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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Democracy</title>
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		<title>Talking About ‘the Moroccan Issue’ Is Not a Crime</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/geert-wilders/talking-about-the-moroccan-issue-is-not-a-crime/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=talking-about-the-moroccan-issue-is-not-a-crime</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2014 05:20:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Geert Wilders]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[morocco]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wilders]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247966</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A democracy must allow for the frank discussion of the problems it faces.]]></description>
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<div id="wsj-article-wrap" class="article-wrap" data-sbid="SB10912639172741004777804580345643490257412">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/wilders-marked.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247969" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/wilders-marked.jpg" alt="wilders-marked" width="174" height="259" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://online.wsj.com/home-page">wsj.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Four years ago I was taken to court in the Netherlands on hate-crime charges. After a trial that lasted almost two years, I was finally acquitted. But the case cost me a lot of time and energy that, as an elected politician, I would rather have devoted to my parliamentary work.</p>
<p>Now, just as my Party for Freedom (PVV) is taking the lead in the polls and the Dutch government is facing serious political difficulties, the public prosecutor is again bringing me to court, this time for asking my party supporters, during a PVV electoral meeting in March, whether they want more or fewer Moroccans in the country.</p>
<p>This question needs to be understood in proper context.</p>
<p>In the Netherlands, as in many other Western European countries right now, problems arise when Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate and integrate into the wider community. In our case I referred specifically to the Moroccans not because I have anything against them generally but because they are one of the largest immigrant groups here and are overrepresented in our crime and welfare statistics.</p>
<p>Moroccans are suspects in violent robberies 22 times as often as indigenous Dutch. Between 1996 and 2010, more than 60% of the Moroccan male youths born in 1984 had at least once been suspected of a crime, a rate three times as high as their indigenous counterparts. Meanwhile, 14% of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 64 is dependent on welfare, compared with 9% for the Turks and 3% for the indigenous Dutch. According to Dick Schoof, the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism and security, Moroccans also account for three-quarters of all Dutch Muslims who leave for Syria to wage jihad.</p>
<p>The Dutch often refer to this problem as the “Moroccan issue.” If instead the Americans were the largest group of immigrants refusing to assimilate in the Netherlands, we would no doubt be referring to it as “the American issue.”</p>
<p>For almost a decade, my party has proposed three measures to address this issue. First, we want an end to immigration from Mulslim countries. Second, we want to expel all criminals of foreign nationality and, for those offenders who have dual nationality, deprive them of their Dutch citizenship, sending them back to the country of their other nationality. Third, we want to encourage the voluntary repatriation of non-Western immigrants.</p>
<p>These three measures don’t target any particular ethnic group, but given the demographics in our country it would immediately entail the presence of fewer Moroccans. Hence my question: “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?” I never advocated that all Moroccans should leave. Nor do I object to every Moroccan. The decision to prosecute me for insulting an ethnic group and inciting hatred and discrimination is preposterous.</p>
<p>The prosecutor’s decision can’t be seen as being anything but politically motivated, especially when he has refused to prosecute two leading politicians of the governing Labor Party, Diederik Samsom and Hans Spekman, for similar statements on Moroccans. Mr. Samsom said that Moroccans have an “ethnic monopoly” on street crime, while Mr. Spekman said that Moroccans who don’t abide by the law have to be “humiliated in front of their own people.”</p>
<p>Polls have indicated that more than 43% of Netherlanders agree with me. I was thus expressing the feelings of millions in my country. In a democracy, a public debate about important political issues, such as “the Moroccan issue,” shouldn’t be restricted by criminalizing the expression of certain problems and policy proposals.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, political debate is now being increasingly restricted, not just in the Netherlands but across many European countries. Laws limiting freedom of expression, including the freedom of political debate, are introduced to protect subjective rights such as the right of certain groups to not feel offended, preventing the open discussion of pressing problems like those that arise from large-scale immigration across Western Europe. The unwillingness to address such problems is leading to the growth of parties, similar to my own PVV, in many other Western countries.</p>
<p>And existing laws are being applied ever more vigorously. Earlier this month, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the existing Dutch penal laws not only criminalize incitement to hatred and discrimination but also “incitement to intolerance.”</p>
<p>I don’t believe in political self-censorship. During the past 10 years, I have drawn attention to the problems that Dutch citizens experience related to integration, immigration and the Islamization of our society. And I have paid, and continue to pay, a very high price for it. For more than a decade now I have lived under constant police protection because I am on the death list of several Islamist terror groups. However, I will never let anyone silence me, no matter the consequences. My voters have elected me to express their concerns, and that is what I will do.</p>
<p>Prosecuting me as an elected politician for expressing the opinions of my constituents is absurd. Excluding certain problems from the political debate by making it a crime to discuss them won’t lead to the disappearance of these concerns, let alone contribute to a solution. This prosecution, moreover, is also dangerous. People will begin to lose their trust in the democratic process. Festering political problems do not go away simply because they are kept in a dark corner. I wish the Dutch public prosecutor had been wise enough to see that.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don’t miss <strong>Geert Wilders</strong> on the <strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Glazov Gang</a></strong> discuss <strong>&#8220;The West&#8217;s Battle for Freedom&#8221;</strong>:</em></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Give Back the Senate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:54:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244889</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats, and now that they have, it&#8217;s time to give it back to its rightful owners&#8230;</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Join Bill Whittle in his latest Firewall, where he shows how destructive the Progressive Amendments have been &#8212; especially the Seventeenth Amendment. Find out why it matters! See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DUOGdBgeB14" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody, I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats. And now that they have, it’s time to give it back. Not to the Democrats. And not even to we, the people. No, now that Republicans have the Senate, it would be nice if actual conservatives lead the fight to return the Senate to its rightful owners.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See these ancient old prudes? These are Progressives. Yes, they were ancient old prudes even back in the Progressive era, around the turn of the last century. Now modern Progressives are a little better exfoliated and botoxed, of course, but they have in common with these proto-Progressives that same fiery look in the eye — which is that genetic defect of getting all excited about telling other people what to do — for their own good, naturally.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((WINK))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive Era gave us the Progressive Amendments to the Constitution — which, looked at individually, show just how envious Progressives are, how prudish they are, and how tyrannical they are.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The 16th Amendment gave us the income tax, which, when you think about it, doesn’t even penalize the rich — which was, of course their goal then as it is today. No, taking income penalizes hard work, and the harder you work, the more you get penalized. So next time you get your paycheck, take a look at the raw amount before withholdings. Thank the Progressives for what you don’t take home.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Eighteenth Amendment — Prohibition — was the first time the Constitution was changed to actually take away a freedom: the freedom to get lit so that you didn’t have to listen to these Progressive harpies whine and complain day and night. But this freedom — the God-given freedom to have beer at the end of a hard day — was a little too precious, a little too near-and-dear to give up, so the eighteenth amendment was repealed by the twenty first Amendment. And don’t forget that: freedom can come back sometimes — if you miss it enough.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the real damage was done by the Seventeenth Amendment, changing Article one, section three of the Constitution, which stated that U.S. Senators were to be elected by the legislatures of each state. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that to make US Senators electable by the people of the state.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Democracy! Now the people have a voice in Washington, not just the rich fat cats in the state legislatures! Hooray for democracy! And that is how Progressives steal freedom: they do it in the name of democracy. They’re very good at it now: they ought to be — they’ve had a lot of practice.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, first, those fat cats in the legislatures were in fact elected by the people of their state, so there’s some democracy for you right there.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the main problem is, the people already had a voice in Washington: it’s called the House of Representatives. They’re elected directly by the people, every two years, and the more people a state has, the more representatives that state has in the House.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was never intended to represent the people. The senate was supposed to represent the states: that’s why Wyoming, with roughly five hundred thousand people, has two senators, and California, with roughly seventy-six times as many people — also has two senators.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Seventeenth Amendment made the Senate utterly redundant. Now it’s kind of a retirement home for lifers; the House of Lords with six year terms that get further and further away from the people that elected them and who sit in a sort of royal court being serenaded by special interest groups in DC steakhouses.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was designed to protect the power of the states because the more power the states have, the less power the Federal government has — and vice versa. But progressives can’t leave people alone, you see? They have to take their income, and tell them whether they can drink or not, or what kind of health insurance they have to buy, or how big a soda they can have, and what kind of car to drive and all the rest. And in order to do that, they need the coercive power of central authority — which meant destruction of the power of the states. After all, you can’t force people not to gamble, drink, or whore around if they can just move to Nevada!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To paraphrase H.L Menken, that’s the Progressive nightmare: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may escape being told what to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Our founders weren’t the idiots we have in Washington today. They knew what kind of people go into politics — control-freak weenies, that’s what kind — and they set up legal and structural barriers to put limits on just how much power jug-eared narcissists, sleazy used-car salesmen and dimwitted botoxed harpies can actually accumulate. We need to get that power back to the states, so that if you don’t like the way they roll in Tulsa you can move to San Francisco and visa versa.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">We repealed the Eighteenth Amendment — we can repeal the Seventeenth as well, because only the states are powerful enough to stop this Federal government from enforcing that Progressive utopia: a country where anything that is not forbidden is mandatory.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So kick back, relax, have a drink and think it over.</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>Juan Cole’s ‘New Arab’ Fantasies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/juan-coles-new-arab-fantasies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=juan-coles-new-arab-fantasies</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2014 04:07:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243790</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The vain search for lasting democracy in the Middle East. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/juan-cole.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243791" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/juan-cole-450x307.jpg" alt="juan-cole" width="355" height="242" /></a>The “advent of a new generation” of Arabs was the overly optimistic theme for University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole’s recent <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=otj666baaa043fca648f191abced399970924#bookmark=http://www.gwu.edu/~imes/events/IMES.cfm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">lecture</span></a> at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Relations.  Cole’s discussion of his new <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Arabs-Millennial-Generation/dp/1451690398"><span style="color: #0433ff;">book</span></a>, <i>The New Arabs:  How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East</i>, to an audience of about fifty, mostly Elliot School students, failed to substantiate his ongoing hopes for the so-called Arab Spring.</p>
<p>Elliot School professor <a href="http://elliott.gwu.edu/gnehm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Edward W. (Skip) Gnehm</span></a> introduced Cole as a Middle East expert who is popular on television, a supposedly confidence inspiring credential. Cole focused on Tunisia, noting that this comparatively small North African country with no oil resources had received “insufficient press.”  His main concern was “youth revolutionaries,” as the Arab press termed Arab Spring regime opponents in Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Cole began by claiming that a “relatively successful . . . transition away from authoritarianism” under the “Ben Ali clique,” who were “basically bank robbers,” had marked Tunisia’s Arab Spring.  Nonetheless, Tunisia is still “on a tightrope,” he added, as some Tunisian regions are prone to violence and Tunisia’s neighbor Libya also presents dangers.  The “Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror” previously described in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-cole-arab-spring-millenials-20140629-story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Cole’s writings</span></a> “have . . . dashed” the Arab Spring’s “bright hopes” in Libya and elsewhere.  Elliot School professor <a href="http://elliott.gwu.edu/part-time-faculty-l"><span style="color: #0433ff;">William Lawrence</span></a> noted in a post-lecture conversation that Libya’s parliament has now fled the capital Tripoli for a Greek <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/09/libyas-exiled-government-is-living-inside-a-car-ferry/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">car ferry</span></a> moored in Tobruk.  However, in December 2011, Cole stated erroneously that the “Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration.”</p>
<p>Cole contrasted Libya with Tunisia, calling the new 2014 Tunisian <a href="http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articledetails.aspx?aid=577"><span style="color: #0433ff;">constitution</span></a> “very good on paper” and “very nicely worded.”  The “secularists won” in defeating attempts to codify sharia, which Cole dubiously compared to Catholic canon law, as well as a gender “complementarity” clause.  “The feminists in the room know what that means,” Cole said of the latter, before equating the “party of the Muslim religious right,” Tunisia’s Islamist, pro-jihadist <a href="http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/09/13/moderates-or-manipulators-tunisias-ennahda-islamists/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ennahda Party</span></a>, initial supporter of both measures, with American conservatives.</p>
<p>But Cole conveniently omitted key passages of Tunisia’s constitution, including the opening traditional Islamic invocation, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”  Other passages stipulate Tunisia’s “Islamic-Arab identity” and “civilizational affiliation to the Arab-Islamic nation.”  The preamble also supports “just liberation movements . . . against all forms of occupation and racism,” whose “forefront . . . is the Palestinian liberation movement.”  Article 1, which “cannot be amended,” further proclaims that Tunisia’s “religion is Islam” while Article 6 denotes state duty “to protect the sacred.”</p>
<p>Tunisia’s regionally unique “broad spectrum of politics” includes “militant” secularists, even though Ennahda won a thirty-seven percent plurality in the October 23, 2011 constitutional assembly <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/11/20111114171420907168.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">elections</span></a>, Cole observed.  “People will say things in Tunisia that if you said them in Cairo you certainly would be killed” by some Muslim vigilante, he noted.  Yet even Tunisia “pushing the boundaries,” erroneously compared by Cole with American history, has its limits.  A television broadcast of <i>Persepolis</i> depicting God as an old man brought a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/tunisian-who-showed-persepolis-on-tv-fined-in-free-speech-case/2012/05/03/gIQA0GpzyT_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">blasphemy conviction</span></a>, he warned.</p>
<p>Cole contrasted his book’s focus on “secular, leftist movements” with what he called the media’s obsession with the “Arab world—Muslim barbarians,” but audience questions prompted him to address the role of Islam.  “I can’t deny that religious themes are very important in politics” in Iraq now, Cole conceded.  Yet Shiites and Sunnis killing each other over theology “just doesn’t seem to me . . . the way the world works,” he incorrectly concluded.</p>
<p>Cole praised the Middle East’s “new political generation,” noting that, according to polls, it’s “significantly less religiously observant” than previous generations.  He warned, however, that democracy is “not necessarily . . . breaking out.” Elaborating on his Arab variant of the secularization thesis (refuted throughout history), he added that countries like Saudi Arabia and Libya had urbanized in past decades.</p>
<p>“At this point in the American Revolution, the British still had Staten Island,” was Cole’s ahistorical Middle East/America comparison.  Presidential term limits in Egypt’s new constitution, for example, show that “things are changing a little bit.”  Events are “still changing . . . fluid,” and it’s “too early to call” on renaming the Arab Spring the “Islamic Winter.”</p>
<p>Despite Cole’s wishful thinking and strained comparisons of Arab upheaval with American political history, the Middle East’s road to liberty under law will remain rocky.  Small, atypically secular Tunisia’s narrow democratic success does not justify Cole’s optimism that the Middle East will develop open societies freed from Islamic atavism.  While the Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife Cole consistently downplays ravages Iraq, Syria, and beyond, jihadists hail from Saudi Arabia, other urbanized parts of the Middle East, and the West.  As with Arab Spring Libya, Cole will certainly err again.</p>
<p><i>Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the</i> <a href="http://www.thelawfareproject.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Lawfare Project</i></span></a><i>; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod. He wrote this essay for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Campus Watch</i></span></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Middle East Forum</i></span></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></p>
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		<title>The President We Deserve?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-president-we-deserve/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-president-we-deserve</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242418</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will Americans choose a difference course for the country this election season? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/8C9521234-131028-obama-healthcare-331p.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242420" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/8C9521234-131028-obama-healthcare-331p-443x350.jpg" alt="Image: U.S. President Obama walks to speak about the Affordable Care Act at the White House in Washington" width="339" height="268" /></a>In 1920 H.L Mencken wrote prophetically, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”</p>
<p>Like the long tradition of antidemocrats from Plato to Founding Father Fisher Ames, Mencken believed that a democratic leader would reflect the self-interested aims and passions of the necessarily mediocre mass of voters. The disaster of Barack Obama’s administration invites reflection on the truth of this proposition.</p>
<p>Obama’s narcissistic self-regard by now is obvious to all but the most besotted of tingle-down-my-leg, smartest-president-ever, trousers-crease-bedazzled Obamaboppies, as Mark Steyn calls them. Obama’s favorite words are “I,” “me,” and “my,” except of course when he’s dodging responsibility for his failures, as he did recently when he blamed his intelligence agencies for his own neglect of the growing threat from Islamic State in northern Iraq. He’s still blaming George W. Bush for many other failures, most recently when he blamed him for the lack of a status of forces agreement with Iraq––something he really didn’t want so he could brag, as he did in 2011, “<span style="color: #272727;">The tide of war is receding. Now, even as we remove our last troops from Iraq, we’re beginning to bring our troops home from Afghanistan . . . Our troops are finally coming home.” A year later he made this political calculation explicit when he said of the SOF agreement during the foreign policy presidential debate, “</span><span style="color: #343434;">What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down.”</span></p>
<p>Dodging accountability and refusing to confess one’s mistakes are classic signs of the egomaniac. So too is seeking out audiences that uncritically accept one’s own estimation of personal greatness. That’s why the president prefers fund-raisers to governing. It’s not just about garnering money for his party; it’s also about bathing in the waves of adulation from the carefully selected audience of fans. That’s certainly more gratifying than sitting through the Presidential Daily Briefings, 56% of which he missed in his first term, and 62% in his second. George W. Bush, in comparison, almost never missed the PDB.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">And when someone does get by the gatekeepers and asks an even slightly challenging question, Obama gets a bit snappish, as those convinced of their own brilliance are wont to do. For example, when asked at a recent town-hall gathering about double-digit rate-increases for health care, he sniffed, </span>“The question is whether you guys are shopping effectively enough.” It’s your fault, not mine. So too when his handlers can’t control the questions, as in presidential debates. There he relies on juvenile snarkiness to defend his amour propre. Remember when he responded to Mitt Romney’s warning about Russia, which recent events have proven prescient? “The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back,” he jeered with the air of a junior-high witling.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;"><span style="color: #272727;">Overestimating one’s abilities, however, is the most obvious indication of crippling self-regard. Way back in 2008 Obama sent us a very clear signal of what would make him a dangerous president: </span>“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Such a preposterous statement, proven false by the events of the last 6 years, points us to the reasons for those failures––his unwillingness to listen to advice from anyone other than his servile courtiers. As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in his new book, Obama and his spaniel advisors refused to listen to Panetta and military commanders about the importance of leaving a residual force in Iraq. Instead, the administration gave up on securing an agreement it didn’t want in the first place, choosing the self-flattering political narrative about “ending the war” over the long-term strategic dangers of walking away from the still fragile political order in Baghdad.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;">But why should Obama question himself, when his closest and most trusted advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has gone on record with astonishing claims about the president’s brilliance? The following statement from 2010 is one of the most embarrassing displays of toadying I know of outside a Versailles fop or a Hollywood press agent:</p>
<blockquote><p>I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.</p></blockquote>
<p>We know now that this whole encomium is false in every detail––except for the claim that Obama “knows” that all Jarrett’s claims are true. In a position as powerful as the presidency of the world’s greatest economic and military power, such self-delusion is lethal.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;">Obama’s claim to his own brilliance, reinforced by enablers like Jarrett, brings us to the issue of intelligence. With his typical hyperbolic sarcasm, Mencken uses the word “moron.” But the problem with Obama is not his level of intelligence, which I suspect is above average. Rather, Obama’s mind has never been properly trained. Like physical strength, intellectual development needs resistance. The novice needs to be regularly scolded that his callow opinions and interpretations are badly argued or uninformed, and then sent off to improve them. Does anyone think that an affirmative action admit like Obama was ever subjected to such ego-wounding criticism? I’ve been in the university for 40 years, and I’ve seen repeatedly the anxious cossetting, inflation of ability, tender solicitude for feelings, and unwillingness to apply rigorous standards when it comes to minority students, what George Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” All Obama has had to do is show up, and white people have done the rest.</p>
<p>Back in 2008 we had an example of this dynamic when esteemed presidential historian Michael Beschloss––a Harvard-trained holder of numerous prestigious fellowships and visiting scholar positions––claimed Obama had the highest I.Q. of any president ever, without having a clue about what his I.Q. actually is. For the rest of us, there is scant evidence of this brilliance. No college transcripts, no LSAT scores, no peer-reviewed articles, nothing other than a couple of books of uncertain authorship.</p>
<p>We do have, however, Obama’s astonishing blunders like “there are 57 states; Canada has a president; ‘Austrian’ is a language; America is ‘20 centuries’ old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He’s called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be ‘unprecedented’ for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress,” as Jack Kelly has <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/25/obama_is_not_that_bright_114271.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">written.</span></a> And let’s not forget the “intercontinental railroad” and the reference in the 2009 Cairo speech to Muslims in 15<sup>th</sup> century Córdoba decades after they had been driven away. Such mistakes bespeak not a stupid mind, but a lazy and untrained one completely lacking in Socratic self-awareness of how much it doesn’t know but only thinks it knows.</p>
<p>Obama will be history in 2 years, so the real question is whether Mencken was right when he said that such a president reflects the “inner soul” of a democratic people. Has narcissistic self-regard become a defining characteristic of the American people, as Christopher Lasch argued in his 1979 book <i>The Culture of Narcissism</i>? Is the electorate dominated by what Rush Limbaugh calls the “low-information voter,” as Ilya Somin documents in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Political-Ignorance-Smaller-Government/dp/0804786615/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1412525981&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=democracy+and+political+ignorance"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Democracy and Political Ignorance</i>,</span></a> published last year? In short, is the antidemocratic charge that “Among the common people [is] the greatest ignorance,” as the Athenian called the Old Oligarch wrote around 450 B.C., really true?</p>
<p>The next 2 elections may give us an answer to that question. Perhaps the residual common sense of Americans, once awakened by increasing crises at home and abroad, will reassert itself, and prove Abe Lincoln correct: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Let’s hope the future proves Lincoln a better prophet than Mencken.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy of Empty Words</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[For America's enemies, actions speak louder than rhetoric. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240426" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001-450x337.jpg" alt="1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001" width="316" height="237" /></a></p>
<p><em>“When force threatens, talk is no good.”</em></p>
<p>That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.</p>
<p>Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.</p>
<p>Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?</p>
<p>Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”</p>
<p>Commensurate with this undercutting of America’s armed forces have been Obama’s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. “Leading from behind” in Libya, the vanishing “red line” in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin “that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,” the “no strategy” gaffe about the “jayvee” jihadists of the Islamic State–– all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria’s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama’s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words “inspire greater distrust” in everyone except our enemies?</p>
<p>Of course, Obama’s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed “to establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I’m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of “several thousand” NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn’t acting now, what makes anyone think this special “spearhead force” will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force “is a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.”</p>
<p>And haven’t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man “rapid reaction force” the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having “cowboy” Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it’s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged “deterrent” will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over “austerity” budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, “most details of the force . . . remained to be settled.” But don’t worry, NATO leaders have “committed” to spending the 2% on defense they “committed” to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.</p>
<p>“Word, words, words,” as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don’t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming––a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.</p>
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		<title>The UN&#8217;s Perversion of Human Rights</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-uns-perversion-of-human-rights/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-uns-perversion-of-human-rights</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Sep 2014 04:02:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Investigating the IDF instead of Hamas for "war crimes."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/22nd-session-of-the-human-rights-council-at-the-united-nations-in-geneva.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240429" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/22nd-session-of-the-human-rights-council-at-the-united-nations-in-geneva-450x328.jpg" alt="Delegates talk before the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva" width="296" height="216" /></a>If one doubted that the world has gone topsy-turvy, where good is being persecuted and evil labeled as victim, all that is needed for proof is to consider the behavior and actions of the United Nations (UN), and especially the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where non-democratic regimes hold sway, and Israel is the habitual scape-goat. What is over the top, however, is the UN decision to send an Inquiry Committee to investigate alleged “war crimes” committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the recent Protective Edge operation in Gaza.</p>
<p><i>Reuters</i> reported (Monday, August 11, 2014) that the UN named experts to an international commission of inquiry into possible human rights violations and war crimes committed by both sides during Israel&#8217;s military offensive in the Gaza Strip. The so-called “experts” include William Schabas, a Canadian professor of international law who will head the panel, and Doudou Diene, a Senegalese veteran UN human rights expert.  Amal Alamuddin, a British-Lebanese lawyer engaged to be married to Hollywood actor George Clooney was also named, but Alamuddin has announced she will not be participating in the inquiry.</p>
<p>While the fighting in Gaza was ongoing and Hamas was firing rockets daily at civilians throughout Israel, the UNHRC had already condemned Israel. Its resolution was adopted by a vote of 29 states in favor, 1 against, and 17 abstentions. It stated that “The Council strongly condemns the failure of Israel, the occupying power, to end its prolonged occupation of occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem; and condemned in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic, and <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14897&amp;LangID=E"><span style="color: #0433ff;">gross violation</span></a> of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli military operations carried out in the occupied Palestinian Territory since 13 June 2014 that may amount to international crimes, directly resulting in the killing of more than 650 Palestinians, most of them civilians…” Throughout the resolution Hamas’ name was not mentioned nor was it pointed out that Hamas provoked the conflict by deliberately firing rockets at Israel.</p>
<p>Even before the Israeli–Hamas ceasefire agreement went into effect, the UNHRC in Geneva rushed to set up a kangaroo court headed by the blatantly anti-Israel William Schabas. The same Schabas said last year that he “would like to see <a href="http://mida.org.il/2014/08/13/schabas-netanyahu-head/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Netanyahu</span></a> within the dock of the International Criminal Court.” Confronted by a reporter on his visceral hatred of Netanyahu, Schabas explained that he was echoing the Goldstone Report that related to Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009, except that it was Ehud Olmert and not Netanyahu who served as Prime Minister then. When asked if he considered Hamas a terrorist organization and whether Hamas too, will be investigated, Schabas declined to respond.</p>
<p>Speaking before Israeli naval cadets on Tuesday (September 2, 2014), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the UN hypocrisy. He stated that “All of you IDF soldiers are part of the most moral army in the world, and we will stand against any attempts of hypocritical organizations to criticize you. If the <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/184691"><span style="color: #0433ff;">UN</span></a> wants to set up a commission of inquiry – let them investigate Hamas’ war crimes instead of the Israeli soldiers who behaved in an exemplary manner.”</p>
<p>In the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), both the coalition and the opposition criticized the UN for dispatching a commission of inquiry to Gaza to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. They were likewise critical of the appointed head of the commission William Schabas, whose biased statement against Israeli leaders made the commission nothing but a kangaroo court.</p>
<p>During the Protective Edge operation in Gaza last month, the IDF dropped leaflets in 14 areas in Gaza, urging residents to temporarily leave their homes. The IDF provided instructions as to which areas civilians may go to in order to seek safety. Juxtapose that with the Hamas’ behavior of deliberately risking the lives of its people by using them as human shields, which is in contravention of international law and constitutes a war crime.</p>
<p>British army Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan had this to say (July 27, 2014) about the IDF, “I believe that on the basis of everything that I&#8217;ve seen, that everything the IDF does to <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4548821,00.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">protect civilians</span></a> and to stop the death of innocent civilians is a great deal more than any other army, and it&#8217;s more than the British and the American armies.”</p>
<p>What is most disturbing about the UNHRC is the hypocrisy when it comes to Israel. The UNHRC Commission of Inquiry on Syria presented its findings on August 27, 2014. In it was a detailed human cost of the Syrian conflict. It charged that both the Assad regime and the opposition groups, and in particular the fanatical jihadist ISIS, were responsible for mass killings (170,000 at the minimum), civilian suffering and disregard for the safety of women and children. ISIS in particular committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, murder, enslavement of women, public executions, amputations, lashing in public squares, and training children as young as ten in military camps.</p>
<p>While the truth about ISIS committing war crimes and crimes against humanity have been largely revealed, those committed by Hamas (publicly executing 20 Palestinians for alleged collaboration with Israel) in Gaza have not, at least not by UNHRC. Professor Michael Curtis pointed out that Hamas’ relentless aggression against Israeli civilians was publically exposed on July 9, 2014 by Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian representative to the UNHRC. Khraishi stated that “The rockets fired from Gaza toward Israel are each and every one a <a href="http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5197/comparing_crimes_against_humanity_hamas_and_isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">crime against humanity</span></a> whether they hit or miss, because they are directed at civilian targets. That is why Israel resorted to an attack against Gaza.”</p>
<p>Hamas, with total disregard for its civilian population, stored rockets in hospitals, schools, and mosques, as well as in apartment buildings and private homes. It used the civilians at these locations as human shields, anticipating that an Israeli retaliation (following over 4000 rockets fired at Israel) would kill Palestinian civilians, particularly women and children. Hamas sacrificed its people in order to win the public relations war. Still, the international media by and large bought into Hamas’ charade. Hamas’ cynical exploitation of its civilian deaths, its use of human shields, and the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>To understand the perversion that is the UNHRC, let us look at the UN as a whole. Of the 193 member states, 120 belong to the Non-Allied Movement (NAM) and of the 120, 57 are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which in turn is dominated by the 22 Arab League states. Arab/Muslim leverage has turned the UN into a blunt instrument against Israel. The 29 states who voted in favor of the blatantly prejudiced resolution are non-free states according to the Freedom House. The U.S. was the only state to vote against the resolution. The European Union states of Britain, France, Germany and Italy, all with a colonial past, and beset by guilt, abstained. They were fearful to upset the NAM.</p>
<p>The UNHRC is probably the best example of a world gone topsy-turvy. The non-free nations run the show at the UN while the free democracies cower before them. In the process, Israel, a country with a just cause, a praise worthy democracy in a sea of oppression, is being scapegoated and condemned. It is time for nations seeking justice and fairness to end this bizarre show called UNHRC, and reestablish a UNHRC based on nations with bona fide human rights credentials.</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>Mob Rule and Free Stuff from Athens to Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/mob-rule-and-free-stuff-from-athens-to-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mob-rule-and-free-stuff-from-athens-to-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 04:56:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Athens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton’s "Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents" exposes the perils of populism and the voting booth. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239500" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover-233x350.jpg" alt="democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover" width="201" height="302" /></a><strong>The David Horowitz Freedom Center will be hosting an evening with Bruce Thornton in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014. For more information, click <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/evening-reception-and-talk-with-bruce-thornton-tickets-12467323099">here</a>. </strong></p>
<p>21<sup>st</sup> century Americans have come to take democracy for granted as one of the comforts of modern life, like electricity or plastic, a thing that exists unconsidered as the foundation of their convenience. You hit a light switch and the light turns on. You push a button and politicians carry out your will.</p>
<p>The wars of the last century were defined as wars for democracy and the wars of this century have also been fitted into that mold, becoming not wars against external enemies, but wars for the assertion of the popular will of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. All wars have become wars of democracy.</p>
<p>19<sup>th</sup> century America exported religion. 21<sup>st</sup> century America exports democracy.</p>
<p>Internally however democracy has degenerated into billion dollar elections fought with armies of consultants, polling firms and volunteers who expertly divide and conquer the populace through their infinite identity politics subdivisions on behalf of the wealthiest men in the country fighting to preserve and promote their status quo of a powerful central government and its oligarchic corporations.</p>
<p>The ruling left vocally demands that its leader fulfill their demands by violating the Constitution. They assert that since he won the popular vote in two elections, he can disregard the mere process of ancient laws. Democracy trumps republic just as the Democratic Party trumps the Republican Party.</p>
<p>It is this political climate of Obamaphones and attack ads, free stuff and mob rule, that Bruce Thornton enters with his new book, <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents</i>. Thornton sees a country that has tilted too far toward the populism of the voting booth and too far away from the structure of a republic. Our collision of tyranny and greed has come from the mangling of a carefully constructed lawful structure.</p>
<p>Freedom requires firewalls, not only against the direct power of government, but also against the indirect power of the popular vote through government on the freedom of the individual. We need defenses not only against the tyranny of a tyrant, but also against the tyranny of King Mob.</p>
<p>The American system created firewalls against tyranny by limiting the power of any individual, in or out of politics, to influence the system. Not only did the branches of government have to be set against each other, but the popular vote could not be allowed to so thoroughly control the system that it would become a slave to the popular will and in turn enslave every individual to the latest poll and trending topic. As America has weakened its structural defenses, it has enslaved the individual to the group.</p>
<p>In <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents,</i> Bruce Thornton traces the weaknesses of democracy from Athens to the modern revivals of democracy and the imbalances of power that they manufacture. Thornton suggests that the challenges raised by the critics of Athenian democracy remain unanswered and that those unanswered questions continue to haunt our system of government today.</p>
<p>The radical political transformations of the last century merged democratization and centralization into a soft tyranny that promised to fulfill the people’s short term wishes and needs at the expense of their autonomy. It plugged them into a collective system that exploited the populist image of democracy to erode the structural republicanism that made individual freedom and responsibility possible. The false association between political power and freedom continues to undermine our efforts, not only in the United States, but abroad where democratically elected Islamists implement populist tyrannies.</p>
<p>We think of Democracy as a means of empowering the individual and yet it’s difficult to look at the shapeless masses weeping over Obama’s election and see the individualism. The epithet of “mob rule” is often seen as an elitist critique of democracy, but it should instead be seen as an individualistic critique.</p>
<p>There is no room for the individual in the ranks of the mindless mob. Mobs operate on a hysterical consensus. They are as intolerant of the individual as any tyrant.</p>
<p>As Thornton shows us in <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents</i>, the greatest threat to democracy has always been democracy. Unmetered democratization is far likelier to end in tyranny than a republic structured and steeped in law and tradition. And if it does not end in tyranny, then its own weaknesses, its unwillingness to sacrifice comfort for the steadfast virtues, Obamaphones for armies, will undo it.</p>
<p>The progressive shift generated a soft despotism of complex systems that are built on promising to meet the needs of the people, but never quite meet them, resulting in a constantly expanding system that is forever trapped in a race between populist demagoguery, unsustainable spending and frustrated anger.</p>
<p>The system promises to save us from ourselves while dismantling the processes that would allow us to save ourselves from it.</p>
<p>As America faces threats from barbarian bands such as ISIS and from rival states such as Putin’s Russia, its politics have concentrated away from the big questions of the future and toward the immediate demands of angry mobs for the free things that they assert a primal moral entitlement to.  Like Greece and Rome, the United States is being consumed by rival factions who vie for the favor of the mob, by sybaritic despots who play at being the patrons of the citizenry even as they despoil them and who think no further than their next cup of wine or their next golf game.</p>
<p>A republic vests power in the responsible, but unmetered democratization provides endless means of shifting responsibility. The people blame the leaders for fooling them with false promises. The leaders blame their predecessors. The buck keeps being passed around until it’s worn and torn to pieces.</p>
<p>Freedom and good government cannot exist without responsibility. Thornton argues that the progressive experiment with democratization is replicating the mistakes of ancient Athens. American exceptionalism is a powerful force, but underestimating the flaws of human beings and subsuming good judgment in empty idealism is a timeless formula for destroying nations.</p>
<p>Character, it has been said, is about transforming what you need to do into what you want to do. Democratization reverses that cycle of responsibility by pandering to human weakness. If we are to retain a republic, it must be built on character, on doing what we need to do as a nation.</p>
<p>America can either be a nation of free things or free people. It can be a place that upholds the dignity of the individual or subsumes him under the clutching hands of a grasping mob prying loose the free things that they were promised by their democratic masters.</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>Illiberal Fantasies: Hungary&#8217;s Viktor Orban Embraces Authoritarianism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu-and-marius-stan/illiberal-fantasies-hungarys-viktor-orban-embraces-authoritarianism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=illiberal-fantasies-hungarys-viktor-orban-embraces-authoritarianism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2014 04:28:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hungary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Viktor Orban]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A dark turn for the post-communist nation. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Viktor-Orban.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238419" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Viktor-Orban-450x348.jpg" alt="Viktor Orban" width="216" height="167" /></a>The signals did not cease to arrive. Viktor Orban is the man who, in June 1989, gave a speech at Imre Nagy’s reburial ceremony that would endure forever in the history of Eastern Europe. He was one of the founders of the anti-totalitarian youth party Fidesz and his intellectual mentor was the well-known dissident and critical former Marxist, György Bence. And now, Orban has shifted towards a collectivist authoritarianism with pointblank xenophobic inflections.</p>
<p>Orban&#8217;s recent speech in Transylvania has led to worried comments from commentators, such as Fareed Zakaria in &#8220;Washington Post,&#8221; David Brooks in &#8220;New York Times,&#8221; and the Princeton professor Jan-Werner Muller in &#8220;Foreign Affairs.&#8221;</p>
<p>Many things in politics are born out of resentment. Orban is unmistakably a man of tremendous intellectual prowess. Yet those he perceived as some sort of urban aristocracy – the Hungarian Democratic Opposition leaders, including, first and foremost, János Kis, Gábor Demszky, and Miklós Haraszti – always gave him a strange complex. He regarded the Alliance of Free Democrats as an exclusive liberal club that he felt he was left out of. Other members of the Fidesz leadership shared the same neurotic feelings. In addition, Orban was attracted to classical liberalism and was distrustful of any form of internationalism, even a liberal or neo-conservative one.</p>
<p>Endemic corruption associated with a socialist government radicalized Viktor Orban’s phobias and apprehensions. He started to entertain more intensely the idea of populist conservatism – which in Hungary is difficult, if not impossible, to dissociate from anti-Semitism. The media close to Fidesz (which in the meantime had become an ever more traditional and traditionalist party) excelled in insinuations against those who supposedly did not pass the test of pure Hungarianness. When Jobbik – a downright fascist party – was born, all it had left to do was merely intensify as forcefully as possible topics which were already implicit in Orban’s rhetoric, including the idea that the radical left was somehow genetically constituted.</p>
<p>The Orban team began to insist on a majoritarianism that was increasingly intolerant of the opposition. The unassailable victories obtained in the elections made​ Orban less and less willing to acknowledge his own fallibility. Hungary has become gradually more provincial and ethnocracy has begun to stifle democracy. What a quarter of a century ago was the superb promise to reinvent politics through a revival of civic liberalism, now seems destined to turn into a neo-authoritarian nightmare.</p>
<p>And now, Viktor Orban announces that liberal democracy is on the skids. He has taken it upon himself to become the champion of an authoritarianism which glamourizes the Putin-inspired police model and the Chinese &#8220;market Leninism&#8221; (a term proposed by Soviet expert Peter Reddaway). Those interwar tenets endorsed by the prophets of fascism are being revived. A consistent and &#8220;ethnically&#8221; healthy body politic is being exalted. Liberalism is seen as rotten, corrupt, and decadent. This is the hour of the “magic savior,” akin to the demagogues described by Erich Fromm in his classic book on the escape from freedom.</p>
<p>What Orban seems to ignore is that NATO and the EU are not only political, military, and economic institutions, respectively. They define, as Václav Havel put it, civilization options. The battle between the open society and its enemies continues. Yet another mask has fallen, which, after all, is far from being a tragedy.</p>
<p>We might imagine that liberal democracy is built on a deeply rooted historical and intellectual foundation, but such a belief could not be further from the truth. Before 1945, the very idea of ​​“liberal democracy” was very much anathematized. In times of crisis (both moral and economic), democracy is attacked from the left and right alike. Be it critic Vladimir Lenin, critic Georges Sorel or critic Robert Michels, they all claim to stem, to a certain extent, from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and draw on the self-proclaimed image of the “genuine democrat.”</p>
<p>Orban is now such a “true democrat” (also read “original”), who nonetheless does not stumble on civil liberties or consensual-parliamentary type of deliberations. For the Hungarian prime minister, liberal democracy – with all its intermediary institutions, intermediate bodies, and parliamentary games – makes a terrible mess of the final and irretrievable fusion between – as Carl Schmitt explained in <em>The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy</em> – “the identities of the governed and the governing.” At the core of this “redemptive” political view stands none other than the mythological idea of unity (in this case, one based on ethnicity).</p>
<p>In a populist translation of Orban’s political message, the masses are looking for <em>identification</em>. The economic crisis had deepened this existential anguish. His promise, which also sounds like a prophecy, comes to provide precisely this redemptive identification. According to a very judicious remark by political scientist Jeffrey C. Isaac, all the flaws of liberal democracy “were skillfully reinterpreted as <em>virtues</em> of liberal democracy. In an almost Orwellian manner, weakness was turned into strength.” This is exactly what Viktor Orban is doing. Then, to use one of Albert Camus’s phrases, “it transforms a spontaneous burst of energy into a concerted action.”</p>
<p>What the Hungarian Prime Minister is essentially saying is that liberal democracies are reversible. That the counterpart of democratization is what we may call de-democratization (see also the summer of 2012 in Romania when only joint EU and US pressured could prevent the fulfillment of a parliamentary putsch). This, obviously, is not a complete novelty. What is actually new has to do with the metamorphosis of a politician who reached the pinnacle of power as a partisan of liberal values ​​and who morphed into an advocate for the opposite values.</p>
<p>This might sound rather harsh, but the Orban case is reminiscent of Mussolini’s conversion, a century ago, from an internationalist socialist into a nationalist fascist..At this point in his inner evolution, Viktor Orban seems “condemned to condemn.” When, in 2002, Fidesz had lost the elections, he thundered that “the nation cannot be part of the opposition.” As historian Balázs Trencsényi aptly observed as well, “Franz Joseph, Miklós Horthy, and János Kádár have all established their authority by way of terror and all have become fathers of the nation[.]”</p>
<p>Let us hope, however, that we will not slip towards what René Girard called <em>the mimetic circle of violence</em>. In this version of “goulash authoritarianism” towards which Orban’s Hungary is heading, Europe is “oppressive,” but its funds “necessary.” Unfortunately, the entire fate of Europe’s political culture depends on such increasingly frequent antidemocratic outbursts. How it will manage to resist the virus that Orban is spreading remains to be seen.</p>
<p><em>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author of numerous books, including &#8220;The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century,&#8221; published by the University of California Press in 2012 (paperback, 2014). </em></p>
<p><em>Marius Stan is a Romanian political scientist interested in revolutions, political ideologies and the transitions from communism to democracy. This essay came out on the Romanian online platform &#8220;Contributors&#8221; and was translated into English by Monica Got.</em></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 Blair Doctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-blair-doctrine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-blair-doctrine</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Apr 2014 04:56:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Blair speech]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Replacing democracy with religious freedom.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipeI.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224041" alt="ipeI" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipeI-450x313.gif" width="315" height="219" /></a>Tony Blair’s latest speech on Islam is significant as much for what it doesn’t mention as for what it does. Not long ago, a speech of this sort would have been rich with contrasts between dictatorship and democracy. Democracy, the audience would have been told solemnly, equals freedom and modernity.</p>
<p>Instead Blair mentions the word ‘democracy’ only three times.</p>
<p>The first time he’s referring to Israel and the second time he disavows the entire program of dropping elections on Muslim countries and expecting their populations to make the right choices. Instead he argues,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Democracy cannot function except as a way of thinking as well as voting. You put your view; you may lose; you try to win next time; or you win but you accept that you may lose next time. That is not the way that the Islamist ideology works.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This is very much a post-Arab Spring speech and though he offers obligatory praise of that over-hyped phenomenon, the lessons he has drawn from its failure make for a changed perspective.</p>
<p>How changed? Blair endorses the Egyptian popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood and urges support for the new government within the larger context of “supporting and assisting” those who take on “Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood”.</p>
<p>That’s an impossible position in Washington D.C., but it emerges naturally out of an understanding that democracy isn’t enough and that an Islamist political victory inherently dismantles democracy.</p>
<p>&#8220;Islamist ideology&#8221;, Blair says, has an &#8220;exclusivist&#8221; ultimate goal, which is &#8220;not a society which someone else can change after winning an election&#8221;. The Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist groups, he says, are both part of an “overall ideology” in which “such extremism can take root”. They are all totalitarian group that differ on “how to achieve the goals of Islamism” rather than on “what those goals are.”</p>
<p>Democracy is downright destructive in a political landscape in which Islamic political forces compete. Instead Blair’s new doctrine replaces democracy with religious freedom.</p>
<p>The former British Prime Minister calls for supporting “the principles of religious freedom and open, rule based economies.  It means helping those countries whose people wish to embrace those principles to achieve them. Where there has been revolution, we should be on the side of those who support those principles and opposed to those who would thwart them.”</p>
<p>That position, Blair continues, leads him to support the Egyptian uprising against the Muslim Brotherhood and even interim Assad rule until a final agreement is concluded.</p>
<p>While that may not seem like much, imagine the last 15 years if the obsession with using democracy to replace dictatorships had instead been turned to promoting religious freedom at the expense of Islamic rule. Imagine if we made tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities into the defining line instead of the meaningless one of holding majority rule Muslim elections.</p>
<p>The Blair Doctrine surgically replaces democracy with religious freedom while leaving the larger worldview so common in European and American political circles untouched so that it does not seem like a shift, but a natural adaptation to the failures of the Arab Spring.</p>
<p>Blair cannot and will not say that the problem with democracy in countries with an Islamic majority is the tyranny of the majority, nor does he ever use the word ‘secularism’, and his rhetoric is largely dependent on assumptions made in the aftermath of the Cold War by a comfortable West.</p>
<p>He speaks positively of globalization, without conceding that the UK has a terrorism crisis largely because of it. He briefly mentions the export of ‘radicalism’ from the Middle East, but aside from the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing power in Europe, he doesn’t elaborate.</p>
<p>To a multicultural left that already embraces Burkas and FGM, his speech is rage fodder. But while Blair may have helped turn Islam into a problem in the UK, it’s his foes on the left who have championed its worst aspects.</p>
<p>Tony Blair is no Geert Wilders and the UK’s problem with Islam is in no small part of his making due to his government’s immigration policies, but revolutionary ideas are more likely to be accepted from thoroughly establishment sources.</p>
<p>In his speech, Blair argues that reactionary Islamic rule is the problem, rather than mere tyranny. It’s a shift that invalidates the entire political Islam movement behind the Arab Spring. And for all the many ways that he covers his tracks, subdividing Islam from Islamism, he does hold a nearly firm line on Islamic rule. That is a rarity in a world order which had come to embrace political Islam as the future.</p>
<p>And yet Blair’s speech isn’t really that revolutionary. It’s a reaction to current events such as the degeneration of Erdogan’s Turkey, once used by Western diplomats as a model of Muslim democracy, into a brutal tyranny whose abuses the world is no longer able to ignore, the collapse of the Arab Spring and the failure of elections to bring peace to the religious conflicts in the Muslim world.</p>
<p>The establishment parties and pundits have had little to say about it. The Obama-Romney foreign policy debate has been largely mirrored across the ocean in Europe. Widely hated by his own party, Blair has little to lose by offering a shift that seems very mild, while explaining the failures of the past 15 years in terms of a new paradigm. It’s much more graceful than Cameron’s episodes of unconvincingly bellicose rhetoric, to say nothing of his opposite number, and yet for all its shortcomings, it’s also very promising.</p>
<p>If religious freedom replaces democracy as the metric by which we judge Muslim countries, if we put as much effort into protecting the rights of minorities as we did into promoting elections, we will finally be on the right track. And even if we accomplish little, the metric effectively blocks the political ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various front groups.</p>
<p>And that is no small thing.</p>
<p>The Blair Doctrine, while paying ample lip service to the peaceful nature of Islam, would block the rise of Islamic political parties. It would make pluralism into the new democracy and “religious extremism” into the new tyranny. It would be far less interested in majority rule elections and far more cognizant of protecting the diversity of political and religious expression.</p>
<p>It would apply the very metrics that the modern left insists on applying to the West, but refuses to apply to the Third World, to the Muslim world.</p>
<p>Republicans could do worse than put copies of the speech into the hands of presidential candidates still mumbling confused nonsense about the region. Blair offers much of the same rhetoric, but with a clear focus on the lack of religious freedom. If Romney had been operating from the Blair Doctrine, he might have been able to put forward a polished and reasonable worldview in the debate.</p>
<p>There are plenty of things wrong with Blair’s speech. He believes the Saudis are reformers, that the Palestinian Arabs want peace and that the issue isn’t Islam as a religion. But he is also surprisingly honest about Egypt, Syria and Libya; and about the links between Islamic power and violence.</p>
<p>And the Blair Doctrine’s shift from democracy to religious freedom could fundamentally change our relationship with the Muslim world.</p>
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		<title>U.S. Courts Islamic Terrorists to ‘Support People of Egypt’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/u-s-in-contact-with-islamic-terrorists-to-support-people-of-egypt/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-in-contact-with-islamic-terrorists-to-support-people-of-egypt</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:30:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[islamist]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221455</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama administration’s hypocrisy on full display.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-is-a-terrorist-.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221514" alt="obama-is-a-terrorist-" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-is-a-terrorist--450x340.jpg" width="270" height="204" /></a>On March 14, in a meeting with foreign journalists in Washington, D.C., deputy spokesperson of the U.S. State Department Marie Harf confirmed, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/other-matters/u-s-still-declares-support-for-muslim-brotherhood/">once again</a>, that the United States is in “communication” with the Muslim Brotherhood but denied that this means it supports the Islamist organization.  The <a href="http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2014/03/20140315296358.html?CP.rss=true#ixzz2w5Fk1BcJ">exchange</a> follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>QUESTION: Okay. The second question is: The State Department has recently said that it is in constant contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, as with the other political groups, you see?</p>
<p>MS. HARF: Mm-hmm, yes.</p>
<p>QUESTION: So do you think that these contacts have any effect on the United States relations with Egypt? And are these just mere contacts or support? Because this is very important for the Egyptian public opinion. Thanks.</p>
<p>MS. HARF: Well, they’re contacts, and let’s just – I’ll put it in a little context here. We think it’s important to have contacts with all the parties in Egypt, because all the parties in Egypt ultimately are going to need to be a part of Egypt’s future, and that we want to help them be a part of that future and move Egypt out of the situation it’s in today. So we think this is important to do. Do we always agree, do they always agree with what we’re saying? Of course not. But we believe it’s important to have the dialogue.</p>
<p>We don’t support one party or one group or one person. So when we’re talking about elections, when – I know there’s a lot of conspiracy theories about us supporting the Muslim Brotherhood or supporting the military or – there’s a lot. They can’t all be true, right? Because they’re mutually exclusive. But we don’t support one group. We support the process. We support the people of Egypt who make up these parties – right – as they are trying to determine how to get Egypt back on a better path.</p></blockquote>
<p>One wonders: if the Obama administration does not “support one party or one group or one person,” why did it try to urge the Egyptian people in general, the Christian Copts in particular, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/obama-to-egyptian-christians-dont-protest-the-brotherhood/">not to protest against former president Muhammad Morsi</a> (“one person”) and his increasingly oppressive Muslim Brotherhood (“one party”)?</p>
<p>Conversely, if the Obama administration is supportive of “the people of Egypt” in general, where was it when the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters were terrorizing Egypt, and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/pro-brotherhood-cleric-issues-fatwa-to-terrorize-egypt/">continue to do so</a>—including by burning and destroying over 80 Christian churches? But when millions of Egyptians protested against the increasingly oppressive Morsi/Brotherhood government, leading to their ousting, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/murdered-christian-children-the-price-of-obamas-pro-brotherhood-jihad/">it was then that the Obama administration reacted by reducing aid to Egypt</a>.</p>
<p>Indeed, in regards to Harf’s claims that “We support the people of Egypt,” the other day an Egyptian TV commentator <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRKhzt2yMig">summed up</a> mainstream Egyptian opinion as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Harf yesterday confirmed that her nation is in communication with the Muslim Brotherhood but denied that this means it supports them.  They’re just in contact—you know, “checking up” on each other.  She said that the United States is in contact with all political parties in Egypt.  In reality, they [Brotherhood] are no longer “political parties.” They are “<i>terrorist</i> parties.”  She stressed that they do not support any particular person or political party, adding “we support the people of Egypt.”  Apparently that explains why they stopped their aid and support?  They “support the people of Egypt,” even as the Egyptian people cannot stand the Muslim Brotherhood, has rejected them, and is rejoicing because the government finally designated them as a terrorist organization.  So this is the sort of “support” Mary Harf offers to the Egyptian people—<i>that the United States is in contact with a terrorist organization</i>.  Regarding a “conspiracy” between the U.S. and the Brotherhood, she said this cannot be true, adding that they only “support the people of Egypt as they are trying to determine how to get Egypt back on a better path.”  What’s it to you?  If we want a democracy, a dictatorship, or just to stay as we are—we’re free to do so.  I really don’t understand this idea whereby they [Obama administration] always show up saying “we support democracy” in the Arab world, and yet here is the result of their support: every nation they have put their nose in, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/confirmed-u-s-chief-facilitator-of-christian-persecution/">they destroyed it</a>.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>De-Imagining America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/de-imagining-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=de-imagining-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:40:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Imagining America]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221188</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Big foundations, universities and your tax dollars merge to support the Left's cultural warfare.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/337.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221225" alt="337" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/337-350x350.png" width="245" height="245" /></a>A little-known consortium of radical groups, public-funded universities and the federal government is quietly seeking to transform the arts and other academic disciplines into vehicles of left-wing extremism and indoctrination. The initiative, called &#8220;Imagining America,&#8221; embraces the philosophy of Communist historian Howard Zinn, famous for manipulating historical fact to fit Marxist paradigms of human &#8220;progress&#8221; and to plant the seeds of radicalism in unsuspecting youth.</p>
<p>Imagining America is headquartered at taxpayer-funded Syracuse University in upstate New York and was virtually unknown until Glenn Beck <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/17/glenn-beck-horrified-by-americas-latest-propaganda-machine/">threw some light</a> on it in a broadcast. Beck described Imagining America and another group that calls itself “The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture” as an “effort to rewrite our history and catalyze a new culture for America.” This &#8220;department&#8221; isn&#8217;t actually part of the U.S. government but describes itself as “the nation’s newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change.”</p>
<p>Active in both groups are “the people that will be teaching and influencing your children” through “art and music and film and history books,” Beck said.</p>
<p>America&#8217;s neo-communist radicals figured out a long time ago how to have their cake and eat it, too. U.S. taxpayers <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/you_subsidize_leftist_anarchy.html">have been funding</a> subversive left-wing groups like the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Saul Alinsky&#8217;s Industrial Areas Foundation since the Johnson administration. They advance their objectives, erode civil society, and send you the bill. Such is also the case with Imagining America, which occupies a cushy niche at the intersection of taxpayer-funded universities, government agencies and wealthy far-left non-profit organizations.</p>
<p>Imagining America grew out of executive action. President Bill Clinton <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=54960">created</a> the White House Millennium Council by Executive Order 13072 on Feb. 2, 1998. One of the council&#8217;s tasks was to &#8220;[p]roduce informational and resource materials to educate the American people concerning our Nation&#8217;s past and to inspire thought concerning the future[.]&#8221; The veritable cultural warfare council was headed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>Imagining America <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/about/collaborators/">was founded</a> at a 1999 White House Conference initiated by the White House Millennium Council, the University of Michigan, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Conference participants became the basis for what was to become the group&#8217;s &#8220;consortium&#8221; of 100-plus colleges and universities. The group was initially hosted by the University of Michigan. Syracuse University took over in 2007 as IA&#8217;s temporary home, and will remain <a href="http://insidesu.syr.edu/2011/09/19/imagining-america/">host</a> through 2017.</p>
<p><b>Radical Objectives</b></p>
<p>Like many radical groups, Imagining America (its full name is Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life) couches its goals in soothing, innocuous-sounding prose.</p>
<p>&#8220;Imagining America,&#8221; according to its current <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/about/our-mission/">mission statement</a>,</p>
<blockquote><p>advances knowledge and creativity through publicly engaged scholarship that draws on humanities, arts, and design. We catalyze change in campus practices, structures, and policies that enables publicly engaged artists and scholars to thrive and contribute to community action and revitalization.</p></blockquote>
<p>According to IA, <i>publicly engaged scholarship</i></p>
<blockquote><p>is defined by partnerships of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address and help solve critical social problems; and contribute to the public good.</p></blockquote>
<p><i>Publicly engaged scholarship</i>, also called simply <i>public scholarship</i>, means politicized scholarship. It is not about the free pursuit of knowledge for knowledge&#8217;s sake. In other words, going to college is not about the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth. It&#8217;s about righting the perceived wrongs of the past and changing society in furtherance of so-called social justice.</p>
<p>And in the hands of leftist crusaders, many of the above words in IA&#8217;s mission statement don&#8217;t mean what you might think they mean.</p>
<p>For example, when these people use the word <i>democracy</i> or <i>democratic</i>, they mock democracy as the idea is understood by most Americans. They believe in what the Left calls <i>economic democracy</i>, also known as socialism. They are excited at the prospect of reordering society with the help of capitalism-hating agitators. To them, <i>democracy</i> is Marxist mobocracy. And it’s only <i>true</i> democracy if they prevail. If they lose, it’s not democracy: the capitalists stole the election or took advantage of the people because they suffer from a mass “false consciousness.”</p>
<p>To cut through the billowy clouds of word smog generated by leftist academics, it is necessary to examine what the ideas embraced by Imagining America actually amount to in the plain English that these people use in public outreach.</p>
<p>Take the case of socialist theorist and community organizer <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2503">Harry Boyte</a>, who is director of the Center for <i>Democracy</i> and Citizenship at Augsburg College in Minneapolis (Augsburg is a member of IA&#8217;s consortium of colleges.)</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://youtu.be/tLyUWmMCPIE">video</a> intended for public consumption that promotes Imagining America&#8217;s <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/convenings/national-conference/2014-national-conference/">national conference</a> this October in Atlanta, Boyte urged the fusion of higher education and left-wing activism:</p>
<blockquote><p>I want to lift up organizing as a supplement. It&#8217;s different than action. In fact, organizing is not mobilizing. It&#8217;s not people out in the streets in a protest mode. It&#8217;s the patient, slow development of relationships that build power &#8230; This is actually an extraordinary pioneering step for Imagining America to be bringing in organizing methods to which people in higher education, and connected to the world, can make our work more public.</p></blockquote>
<p>Academic Scott J. Peters, co-director of Imagining America, said his group is tasked with</p>
<blockquote><p>producing knowledge and theory and writings but the most substantial part of that work is actually building relationships, organizing opportunities for people to understand what they&#8217;re facing, to come together to share their values and experiences, and then to try to make the changes that will help advance their values and their ideals. That work is organizing work.</p></blockquote>
<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a tension that organizers are always working and that&#8217;s the tension between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be,&#8221; said Peters, paraphrasing Saul Alinsky, author of <i>Rules for Radicals</i>, the <i>vade mecum</i> of the organizing world.</p>
<p>&#8220;Well, the &#8216;story of now&#8217; is a story that helps us see and feel that tension,&#8221; Peters said in a reference to what community organizing theorist Marshall Ganz of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government calls the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/groupthink/activism-what-works/a-story-of-self-a-story-of-us/">&#8220;public narrative&#8221;</a> framework. &#8220;We can see that the world as it is, &#8216;the story of now,&#8217; is not the same thing as the world we&#8217;d like it to be, so therefore we&#8217;re called to act.&#8221;</p>
<p>Peters <a href="http://www.syr.edu/news/articles/2012/imagining-america-08-12.html">is also part of</a> the leadership team for a dubious research project that received $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The project is called &#8220;Food Dignity: Action Research on Engaging Food Insecure Communities and Universities in Building Sustainable Community Food Systems.&#8221;</p>
<p>When you&#8217;re a Marxist, America is always in crisis. Kevin Bott, an associate director at IA, said the group &#8220;is at a particularly interesting and ripe moment to assert arts, humanities, and design thinking as a way to get the heart of the crisis that we all find ourselves in locally, nationally, and globally, politically, socially, economically.&#8221; Bott was also the Green Party&#8217;s unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Syracuse last year.</p>
<p>George J. Sanchez, vice dean for diversity at the University of Southern California, declared that IA examines &#8220;huge issues for the country and I think, again, we have to imagine a different America.&#8221;</p>
<p>Jesikah Maria Ross, a community organizer who is creative director at Praxis Projects, said IA &#8220;is really looking at, how do we bring together faculty, students from different disciplines with community organizations to kind of co-create something whether it&#8217;s an artistic production or engaged scholarship in a publication. How do we do something together for mutual benefit that moves community organizing and community change forwards?&#8221;</p>
<p>Fresh from the politically correct indoctrination camp, Ryan Metzler, a student in Occidental College&#8217;s Media Arts &amp; Culture Program, <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/fg-item/ryan-metzler-occidental-college/">spews</a> the things that Imagining America wants to hear, complete with appropriately tortured postmodern diction, neo-Marxist buzzwords, and trendy academic gibberish.</p>
<p>In a testimonial on the IA website he writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;My work is informed by the belief that media makers have a responsibility to collaborate with and integrate marginalized communities into documentary films and other media projects in order to transform problematic representations &#8230; Media makers must take responsibility as a democratic community to break stereotypes by giving voices to men and women who lack the technological resources &#8230; We as a society cannot forget the history of media practices. As a society we cannot practice such an influential art without all groups having a voice.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>This is the language of relativism and multiculturalism, both of which are tools neo-Marxists use to weaken and transform America. The first obligation of media &#8220;makers,&#8221; as the student calls documentarians and journalists, is to push so-called social justice and allow disadvantaged groups a veto over his work, he claims. After years of PC brainwashing, truth is apparently not important to him.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Imagining America <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/consortium/student-networks/resources/">requires</a> fellows in its Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program to read the Marxist journal, <i>Monthly Review</i>, and works by communists W.E.B. DuBois and Paulo Freire (author of <i>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</i>).</p>
<p>Among the course offerings for which Syracuse University faculty members have <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/consortium/ia-at-su/curriculum-development/awardees/">received</a> IA grants are &#8220;Jazz and Human Rights as Cultural Democracy&#8221; and &#8220;Queering Syracuse.&#8221; A grant was also given for a course called &#8220;Masks, Movement, and Giant Puppets&#8221; that may as well be taught by anti-American radical Medea Benjamin of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6149">Code Pink</a>.</p>
<p><b>Legal Status</b></p>
<p>Figuring out the legal status and internal organizational structure of Imagining America is no easy task.</p>
<p>When the University of Delaware received a $2,000 &#8220;Critical Exchange Grant&#8221; from Imagining America, the school <a href="http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2007/feb/grant020807.html">described</a> IA as &#8220;a national nonprofit organization that encourages the incorporation of civic responsibility into art education at the university level.&#8221; But this researcher could find no evidence that Imagining America is a legally incorporated nonprofit entity. A public database search in Nexis revealed what appeared to be an old, probably lapsed business listing of some kind in its name in Michigan, but nothing else.</p>
<p>It is difficult to imagine running an enterprise as large and active as Imagining America appears to be without incorporating it somewhere. If Imagining America is merely an unincorporated project of Syracuse University there could be problems in terms of commingling of funds and it could generating major accounting headaches.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s exactly what Imagining America is, according to Erin Martin Kane, Syracuse University&#8217;s associate vice president for public relations, who responded to some organizational questions by email. After rehashing IA&#8217;s creation story, she explained that IA &#8220;is an academic unit of SU that’s funded and supported by the more than 100 member institutions, including SU, other colleges and universities, and civic organizations. IA does not solicit, or accept donations from individuals.&#8221;</p>
<p>At press time, Kane had failed to respond to follow-up questions about how large IA&#8217;s annual budget was, how many employees it has, and if it produces annual or regular reports. That IA is an &#8220;academic unit&#8221; of SU, as Kane indicated, appears to be true. The SU comptroller&#8217;s office <a href="http://comptroller.syr.edu/comptroller/display.cfm?content_ID=%23%2BH%21%2F%0A">lists</a> Imagining America as department 20018 of the university.</p>
<p>Even so, Imagining America&#8217;s finances are very difficult to track, perhaps deliberately so. It charges taxpayer-funded educational institutions up to $5,000 annually in membership dues, which means that taxpayers fund IA indirectly. Grants to IA from foundations and membership dues from these tax-exempt universities and colleges that are part of the IA consortium should presumably appear in tax returns somewhere. But very little appears in the comprehensive FoundationSearch database which contains data extracted from the compulsory annual IRS filings of foundations and other nonprofit organizations.</p>
<p>The database shows only a handful of grants from foundations that benefited the group.</p>
<p>The Rockefeller Foundation has been onboard with IA since at least 2001. That year it gave $150,000 to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation &#8220;to support &#8216;Imagining America&#8217; public scholarship grants program.&#8221; The next year it gave $25,000 to the University of Michigan &#8220;toward the costs of a conference of the Imagining America public scholarship program entitled &#8216;The Engaged University, the Engaged Community, &amp; the Daily Practice of Democracy.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>The New York Council for the Humanities, a taxpayer-funded nonprofit, gave Imagining America $18,000 in 2010. The Teagle Foundation <a href="http://www.teaglefoundation.org/Grantmaking/Grantees/default?rfp=218#sthash.pHquOORg.dpuf">gave</a> IA $150,000 in 2012.</p>
<p>And there the paper trail of grants specifically designated for Imagining America ends.</p>
<p>High-profile left-wing philanthropies have given money to the University of Michigan and Syracuse University that may have ended up supporting Imagining America projects.</p>
<p>Radical financier George Soros&#8217;s Open Society Foundations (formerly known as Open Society Institute) has given grants to the University of Michigan ($6,020 since 2000) and Syracuse University ($203,880 since 1999). The Soros-associated Tides Foundation has given grants to the University of Michigan ($35,000 since 2005).</p>
<p>Syracuse University has received funding from the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5311&amp;category=79">Nathan Cummings Foundation</a> ($185,000 since 2001), <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderProfile.asp?fndid=5210">Rockefeller Foundation</a> ($638,800 since 2000), and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation ($392,600 since 2009).</p>
<p><b>Transforming America With Your Tax-dollars </b></p>
<p>&#8220;Politics is downstream from culture,&#8221; the late, great media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart liked to say frequently when explaining how the deck has been stacked against conservatives for decades. At <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2011/08/22/Politics-Really-is-Downstream-from-Culture">Breitbart&#8217;s website</a>, screenwriter and producer Lawrence Meyers, elaborated.</p>
<blockquote><p>Culture influences politics, and in ways the Left has understood for a long time. The Right has sat idly by, as they did with higher education, and let an ideological movement take over one of the most important aspects of American society.</p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Imagining America is at the center of it all, accompanied by neo-communist activists and organizers, cheering our republic&#8217;s decline, and teaching Americans to despise their country.</span></p>
<p>The Obama administration is helping the group accomplish its mission.</p>
<p>In early 2012, IA proudly <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/blog/2012/01/10/syracuse-university-joins-yearlong-initiative-to-promote-higher-education-as-agent-of-democracy/">announced</a> it was working with the White House Office of Public Engagement, the U.S. Department of Education, and various groups to publicly launch the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), &#8220;a yearlong initiative to promote higher education as an agent of <i>democracy</i> and a force for public good.&#8221; [emphasis added]</p>
<p>The director of ACP was socialist organizer Harry Boyte. IA&#8217;s Peters and his fellow co-director Timothy K. Eatman were also both members of ACP&#8217;s steering committee.</p>
<p>With taxpayer funding provided by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) laid bare the radicals&#8217; objectives in a 2012 report.</p>
<p>In &#8220;A Crucible Moment: College Learning &amp; Democracy&#8217;s Future,&#8221; AACU <a href="http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf">recommended</a> that &#8220;existing national civic networks &#8230; be tapped and expanded for leadership in mobilizing the next generation of investment in civic learning.&#8221; It singled out The Research University Civic Engagement Network (<a href="http://www.compact.org/initiatives/civic-engagement-at-research-universities">TRUCEN</a>), <a href="http://www.projectpericles.org">Project Pericles</a>, and Imagining America.</p>
<p>At page 42 the report states,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;If indeed we seek a democratic society in which the public welfare matters as much as the individual’s welfare, and in which global welfare matters along with national welfare, then education must play its influential part to bring such a society into being.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s the goal of Imagining America and the public scholarship movement in a nutshell. To transform America so that the collective trumps the individual, and the rest of the world trumps America.</p>
<p>As long as President Obama remains in office, your taxpayer dollars will continue to support these un-American goals.</p>
<p>And if Hillary Clinton, who got the American narrative rewriting effort underway in 1999 when she headed the White House Millennium Council, succeeds Obama in the Oval Office, she&#8217;ll do whatever she can to finish the job she started.</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>Sacrificing the Military to Entitlements</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2014 05:30:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Achilles' heel of democracy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220112" alt="hagel-defense-cuts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg" width="267" height="210" /></a>Vladimir Putin, playing geopolitical chess while our president plays tiddlywinks, has effectively taken over Crimea. Armed men, looking suspiciously like Russian military personnel, have seized both airports and established border checkpoints decorated with Kalashnikovs and Russian flags. This comes after other armed men seized two government buildings and raised Russian flags, as the legislature appointed a pro-Russian regional leader. Meanwhile Russian military forces are gathering on the border, with Russia’s parliament unanimously voting to approve deploying troops in Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is just Putin’s latest revanchist expansion of Russian power throughout the region. He’s been at this for a while. Remember that during the Bush administration he stole chunks of Moldova and Georgia, using the same argument of ethnic self-determination that served Hitler so well in 1938, when he made the Sudeten Germans the pretext for gobbling up Czechoslovakia. Remember when in 2005 Putin said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union––the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century, as he put it–– “tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”? And just as England and France did nothing except talk about Hitler’s aggression, so too the West has blustered and threatened and indulged “diplomatic engagement” in response to Putin’s depredations. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Vladimir is dismissing Obama’s flabby threat of “costs” and damage to Russia’s “standing in the international community” if Russia annexes part of Ukraine––as if the ruthless Putin, currently arming and backing the Syrian butcher Assad and the genocidal mullahs in Iran, gives a hoot about his international reputation. And after so many of Obama’s toothless “deadlines,” “red lines,” “game-changers,” “I don’t bluffs,” and “no options are off the table,” who can possibly take this administration seriously? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But let’s not forget why the president has gotten away with this foreign policy of apology, retreat, and appeasement in a world bristling with brutal aggressors. Too many Americans are sick of military involvement abroad, with 52% in a Pew </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips/">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last December saying the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” More important, many don’t want to spend money on defense if it means cuts to entitlements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider that at the same time the Ukraine crisis was heating up, more cuts to our defense budget were announced. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled plans to reduce the army’s strength from 520,000 active-duty personnel to between 450,000 and 420,000 soldiers, eliminate the A-10 Warthog ground-support aircraft, mothball 11 Navy cruisers, put in doubt funds needed to retrofit the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, and cut 8,000 Marines from the Corps. And things could get much worse if sequestration remains in effect after 2015. Max Boot </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/02/24/defense-budget-incoherence/">points out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the obvious dangers of these cuts: “The world is a more chaotic place than ever and we face the need to respond to a multiplicity of threats, from pirates and terrorists and narco-traffickers to rogue states like Iran and North Korea to potential great power rivals such as China and Russia to failed states such as Yemen and Syria. And not only do we have to be able to project power in traditional ways, but we also have to be able to protect new domains such as outer space and cyberspace.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prudence dictates that we be prepared for those contingencies. But apologists for the cuts premise their arguments on a lack of money and on fantastic projections about the future. A </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial approving the cuts asserts, “The truth is that the United States cannot afford the larger force indefinitely, and it doesn’t need it. The country is tired of large-scale foreign occupations and, in any case, Pentagon planners do not expect they will be necessary in the foreseeable future.” The claim that we cannot “afford” a larger military is preposterous. The same week Hagel announced the cuts, Obama proposed spending $302 billion on roads. In 2013 defense spending was 4% of GDP, while mandated entitlement spending and interest payments on the debt were 14.5%. The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over eleven years, $1.4 trillion, was only 4% of federal spending, and nine-tenths of 1% of the $163 trillion the economy produced during that same period. Yet half the amount of the $1 trillion in the 2011 budget sequester cuts are coming from defense, while the real engines of our debt and deficits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, were left untouched. We have the money, but we just choose to spend it on ourselves rather than on ensuring that we have the military power to defend our security and interests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for the rosy projections that large forces will not “be necessary in the foreseeable future,” such rationalizing prognostications are dangerous, as history shows. After World War I, English military planners formulated the “Ten Year Rule,” which assumed that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for that purpose,” as military planners announced. The defense budget was reduced by four fifths in just 2 years. In 1928, the rule was extended. There were similar reductions in shipbuilding and air power, with the result that in 1934, the whole defense budget would have been necessary just to restore the cuts to the army. Meanwhile, Germany was secretly rearming, training its officer corps, and improving its tanks and planes. By 1938-39, Germany was spending 5 times more on its military than England was. Wishful projections about future threats forget that the enemy always has a vote on what is “necessary.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial, however, does hit on one accurate cause: many Americans don’t want to spend more money on defense </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">if</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it means reductions in entitlement spending. That’s why cutting the defense budget isn’t the political “third rail” that reducing Social Security or Medicare is. The preference for butter over guns, except when there are direct attacks on the homeland, is typical of democracies going back to Athens in the 4</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century B.C. Then citizens received state-pay for serving on juries or in the Assembly, and even for attending the tragic performances and other religious festivals. Indeed, it was a capital crime even to propose transferring surplus funds to the war-fund rather than to the fund for subsidizing attendance at religious festivals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as Philip II of Macedon began his campaign of aggression against the southern Greek city-states, the Athenians refused to finance a defense build-up. While trying to rouse the Athenians to defend the city of Olynthus against Philip’s attacks, the great orator and defender of political freedom Demosthenes scolded the Athenians on just this score. “With regard to the supply of money,” he orated, “you have money, men of Athens; you have more than any other nation has for military purposes. But you appropriate it to yourselves, to suit yourselves.” Later historians linked Philip’s defeat of Athens and its subsequent loss of political freedom to the Athenians’ refusal to spend money on their military instead of on themselves. The historian Theopompus blamed the law financing festival attendance for making the Athenians “less courageous and more lax” and for “squandering state revenues.” Two millennia later, England’s reductions in defense spending during the twenties and thirties were similarly motivated in part by the desire to devote more funds to social welfare programs. Cuts in military spending were more politically palatable than cuts in subsidized housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As justified as the criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy are, we have to remember that we citizens create priorities with our votes. If we do not vote into office effective leaders who can convince us that we must prepare for future threats by building a military deterrence, and who have the political spine to back up words with deeds to make sure that deterrence works, then we must share some of the blame for the consequences sure to follow when our enemies and rivals are emboldened by our seeming acceptance of empty bluster as an instrument of foreign policy, and by our willingness to prefer butter to guns.</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>The Douala-Djibouti Corridor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jerome-vitenberg/the-douala-djibouti-corridor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-douala-djibouti-corridor</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Feb 2014 05:15:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jerome Vitenberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Central African Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How France is enabling a bloc of non-Islamist, liberal democracies in Africa.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lk.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218049" alt="lk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lk.gif" width="400" height="162" /></a>The current French involvement in the Central African Republic, which follows in the footsteps of its ongoing “Operation Serval” in Mali, has led many to wonder about President Francois Hollande’s goals in his African campaigns.</p>
<p>In recent months, the CAR&#8217;s ex-<i>Séléka</i> Muslim rebel fighters, bolstered by Sudanese and Chadian mercenaries, have waged a campaign of murder, rape and pillage against the country&#8217;s 80% Christian-majority population. With the government in disarray, Christians have organized defensive “<i>anti-balaka</i>” (“anti-machete”) militia groups that have carried out reprisal actions. The spiraling inter-religious violence has displaced half a million people and claimed a thousand civilian lives in December 2013 alone.</p>
<p>The French military “Opération Sangaris,” supported by the African peace-keeping force, MISCA, is engaged in a crisis intervention aimed at stabilizing the CAR and protecting its civilian population. Given the dramatic context, the French action to disarm the various militias, secure the infrastructure necessary for the distribution of humanitarian aid, and re-establish public order is admirable.</p>
<p>Yet, the ramifications of events in the CAR extend far beyond its own borders. The country&#8217;s descent into chaos, indeed, would be like a volcanic eruption in this combustible region, affecting the future of a strip of nations stretching from the Cameroonian port of Douala on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.</p>
<p>First, a power vacuum in the CAR would clear the way for Chad to seize the country&#8217;s oil- and diamond-rich north. Instability would also increase on its borders with Sudan and the DRC. A further menace would unfold in the form of attacks against Cameroon by the militant Nigerian jihadist group, <i>Boko Haram,</i> with <i>Al-Qaeda, AQIM </i>and<i> Al-Shabaab</i> likely to join the fray. Moreover, the turmoil would open the door to involvement by extremist groups in the illegal mining and sale of diamonds, precious metals and uranium, with all that implies for regional and global security.</p>
<p>“Opération Sangaris” is named for the Red Glider, a butterfly native to the area, as an expression of its planned short life.  However, the chronic issues in the CAR will not be solved by temporarily imposing order only to allow the cycle of violence to begin again once the forces are withdrawn.</p>
<p>For it is the problem of failed states – ruled by dictatorial regimes that routinely disregard human rights and looting their countries&#8217; wealth, while some Western corporations turn a profitable blind eye – that lies at the heart of CAR&#8217;s troubles and of those of the wider region.  Among the consequences of this corruption is the tragic lack of economic development in a region abundant in natural resources.  With few exceptions and despite limited economic progress (at least in statistical reports), Africa is the only continent to have been left behind the wave of socio-economic growth that raised up much of the Third World at the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>Over the past decade, China, Russia and the Arab world have recognized this shockingly under-developed continent&#8217;s immense economic potential and invested heavily in certain countries.  The United States and Europe woke to the opportunity more belatedly.  As President Hollande acknowledged in 2013: “African growth pulls us along, its dynamism supports us and its vitality is stimulating for us. We need Africa.”</p>
<p>With their historical links to these lands, France and the United Kingdom, cooperating under the 2010 Lancaster House security cooperation treaty, are facing a moment of truth.  It is becoming more and more difficult to ignore their obligation to assist the desire of the region&#8217;s peoples for a durable democratization process that will end the incessant cycle of military coups and civil wars.</p>
<p>Visiting Western heads of state routinely promote democracy, accountability, transparency and development.   But unlike most of the countries now sowing the seeds of their future economic interests in Africa, the liberal democracies – and particularly France and the UK – have both the ideological incentive and the tools to act more responsibly.  Their leaders have the statutory and executive power to prioritize business ethics, corporate responsibility and sustainable development in the way their nationals engage in commercial enterprises abroad.</p>
<p>Explicitly translating their national leaders&#8217; words into deeds, corporations should adopt ethical “best practices” in their African business dealings, transforming their signature on commercial contracts into a hand extended in friendship to the local communities, to Africa&#8217;s people, to its youth.  Just as they do at home.</p>
<p>To assist Africa with discarding its chronic socio-economic malaise, France should take a longer view in its current intervention.   This would require turning “Opération Sangaris” into the kernel of a wider initiative to bring security, free-market economic growth and democratic rule of law to a &#8220;Douala-Djibouti Corridor&#8221; of model countries.</p>
<p>Such a corridor would serve three functions. First, it would create the prerequisite stability to improve its peoples&#8217; quality of life.  Second, it would benefit three of its major neighbours – Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya – still struggling with their own transitions towards “full democracy” status.  Third, it would serve as a beacon of hope for the citizens of the authoritarian regimes outside the corridor, guiding them in their journey towards a brighter, freer, more prosperous future.</p>
<p>From Douala in the west through the CAR, South Sudan and Ethiopia to Djibouti in the east, the future of this strip of states will in large measure determine the futures of more than a billion Africans, from the Mediterranean to the Cape.  The CAR capital Bangui is the pivot point, the key to the 21<sup>st</sup> century&#8217;s “New Frontier”.</p>
<p>France&#8217;s “Opération Sangaris” may, at cursory glance, appear more like simply another fire-fighting mission than the start of a recovery for central Africa. But with a little far-sightedness, it could lead to the creation of a “Douala-Djibouti corridor” of liberal democracies, a belt of freedom and hope for its ordinary men, women and children.</p>
<p>As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry revealed in the “The Little Prince,” work is needed before we can enjoy life&#8217;s glories: “We must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if we wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”</p>
<p><strong>Jérôme Vitenberg is an international political analyst. He has taught Political Science and International relations for the LSE via the University of London&#8217;s International Programs at DEI College, Greece, and has been a Sales manager for Africa in the telecommunications industry.</strong></p>
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		<title>Amnesty Ends the American Dream</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/amnesty-ends-the-american-dream/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-ends-the-american-dream</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/amnesty-ends-the-american-dream/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:35:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[globalization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Welfare immigration]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217358</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welfare immigration is not an investment in the future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amnesty.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-217361" alt="amnesty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amnesty.jpg" width="350" height="293" /></a>Immigration is becoming unpopular everywhere else. In the UK, immigration has become so toxic that it may lead to a split from the European Union. In Australia, it helped elect a conservative government willing to tackle its migrant boat problem. Meanwhile in the United States, Republicans keep flirting with a Super-Amnesty that would be four times as big as the last disastrous amnesty.</p>
<p>Accepting amnesty as inevitable would be a mistake even if the economy were on track, but it’s an even worse idea when unemployment is so bad that a sizable percentage of the population has dropped out of the economy, national and local social services are overstrained and the country is deep in debt.</p>
<p>Politicians on both sides of the aisle promise that legalizing illegal aliens will jumpstart the economy, but the illegal alien population is already a floating economic disaster.</p>
<p>The states with the highest illegal alien populations also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strike-on-american-workers/">tend to have the highest</a> unemployment rates and the highest poverty rates. That welfare triangle is dragging down formerly booming states into the economic gutter. Legalizing illegal aliens won’t change that. Instead it will push those states even closer to the drain as legalized illegal aliens lose their illegal jobs and are replaced with new illegal aliens.</p>
<p>Corporate lobbies insist that America lacks workers even as the country’s immigration rate and unemployment rate remain extremely high.</p>
<p>The United States has been taking in a million immigrants a year since 2004. Are a million immigrants a year really inadequate for the needs of businesses in a country with less than one hundred million private sector employees and over ninety million people out of the workforce?</p>
<p>Black and Latino unemployment rates are already far higher than white unemployment rates. The Mexican-American unemployment rate is between 10 and 12 percent. If American companies can’t employ the millions of Mexican-Americans already in this country, why do they insist on displacing minority workers born in this country, including Mexican-Americans, by legalizing 12 million more?</p>
<p>From 2000 to 2009, nearly 2 million Mexican immigrants obtained permanent legal status in the United States. Along with them came 200,000 Haitians, part of the more than one million Caribbean migrants, who have a higher unemployment rate than African-Americans. Those figures are unusually bad because immigrant minorities are more likely to hold jobs than domestic minorities.</p>
<p>Pro-amnesty politicians use that to prove that immigrants are more likely to “contribute” to the economy than the native population.</p>
<p>The dirty little secret however is in the details.</p>
<p>To quote the <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.nr0.htm">Bureau of Labor Statistics</a> report, “The unemployment rates for foreign-born blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were lower than for their native-born counterparts, while the rates for foreign-born and native-born whites were little different.”</p>
<p>Talk to anyone who employs illegal aliens and that discrepancy between foreign-born minorities and native-born minorities stops being a mystery. They prefer first generation minority immigrants to second generation immigrants because they consider them more obedient, docile and responsible.</p>
<p>Like a man who keeps divorcing and remarrying every few years, they constantly want fresh immigrants, but they don’t want to hire their American-born children. And so the social welfare system becomes a dumping ground for the children of cheap labor immigrants and the businesses head somewhere else to escape the taxes voted in by that second generation leaving behind bankruptcy, crime and despair.</p>
<p>Taking in millions of people whose children will be less likely to find work than their parents is a brutal reversal of the American Dream.</p>
<p>It’s unfair to them and it’s unfair to us.</p>
<p>We aren’t doing immigrants any favors by encouraging them to trade Mexico’s 4.25 unemployment rate for an unemployment rate that is more than double that for Mexican-Americans and has to be balanced out with a generous helping of subsidized everything from food to phones courtesy of the welfare state.</p>
<p>That’s not an investment in the future. It’s an investment in voting blocs while stealing the futures of second generation Mexican immigrants who would be more likely to find work at home and the future of the United States which cannot afford to keep investing social capital that will never be paid back.</p>
<p>The traditional forms of immigration that worked were undone and reversed with disastrous results. There was more legal immigration from Mexico (pop. 120 million) in ten years than from all of Europe (pop. 739 million). 156,000 immigrants came from Guatemala and 15,000 from Ireland, 28,000 from Italy and 251,000 from El Salvador. This reversal might have been defensible if it had worked. It didn’t.</p>
<p>These unbalanced numbers reflect very little concern for either immigration fairness or the future. Despite the statistics showing that white immigrants are less likely to be unemployed, our immigration system perversely favors bringing in immigrants who are more likely to be unemployed.</p>
<p>The Irish are coming. One Irish person emigrates every six minutes. 300,000 have left in the past four years. But they aren’t coming to America; not legally, though there are 10,000 Irish illegal immigrants in Boston alone.  1,371 Irish immigrants became permanent legal residents in 2011 compared to 19,662 Jamaicans, 22,111 Haitians, 46,109 Dominicans, 10,166 Nepalese, 15,546 Pakistanis, 21,133 Iraqis and 143,446 Mexicans. 60,000 Italians emigrate each year, but only 2,443 became US residents in 2011.</p>
<p>American immigration has been ingeniously designed to bring in immigrants who are less likely to be employed than the white native population in either the first generation or the second generation so that the first generation provides cheap labor while the second generation provides cheap votes.</p>
<p>Pro-amnesty politicians and business lobbies talk about investing in our future with an illegal alien amnesty, but what they really want is a first generation of cheap labor for disposable service and manufacturing industries whose employees will be so poorly paid that they will contribute little if anything in taxes and whose children will be more likely to be unemployed than their parents.</p>
<p>Europeans have grown weary of the economic and social consequences of these policies. Americans however have been slower to link their economic problems to their government’s immigration policies. But Democrats and Republicans who are jumping on the amnesty express might want to pay attention to the dramatic reversal in the UK where the parties and outlets mouthing empty migration boosterism are being forced to reverse course after an explosion of public outrage.</p>
<p>Cameron and the Tories face an insurgent UKIP which has cut off the ‘conservative’ party at the knees over immigration and globalization. Democrats who are selling out minority voters and Republicans who are selling out small businesses might easily find themselves in the same sinking boat in the Rio Grande.</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>When The Arab Spring Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-arab-spring-is-dead/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-arab-spring-is-dead</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-arab-spring-is-dead/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2013 04:39:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab Spring]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tunisia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205828</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The movement that was born in Tunisia, dies in Tunisia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tunis-islamist-protest.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205838" alt="T" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tunis-islamist-protest-450x310.jpg" width="270" height="186" /></a>The Arab Spring was born in Tunisia. It died in Tunisia. Its funeral was attended by the same violent flag-waving protests as its birth.</p>
<p>The ruling Islamist Ennahda party has agreed to step down. Ennahda’s move came after months of violent clashes and even murders. The Islamists had held out against the protesters, swapping out governments, but Morsi’s example frightened them into backing away from a final confrontation for fear that their movement might suffer the same punitive outlawing as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>Egypt and Tunisia were the two great victories of the Arab Spring. Now both of them have been undone.</p>
<p>The picture doesn’t look any brighter for the Islamists elsewhere. The Muslim Brotherhood in Morocco faces rising protests. The Libyan Muslim Brotherhood bit off more than it could chew with its attempted coup and risks plunging the country into a civil war with no NATO warplanes to bail its fighters out.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign to capture Syria is collapsing as its Free Syrian Army fighters lose to the more suicidal Jihadists of Al Qaeda and the superior firepower of the Syrian military. Its only hope in lay in Western military intervention and that hope died with Cameron’s parliamentary defeat in the UK and Putin’s outmaneuvering of Obama.</p>
<p>In Syria and in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, with its army of infiltrators and foreign agents, had bet everything on Western support. But Obama couldn’t save Morsi and it doesn’t look like he will be able to save the Free Syrian Army. The Brotherhood’s decades long effort to build influence in the West may have proven to be worthless, helping them topple weak regimes, but unable to keep them in power.</p>
<p>Obama was at once their greatest gift and their greatest curse. He gave the Islamists an American leader who was overtly sympathetic to their cause, but who was also too weak to protect them. Obama may have rolled over for the Muslim Brotherhood, but he also rolled over for Russia and Saudi Arabia. And when the dust settled, so did the hopes of the followers of Qutb.</p>
<p>The Arab Spring was designed to move the Muslim Brotherhood into power. Now it’s dead and an identical combination of factors; a sympathetic American leader, global economic depression, regional turmoil, terror fears and European immigration integration panic, may never come around again. More than anything else, the Islamists were undone by the same economic problems that allowed them and their leftist allies to topple their former governments.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda made the mistake of assuming that their political victories would allow them to implement their religious agenda before producing actual economic improvements. That was the opposite of the Turkish model where Erdogan’s economic shell game produced enough gains to allow him to arrest political opponents and wreck the rule of law in order to implement Islamic law.</p>
<p>Another reason that Ennahda may have been more willing to step down was that Tunisia’s economy is approaching a critical point. Economic growth in Tunisia fell 2% after the Arab Spring, its currency fell 10%, the budget deficit doubled and external debt is approaching 50%. Ennahda may have gambled that its best bet was to leave before its economic policies were completely discredited.</p>
<p>If the Muslim Brotherhood had been a little more pragmatic, it might have come to the same conclusion. Egypt’s economy was a disaster and the new government has resorted to higher subsidies to hold on to its popularity. Those subsidies had to be cut by Mubarak and Morsi because Egypt couldn’t afford them. And despite the flow of UAE and Saudi aid and investment money into Egypt, that hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>Even Sudan’s bloody butcher, President Omar Al-Bashir, was forced to cut fuel and cooking oil subsidies leading to violent riots.</p>
<p>In Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood’s subsidy cuts are touching off waves of protests, alienating its liberal allies and pitting it against the rival Islamists of the Justice and Spirituality Organization. With the left and even its own Islamists turning on the Moroccan Brotherhood, its political prospects are dim. But like Sudan, it can’t afford to keep up the subsidies which cost billions.</p>
<p>Western support for Islamist regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco came with the expectation of the IMF that they would make the hard decisions of economic reform. Morsi had trouble committing and his attempts to cut subsidized fuel use only further enraged the Egyptian public. Morocco’s Brotherhood is finding out the dangers of touching fuel subsidies after mass outrage over an 8% fuel price increase.</p>
<p>But the successful counterrevolutions against Muslim Brotherhood rule may have actually salvaged its reputation.</p>
<p>Had the Brotherhood gone down in complete economic disaster, it would have been obvious that it was not only brutal and tyrannical, but also incompetent at everything except setting up front organizations and infiltrating other movements. Instead the Brotherhood has been able to play the victim. Instead of being seen as a failure, it has reinvented brutal power-hungry thugs like Morsi as revolutionary martyrs.</p>
<p>Imagine if the Bolsheviks had been forced out in the 1920s. Millions of lives would have been saved, but Stalin would have been remembered as a political martyr, instead of as a monster. Communism would not have been discredited in the stark economic terms that the slow collapse of the Soviet Union, its growing indebtedness to the United States and the defection of its allies into the Capitalist camp did.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood was forced out before its Caliphate experiment could become as great a disaster as the Soviet Union and its ideas have not been completely discredited. Discrediting it however might have proven as costly in human lives as the discrediting of Communism. As the Russian scientist Pavlov once said, if Communism were an experiment, he would not spare a frog’s hind legs for it.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood’s experiments in the Middle East deserve even less than a frog’s hind legs.</p>
<p>The real story of the Arab Spring is not that the Muslim Brotherhood failed as a political movement, but that it was not up to the task of dealing with the economic turmoil. Like the Communists, it excelled at organizing its core activists, but proved incapable of actually running a country.</p>
<p>The Arab Spring was born out of economic discontent and it died because of economic discontent. The Muslim Brotherhood did not lose the battle for the soul of the Muslim Middle East.</p>
<p>It lost the battle for its wallet.</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>Jordanian Parliament Budget Dispute Ends with AK-47 Shooting</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/jordanian-parliament-budget-dispute-ends-with-ak-47-shooting/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jordanian-parliament-budget-dispute-ends-with-ak-47-shooting</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/jordanian-parliament-budget-dispute-ends-with-ak-47-shooting/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:29:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jordan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jordanian parliament]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204017</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[They keep saying democracy is the solution to the political problems of the Middle East.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/jordan-parliament-shooting-incident.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-204042" alt="jordan-parliament-shooting-incident" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/jordan-parliament-shooting-incident-450x346.jpg" width="450" height="346" /></a></p>
<p>They keep saying democracy is the solution to the political problems of the Middle East. I<a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/09/10/Jordanian-MP-shoots-rifle-during-Parliament-session.html">f they think that&#8217;s the solution</a>, maybe they should reconsider<a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/171766#.UjJfyT8xFfI"> the nature of the problem</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>An ongoing dispute between Jordanian parliamentarians resulted in one MP shooting an automatic rifle at a fellow lawmaker during a parliament session on Tuesday.</p>
<p>MP Talal al-Sharif pulled out an AK-47 rifle and shot at fellow MP Qusay Dmisa during a public session of Jordan’s Parliament, but did not manage to wound him.</p>
<p>Local websites showed video footage of Sharif shooting at Dmisa, who opposed him in a parliamentary dispute on Sunday.</p>
<p>This is the first time that guns have been fired in Jordan’s Parliament, although earlier this year MP Shadi al-Edwan attempted to pull out a pistol in the building during a bitter dispute over rising fuel prices.</p></blockquote>
<p>There are countries that go years without anyone pulling a gun in parliament. But that&#8217;s democracy in an honor-shame culture.</p>
<blockquote><p>The source said the shooting came after an argument broke out in parliament on Sunday between Damissi and another member, Yahia al-Saud.</p>
<p>Video footage emerged showing Damissi removing his shoes and Saud his belt during the dispute, which flared due to differences over parliamentary procedure, before they were separated.</p></blockquote>
<p>First the shoes come off. Then the belt. And then the assault rifles come out.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Jordanian Parliament adopted on Monday unprecedented measures to expel MP Talal Al-Sharif, who used a Kalashnikov rifle to shoot at MP Qusay Al-Demsi during a dispute. The Parliament also decided to freeze the membership of Al-Demsi for one year as a disciplinary punishment for his role in triggering the dispute.</p>
<p>Although Al-Demsi was the shooting target, the ad-hoc investigation committee found him guilty of inciting the action. The MPs said that Al-Sharif resorted to arms only after Al-Demsi slapped him while they were shaking hands in an effort to resolve their dispute.</p>
<p>Al-Sharif was so offended by the slap that he rushed to produce his machine gun from his car and started shooting.</p></blockquote>
<p>No seriously. This happened.</p>
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		<title>The Muslim Brotherhood’s False Appeal</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-muslim-brotherhoods-false-appeal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-muslim-brotherhoods-false-appeal</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:22:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[non-violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200263</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What if terrorist Islam and political Islam are the same thing?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Muslim-Brotherhood_2013345c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200323" alt="Muslim-Brotherhood_2013345c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Muslim-Brotherhood_2013345c.jpg" width="290" height="228" /></a>We spend a great deal of time talking about the Muslim Brotherhood’s networks, its agents of influence and the structural elements of its infrastructure. But it may be worth exploring a more basic question.</p>
<p>What is its appeal?</p>
<p>This isn’t an inquiry about the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and its varied front groups to the educated and wealthy Muslims who make up its key demographic.</p>
<p>The Brotherhood promises the Sunni Arab elites that they can stay on top while beating the West by making Islam into as compelling a method of national and international governance as the freedom and free trade that upended their feudal societies.  So it’s no great mystery why a Cal-Tech student from Egypt will join the MSA. It offers him a heady combination of community, power, revenge and destiny.</p>
<p>What is more interesting is the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, a reactionary Islamist terrorist organization with a history of Nazi collaboration that stands for theocracy, to the Western politicians who have come flocking to it as the last best hope for stability in the Middle East.</p>
<p>A glimmer of that false hope can be seen in the Washington Post editorial that Senator McCain and Senator Graham penned after a disastrous visit in which they failed to pressure the Egyptian authorities to free Muslim Brotherhood detainees.</p>
<p>Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, McCain and Graham warned ominously, “is a former member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who was radicalized during the violent crackdowns and detentions of Brotherhood leaders by previous Egyptian regimes. “  And if the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t given a chance to take power, the two politicians implicitly conclude, a new generation of Al Qaeda will be born.</p>
<p>Every single Al Qaeda leader, including Bin Laden, had actually been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Somehow Bin Laden turned to terror without the benefit of any Egyptian crackdown.</p>
<p>McCain and Graham’s thinking shows the logical flaw that allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to seduce the West. They focus on the “radicalization” of Ayman al-Zawahiri as a matter of means, not of ends.</p>
<p>The difference between Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, a difference that so many politicians have made their talking point in support for the Brotherhood, does not hinge on the nature of the society that both want to bring about, but on the tactics they use to bring that society about.</p>
<p>It’s not that there are no differences between them, but they are comparable to the ones between the Bolsheviks and the Trotskyites, rather than between the Labour Party and the Bolsheviks. The distinction is occasionally crucial to dogmatic insiders, but irrelevant to us in terms of the violence and warfare that we would inevitably face from such a regime in the long term.</p>
<p>As every leftist activist knows, moderation is a strategy.  Terrorism is also a strategy. Strategies can be revealing, but objectives are much more revealing.</p>
<p>The terrorism-or-democracy fallacy treats Islamists as “bad” if they blow up buildings in order to build a theocracy, but “good” if they compete in elections to build a theocracy. It prioritizes process over outcome and its logic suggests that we should have no objections to Hitler and Stalin if they had come to power as part of a pure democratic process. Or worse still, bet that democracy would moderate them.</p>
<p>Democracy and terrorism are treated as opposite poles. One leads to a stable, prosperous and free society and the other to ruin and perpetual war. But despite all the assertions that democracy is the only thing that can stabilize Egypt, democracy has already badly destabilized Egypt. Most Egyptians were safer and better off under Mubarak. That may be one reason so much of the country appears to have breathed a sigh of relief at the current state of affairs. The majority of Egyptians polled appear to show that democratically they are happy to be rid of democracy.</p>
<p>The lazy assumption that when the Muslim Brotherhood switched from the bomb to the ballot box, it did more than switch means, it also switched ends, doesn’t hold up. Not when examining the tactics of Islamists in power from Turkey to Tunisia to Egypt. Islamists are as violent in power as they are out of power. It isn’t disenfranchisement that radicalizes them. It’s their belief in Islamic rule that does.</p>
<p>Rather than trying to avoid the outcome that leads to an Islamist tyranny, men like McCain and Graham try to avoid leading the Islamists to violent tactics. Their goal is not to stop terrorists from forming regimes, but to dissuade them from using terrorist tactics to form those regimes.</p>
<p>But do McCain and Graham really think that Ayman al-Zawahiri would have been a great improvement as a Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt rather than as a leader of Al Qaeda? If so, they ought to honestly defend that point of view. Instead they warn us that if the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t allowed to take over Egypt by the ballot box, they’ll go on trying to take it over by the bomb.</p>
<p>Is a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood really better than a violent Muslim Brotherhood opposition? Even if the goal is to shut down terrorism, a regime in one of the largest countries in the region that supports terrorism is far more of a threat than that same regime as a terrorist opposition.</p>
<p>Stability through appeasement led to pressure on Israel to create a Palestinian state because a state created through moderate means was bound to be moderate. After two decades of terrorism, there is no evidence that this has been the case. Nor is there any evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood had become moderate to the point of eschewing violence.</p>
<p>In Egypt, Morsi’s successful election through a flawed democratic process did not prevent him from attempting to seize absolute power anyway. It did not prevent him from using armies of thugs to rape, torture and terrorize his political opponents.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood’s emphasis on political Islam did not preclude terrorist Islam because like the political and military wings of a terrorist organization, political Islam and terrorism Islam are the same Islam.</p>
<p>Western leaders have seized on political Islam as the salvation of a civilized world reeling from attacks by terrorist Islam; but this sees terrorism only as an end, rather than as a means.</p>
<p>McCain and Graham, like most Western leaders, are unable to take the Islamist dreams of a revived Caliphate seriously. That is their undoing and ours. To them, the Brotherhood will become another political party and its Islamist agenda will mean little except a ban on liquor or a lower marriage age for little girls. They refuse to understand their enemies by contemplating the world of the present through the dirty glass of the Islamic lens.</p>
<p>What they fail to understand is that the Islamists don’t just seek to change a few laws; they want to overthrow the entire system, to sweep away the assumptions of one civilization and replace it with those of another.</p>
<p>Western politicians are too much creatures of the current system to contemplate the return of the world as it was a thousand years ago. They have imbibed the machinery of the clock and believe that history only marches forward, never backward. And the Muslim Brotherhood is proving them wrong.</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>Rep. Louie Gohmert&#8217;s Challenge to America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/rep-louie-gohmerts-challenge-to-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-louie-gohmerts-challenge-to-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2013 04:09:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[caliphate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[louie gohmert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=197773</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why we must defend global freedom and fight Islamic tyranny. ]]></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/Gohmert-with-CNN-Poster.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-197774 alignleft" alt="Gohmert with CNN Poster" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Gohmert-with-CNN-Poster-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>It is not often one hears a member of the U.S. House of Representatives refer to the building of a global Caliphate in the Middle East &#8212; something which both Christians and non-Islamist Muslims in that part of the world take very seriously. The idea of a coming global Caliphate is hardly even on the radar for most members of Congress. But in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg3mII4vYI0">his House floor speech</a> broadcast on C-SPAN last Friday, July 19, 2013, U.S. Representative <a href="http://gohmert.house.gov/">Louis Gohmert (TX-01)</a> did just that.</span></b></p>
<p>Speaking for almost an hour, Gohmert warned that we were witnessing &#8220;the rise of a new Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, which, unfortunately, the Obama Administration has helped jumpstart.&#8221; He also declared that the rising of the people of Egypt against a radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government has caused the “grand scheme of building a great Caliphate” to run into a “huge problem.” The Texas Republican called for the United States government to once again be seen as supporting and defending those seeking true freedom and democracy.</p>
<p>Congressman Gohmert contrasted the so-called Arab Spring with the current &#8220;major, incredible, earthshaking revolution going on in Egypt.&#8221;  He assessed frankly the Obama Administration’s promotion of the Arab “Spring” and contrasted this with how the United States government and most of the mainstream media now appear to be at odds with those resisting the domination of radical Islam. In addition, Gohmert, who is Vice Chair of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, connected the dots between the Obama Administration&#8217;s foreign policy, United States national security, and the increasing persecution of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities in Islam-dominated parts of the world.</p>
<p>According to foreign policy and terrorism expert Dr. Walid Phares, one House observer called Gohmert’s speech &#8220;the most powerful speech in the defense of reformers, democracy seekers, seculars, Christian Copts, and Muslim moderates in Egypt in the history of the US Congress, to date.&#8221;  But the congressman’s speech was even more than that. It was a defense of reformers in Egypt and beyond, and it was an education in foreign policy for those who have ears to hear.</p>
<p>Speaking of Libya, Gohmert said that it seemed clear that Ghadafi had stopped supporting terrorism after the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein in 2003. Libya, Algeria, and Mali were actually focused on combating Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terrorism in the Sahel region. Gohmert recollected how they were told that the U.S. has “no national security interest in Libya” by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but that President Obama decided, with the support of 57 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) states, as well as NATO states that get oil from Libya, to use U.S. assets to take out Ghadafi.</p>
<p>“Consistency is very important in foreign policy, and yet we don’t seem to be very consistent in using our military powers to oust Ghadafi after he had had a &#8216;conversion experience&#8217; and was doing what he could to help us fight terrorism,” said Gohmert. This was especially troubling after there was intelligence that Al Qaeda was backing rebels. “We knew that there were radical Islamists trying to drive Ghadafi out,” Gohmert continued, “and this administration did not pause long enough to get an answer to the question: ‘If we drive Ghadafi out, would we be more safe in America or less safe?’” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfMrxMHnSZ8&amp;list=TLYdXN-ZflVVU">Benghazi appears to have answered that question</a>.</p>
<p>Gohmert warned of similar inconsistency in actions being contemplated in Syria. The congressman revealed that “it looked like initially these were <i>not</i> al Qaeda backed rebels in Syria, and if we had acted quickly enough, and had someone who did not vote ‘present,’ we could have helped rebels who were not al Qaeda rebels.” But the situation has degenerated, Gohmert lamented. “You have a tyrant leader on one hand, and you have radical Islamists – most of whom would like to destroy the United States as well – challenging him,” he declared. “Where in the world is the interest in spilling American blood or treasure in getting into Syria?” he demanded.</p>
<p>Returning to Egypt, Gohmert described President Morsi’s overreaches of power, the brutality towards the Copts and other Christians, and the drafting of an Islamic constitution in November 2012 that was boycotted by the Christians and liberal secularists alike. These led to the pro-democracy and freedom group <i>Tamarud’s </i>petition for Morsi to step down and for new elections to be held. Ensuring that Egyptian revolution statistics will be enshrined in the congressional record, Gohmert told how that petition garnered over 22 million signatures and noted the 33 million protesters at one demonstration. He exclaimed, “There has never been a demonstration of as many as 20 million people! But the people of Egypt rose up. They recognized that radical Islamists in charge of their country were not a good thing, even if the leaders of our country in the Executive Branch could not see the obvious.”</p>
<p>Gohmert also described the Egyptian people’s anger that their revolution was being described as a &#8220;military coup&#8221; and that &#8220;they were furious at how CNN seemed to take the side of the Muslim Brotherhood over and over.&#8221; Gohmert wanted the American people to know what really is happening in Egypt and its significance and so returned to the looming danger of a global Caliphate and how the “major, incredible, earthshaking revolution,” of moderate Muslims, Coptic Christians, and liberal secularists who oppose radical Islam “rose up in greater numbers than has ever arisen anywhere in the world in the whole history of mankind.”<i> </i>And in contrast to anything that U.S. foreign policy was doing, because of “these incredible, freedom-desiring Egyptians,” said Gohmert, “this grand scheme of building a great Caliphate, a new Ottoman Empire, ran into a huge problem.” The American people need to recognize, and be encouraged, not by the Arab winter that was originally called an Arab “Spring,” but by “the true Spring that is now happening in Egypt as moderate Muslims and Coptic Christians and caring secularists have arisen together and said &#8216;No!&#8217; to radical Islam,” he said.</p>
<p>Gohmert displayed photographs showing the millions and millions of people who demonstrated for freedom. There were also examples of posters denouncing Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood, radical Islam, and, thanks to U.S. foreign policy, posters condemning not just CNN, but President Obama and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, as Muslim Brotherhood supporters and labeling Patterson the &#8220;New Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.&#8221; Gohmert said that he did not support the signs nor think that they were correct, but that it was important to know what the people of Egypt&#8217;s perceptions are about the United States government, based upon our actions. “Of course, the United States government does not support terrorism,&#8221; he remonstrated, but “this nation, this Administration, has supported terrorists in Libya, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2S1mJAxMzA&amp;list=TLWppGvHohx5A">in Egypt</a>, and is now trying to get support for terrorists in Syria,” so it is understandable that Egyptians would accuse us of supporting terrorism.</p>
<p>Issuing a call for the United States to return to a position of strength, Gohmert voiced concerns about the weakening of American national security, caused by the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists throughout the United States government. Using <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZNciYuclDU&amp;list=TLy0GL3JZAvGY">the Boston bombing</a> as an example, Gohmert talked about how we were “given information that was not properly utilized because of the handcuffing that has gone on” within the FBI, the intelligence community, and the State Department, in the purging of training material. He quoted one intelligence officer who said that this action kept us “from seeing who our enemy is.”</p>
<p>Gohmert also explained that a strong United States, supporting reformers that we can trust and hold accountable would be a help to Christians around the world who are facing increasing persecution, torture, and death. “This great nation, that arose based on Judeo-Christian ethics,” stood “idly by,” while there was still a vast American presence, said Gohmert, as the last Christian church in Afghanistan closed and as the last publicly-declared Jew left the country. Gohmert invoked the memory of John Quincy Adams arguing for the freedom of the Africans of the Amistad in the old Supreme Court chamber below them, and also invoked the “Judge of all judges” to hold America accountable &#8220;to stand with free nations and be friends of free nations.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Some of us have a fear that if we do not do more to support truth and justice and the American ideals that this country was founded on, there <i>will</i> come a day of judgment,” Gohmert confessed in his closing remarks. On national security and the U.S. government’s obligation to support the Constitution and protect it from all enemies, foreign and domestic, Gohmert spoke of how before Morsi’s arrest, a Muslim Brotherhood official in Egypt had boasted that there are “six Muslim Brotherhood members that are high level confidantes” in important advisory positions in this administration. He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States did not need to use violence because they were so effective at infiltrating the government.</p>
<p>Gohmert blasted the acquiescence to the Islamism in America that is threatening our national sovereignty. “The truth is that anyone . . . that wants to subvert our Constitution to Shariah Law is an enemy of the United States,” he declared. These are the people “from whom we took an oath to protect our Constitution and this country,” he continued. Gohmert contrasted the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists with the people of Egypt who, he said, had arisen and made clear that they did not want radical Islamists running their country, nor to see Christians persecuted. “Those are the kind of people this nation should befriend,” Gohmert declared, “and not try to rush in and shore up those who would persecute, torture, and kill Christians, and Jews, and secularists who just want to be free.”</p>
<p>Congressman Gohmert’s message was not new information to many, but what was new, and quite earthshaking in its own way, was the fact that this speech was given by a U.S. representative on the floor of the House and before the C-SPAN cameras. The congressman’s words have been a great encouragement to the Egyptian people. Walid Phares reported that Gohmert’s speech has been widely viewed in Egypt. Phares also said that because of the speech, “a number of members of the European Parliament will be making stronger comments about Egypt and asking their governments to side with civil society and shift away from the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood).” Just as the Egyptian people launched a freedom revolution, one House observer declared that “Gohmert has launched a moral revolution in U.S. foreign policy.” But he needs all the help he can get from Americans who understand the truth of what he says because getting his colleagues in Congress to rise up and support that revolution may prove more difficult than mobilizing 33 million Egyptians to fight for freedom.</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>Iran&#8217;s Hope for an &#8216;Islamic Awakening&#8217; in Egypt</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/irans-hope-for-an-islamic-awakening-in-egypt/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-hope-for-an-islamic-awakening-in-egypt</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2013 04:30:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The dangerous power vacuum left by an absence of U.S. leadership. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/640x392_31494_145906.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196814" alt="640x392_31494_145906" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/640x392_31494_145906-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>One of the most detrimental consequences of the Obama administration’s avoidance of taking a robust and assertive foreign policy leadership role is that it has directly contributed to emboldening the hegemonic, ideological, and geopolitical ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran – not only across the region, but also in the international arena. Because the Obama administration has been hesitant to take decisive action towards the heightening political leverage and influence of the Islamists and Salafists in Egypt, Iran has been able to pursue actions that further preserve its geopolitical, national, geostrategic and ideological privileges across the region.</p>
<p>After the recent overthrow of the Islamist and authoritative leader, Mohammad Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood party, the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been publicly calling for the Islamists, fundamentalists, Salafists, and advocates of radical Sharia law to mobilize on the streets and to protest Israel and the United States until Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are reinstated to power. Due to the political vacuum in Egypt and due to the absence of U.S. leadership, Iranian leaders are eagerly intervening in Egypt’s political affairs in order to shift the current political developments to their favor.</p>
<p>This week, the Supreme Leader and his loyal followers – in a manner that appears to be following the footsteps of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution – are publicly encouraging another uprising in Egypt, referring to it as an &#8220;Islamic Awakening.” Intriguingly enough, the Iranian leaders used a description other than an “Islamic Awakening” when describing the nation-wide protests in Syria. Instead, Iranian officials hypocritically labeled Syria’s uprisings as a struggle between Assad’s legitimate Alawite-based government on one hand and Israeli-and-U.S.-backed conspirators, traitors and “terrorists” on the other.</p>
<p>After former Egyptian president Morsi was removed from power by the high generals of the Egyptian Army, as well as through the efforts of millions of protesters, Iran&#8217;s Foreign Ministry harshly criticized the Egyptian military, U.S. and Israel for toppling the nation&#8217;s Islamist president. In an official interview, the Islamic Republic of Iran&#8217;s Foreign Ministry called the move to remove ex-president Morsi as extremely improper. According to the official Iranian news agency IRNA, the ministry spokesman Abbas Araghchi stated, &#8220;We do not consider proper the intervention by military forces in politics to replace a democratically elected administration.&#8221; In addition, Mansour Haqiqatpour, a member of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said on Tuesday that “Militarism does not favor democracy…. The Army must defend the great Egyptian people against foreign threats.”</p>
<p>First of all, it is fairly ironic that the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran are lecturing the Egyptian people about democracy and legitimate elections. The Islamic Republic of Iran – a country in which the gilded circle of the Supreme Leader and his loyal members of the Guardian Council hold the power to veto any politically-undesirable candidate from running for presidency – is instructing the Egyptian people and military on the meaning of democracy. Iran, which is encouraging Morsi’s supporters to mobilize on the streets, is the same country that became notorious for its repeated and oppressive crack downs on leaders and participants of the Iranian Green Movement ever since its formation after the highly-contested 2009 presidential election. Many of the oppositional political figures, including Mir Hussein Mosavi and Mehdi Karoubi, are to this day still under house arrest. In addition, the Islamic Republic of Iran ranks among the lowest in freedom of speech, press, assembly, rule of law, and social justice. Iran is also ranked among the top five countries in human rights abuses, media censorship, oppression of political parties, and discrimination against minorities, including the Sunnis, Christian and Bahaeis.</p>
<p>The fact is that Iran gained tremendous geostrategic, geopolitical and political leverage after Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood came to power. The Iranian leaders exploited the increasingly shrinking leadership of the Obama administration, which allowed them to shift the regional balance of power to their favor. For instance, after more than thirty years of denied access, Iran is now able to use the Suez Canal. Although Egypt is one of the largest recipients of donations from the United States (receiving almost over 1.5 billion dollars a year), it was Morsi’s government which submitted to Iran’s assertive demands and signed a contract to grant permission to Tehran to use the Canal. Moreover, Iran had long been in a complete political and diplomatic stalemate with the deposed government of Hosni Mubarak, who gave asylum to the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and who had been in tension with Shiite Iran ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution. For decades, Tehran was denied any kind of strategic access by Mubarak, who also had the military’s backing for over thirty years. In addition, the Islamic Republic of Iran was capable of reopening its embassy in Egypt under Morsi’s rule, which helped restart Iran-Egypt diplomatic, political, and economic ties.</p>
<p>More fundamentally, Obama’s lack of leadership has helped Iranian leaders gain not only a strategic naval access to the Mediterranean Sea, but also the capability to project their naval power into the Atlantic Ocean. The increasing access to the Mediterranean Sea assisted Iran’s navy and Revolutionary Guard Corps to more directly provide militarily and advisory assistance to its closest Arab ally: Syria. In addition, after gaining access to the Atlantic Ocean, the country’s next plan according to the Supreme Leader is to situate its warships near the coasts of the United States.</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>A Pro-Israel Buzz in the Blogosphere</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-pro-israel-buzz-in-the-blogosphere/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-pro-israel-buzz-in-the-blogosphere</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:12:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jim Fletcher]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[American-Israel Friendship League]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What American bloggers have to say about the Middle East's only democracy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/181255_10151716672471000_1240685885_n.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196796" alt="181255_10151716672471000_1240685885_n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/181255_10151716672471000_1240685885_n.jpg" width="265" height="199" /></a>With various political and religious bloggers taking potshots—or launching artillery attacks—at the tiny state of Israel, someone was bound to have a good idea and host influential writers and journalists so that they could see for themselves just what the Jewish state is really all about.</p>
<p>In June, the America-Israel Friendship League (AIFL) launched a “blogger tour” of Israel. By all accounts, it was a smashing success.</p>
<p>Writing for National Review in June, Deroy Murdock, a syndicated columnist, made it clear that seeing Israel in person has a dramatic effect on one’s perceptions:</p>
<blockquote><p>I was fortunate to see Israel for the first time last week, thanks to the America-Israel Friendship League. Five of the eleven journalists on AIFL&#8217;s fact-finding trip were new here. Keys and other artists likely would find Israel at least as surprising as we did.</p>
<p>First and foremost, Israel&#8217;s omnipresence in the U.S. media makes it sound like a superpower. But as much as anything, Israel is impressively compact. At just 7,992 square miles, it is slightly larger than Clark County, Nevada (greater Las Vegas), but smaller than New Hampshire. Israel is crowded on three sides by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. It could fit 157 times within the land masses of those countries.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sandy Rios, vice-president of Family-Pac Federal, recognized in the Israeli people a laundry list of character traits that separate them from their critics, particularly the barbarians committed to destroying them.</p>
<blockquote><p>Mostly on this trip, I saw the value of a cohesive culture and by that I would say Israel is filled with Jews of all descriptions. Secular, religious—tons of differences, but they have a common language, a common educational system. They learn Hebrew, Jewish history, the modern history of Israel, and serve in the military. There is a common sense of purpose.</p></blockquote>
<p>Rios, a leader in the Christian community in the U.S., also said with a tinge of sadness:</p>
<blockquote><p>Israelis create energy and focus, and pride in their culture. Qualities I remember America used to have. I love that in Israel, I envy that.</p></blockquote>
<p>With a growing number of evangelical Christian bloggers advocating for the Palestinian narrative, the AIFL-sponsored trip was even more critical because it brought Christian leaders over who can counter the propaganda. Robin Mazyck, CBN Bureau Chief in Washington, used her first trip to Israel to gain a well-rounded perspective of the Jewish state. Included in her education was the fact that Israel is far from the “apartheid state” her enemies claim.</p>
<blockquote><p>There are Muslim Arabs who voluntarily serve in the IDF, and Israel issues thousands of work permits to Palestinians living in the West Bank,” she said. Obviously, I knew the situation in the Middle East was complicated, but I didn’t understand just how extremely murky the waters were until I learned those things.</p></blockquote>
<p>Religious diversity in Israel is another reality Mazyck was pleasantly surprised to see:</p>
<blockquote><p>I saw nuns walking next to Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews walking past Catholic priests in Jerusalem. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see this. I knew that the Old City was important to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but I wasn’t expecting this at all. Israel is extremely diverse – there are people there from around the world. Every ethnicity you can imagine is represented in this tiny country.</p></blockquote>
<p>Upon returning to the States, Mazyck sees clearly the benefits:</p>
<blockquote><p>I have shared the experiences from my trip with my colleagues, my friends and my family.  The trip has given me a new perspective and insight.</p>
<p>CBN News has a bureau in Jerusalem, and I stopped by for a visit. Seeing their facility and learning more about their workflow allowed me to offer them assistance from my bureau in DC. My early morning videographer is now on standby to help them when they need it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Guy Benson, political editor for Townhall, and a talk radio personality, was grateful to see that his hosts embody an affinity for surviving that few understand:</p>
<blockquote><p>We finished our Friday by attending a Shabbat service at an orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem, followed by a traditional dinner at the local rabbi’s home.  During the meal, I watched the young rabbi carry out ancient religious rituals, surrounded by his happy, healthy and growing family.  They sang in Hebrew, the same language their ancestors spoke.  They practiced their forebears’ faith.  And they did so in a safe and thriving Jewish state, located on the same parcel of land their people have inhabited for millennia.  More than seventy years ago, a malignant ideology terrorized world Jewry.  The resulting genocide continues to shock the free world’s collective conscience.  But for all of Hitler’s vile efficiency, he and his killers ultimately failed.  And that failure is embodied by the smiling, laughing, faithful family with whom our delegation broke bread last evening.  How beautiful.  How moving.</p></blockquote>
<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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