-charged-with-murder-admits-eating-heart-brain-of-ghanaian-victim-agyei-kodie/#axzz2T1I8B2JT">Murderers who have eaten the bodies</a> (or body parts) of their victims always dismember the body first.</p>
<p>Islam, world famous for mayhem, is also <a href="http://shoebat.com/2013/01/31/islam-and-cannibalism-updated/">famous for cannibalism</a>.  The “religion” of Islam honors <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/theodore-shoebat/syria-cannibalism-and-videotape/">this very worst human denigration</a>.  (And Muslims <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/jews-again-accused-of-using-blood-in-matzah/"><i>accuse Jews</i></a><i> </i>of blood eating?  This is simply projection, with an odd twist of impotence.)</p>
<p>Islamic abuse of women, the brutal beatings, killings, and dismemberings, are normative in Islam.  On the other hand, the reward of the faithful is a harem of seventy virgins.  Islamic reality and fantasy clearly exhibit psycho-pathological conflict and perversion.</p>
<p>Islam’s notorious terrorism—a suicidal pervert’s mass-murdering slaughter—is mayhem on steroids.  Mayhem <i>en mass</i>.  <a href="http://www.aina.org/news/20130418140349.htm">Delight in this practice</a> is a clarion declaration of sexual perversion in the Freudian sense.  The “lust for killing” (mentioned in <i>The Future of an Illusion</i>) is clearly sexual in nature—demonstrated by the nature of its exhibition:  mayhem, or dismemberment.   Islamic cannibalism is but the climax of the psychological perversion.</p>
<p>Islam may also involve <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=25171">supernatural influence</a>.  Normally, sexual desire is sublimated by religious energy and its cultural accoutrements.  But, what today is called “radicalization” of a Muslim simply means the person is <i>given</i> to the libido unleashed, through the supernatural—expressed through long-established cultural modes.</p>
<p>But Freud warned the young Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) to keep sexual theory separate from the supernatural.  Jung recalls a conversation with Freud in 1907 (in Vienna):</p>
<blockquote><p><i>“My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory.  That is the most essential thing of all.  You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark against the black tide of mud—of occultism.”  </i>See, C. G. Jung, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Memories-Dreams-Reflections-C-G-Jung/dp/0679723951"><i>Memories, Dreams, Reflections</i></a>, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard Winston (1961; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1989), p.150.  Sex is more manageable than the supernatural.</p></blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>So, the power of Islam is libido unleashed by the impetus of the supernatural.  It is precisely belief in the supernatural, which unleashes the libido.  It may be that all religion is liable for some degree of amalgamation with <a href="http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0902/sacrifice.htm">unleashed libido</a>.  Indeed, Freud says as much in <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Civilization-and-Its-Discontents/"><i>Civilization and its Discontents</i></a> (1929).</p>
<p>Yet, Judeo-Christian westerners understand religion as a <i>restraint</i>.  Ancient Hebrew religion involved animal slaughter (sacrifice) for food, but modern Judaism no longer has such a ritual.  Christianity, on the other hand, aggrandizes the historical slaughter of one human being, for forgiveness, thus psychologically turning the libido on its head, and does finally allow religion to function as a restraint.</p>
<p>But Islam shows us how lethal libido is unleashed through belief in magic, in the context of barbarous cultural identity with historical, collective support.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Margaret Thatcher’s Passing and the Hateful Spirit of the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/margaret-thatchers-passing-and-the-hateful-spirit-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=margaret-thatchers-passing-and-the-hateful-spirit-of-the-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:35:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[funeral]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HATE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Margaret Thatcher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marx]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186064</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The morbid legacy of Marx and Lenin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Margaret+Thatcher.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186065" alt="Margaret+Thatcher" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Margaret+Thatcher-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>Since former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away last week, small pockets of leftists have been figuratively spitting on her memory. You’ve probably seen the stories of their juvenile antics, such as drinking champagne in Trafalgar Square while holding up disrespectful signs and singing “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”</p>
<p>What are we to make of such behavior?</p>
<p>It is obvious to any mature person that such boorish shenanigans cast an unfavorable light, not on Lady Thatcher, but on those individuals who lower themselves to such self-demeaning rudeness. There are dignified ways to express one’s disagreement with Thatcher’s policies as a grateful nation prepares to honor her memory with a ceremonial funeral. An outstanding example of this more civilized approach was that of Argentina’s foreign minister, Hector Timerman. Having not been invited to the funeral due to the decades-long strained relations between his country and the UK, Timerman stated that he did not want to be there anyhow, but that the family should be allowed to mourn in peace. That was classy.</p>
<p>The left, by contrast, prefers to mark this great leader’s passing with derision and disrespect. Part of this is due to simple ignorance combined with a failure of decency.  I am thinking here of twenty-something Britons, who have no personal recollections of Thatcher’s time in office, rendering themselves ridiculous by vilifying her. These young people seem sadly ignorant of the historical reality that Thatcher’s visionary leadership and steely resolve revitalized what had become a moribund economy in the UK.</p>
<p>These kids have acted on hearsay. They have had a parent or teacher tell them that the Iron Lady was mean and that she stepped on people. That calumny is the standard refrain of older Britons, such as trade unionists and Oxford dons, who never forgave Thatcher for cutting off or reducing the flow of government subsidies to them. What the young people denigrating Thatcher don’t understand is that Thatcher did not set out to lay a burden on those formerly privileged constituencies, but rather to lift off the burden that those special interest groups had laid on the beleaguered British taxpayer. To use contemporary terminology, the dons and unionists were cronies of politicians who had channeled large flows of tax monies to them for decades. Today, the left rightly denounces the corruption of political cronyism and the lining of pockets of special interest groups. To be consistent, they should salute Thatcher for having taken on the special interests, reducing cronyism, providing relief to taxpayers, and reinvigorating the UK’s economy.</p>
<p>Besides immaturity, ignorance, spite, and revenge, there is another motive for the unseemly anti-Thatcher eruptions—the reason why the left’s ugly behavior should not be surprising: The left loves to hate. This is their essence, the deformed heart of their ideology.</p>
<p>The leftist penchant for personal vilification dates back at least as far as to Karl Marx. According to Bertolt Brecht, Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” He also was an avid practitioner of the ad hominem attack—the preferred weapon of those who can’t win arguments through reason and logic.</p>
<p>Marx crushed his rivals for intellectual leadership of the socialist movement by ridiculing their theories as “utopian” while insisting that his own version of socialism was “scientific.” What a farce! Remember, Marx had written in “The German Ideology” (1845), “&#8230;in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” He also insisted in “The Communist Manifesto” that the way to make the state disappear was to give all power to the state. Marx was nothing more than a mystic whose “scientific socialism” was fraudulent (an author named Fred Gottheil once catalogued Marx’ historical predictions and found that, out of 325, only six had proven correct); hence, the only way Marx could prevail was to resort to the scorched-earth tactic of verbally abusing and annihilating his opponents—a tactic retained by his intellectual heirs.</p>
<p>Lenin made the centrality of hatred in leftist movements chillingly explicit. In 1923, he told the Soviet commissars of education, “We must teach our children to hate.  Hatred is the basis of communism.”  In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin baldly asserted that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”</p>
<p>The hateful spirit of Marx and Lenin has suffused all leftist ideologies, movements, and regimes, whether Soviet communism, Hitler’s national socialism, or today’s illiberal progressivism and pagan environmentalism.  Only hatred could explain the willingness to kill, enslave, and rob vast numbers of innocent human beings.  Hatred corrodes one’s conscience.  Under its toxic influence, a person will regard man’s God-given right to be secure in his life, liberty, and property as nuisances to be overcome, not commandments to be obeyed.  The flip side of hatred is an inflated self-love, self-importance and self-righteousness so extreme that respect for other human beings diminishes and, in extreme cases (Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim, <i>et al</i>.), disappears.</p>
<p>Hatemongering is alive and well on the left today. American leftists, aping the deviousness of Marx himself, protest “hate crimes,” then proceed to foment hatred for right-thinking Americans. Thus, they churn out bilge like “The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh…Reader,” “The I Hate Dick Cheney…Reader,” and “The I Hate George W. Bush Reader.” In fact, now that the Ku Klux Klan has (thankfully!) petered out, the anti-communist-hating American left appears to have taken over as our country’s most virulent hate group.</p>
<p>British leftists have been demonstrating their hate and wretchedness by trying to detract from the solemnity and dignity of the funeral of one of the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s great leaders. I think, though, that their boorishness has backfired. By displaying their morbid glee on the occasion of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing, they unwittingly have paid her a great tribute. For leftists to have made such a big deal about the death of an elderly lady who has been out of the public realm for more than two decades, shows how great and effective she was as a champion of individual liberty, true justice, and smaller government. In this perverse way, the left’s ungracious display of pettiness is the greatest salute they could give to Margaret Thatcher. I think the Iron Lady would be pleased that she earned this backhanded compliment.</p>
<p>Now, while the leftists stew in their own pathetic, self-imposed unhappiness, the rest of us can celebrate a life well-lived and remember with gratitude a principled leader who did so much for so many. Bravo, Mrs. Thatcher. Well done!</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>Palestinian Stone Attacks and Double Standards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/palestinian-stone-attacks-and-double-standards/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinian-stone-attacks-and-double-standards</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:07:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stoning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=184935</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Only when it is used against Israelis is stoning not seen as a violation of human rights. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/palestinian-stone-attacks-and-double-standards/enhanced-buzz-29192-1275507965-8/" rel="attachment wp-att-184936"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184936" title="enhanced-buzz-29192-1275507965-8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/enhanced-buzz-29192-1275507965-8.jpg" alt="" width="253" height="185" /></a>When it comes to Israel there’s a perpetual double-standard that exists. And indeed today there seems to be a debate about whether stone-throwing is violent and can be deadly. In Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates execution by stoning is a legal punishment.</p>
<p>Wikipedia defines stoning as “a method of execution in which an organized group throws stones or rocks at the person they wish to execute. Although it takes many different forms, stoning has been used throughout history and in many religious and cultural traditions as a kind of community justice or capital punishment.” Stones kill and are indeed dangerous and violent.</p>
<p>In the past, Amnesty International has called upon countries not to abuse human rights by renouncing the use of stoning as a punishment.  Even a <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/index.cfm">Public Relations</a> pro who works in spin wouldn’t possibly debate the fact that stoning is a violent, potentially deadly crime.</p>
<p>Indeed, there are so many examples: In March, headlines in Kashmir, India blared that police charged four people with murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for throwing rocks at cars. There is a massive man-hunt in place to find two other stone-throwers who have not yet been captured.</p>
<p>In a 2010 video that circulated online widely in northwest Pakistan, a woman was stoned to death by Taliban members.  Her crime was being seen out with a man, and State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, &#8220;We condemn in the strongest possible terms the brutal stoning of a woman in Orakzai, Pakistan. &#8230; The vicious attack &#8230; is a chilling example of the cowardly disregard violent extremists have for human life.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;The stoning of this couple is a heinous crime. The Taliban and other insurgent groups are growing increasingly brutal in their abuses against Afghans,&#8221; said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International&#8217;s Asia-Pacific Director.</p>
<p>An international women’s rights’ organization, “The Violence is Not Our Culture Campaign,” was launched in 2007 in Istanbul and they state that “Stoning is a grave and serious violation of International Human Rights Law. Stoning breeches the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights (1966).” In that same year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said, “Stoning is in clear violation of international law.” A young mother found guilty of adultery in Sudan was sentenced to death by stoning and there was an outcry from human rights organizations. At the time, Amnesty International said: &#8220;Stoning is a method of execution designed to increase the suffering of the victim, which means it is an extreme and cruel form of torture.”</p>
<p>America is clear about rocks. American border patrol police are on the record as saying they “<a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/11/24/165822846/border-killings-prompt-scrutiny-over-use-of-force">considers rock-throwing to be deadly force which sometimes demands the same in response</a>.”  And rest assured, anyone who disagrees should throw rocks at their local police station – will anyone be amazed when they are shot?</p>
<p>Day after day, stoning occurs in Israel, and the Palestinian Arabs are emblazoned with title “non-violent protestors.” Yet, these are indeed very violent attacks, and stone throwers are violent terrorists. As Israeli Cabinet member <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/06/ideologists-in-defense-of-naftali-bennett-and-yair-lapid/">Naftali Bennett</a> said, “Rocks kill… Some people take rock throwing lightly, and prevent action against them. Rock throwers are trying to murder and they need to be treated accordingly.”</p>
<p>Worldwide, stoning is dangerous and human-rights organizations denounce stone-throwing.  They should do precisely the same when stones are directed at Jews in Israel.</p>
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