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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; fight</title>
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		<title>9/11 and Forgiveness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joeherring/911-and-forgiveness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=911-and-forgiveness</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joeherring/911-and-forgiveness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:51:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Herring]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[betrayal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[forgiveness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Faith Institute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240755</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I'm sorry, but on this 13th anniversary I'm not looking for closure.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fr.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240759" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fr-450x314.jpeg" alt="fr" width="320" height="223" /></a>On a certain day in the very recent past, before the sun had melted the morning into afternoon, I had been told three times that forgiveness was the order of the day for this upcoming 13<sup>th </sup>anniversary of 9/11.  Once was by the carnival barker/news anchor on the television.  I heard it for the second time by a teenager in a television commercial, urging his fellow citizens to commit &#8220;acts of service&#8221; as a means of remembrance.  Lastly, a sign on the marquis outside a church I drove past read, &#8220;Remember, but Forgive.&#8221;</p>
<p>It has always been a difficult concept for a hothead like me to grasp, this forgiveness thing. I know Jesus would, but I&#8217;m no Jesus.  To me, forgiveness is something bestowed on those who erred unintentionally, or through a lapse in judgment, not for those who acted out of a malicious intent to harm or kill.  I can&#8217;t fathom forgiving the rapist of a child or the savage murderer of the innocent and helpless.  It is a good thing that I am not all-powerful, because I would make for a terribly vengeful god.</p>
<p>It was a beautiful day on which I wrote this. The sky was crystalline blue; the air was clear, with a whisper of the coolness of approaching fall.  In fact, it was a near-carbon copy of the weather from thirteen years earlier.  I remember watching the warplanes buzzing over my city like angry hornets on that day, to and fro, with armaments hanging menacingly from their wings.  Only later would I discover that they were performing an over-watch operation, guarding the airspace above the military base south of town, where President George W. Bush had just landed in Air Force One.</p>
<p>I come from a military family and am a veteran myself.  I understand the nature of conflict, and the reasons to avoid it, if possible.  I also realize that conflict is often unavoidable, and at times even preferable to maintaining the status quo.</p>
<p>After the brutal assault we suffered on 9/11/01, we could have maintained our usual pattern of treating terrorism as a police matter and launched an international investigation.  Or we could have followed the fetid and worn advice of the appeasers (who tell us everything is our fault) and simply offered money or a new aid program to assuage the perpetrators of this attack.  Instead, we chose war, and properly so.</p>
<p>Now that the 13<sup>th</sup> anniversary is here, I don&#8217;t feel the catharsis the media tells me I should have experienced by now.  I must be a barbaric freak – some war-loving monkey with a cylindrical brain that recycles the same hatred over and over again, tumbling it like compost until it steams.  I&#8217;m supposed to forgive, and even, according to some commentators from the left, forget that 9/11 happened.  To &#8220;get over ourselves,&#8221; as the &#8220;enlightened&#8221; opine.</p>
<p>It finally occurred to me, though, why I couldn&#8217;t get right with this whole &#8220;forgiveness&#8221; theme.  It struck me why I bristled at the suggestion by President Obama that we declare 9/11 a &#8220;day of service,&#8221; casting about for volunteer opportunities as a way of honoring our dead.  The unrest in my heart was not courtesy of 9/11 itself; it was the tainting of the victory America deserved and earned <em>after</em> 9/11 that spawned my ill ease.</p>
<p>In times past, our remembrances have been predicated on victory, whole and entire.  Such victories are the necessary resolutions of violent conflict.  No one celebrates a stalemate, much less a loss.  WWII was solid.  We won.  Polio was solid.  We beat that, too.  In the Civil War, we lamented the terrible price our countrymen paid, but we celebrated the ultimate supremacy of our Union, and built ever higher on that hard-won foundation.</p>
<p>The War on Terror, like Vietnam, has emerged muddled and unclear, seemingly by design. It is precisely this feeling that the left seeks to engender in us: a sense of haplessness – to have us view our defense as a burden of care that we can&#8217;t wait to lay down.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t want to lay down that burden.  I&#8217;m not looking for closure.  I want to fight.  I want to ratchet up the retribution until the very ground our enemy stands upon screams its submission, and the air itself cracks with the blast of our righteous vengeance.  Our blood-earned victory has been stolen &#8212; and I want it back.</p>
<p>I want those who preach the politics of defeat and appeasement to find themselves shunned at every turn by those of us who still believe that America fights when America is right – and that to accept anything short of victory is to dishonor the sacrifice of the dead and wounded.</p>
<p>War is an ugly and repulsive thing, but it is not as ugly and repulsive as the coward who would lick the hand of his master and thank him for beating him less today than the day before.  America has changed the world in unprecedented ways.  We have shown the common souls of this earth that they are possessed of an inherent worth, granted by a force mightier than any government, and not subject to the whims and designs of men.</p>
<p>Despite our successes, or perhaps because of them, the brutish of the world are fighting back.  Never forget: the default position of humanity has always been brutal oppression and savage war.  America and the ideals of its founding have done more to change that than anything else, save Christianity.</p>
<p>The left wishes us to accept less than winning.  We aren&#8217;t any better than all the other nations of the earth, they tell us.  Well, I think that those on the left are right: <em>they</em> aren&#8217;t any better than all the other nations, but the rest of us are, and we intend to raise a standard to which the righteous and patriotic may aspire.  I say fight on, against all enemies, foreign <em>and</em> domestic.</p>
<p>The &#8220;parade marshal&#8221; of the American left, Barack Obama, marches proudly toward an alternative vision of our nation, leading those who fail to recognize that our strength is built upon action, not apology – goodness in the deed, not merely the intention.</p>
<p>We have earned our victory.  We deserve it as a nation and as a people, and I intend to mark the anniversary of 9/11 with martial pride and a hearty thump of the chest.  Let 9/11 be a day of service for those inclined to servitude.  For me, it will always be a reminder that our safety is only as sure as our strength.  To God the glory; to the rest of us, <em>Semper Fidelis!</em></p>
<p><strong>Joe Herring writes from Omaha, Nebraska and welcomes visitors to his website at <a href="http://www.readmorejoe.com/">www.readmorejoe.com</a>. He is the communications director for the <a href="http://globalfaithinstitute.org/">Global Faith Institute</a>. </strong></p>
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		<title>American ISIS Supporter Plotted to Blow Up &#8216;Zionist&#8217; Day Care</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/american-isis-supporter-plotted-to-blow-up-zionist-day-care/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=american-isis-supporter-plotted-to-blow-up-zionist-day-care</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:45:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arrest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Convert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicholas Michael Teausant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239684</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The walking time bombs in our midst. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="color: #000000;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/nicholas-michael-teausant.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239685" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/nicholas-michael-teausant-450x317.jpg" alt="nicholas-michael-teausant" width="288" height="203" /></a>In March <i>Frontpage</i> <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/fbi-bags-aspiring-american-assad/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">profiled Californian Nicholas Michael Teausant</span></a>, </span>indicted for attempting to support ISIS, a foreign terrorist organization. Teausant remains in custody but recently <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2014/08/26/6656921/lodi-area-terror-suspect-says.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">granted an enlightening interview</span></a> to Sam Stanton and Denny Walsh of the <i>Sacramento Bee</i>.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">In March Teausant was en route to Canada and near the border texted a friend who told him “</span>if I get myself out of the country everything will be taken care of, they’ll pay for me to go over there, they’ll give me a gun.” He had been in the National Guard but had not brought along a weapon. His friend also told him “They’ll give me everything I could possibly want. They’ll take care of my family, and that I can always come back to America when this is over.” The friend turned out to be an FBI informer, and that led to his arrest.</p>
<p>“I’m not going to say that I’m completely innocent and I have no fault in this,” Teausant told the reporters. “Some of it is my fault, yes. But then again I also feel that if the informant hadn’t come along I would have just been making idle boasts and I wouldn’t have done anything.” But there’s more to the story.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">Teausant told the reporters that while living in Montana he</span> met a beautiful Muslim woman who would speak only to Muslim men. That spurred his interest in Islam, but it wasn’t only romantic. The zealous convert came to believe his daughter’s day care center was “Zionist.” He wanted to blow it up but claims he told the informant he would only bomb the place when nobody was there. Teausant doesn’t recall discussing any bomb attacks in Los Angeles but on fighting overseas he showed good recall. The newly minted Muslim soon became convinced that the government of Syria needed to be taken down.</p>
<p>“I wanted to go help fight for these people because the New Hampshire slogan is ‘Live Free or Die,’” he told the <i>Bee</i> reporters. “In 1775, we rebelled against Britain because we felt we were being tyrannized and conquered, so we wanted our own freedom. So I felt like I could try and help with that, and give the people freedom that they were fighting for.”</p>
<p>In May his lawyers argued that he would <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/13/6402038/lodi-area-terror-suspect-renews.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">never make it to Syria</span></a> and never provide support for anyone. He now tells the <i>Bee</i> his support for ISIS was the informer’s suggestion and that “at the time they were not doing the brutal stuff that they’re doing now,” adding that he is “absolutely abhorred at that Foley thing. I did not see that coming.”</p>
<p>That is a stretch, even for someone reportedly diagnosed with schizophrenia. That “Foley thing” would be a beheading, something Islamic jihadists have been doing for centuries for such offenses as being non-Muslim. So despite claims he is “kind of like a cracked egg,” the authorities are sticking to their guns. They told reporters that they reviewed all the evidence, conducted the investigation properly, and are prosecuting the case by the book.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Teausant’s case has drawn no comment from Mohamed Abdul Azeez, leader of the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/fbi-to-honor-cair-linked-group/"><span style="color: #6b0901;">Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims</span></a> (SALAM) Islamic Center and frequently interviewed in the local press. The SALAM center co-hosts events with CAIR and in 2009 Abdul Azeez was the recipient of the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/lloyd-billingsley/the-fbi-awards-by-lloyd-billingsley/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">FBI’s community service award</span></a> “for preventing violence, creating understanding, bringing people together.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Last year after the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon Abdul Azeez <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/the-fbis-favorite-imam-sounds-off-on-boston/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">lamented the “explosions in Boston,”</span></a> but told reporters “I don’t want to have to apologize for any crime that’s been committed.” The California Muslim leader said “I feel similar to a gun owner worried about gun laws all the time because people are shooting people, or a Jew who has to worry about the atrocities being committed in Israel.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The articulate Abdul Azeez, who holds degrees from Ohio State and the University of Chicago, has remained quiet about Boko Haram in Nigeria and the beheading of James Foley by ISIS. Meanwhile, Nicholas Teausant, who wanted to support ISIS and blow up a “Zionist” day care center, remains upbeat.</p>
<p>“Even if they gave me the maximum 15 years I’d come out of prison at 35,” he told the <i>Bee</i> reporters. “That still leaves me the rest of my life to go to college and get a Ph.D., do what I want and be with my family.”</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>Frontpage&#8217;s 2013 Man of the Year: Ted Cruz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/frontpages-2013-man-of-the-year-ted-cruz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=frontpages-2013-man-of-the-year-ted-cruz</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Dec 2013 05:37:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Man of the Year]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Cruz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Cruz effect. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Ted_Cruz.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214129" alt="Ted_Cruz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Ted_Cruz-427x350.png" width="299" height="245" /></a>Harry Reid called him a “laughingstock” and Grover Norqust’s men accused him of being a “terrorist.” The head of the Chamber Commerce suggested that he learn to sit down and be quiet. Nigeria demanded that he apologize and Chris Matthews accused him of wanting to kill Obama’s baby.</p>
<p>At September’s end, Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine gloated, “Someone tell Ted Cruz the ObamaCare War is Over.”</p>
<p>&#8220;Cruz can say, &#8216;Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy,&#8217; and quite plausibly believe it. News to the contrary has never penetrated his mental bunker,&#8221; Chait wrote suggesting that Cruz and his allies would end up like the Japanese soldiers on lost islands fighting for a lost cause.</p>
<p>Fast forward a few months and it’s ObamaCare that looks like the lost cause.</p>
<p>A Rasmussen poll places Cruz as the third most influential world leader after Obama and the Pope. Texas Republicans favor him for the top job and he took first place in the Value Voter Summit straw poll. Cruz ties Hillary Clinton in Colorado and beats her among independents.</p>
<p>It’s quite a comeback for a man who was being lowered into the coffin by the liberal media just a few short months ago after a vicious hate campaign with no parallels except the left’s War on Palin.</p>
<p>From one end of the country to the other, the voices of the inevitable, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, pollsters and pundits, in ink-stained print, on the sprawling feeds of cable news and the endless whirl of the Internet, boomed their message.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz was wrong. Ted Cruz was doomed. Ted Cruz would destroy the Republican Party. Ted Cruz was a mad fool for taking on ObamaCare in all the wrong ways. But as the old year tips into the new, Cruz is standing tall and ObamaCare is being torn apart by its namesake in a frantic effort to save his popularity.</p>
<p>Desperation has forced Obama to become Ted Cruz, tearing away pieces of ObamaCare, throwing around delays and postponements for his signature legislation like confetti at a parade.</p>
<p>“One man with courage makes a majority,” Andrew Jackson said. &#8220;The Washington strategist said keep your head down, don’t rock the boat, the economy is not going great for President Obama so keep your head down and we will win. Shock of all shocks, we got our butts cleaned,” Cruz said.</p>
<p>“Just keep your head down and we will win races,&#8221; Cruz said. &#8220;The problem is if you do that, you destroy every single reason anyone has to come up and vote.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now the Washington strategists are catching up with Ted Cruz. And so are the polls.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz understood that the impact of ObamaCare on ordinary Americans would be the defining issue of the next election. And he understood that ObamaCare itself would prove him right.</p>
<p>While Republican leaders tried to hold him back, Ted Cruz was getting out in front of the health care policy cancellations, taxes and job cuts. While some Senate Republicans were collaborating in Obama’s illegal alien amnesty, chasing populism with empty gimmicks like domestic drones strikes or delivering empty speeches and bloated budgets; he never deviated from what really mattered.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz was too ruthless, they said. Too arrogant and mean-spirited. Too unwilling to compromise.</p>
<p>And they were right. Ted Cruz was too unwilling to compromise. Too unwilling to choose Green Eggs and Ham, accept ObamaCare as the law of the land and retreat to fighting on the next sinking atoll that the Washington strategists would declare the next great battlefield shortly before they declare it a doomed cause and negotiate another strategic withdrawal to the home islands.</p>
<p>The Republican leadership still favors the great compromisers who compromise on budgets and illegal alien amnesties, and who are never ruthless unless they are stabbing conservatives in the back.</p>
<p>The Cruz Effect forces the Republican Party to choose between style and substance. It can keep its glib unconvincing candidates with perfect faces and perfect hair who have no ideas and nothing to offer. Men whose only virtue is standing for nothing are still the choice of the political machine for the elections of tomorrow where heads will once again be kept down and no harshness will be allowed.</p>
<p>But the definitive figure in the Republican Party is FrontPage’s Man of the Year.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz has emerged as the leading voice of principle in a Republican Party that has become pathetically eager to trade substance for style. He made his stand on substance and in a short few months the pundits and politicians who had abandoned him were forced to do their own sharp turns when he was proven right.</p>
<p>Political parties are not brands of mouthwash or detergent. They cannot be sold through money and repetition alone. Campaign volunteers do not walk through the rain when there is nothing to believe in. Struggling men and women do not mail out checks because they are told to do it. And millions and millions of Americans do not take time out from caring for their families, working a second job and struggling to make ends meet to wait on line and cast a vote for a man whom they do not believe in.</p>
<p>Cruz has brought principle and substance back to the Republican Party. And that has given millions of its supporters who despaired after the defeat of 2012 something to stand for, to fight for and to believe in.</p>
<p>The Cruz Effect happened because one man understood that you don’t keep your head down while looking for popular fights to pick, but you pick the unpopular fights that truly matter and you fight them until they become popular.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz took on ObamaCare and when everyone was done writing his political obituary as a dangerous loose cannon who shouldn’t be allowed to talk without the party’s permission, they looked up from their iPads to find ObamaCare hunched over and bleeding in a corner while Ted Cruz was back in Texas speaking to cheering crowds.</p>
<p>In 2013, he took on ObamaCare, the media and his own party without ever losing faith in the fight. And instead of the fight burying his political career, as every media outlet insisted it would, it buried Obama’s second term instead.</p>
<p>This was the year when Ted Cruz showed the Republican Party what was possible when you fight the good fight for what you believe in. And that is why he is FrontPage Magazine’s Man of the Year.</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>White Hipsters in Austin: What Black Mob Violence?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/colin-flaherty/white-hipsters-in-austin-what-black-mob-violence/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-hipsters-in-austin-what-black-mob-violence</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2013 04:17:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Colin Flaherty]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Austin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[highland mall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hipster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209522</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[White people do it all the time. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/four_14045.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209530" alt="four_14045" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/four_14045.jpg" width="270" height="151" /></a>The white hipsters of Austin want us to know that race had nothing to do with the 200 black people who fought, destroyed property and threw rocks at police a few days before Halloween.</span></p>
<p>White people do it all the time, said Katie Friel, who writes for <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">Culture Map in Austin</a>. But the only time anyone calls it a riot is if it involves a large number of black people, she says. She pointed to a 2011 punk rock concert where mostly white fans tried to tear down the chain link fence. Police sprayed pepper gas. No one said that was a riot, she said.</p>
<p>“If Austin wants to grow into the creative, supportive, progressive community we claim to want to be, we need to stop thinking, seeing and reporting in black and white,” she said.</p>
<p>Which is strange because none of the local media reported what witnesses, Twitter, Facebook, night-vision videos and other Internet sources revealed: Everyone involved in the Austin mayhem was black.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">Austin Statesman was merely following the advice of a recent article </a>in the monthly magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. The topic was how to cover racial violence. The advice? Don’t.</p>
<p>The riot that was not a riot began the Saturday night before Halloween at the annual House of Torment in the parking lot of the Highland Mall. Police arrived to find 200 “unruly” teenagers roaming the area, fighting in at least five different places.</p>
<p>When police ordered them to break it up, they threw rocks instead. Several rioters urged fellow miscreants to preform bigger and greater acts of violence. It took every officer on duty in Austin more than two hours to bring the violence under control. Not before dispensing generous amounts of pepper spray. Four black people were arrested and charged with crimes ranging from rioting to using a fake ID.</p>
<p>Seven people were treated at the scene for riot-related injuries. Much of the violence took place under a grainy black and white, night-vision police video from a helicopter that monitored the violence.</p>
<p>Police said they did not know why so many black people were rioting. One spokesman said the rioters were “silly.”</p>
<p>That is a different excuse than what we heard from a similar episode of black mob violence at a recent showing of a scary movie in a suburb of Rochester. There, a police spokeswoman explained <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">why 500 black people were fighting in and outside of a </a>scary movie:</p>
<p>“They have pent up energy from being scared in the movie theater and they come out and they don’t know what to do with that energy,” said Lt. Jonna Izzo to Rochester News 8.</p>
<p>So they riot.</p>
<p>Local police did not offer up that explanation here. Perhaps because promoters of the haunted house said none of the rioters were customers of the House of Torment, where ticket prices begin at $25.</p>
<p>Or maybe the ticket price is what scared them. If we depend on the sketchy local media, we may never know.</p>
<p>The Austin Statesman and other local media dutifully neglected to report that everyone arrested and everyone involved in the mayhem was black. Many commenters to local news sites pointed that out, but most of these remarks were removed minutes after going up.</p>
<p>The comments blasting the censored remarks as being racist were allowed to remain.</p>
<p>But at least the brave hipsters at <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">Culture Map opened it up for some straight talk</a>. Said one reader:</p>
<blockquote><p>Serious question: how you gonna write about this story and leave out the fact that Highland Mall has previously called police to disperse large, mostly black crowds? Were you not here during Texas Relays a few years back?</p></blockquote>
<p>For non-Austinites, here is what he is talking about: In 2009, the Highland Mall and several other local businesses closed in advance of the Texas Relays &#8212; a state-wide track and field event at the nearby University of Texas.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">Austin Chronicle said the Texas Relays</a> caused “flares of uptight resistance to the annual influx of thousands of mostly African-American visitors. The sparks raised questions – again – about the city&#8217;s too often less-than-progressive track record on race.”</p>
<p>The president of the local NAACP weighed in, accusing the mall owners of racism. And accusing the city of not living up to the standards for black people it created in the city council’s African American Quality of Life Initiative from 2005.</p>
<p>Others pointed to the track record of racial violence surrounding the Relays and compared it to the rolling racial violence of Freaknik in Atlanta &#8212; another annual gathering of black college students that the black mayor, black police and black city leaders ran out of town 13 years ago because of the large-scale violence, destruction and fights with police.</p>
<p>This mayhem at the Texas Relays and the House of Torment is part of a pattern of black mob violence documented in <a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/new-black-mob-violence-at-austin-happy-halloween/">One security guard told wrote about racial violence at the Highlands Mall</a>: “I worked as a security guard last year during the relays and there were fights verbal and physical between rival schools, numerous instances of racial discrimination against whites,theft, police officers assaulted, Then someone shot off a gun in there and the police finally shut down the mall early. Why are these not mentioned or addressed by the NAACP or Austin City Council?”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Richard Boland of the Peaceful Streets Project is urging anyone who feels police were too rough with the rioters to file a complaint with the NAACP or the Austin Chapter of the ACLU.</p>
<p>As for the mall, racial violence will soon be a thing of the past there. All the anchor tenants left long ago. One of the owners filed bankruptcy. And it was recently sold to a Austin Community College for office space and classrooms.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong>Colin Flaherty</strong> on the epidemic of black mob violence &#8212; and the media&#8217;s cover-up:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xbE4MLnAIeQ" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>Revoking Citizenship for Americans Who Fight With Syrian Jihadists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/revoking-citizenship-for-americans-who-fight-with-syrian-jihadists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=revoking-citizenship-for-americans-who-fight-with-syrian-jihadists</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Sep 2013 04:29:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A legal case for action.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/syrian_islamists_146545445.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203609" alt="syrian_islamists_146545445" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/syrian_islamists_146545445-435x350.jpg" width="261" height="210" /></a>Syria has become a magnet for many radical Islamist sympathizers from outside Syria, who have gone over to join the jihad against Bashar Assad’s regime. While the vast bulk of the foreigners are from other Middle Eastern countries or from North Africa and Asia, Westerners, including some Americans, have also shown up to fight.</span></b></p>
<p>Former FBI Director Robert Mueller expressed concern last month that Americans fighting with jihadists abroad, including in Syria, will bring back the training and radical ideas they picked up and decide to “undertake an attack upon the homeland.&#8221;</p>
<p>Syria, Mueller said, is a harbor for &#8220;radical extremists who want to do harm&#8221; to the United States.</p>
<p>Estimates vary as to how many Americans may be involved in actual fighting with the jihadists against the Assad regime, but it could be as many as several dozen. That number may rise further if the Syrian conflict intensifies and the United States becomes more deeply involved. Europeans have joined the jihadists from countries such as Germany, France, Great Britain and Belgium. They would be able to enter the United States rather easily, because European nationals often do not require an advance visa to do so.</p>
<p>Tracking the movements of would-be jihadist Americans and Europeans in places like Syria is hard enough. But even with good tracking methods and border controls, a serious question confronts us: What do we do about the American citizens – native born or naturalized &#8211; seeking to return to their own country after their Syria jihad days are over? Can the U.S. government strip them of their citizenship on grounds related to their active participation on the side of terrorists sworn to America’s destruction?</p>
<p>Consider this question in the context of the government’s indefinite detention and target lists of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States under the auspices of a foreign terrorist organization. Such extreme actions against U.S. citizens have not yet been adjudicated flatly illegal by the courts. On the face of it, wouldn’t stripping such an individual of his or her U.S. citizenship be less onerous than depriving the individual of his or her life or liberty? It would seem so, but things are not always as simple as they may appear to be.</p>
<p>Before looking at the limited legal bases for removal of citizenship that currently exist, including proof that a citizen has taken up arms against the United States, what happens when an American citizen is fighting abroad alongside terrorists against a foreign regime that the United States government itself views as an adversary? This would be the case in Syria today.</p>
<p>As former FBI Director Mueller fears, the individual currently operating with the jihadists against the Assad regime, which the U.S. government also opposes, may pick up training and become more motivated to use that training to carry out an attack on the homeland upon his or her return to the United States. However, possibilities of such future action, without some sort of concrete overt conduct by the U.S. citizen in that direction, is most likely insufficient in itself to legally justify removal of citizenship.</p>
<p>More generally, the Supreme Court ruled over 45 years ago that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily (<i>Afroyim v. Rusk</i>). &#8220;Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof,&#8221; the 1967 majority opinion stated in a case involving a Polish-born man who had voted in an Israeli election after having become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Citing the citizenship privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court concluded in its 5 to 4 decision that “Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other governmental unit.”</p>
<p>In a 1980 case (<i>Vance v. Terrazas</i>), the Supreme Court ruled that intent to relinquish citizenship needed to be proved directly by itself, and not automatically inferred from an individual&#8217;s having voluntarily performed any action designated by Congress as being incompatible with an intent to keep one&#8217;s citizenship.</p>
<p>Thus, there is some well-established court precedents limiting the government’s ability to remove an individual’s citizenship. However, the tide may be turning in favor of the government when it comes to combating the scourge of terrorism.</p>
<p>While not a case involving citizenship revocation, a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in 2010, authored by Chief Justice Roberts (<i>Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project</i>), upheld a federal statute which makes it a federal crime to “knowingly provid[e] material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization,” as designated by the Secretary of State. The Roberts court concluded that the criminal ban did not violate the First Amendment freedom of speech or freedom of association protections.</p>
<p>Justice Roberts wrote that the “government’s interest in combating terrorism is an urgent objective of the highest order” and cited the “common defense” clause of the preamble to the Constitution to support his conclusion:</p>
<blockquote><p>“The Preamble to the Constitution proclaims that the people of the United States ordained and established that charter of government in part to ‘provide for the common defence.’ As Madison explained, ‘[s]ecurity against foreign danger is . . . an avowed and essential object of the American Union.’ We hold that, in regulating the particular forms of support that plaintiffs seek to provide to foreign terrorist organizations, Congress has pursued that objective consistent with the limitations of the First and Fifth Amendments.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Such reasoning in an analogous case indicates that the current Supreme Court may well be inclined to revisit the limits on citizenship revocation established by decades-old decisions from the days of more liberal Supreme Court majorities, especially when support of terrorists is involved.</p>
<p>Of course, an individual’s conviction for an act of treason against the United States would be enough to trigger the government’s right to remove that person’s citizenship, but proof of treason is a very high hurdle for the government to overcome.</p>
<p>Short of proof of actual treason, the government may be able to argue that an individual’s intent to relinquish citizenship can be presumed by the very specific action of actively supporting armed forces engaged in hostilities against the United States. A federal statute (8 USC § 1481) provides that a citizen’s taking up arms against the U.S. provides sufficient grounds to establish that such an individual has in effect made the decision to voluntarily relinquish his or her U.S. citizenship. However, the statute containing such grounds for revocation of citizenship refers specifically to “the armed forces of a foreign state,” not to non-state militia or terrorist groups. Moreover, if application of this federal statute were to be challenged in a citizenship revocation hearing, the Roberts court would in fact have to move beyond the constraints imposed by the earlier Supreme Court cases in order for the government to prevail.</p>
<p>Naturalized citizens may run afoul of another federal statute (8 USC § 1451) and have their naturalization revoked on additional grounds such as refusal to testify before Congress within ten years of being naturalized regarding their involvement in any subversive activities. Subversive activities include belonging to a terrorist organization aimed at overthrowing or undermining the U.S. government. A naturalized citizen may also lose his or her citizenship if the U.S. government can prove that such person joined a subversive organization within five years of becoming a naturalized citizen. Subversive organizations would presumably include al Qaeda and its affiliates.</p>
<p>A bill introduced in the United States Senate last year, entitled the Enemy Expatriation Act, would authorize the federal government to revoke the citizenship of anyone voluntarily “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.” This standard is too broad, providing the Obama administration and future presidents with another weapon to punish or intimidate political enemies. It should focus instead specifically on the threat posed by citizens providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations and affiliates engaged in hostilities against the United States.</p>
<p>Congress would do well to consider adding language such as the following to the existing federal statute dealing with revocation of citizenship (8 USC § 1481):</p>
<blockquote><p>“Any person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization shall lose his or her nationality by knowingly providing material resources or support to a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the State Department, including by engaging in hostilities, operational or propaganda activities on behalf of, in coordination or under common cause with such foreign terrorist organization or its affiliates.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Citizenship is not an absolute right. It carries responsibilities and obligations. A U.S. citizen who betrays his or her own country by teaming with foreign state or non-state entities bent on our destruction should forfeit the rights, protections and privileges of U.S. citizenship and be expelled from the country.</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>Horowitz: Conservatives Must &#8216;Fight Fire with Fire&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/horowitz-conservatives-must-fight-fire-with-fire/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=horowitz-conservatives-must-fight-fire-with-fire</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Aug 2013 04:59:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A call to arms from the Freedom Center President at the Defending the American Dream Summit. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Horowitz.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-202700" alt="Horowitz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Horowitz-450x336.png" width="315" height="235" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/30/Horowitz-to-conservatives-fight-fire">Breitbart.com</a>. </em></p>
<p>Speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit in Orlando, Florida, conservative icon David Horowitz, head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, took to the microphone to encourage conservatives to “fight fire with fire.”</p>
<p>Horowitz, who grew up in a Communist family and then spent his youth as a Marxist leader of the New Left, gradually became a conservative after recognizing that all of the measures he had fought for were wildly counterproductive – and recognizing that the leftist movement he supported was not a movement of the people, but of the elites. “Historically the upper classes have been movers of radical change,” Horowitz said. “The French Revolution was initiated by French aristocrats; Karl Marx was funded and promoted by a capitalist factory owner. And the Obama socialists who today threaten our way of life are swimming in wealth up to their eyeballs. The purpose of my making these observations is first to underscore how important the creators of wealth are to the battle facing us; they have to be active on the side of freedom and ready to support a grass roots army to fight in the trenches.”</p>
<p>How can conservatives fight back against a well-entrenched opposition? Horowitz explained: “<em>character attacks can have a crucial impact on electoral outcomes; w</em>ell-designed attacks on an opponent’s credibility can overpower well-crafted messages.” And Horowitz encouraged conservatives to argue on the basis of character: “Obama is the most brazen and compulsive liar ever to occupy the White House. He is a commander-in-chief missing in action &#8212; invisible at the budget negotiations in Washington and the withdrawal negotiations in Iraq, hidden from view in crisis after crisis. While Egypt and Syria burn, he golfs. His endless dithering and wrong-headed interventions to support the Muslim Brotherhood have set the Middle East aflame. Meanwhile, he and his wife carry on like French royalty, lavishing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on their family and dog while tens of millions of Americans suffer historic levels of deprivation because of policies he put in place. This is a leader who just doesn’t care. That’s how he was able to leave four brave Americans to die in Benghazi. He just doesn’t care.”</p>
<p>So why haven’t conservatives attacked Obama on character? Horowitz suggests:</p>
<blockquote><p>The reason why we have not attacked him is obvious to everyone, but no one will say it out loud. I will. The reason no one is willing to confront Obama the way he deserves to be confronted is because the color of his skin is black<em>.</em> Actually he is half black, raised by whites and one Indonesian. But no matter, since racist liberals have made the color of one’s skin <em>all</em> that matters. It is because Obama is a minority that no one will hold him to a common standard; or confront him with what he has actually done. Any political consultant will tell you that you can’t. This is how race conscious and race-prejudiced our country has become. This is why we lose elections. Because what is true of Obama is true of the Democratic Party and the liberals and socialists generally. They present themselves as the defenders of minorities. Whenever they are attacked, they use minorities as human shields, so they can call their opponents racist. If we can’t hold Obama accountable, how can we hold any Democrat, any liberal or any socialist accountable? Because this is how they fight, and will do so until we have a counter-strategy to neutralize their attacks.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz continued, “How can we turn the tables on them? It’s not rocket science. <em>We can beat back their attacks by turning their guns around.</em> We can neutralize them by fighting fire with fire. In the real world, Democrat socialists have made the lives of poor Americans worse, much worse. We need to shove this fact in their faces every time we speak…. This is a social atrocity committed by liberals and democrat socialists against African Americans. If we spoke like they do, we would call this racism &#8212; the most appalling racist atrocity committed against African Americans since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts.”</p>
<p>“So here’s the strategy to beat them, remembering that the best defense is a good offense:<em>Attack the democrat socialists for their wars against minorities and the poor</em>,” Horowitz concluded. “Expose their empty promises and question their character and undermine their message by portraying them as hypocrites whose words cannot be trusted.”</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>Obamacare: It’s Christmas Eve, 1776</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Mar 2013 04:09:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why we cannot concede defeat on Obamacare -- and how and why it must be rolled back. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776/obamacare-6/" rel="attachment wp-att-179901"><img class="wp-image-179901 alignleft" title="ObamaCare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ObamaCare.jpg" alt="" width="325" height="262" /></a>In December 1776, the American revolutionary War for Independence was over, and the colonies had lost. Almost before the ink had dried on the Declaration of Independence of July 4 that year, the British general William Howe attacked New York, driving George Washington and the Continental Army into humiliating retreat. General Howe then pressed his advantage relentlessly through the fall. By December, it was all but finished. As the freezing temperatures and snow arrived, the confident British army demobilized for winter camp.</p>
<p>Further resistance by the rebels may have seemed pointless. Many Americans at that time may have thought that governance by a distant king was so prevalent on all other continents that there was no hope for independence from England.</p>
<p>But then the damndest thing happened: Washington didn’t close shop for the winter like a gentleman, but on December 26 boldly launched a surprise attack on the British and Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey, killing 21, wounding 90 and capturing 900, at a cost of four American wounded and not a single dead. The Revolution was not over after all. The United States of America might yet be more than a footnote to a forgotten rebellion.</p>
<p>Many Americans believe that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known variously as the P.P.A.C.A., the A.C.A. or Obamacare, is a done deal and something we just have to accept and learn to live with. Congress passed the law, the Supreme Court upheld it and Obama was re-elected along with a Democratic majority in the Senate. But a massively ambitious piece of legislation, based on mistaken premises, which can never fulfill its advertised promises and which is the crowning threat to the American constitutional civilization and economy since the American Revolution, cannot be surrendered to. The fact is, a growing majority of American citizens and legislators are already opposed to it. And as more and more supporters of Obamacare discover that they are personally among the millions whose access to affordable health care is being made worse by it, disenchantment will continue to grow.</p>
<p>My new pamphlet, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939" target="_blank">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>, is all about why we cannot concede defeat, why Obamacare must be rolled back, and what to replace it with. Whether you are a patient, a doctor, a legislator, a committed activist or just a middle-of-the-road guy or gal who can’t understand what all the fuss is about, this plain-spoken, slightly irreverent citizen pamphlet will give you the intellectual ammunition necessary to understand America’s predicament, defend your rights, and discuss solutions with your neighbors and your representatives.</p>
<p>We owe it to those Christmas 1776 patriots who gave us the incomparable gift that is the United States of America, and to future generations, who will read in the history books about us, our wisdom or our folly, our courage or our cowardice, as they either enjoy the estate we bequeath them, or struggle to pay the debts we put on their credit card.</p>
<p><em>Howard Hyde is author of the pamphlet ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939" target="_blank">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>’, available at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>, from which this article is excerpted. He writes a blog on free-market economics at <a href="www.HHCapitalism.com">www.HHCapitalism.com</a>.</em></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>Osama vs. Yassin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/manfred-gerstenfeld/osama-vs-yassin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=osama-vs-yassin</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/manfred-gerstenfeld/osama-vs-yassin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 04:29:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Manfred Gerstenfeld]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The world that slammed killing of Hamas’ Yassin now lauds bin Laden hit.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span> </span></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/yassin.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92185" title="yassin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/yassin.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="523" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.ynetnews.com">YnetNews.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p><span>The flurry of international reactions to the killing of <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4063560,00.html" target="_blank">Osama bin Laden</a> by the American army provides <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3284752,00.html" target="_blank">Israel</a> with a great opportunity to demonstrate the double standards applied  against it by so many in the Western world and elsewhere. All one has to  do is compare the reactions of major institutions and leaders with  those after the death of <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3522191,00.html" target="_blank">Sheikh Ahmed Yassin</a>. 	 This leader of the <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3377113,00.html" target="_blank">Hamas</a> terrorist organization was killed by Israel in 2004. He was directly  responsible for many lethal attacks on Israeli civilians including  suicide bombings. </span></p>
<p><span>On  Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that &#8220;the death  of Osama bin Laden, announced by President (Barack) Obama last night,  is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism.&#8221; </span></p>
<p>Yet  after the killing of Sheikh Yassin, then-UN Secretary General Kofi  Annan said &#8220;I do condemn the targeted assassination of Sheikh Yassin and  the others who died with him. Such actions are not only contrary to  international law, but they do not do anything to help the search for a  peaceful solution.”</p>
<p><span>The now-defunct UN Commission on Human Rights condemned “the  tragic death of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in contravention of the Hague  Convention IV of 1907.” At the Security Council, the US had to use its  veto power to prevent condemnation of Israel. </span></p>
<p><span>After the bin Laden killing, the leaders of the European Council  and European Commission stated that his death made the world a safer  place and showed that terrorist attacks do not remain unpunished.  Following the Yassin killing, then-EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana  said, &#8220;This type of action does not contribute at all to create the  conditions of peace. This is very, very bad news for the peace process.  The policy of the European Union has been consistently condemnation of  extra-judicial killing.&#8221;British Prime Minister <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3888344,00.html" target="_blank">David Cameron</a> congratulated President Obama on the success of the bin Laden  assassination. Cameron considered it a massive step forward in the fight  against extremist terrorism. Former Prime Minister <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3877990,00.html" target="_blank">Tony Blair</a> also welcomed bin Laden’s demise.</span></p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s New Twist on &#8220;Reagan Democrats&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ann-coulter/the-lefts-new-twist-on-reagan-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-new-twist-on-reagan-democrats</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 04:07:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Who can ever forget the way government workers idolized Ronald Reagan? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/10543.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91098" title="10543" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/10543.gif" alt="" width="409" height="317" /></a></p>
<p>Among the most preposterous claims being made on MSNBC about the fight over public sector unions in Wisconsin is that Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans are losing &#8220;Reagan Democrats&#8221; by taking on government employees.</p>
<p>The theory seems to have been concocted by Howard Fineman, editor at The Huffington Post, who said, back in February on Lawrence O&#8217;Donnell&#8217;s &#8220;The Last Word,&#8221; that the &#8220;whole idea of a Reagan Democrat&#8221; was that union families were voting for Reagan. But today, according to Fineman, they are shifting against Republicans because of Walker&#8217;s tough line on government unions. &#8220;That&#8217;s got to scare Republican strategists nationally,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Private sector unions are as similar to public sector unions as they are to gay civil unions.</p>
<p>But again on &#8220;Hardball,&#8221; Fineman said that while Ronald Reagan appealed to union members, their &#8220;sons and daughters&#8221; were &#8220;having second thoughts.&#8221;</p>
<p>This could be true &#8212; but only if the sons and daughters of construction workers and miners, clinging to their guns and religion, grew up to be public school teachers, clinging to Earth Day and Kwanzaa.</p>
<p>About a month later, The Washington Post&#8217;s E.J. Dionne was pitching the Reagan-Democrats-Come-Home canard as his own fresh insight in his column and on &#8220;The Ed Show,&#8221; where he said that the Obama White House was no longer worried about losing the Midwest because &#8220;former Reagan Democrats&#8221; are saying, &#8220;This is not our politics.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yes, who can ever forget the way government workers idolized Ronald Reagan?</p>
<p>In his first year in office, Reagan gave striking air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to their jobs or they&#8217;d be fired. He hired permanent replacements and left thousands of illegally striking government workers jobless, banned from ever returning to their government jobs &#8212; until President Clinton allowed them to be rehired.</p>
<p>(And they&#8217;ve done a terrific job since then, haven&#8217;t th– HEY! WAKE UP!)</p>
<p>In Reagan&#8217;s second year in office, not only he, but his vice president and education secretary all declined invitations to speak at the public school teacher extravaganza, the National Education Association&#8217;s 120th annual convention.</p>
<p>In his third year in office, The Washington Post reported that &#8220;few members of government employee unions plan to vote next year for Ronald Reagan.&#8221;</p>
<p>As Howard Fineman suggests, Republicans must have been scared of how that might play out in the 1984 election. Still somehow, Reagan managed to win the largest electoral landslide in U.S. history, despite government workers being overwhelmingly, implacably opposed to him.</p>
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		<title>They Fought Like Tigers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/humberto-fontova/they-fought-like-tigers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=they-fought-like-tigers</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Recounting the heroism of Cuba's fallen and forgotten freedom-fighters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Bay_of_pigs.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58186" title="Bay_of_pigs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Bay_of_pigs.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="418" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;They fought like tigers,&#8221; writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 49 years ago this week. &#8220;But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.&#8221;</p>
<p>That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting – and about long odds. He carries scars from Omaha Beach, The Battle of the Bulge and Korea&#8217;s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles, Lynch and his band of brothers could count on the support of their own chief executive. At the Bay of Pigs, Grayston Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful enemies were not Castro&#8217;s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in Santa Clara, Cuba, but the Ivy League&#8217;s best and brightest dithering in Washington.</p>
<p>Grayston Lynch put it on the line for the U.S. Constitution unlike many living today. I&#8217;d say he&#8217;s earned the right to indulge in a little &#8220;freedom of speech.&#8221;</p>
<p>So when he wrote, &#8220;Never have I been so ashamed of my country&#8221; about the bloody and shameful events 49 years ago this month at the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Decision-Disaster-Betrayal-Bay-Pigs/dp/1574882376">Bay of Pigs</a>, I&#8217;d say we owe him a respectful audience.</p>
<p>In his own words, Lynch helped train, &#8220;brave boys, most of whom had never before fired a shot in anger&#8221; — college students, farmers, doctors, common laborers, whites, blacks, mulattoes. The <em>Brigada</em> included men from every social strata and race in Cuba &#8212; from sugar cane planters to sugar cane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly, this included the folks in between as befits a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.</p>
<p>They were known as <em>La Brigada 2506</em>. An almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. Short on battle experience, yes, but bursting with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in a soldier — morale. No navel-gazing about &#8220;why they hate us.&#8221; They&#8217;d seen the face of Castro/communism point-blank. And that&#8217;s all it takes.</p>
<p>They set their jaws and resolved to smash the murderous barbarism that was ravaging their homeland.  They went at it with a vengeance. These &#8220;brave boys&#8221; fought till the last round, without food or water, and inflicted losses of almost 30-to-1 against their Soviet-led and arm-lavished enemy.</p>
<p>Castro defectors, some the very doctors who attended the casualties, say the invading freedom-fighters inflicted over 3,500 casualties on their Stalinist enemy. Castro and Che were jittery for a while, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the Stalinist leaders assumed they faced at least &#8220;20,000 invading mercenaries,&#8221; as they called them.</p>
<p>Yet, it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered 20-to-1, led by the heroic Erneido Oliva. (A black Cuban, by the way, <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/congressional_black_caucus_smi.html">Congressional Black Caucus</a>.) A high percentage of these men had wives and children. But to hear Castro&#8217;s echo chamber (the mainstream and academia) Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!</p>
<p>The invaders themselves suffered 100 dead. Four were American pilot &#8220;advisers&#8221; who defied direct orders to abandon the men they&#8217;d trained and befriended. &#8220;Nuts!&#8221; they barked — but at their own commander in chief. These U.S. volunteers — Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker, and Wade Grey — suited up, gunned the engines, and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of whom America&#8217;s enemies really are. Their Cuban brothers were being slaughtered on that heroic beachhead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro&#8217;s unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.</p>
<p>All four Americans were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on The Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Miami&#8217;s Little Havana and their crosses at Miami&#8217;s Cuban Memorial cemetery.</p>
<p>When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: &#8220;People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.&#8221;</p>
<p>Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.</p>
<p>To quote author Haynes Johnson, &#8220;The Bay of Pigs was a battle where heroes were made.&#8221; And how! We call them &#8220;men,&#8221; but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro&#8217;s Stalin tanks point blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe. Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his eye. Castro&#8217;s troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour, until the Reds finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.</p>
<p>By then the invaders sensed they&#8217;d been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two days shooting and reloading without sleep, food, or water was taking its toll. Many were hallucinating. That&#8217;s when Castro opened up four batteries&#8217; worth 122 mm Soviet howitzers. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the invaders&#8217; ranks over a four-hour period. &#8220;It sounded like the end of the world,&#8221; one said later.</p>
<p>&#8220;Rommel&#8217;s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,&#8221; wrote Haynes Johnson. By now the invaders were dazed and delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger; too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their commander had to scream.</p>
<p>&#8220;No retreat, <em>Carajo</em>!&#8221; Oliva stood and bellowed to his dazed and horribly outnumbered men. &#8220;We stand and fight!&#8221; And so they did, and wrote as glorious a chapter in military history and the annals of freedom as any you&#8217;d care to read.</p>
<p>Right after the deadly shower of Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up. Another boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it repeatedly with his recoil-less rifle. It barely dented it, but so rattled the occupants that they opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on shaking hands with their pubescent captor who, an hour later, was felled by a machine-gun burst to his valiant little heart.</p>
<p>On another front, Lynch, from his command post offshore, was talking with Cmdr. Pepe San Roman. Lynch had just learned how the Knights of Camelot (for dread of name-calling by the Latin-American “Street” as “yankee-bullies!”) had canceled the vital air strikes to knock out Castro’s Air-force, and figured the men were doomed. &#8220;If things are really rough,&#8221; he told Pepe, &#8220;we can come in and evacuate you.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We will not be evacuated!&#8221; Pepe barked back. &#8220;We came here to fight! This ends here!&#8221; The communists had almost 50,000 men around the beachhead now. But Oliva had one tank manned by Jorge Alvarez, and two rounds. Jorge aimed — Blam! Reloaded — Blam! — and quickly knocked out two of Castro&#8217;s Stalins. But more Stalins and T-34&#8242;s kept coming. So Alvarez — outgunned, outnumbered and out of ammo — finally had no choice: He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering whine and charged! He rammed into another Stalin tank. Its driver was stunned, frantic. He couldn&#8217;t get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again. And again. And again, finally splitting the Stalin&#8217;s barrel and forcing its surrender.</p>
<p>The Brigada’s spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro’s jets were roaming overhead at will. They long ago had sunk the ammo ships; now they concentrated on strafing the helpless men.</p>
<p>&#8220;Can’t continue &#8230;&#8221; Lynch’s radio crackled – it was San Roman again. &#8220;Have nothing left to fight with &#8230; destroying my equipment &#8230;&#8221; The radio went dead.</p>
<p>&#8220;Tears flooded my eyes,&#8221; wrote Grayston Lynch. &#8220;For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.&#8221;</p>
<p>The battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.</p>
<p>Now came almost two years in Castro&#8217;s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. On a visit to Miami during his presidential campaign, John McCain learned that he had shared torturers with his Cuban-American freedom-fighter hosts (Castro had sent several of his regime&#8217;s most promising sadists to North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in finer points of their profession.)</p>
<p>During almost two years in Castro&#8217;s dungeons, Oliva and his men lived under a daily death sentence.  Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” or go on camera and on record denouncing the U.S. Given these freedom-fighters betrayal, you might think the Castroites had a cakewalk here.</p>
<p>Hah! Neither Oliva nor any of his men signed the document. The freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, and solidly with their commander, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. &#8220;We will die with dignity!&#8221; snapped Oliva at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite, such an attitude not only enrages but also baffles.</p>
<p>&#8220;Wimps,” sneers Michael Moore in his book “Downsize This,” referring to Bay of Pigs veterans  “really just a bunch of wimps. That&#8217;s right, wimps&#8211; and crybabies too….ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe down their backs.&#8221; Knowing that anti-yankee confessions would save them from Che Guevara’s firing squads and torture chambers, these freedom-fighters refused any association with the type of slogans Michael Moore shouts weekly for free publicity.</p>
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		<title>Health Care: a Culture Issue</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/s-t-karnick/health-care-a-culture-issue/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=health-care-a-culture-issue</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[S. T. Karnick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=55992</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Taking the option of personal choice away from individual citizens.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cultureissue.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-55994" title="cultureissue" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cultureissue.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Despite the successful (kind of, sort of) passage of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi  health care bill, the debate is far from over, it seems, and the underlying  issues will only become more incendiary: the health care fight has served as a  proxy for a deeper debate over the ongoing transformation of the United States  into a European-style “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism" target="_blank">soft despotism</a>,” to use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville" target="_blank">Tocqueville</a>’s astute description.</p>
<p>Quoted in <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/428833/paul-ryan-is-not-ready-to-give-up-on-health-care/robert-costa" target="_blank">an article in National Review Online</a> this morning, Rep. Paul  Ryan (R-WI) of Wisconsin identified very well the way the health-care debate has  exemplified the vast difference between two cultures in the United States  today:</p>
<blockquote><p>Health care is really the issue that speaks to the relationship between the  citizen and the government in America. It shapes the fiscal trajectory and the  economic trajectory. This whole debate has been a proxy fight about what kind of  country America will be—whether we’ll become a cradle-to-grave welfare state or  stay a free-market democracy. The Democrats who are being told that the wors[t]  is over should know that the battle has not even begun. It’s up to us to now  bring the case to the American people—a real moral, philosophical, and economic  case— asking about our values, our founding principles, and if we really want to  move toward a Western European–style system. . . .</p>
<p>What’s really happening here is the president is saying to the American  people that you’re stuck in your current station in life, you’re frozen, and the  government is here to help you cope with it. But that’s not who we are. We are a  dynamic society where people have the will and incentive to make the most of  their lives, to reach their potential. With this bill, that whole mindset, the  American idea is upended.</p></blockquote>
<p>Matt Peterson put it succinctly in <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/where_were_you_when_the_republ.html" target="_blank">an essay in The American Thinker</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>In November 2008, Americans elected a socialist as their president. In March  2010, they woke up stunned to find themselves living in a socialist  country.</p></blockquote>
<p>He goes on to explain the enormity of this power-grab:</p>
<blockquote><p>Health insurers–once private companies–are now organs of the federal  government. Every citizen is a ward of the state, which can now compel you to  have insurance, punish you if you don’t; determine if your insurance is  acceptable, punish you if it isn’t. Thousands of new federal bureaucrats will  soon spill from the D.C. Beltway and flood the country, scrutinizing our  finances to verify compliance with this new law.</p>
<p>A government that grants itself this kind of power over us can conceivably do  anything to us.  For our own good, of course. Such a country is in no meaningful  sense “free.”. . .</p>
<p>There’s a reason why Democrats were desperate to ram this through at any  cost–once enacted, such things are all but perpetual. Former freedom-loving  peoples begin to tell themselves that it’s really not so bad. Sure, government  is forcing you to eat state-approved gruel, but hey, at least they hold the  spoon, and they even pour a little sugar on top when you’re  good.</p></blockquote>
<p>Tarren Bragdon, president of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, notes that the  health care overhaul legislation has energized the opposition to a degree that  hasn’t been manifested by non-progressives in many years—perhaps more than a  century:</p>
<blockquote><p>Last night’s vote was an assault on the fundamental American values of  freedom, individualism and limited government, but this fight isn’t over.  The  unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans to oppose the  president’s health care takeover will carry through to the November elections  and beyond.  We will not be silenced.  We will continue to fight to protect  Maine families from an intrusive, unaccountable, and now, greatly expanded  federal government.</p></blockquote>
<p>This issue indeed lays bare the great divide between two cultures in the  contemporary United States: a European-style, “progressive” rule by elites,  versus a consumer-oriented, reformist coalition based on the premise of natural  rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Like the Tea Party movement,  the “unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans” in  opposition to Obamacare is evidence of a long-delayed recognition by much of the  public that what’s wrong with progressivism is not the particular policies it  espouses but its assumption that rule by elites is better than freedom of  choice.</p>
<p>The passage of this health care bill is a great triumph of progressivism.  Under the spell of progressive ideology, for the last few decades public schools  across the country have increasingly refused to educate children in the founding  values of the nation and in fact have often openly taught contempt for them. In  turn, a public without a strong understanding of what individual freedom really  means and the reasons why it is precious has little defense against the  ever-increasing encroachments of government—until something as obviously  grotesque, wrongheaded, and overweening as this health care bill comes  along.</p>
<p>That’s what makes this fundamentally an issue of culture, and it’s why those  stubborn souls who persist in believing in individual rights must engage the  culture, especially by wresting control of the public schools from the hands of  the progressive myrmidons who have debauched it.</p>
<p>Certainly the particulars of the health care bill energized many people, both  for and against, insofar as they actually were spelled out and became known to  the public. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the real concern was that the option of  personal choice was being taken away from individual citizens in this vital area  of life. The power to control people’s health care, in addition to the hegemony  over the one-sixth of the economy which it represents, conveys to the government  an enormous amount of control over individual lives, a level of control surely  unprecedented in this nation.</p>
<p>This is not regulation; it is rule. And the public finally realized that the  current government does not intend to be gentle in its rule.</p>
<p>The revolt against the Tyranny of the Majority has begun. Whether it will  succeed over the long term will be decided in and through the culture.</p>
<p><em>S. T. Karnick edits </em><a href="http://culture.stkarnick.com/"><em>the  American Culture</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://culture.stkarnick.com/"><em>http://culture.stkarnick.com</em></a><em>,  where this article first appeared.</em></p>
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		<title>Cheney at CPAC: &#8220;Obama One-Term President&#8221; &#8211; Washington Times</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/newsreal-blog/cheney-at-cpac-obama-one-term-president-washington-times/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cheney-at-cpac-obama-one-term-president-washington-times</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:42:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[NewsReal Blog]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51082</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fresh off his weekend back-and-forth with the Obama administration, former Vice President Dick Cheney took his fight to the heart of the political right, making a surprise address Thursday to the Conservative Political Action Conference and telling them President Obama will be defeated in 2012. &#8220;I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,&#8221; he said. [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Fresh off his weekend back-and-forth with the Obama administration, former Vice President Dick Cheney took his fight to the heart of the political right, making a surprise address Thursday to the Conservative Political Action Conference and telling them President Obama will be defeated in 2012.</p>
<p>&#8220;I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Mr. Cheney&#8217;s appearance was greeted by a standing ovation, with some even getting on top of their chairs.</p>
<p>&#8220;Unbelievable! Thank you!&#8221; shouted one, while a small group shouted, &#8220;Run, Dick, run.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;A run like that is almost enough to make me want to run for office. But I&#8217;m not gonna do it,&#8221; Mr. Cheney said.</p>
<p><a href="http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/18/cheney-surprises-cpac-obama-one-term-president/" target="_blank"><strong>Read more here.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>Obama unveils $3.83T budget with massive deficits &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obama-unveils-3-83t-budget-with-massive-deficits-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-unveils-3-83t-budget-with-massive-deficits-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obama-unveils-3-83t-budget-with-massive-deficits-ap/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:22:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48404</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs. The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year&#8217;s then [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_budget;_ylt=AiE3o178zlfbZ63XT2PSw7es0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTM5MWU2NjlwBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMjAxL3VzX2J1ZGdldARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA29iYW1hdW52ZWlscw--"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/videolthumb.12bdcbd4d634f000badc99c5f15e5e9a.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.</p>
<p>The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year&#8217;s then unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap. The deficit would remain above $1 trillion in 2011 although the president proposed to institute a three-year budget freeze on a variety of programs outside of the military and homeland security as well as increasing taxes on energy producers and families making more than $250,000.</p>
<p>Echoing the pledge in his State of the Union address to make job creation his top priority, Obama put forward a budget that included a $100 billion jobs measure that would provide tax breaks to encourage businesses to boost hiring as well as increased government spending on infrastructure and energy projects. He called for fast congressional action to speed relief to millions left unemployed in the worst recession since the 1930s.</p>
<p>After a protracted battle on health care dominated his first year in office and led to a string of Democratic election defeats, the administration hopes its new budget will convince Americans the president is focused on fixing the economy.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_budget;_ylt=AiE3o178zlfbZ63XT2PSw7es0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTM5MWU2NjlwBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMjAxL3VzX2J1ZGdldARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA29iYW1hdW52ZWlscw--">Obama unveils $3.83T budget with massive deficits &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
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		<title>Chicago’s Real Crime Story</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/heather-macdonald/chicago%e2%80%99s-real-crime-story/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chicago%25e2%2580%2599s-real-crime-story</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/heather-macdonald/chicago%e2%80%99s-real-crime-story/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:06:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Heather MacDonald]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46522</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<div style="line-height: 20px;">
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46526" title="chicago" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/chicago.jpg" alt="chicago" width="450" height="333" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>]</strong></p>
<p><span>B</span>arack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.</p>
<p>This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.</p>
<p>Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.</p>
<p><span>O</span>ne year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer is—Obama didn’t when he decided to become one—yet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which society’s “haves” withhold from the “have-nots.” A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate “power structure.”</p>
<p>Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicago’s most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of a signature Alinskyite agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal ways—raping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.</p>
<p>The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”</p>
<p><span>P</span>ace Alinsky, such political clout could not stop black Chicago’s social breakdown. Crime was exploding. Gangs ran the housing projects—their reign of thuggery aided by ACLU lawsuits, which had stripped the housing authority of its right to screen tenants. But the violence spread beyond the projects. In 1984, Obama’s first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson.</p>
<p>The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence—from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators—noted that all of Wilson’s killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicago’s black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.</p>
<p>Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicago’s social breakdown in his autobiography, <em>Dreams from My Father</em>, but it’s as if he didn’t really see what he recorded. An Alinskyite group from the suburbs, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, had assigned him to the Roseland community on the far South Side, in the misguided hope of strong-arming industrial jobs back to the area. Roseland’s bungalows and two-story homes recalled an era of stable, two-parent families that had long since passed. Obama vividly describes children who “swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block.” He observes two young boys casually firing a handgun at a third. He notes that the elementary school in the Altgeld Gardens housing project had a center for the teen mothers of its students, who had themselves been raised by teen mothers.</p>
<p>Most tellingly, Obama’s narrative is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: “Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?” The most appropriate candidate—“their fathers”—never occurs to him.</p>
<p>Surrounded with daily evidence of Roseland’s real problem, Obama was nevertheless at a loss for a cause to embrace. Alinskyism, after all, presupposes that the problems afflicting a poor community come from the outside. Obama had come to arouse Roseland’s residents to take on the power structure, not to persuade them to act more responsibly. So it was with great relief that he noticed that the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET), which offered job training, lacked a branch in Roseland: “ ‘This is it,’ I said. . . . ‘We just found ourselves an issue.’ ” So much for the fiction that the community organizer merely channels the preexisting will of the “community.”</p>
<p>Obama easily procured a local MET office. It had as much effect on the mounting disorder of the far South Side as his better-known accomplishment: getting the Chicago Housing Authority to test the Altgeld Gardens project for asbestos. In an area that buses wouldn’t serve at night because of fears that drivers would get robbed or hit by bricks, perhaps asbestos removal should have been a lower priority, compared with ending the anarchy choking off civilized life. In fact, “there is zero legacy from when Obama was here,” says Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project, a community group dedicated to eliminating the academic-achievement gap. Jackson, like other local leaders, is reluctant to criticize Obama, however. “I won’t minimize what Obama was doing then,” he says.</p>
<p><span>I</span>n 1987, during Obama’s third year in Chicago, 57 children were killed in the city, reports Alex Kotlowitz in his book on Chicago’s deadly housing projects, <em>There Are No Children Here</em>. In 1988, Obama left Chicago, after four years spent helping “people in Altgeld . . . reclaim a power they had had all along,” as the future president put it in <em>Dreams from My Father</em>. And the carnage continued.</p>
<p>In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifer’s fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Eric’s eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.</p>
<p>A year after these widely publicized killings, and on the eve of Obama’s first political campaign, the aspiring state senator gave an interview to the <em>Chicago Reader</em> that epitomized the uselessness of Alinskyism in addressing black urban pathology—and that inaugurated the trope of community organizer as visionary politician. Obama attacks the Christian Right and the Republican Congress for “hijack[ing] the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.” Yeah, sure, family values are fine, he says, but what about “collective action . . . collective institutions and organizations”? Let’s take “these same values that are encouraged within our families,” he urges, “and apply them to a larger society.”</p>
<p>Even if this jump from “family values” to “collective action” were a promising strategy, Obama overlooks a crucial fact: there <em>are</em> almost no traditional families in inner-city neighborhoods. Fathers aren’t “encouraging” values “within our families”; fathers are nowhere in sight. Moving to “collective action” is futile without a core of personal responsibility on which to build. Nevertheless, Obama leapfrogs over concrete individual failure to alleged collective failure: “Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant,” he told the <em>Reader</em>, “not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”</p>
<p><span>T</span>he same rhetorical leapfrogging governs the Obama administration’s and the Chicago political establishment’s response to current Chicago teen violence. Compared with the 1990s, that violence is way down—114 children under 17 were killed both in 1993 and in 1994, while 50 were in 2008. But the proportion of gang-related murders has gone up since the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Chicago police, working with federal law enforcement, locked up the leaders of Chicago’s most notorious gangs. Those strong leaders, it turns out, exercised some restraint on their members in order to protect drug profits. “Back then, you knew what the killings were about,” says Charles Winston, a former heroin dealer who made $50,000 a day in the early 1990s in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. “Now, it’s just sporadic incidents of violence.” The Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson compares the anarchy in Chicago’s gang territories to Somalia: “There are many factions,” he says, all fighting one another in unstable, shifting configurations.</p>
<p>In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don’t have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.</p>
<p>Each street in a neighborhood possesses a mystical significance to its juvenile residents. What defines their identities isn’t family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory. Roseland’s 123rd Street is the 12-Treys’ turf, 119th Street belongs to the 11-9s, and 111th Street is in an area of Roseland called “the Ville.” Gang members from the Ville aren’t supposed to cross 119th Street; doing so will provoke a potentially lethal challenge. School-reform initiatives may have contributed to increasing tensions on the streets by shutting down failing schools and sending students into enemy territory; the demolition of Chicago’s high-rise housing projects in the 2000s likewise disrupted existing gang groupings.</p>
<p><span>I</span>n September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama’s former turf. Teenagers—some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested—swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside. Throughout the video, a male companion of the videographer reacts with nervously admiring “damns.”</p>
<p>In the Alinskyite worldview, the school system was to blame, not the students who committed the violence. Several years before, Altgeld Gardens’s high school, Carver High, had been converted to a charter military academy. Students who didn’t want to attend were sent to Fenger High School in the Ville, several miles away. Students from Altgeld Gardens and from the Ville fought each other with knives and razors inside Fenger High and out, their territorial animosity intensified by minute class distinctions. Ville children whose mothers use federal Section Eight housing vouchers to rent homes look down upon housing-project residents like those from the Gardens. The morning of the Albert killing, someone fired a gun outside Fenger; during the school day, students sent one another text messages saying that something was likely to “jump” after school. When students from the Gardens, instead of immediately boarding a bus home, walked down 111th Street—the heart of Ville territory—the fighting started. Derrion Albert had a loose affiliation with Ville students; the students who killed him were from the Gardens.</p>
<p>South Side aldermen and the usual race claque accused the school bureaucracy of insensitivity and worse in expecting Altgeld Gardens and Ville children to coexist without violence. In a pathetic echo of 1950s civil rights protests, Jesse Jackson, cameras in tow, rode a school bus with Altgeld Gardens students from their homes to Fenger High, demanding that Carver be converted back to a neighborhood school. No one pointed out that the threat from which Jackson the Civil Rights Avenger was protecting black students came from other black students, not from hate-filled white politicians. Obama’s former organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, led noisy parent protests, demanding that Carver accept all comers from Altgeld Gardens and reduce its military component to a quarter of the school. James Meeks, a race-baiting South Side pastor and an Illinois state senator, staged his own well-photographed bus tour, taking suburban officials through Roseland and past Fenger to demonstrate the “adversity” that Fenger students faced compared with suburban kids—though the greatest adversity comes from the violence that students inflict on themselves.</p>
<p>Other protests sent an even more muddled message. After a day when a dozen fights in Fenger High School provoked a security clampdown and five arrests, a group of parents and students staged a two-day boycott of classes, complaining of excessive discipline and harsh treatment from the guards. “They put us on lockdown for two hours because of a little fight,” senior DeShunna Williams told the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>. “It was just an ordinary fight.” Schools can only restore safety by strict discipline and zero tolerance for violence, however. If parents and students protest whenever such discipline is enforced, they undercut their own call for greater safety.</p>
<p>Mayor Richard Daley initially rejected the protesters’ demands. “The day when the city of Chicago decides to divide schools by gang territory, that’s a day when we have given up the city,” he said. But the Chicago Public Schools soon promulgated a policy letting Fenger students transfer out of the school. Few mothers took advantage of the option for their children, despite the weeks of agitation for it. Meanwhile, the school system allocated millions of additional dollars to protect Fenger students from one another. Ten extra school buses now escort the 350 Altgeld teens to and from Fenger every day, and school administrators pressed the Chicago Transit Authority to add more public bus routes around Fenger so that students wouldn’t have to wait on the sidewalk for more than a few minutes.</p>
<p><span>W</span>ho wins the award for the most Alinskyite evasion of personal and parental responsibility after Albert’s death? Perhaps not the local protesters but the federal officials dispatched to Chicago for damage control. The videotaped murder, seen around the world, couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Obama administration—just over a week before the Olympic Committee was to decide on Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 games. On October 1, the day before Obama was to make his last-minute pitch to the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, the White House announced that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would fly to Chicago to deliver a federal response to youth violence. The next day, Chicago lost its bid in the first round of votes, but Holder and Duncan continued to Chicago the following week.</p>
<p>Their message picked up exactly where Obama’s 1995 <em>Chicago Reader</em> interview left off. “I came here at the direction of the president, not to place blame on anyone, but to join with Chicago, with communities across America in taking responsibility for this death and the deaths of so many other young people over the years,” announced Duncan. Of course, the government has been “taking responsibility” for children for several decades now, at a cost of billions of dollars, without noticeable effect on inner-city dysfunction. The feds have funded countless programs in child and youth development, in antiviolence training, in poverty reduction. If “collective action,” as Obama put it in 1995, could compensate for the absence of fathers, the black violence problem would have ended years ago.</p>
<p>Holder’s remarks were just as irrelevant (though, to his credit, he did pledge $500,000 for beefed-up school security). “We have to ask hard questions, and we have to be prepared to face tough truths,” he said, and then proceeded to ignore the hard questions and duck the tough truths. “Youth violence is not a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem,” he claimed. “It is something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and all colors. It is an American problem.” Tough-truth quotient: maybe 20 percent. No, youth violence isn’t just a Chicago problem. Urban school districts across the country flood school areas with police officers at dismissal time. But youth violence is definitely correlated with race. Though rates of youth killings and shootings vary—Chicago children under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of New York children, for example—youth violence is disproportionately a “black problem” and, to a lesser extent, a Hispanic one. According to James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University, the national rate of homicide commission for black males between the ages of 14 and 17 is ten times higher than that of “whites,” into which category the federal government puts the vast majority of Hispanics. Black juveniles accounted for 78 percent of all juvenile arrests between 2003 and 2008 in Chicago; Hispanics were 18 percent, and whites, 3.5 percent, of those arrests. Recognizing <em>that</em> tough truth is the only hope for coming up with a way to change it.</p>
<p>In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County—which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper—79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap won’t close, either.</p>
<p><span>O</span>fficial Chicago’s answer to youth violence also opts for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. The Chicago school superintendent, Ron Huberman, has developed a whopping $60 million, two-year plan to combat youth violence. The wonky Huberman, who created highly regarded information-retrieval and accountability systems for the police department and the city’s emergency response center in previous city jobs, has now applied his passion for data analysis to Chicago’s violent kids. Using a profile of past shooting victims that includes such factors as school truancy rates and disciplinary records, he has identified several hundred teens as having a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot over the next two years. The goal is to provide them with wraparound social services. (The profile of victim and perpetrator is indistinguishable, but targeting potential victims, rather than perpetrators, for such benefits as government-subsidized jobs is politically savvy.) The program will assign the 300 or so potential victims their own “advocates,” who will intercede on their behalf with government agencies and provide them with case management and counseling.</p>
<p>In some cities, it’s a police officer who visits a violence-prone teenager to warn him about staying out of trouble. Chicago sends a social worker. The Chicago police department has kept a low profile during the public debate over teen shootings, ceding primary accountability for the problem to the school system. This hierarchy of response may reflect Chicago’s less assertive police culture compared with, say, New York’s. “We’d marvel at how the NYPD was getting mayoral support” during New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure, says a former Chicago deputy superintendent. “Mayor Daley is not a cop supporter; it’s no secret that he rules the police department with an iron fist.” The South Side’s black ministers, whom Daley does not want to alienate, also act as a check on more proactive policing. There have been few calls in Chicago for a more aggressive stop-and-frisk policy to get illegal guns off the street, and the police department hasn’t pushed to implement one.</p>
<p>Now, perhaps if Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldn’t be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work. “Some modalities used in this endeavor,” explains the newly hired Youth Advocates Program (YAP), “include: Assess the youth and his/her family to develop an Individualized Service Plan (ISP) to address the individual needs of each youth.” The Youth Advocates Program’s CEO tried further to clarify the advocates’ function: “If a family needs a new refrigerator or a father needs car insurance, it’s the advocate’s job to take care of it,” Jeff Fleischer told the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>. The reference to a “father” is presumably Fleischer’s little joke, since almost none of the Chicago victims-in-waiting will have their fathers at home. It’s not a lack of material goods that ails Chicago’s gun-toting kids, however, or their mothers’ lack of time to procure those goods. Providing their families with a government-funded gofer to carry out basic adult tasks like getting car insurance will not compensate for a lifetime of paternal absence.</p>
<p>The Youth Advocates Program represents the final stage of Alinskyism: its co-optation by the government-funded social-services industry.</p>
<p>Obama came to Roseland and Altgeld Gardens with the fanciful intention of organizing the “community” to demand benefits from a hostile power structure. But here’s that same power structure not just encouraging demands from below but providing the community with its own government-funded advocates to “broker and advocate for each youth and family,” as YAP puts it, thus ensuring constant pressure to increase government services.</p>
<p>Huberman’s plan for ending youth violence includes other counselors and social workers who will go to work in the most dangerous public high schools. He also wants to create a “culture of calm” in the schools by retraining security guards and by de-emphasizing suspensions and expulsion in favor of “peer mediation.” Nothing new there: in 1998, Chicago schools announced plans to train students to be peer mediators and to engage in conflict resolution. In fact, there is nothing in Huberman’s plan that hasn’t been tried before, to no apparent effect. You’d think that someone would ask: What’s lacking in these neighborhoods that we didn’t notice before? The correct answer would be: family structure.</p>
<p><span>N</span>eedless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Riley’s 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, “his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his son’s life.” Nor was the different father of Riley’s younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in <em>his</em> son’s life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father “saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket,” reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.</p>
<p>The absence of a traditional two-parent family leaves children uncertain about the scope of their blood ties. One teen who attends the Roseland Safety Net Works’s after-school program thinks that she has more than ten siblings by five different fathers, but since her mother lives in North Carolina, it’s hard to pin down the exact number. Eight of the ten boys enrolled in Kids Off the Block, another after-school program, don’t know their fathers. “The other two boys, if the father came around, they’d probably kill him,” says Diane Latiker, who runs the program. If children do report a remote acquaintance with their father, they don’t seem to know what he does for a living.</p>
<p>Though teen births have dropped among blacks since the 1990s, unwed pregnancy is still a pervasive reality in Chicago’s inner-city high schools. “Last year at Fenger, it was all you heard about—pregnancies or abortions,” reports the youth president at Roseland Safety Net Works. In autumn 2009, one in seven girls at Chicago’s Paul Robeson High School was either expecting or had already given birth to a child. It’s not hard to predict where Chicago’s future killers will come from.</p>
<p>A 15-year-old resident of Altgeld Gardens, for example, was sitting at home with her three-month-old boy during the week of Veterans Day this year, having been suspended for fighting. You’d never know it from her baby-doll voice, but this ninth-grade mother runs with a clique of girls at Fenger High “who have no problem taking you out,” says Bob Jackson. She lives with her 34-year-old mother, two brothers, and a sister; she sometimes sees her father when he’s in town but doesn’t know if he has a job. Her son’s father, still playing with toys, isn’t providing support. She was on her way to pick up free food from the federal WIC program when I spoke with her.</p>
<p>The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson.</p>
<p><span>T</span>he official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there. A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. But anything more specific about fathers is taboo. “I have not been in too many churches lately that say: ‘Mom, you need to find yourself a husband, this is not the norm,’ ” observes Jackson—an understandable, if lamentable, lacuna, he adds, since single heads of households constitute the vast majority of the congregation. Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participant’s mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the media’s curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obama’s old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. “Does anyone ever ask: ‘Where are the fathers?’ ” he paraphrased me. A brief silence. “That’s a good point.”</p>
<p>Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers <em>or</em> mothers responsible for their children. “To blame it on the family is totally unfair,” says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. “I’m tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you can’t expect a parent who can’t get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity.” Rice corrects my use of the term “illegitimacy”: “There are no illegitimate births,” she says.</p>
<p>One activist, however, makes ending illegitimacy an explicit part of his work. “I tell people: ‘Unless you get married, you will perish,’ ” says the Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson. An intense, wiry man who looks like a cross between Gandhi and Spike Lee, Jackson organizes events to make fathers visible and valued again, like “Take Your Child to School Day.” Yet Jackson is not immune from the Alinskyite tic of looking to government for solutions to problems of personal responsibility (nor does Jackson avoid launching groundless charges of racism). He has gathered a crate of petitions to President Obama regarding Chicago’s youth violence, some of whose signers are as young as four. “President Obama, please send help for the sake of these young people in Chicago,” reads the petition. Asked what he wants Obama to do, Jackson’s answers range from a trickle-up stimulus plan to jobs to leadership.</p>
<p>Jobs, whether government-created or not, aren’t likely to make much difference in the culture of illegitimacy. As journalist Nicholas Lemann observed over two decades ago in <em>The Atlantic Monthly</em>, the black illegitimacy rate has only a weak correlation to employment: “High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people.” An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the “power structure” just puts off the essential work of culture change.</p>
<p><span>B</span>arack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”</p>
<p>But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicago’s embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.</p>
<p><em>Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of </em>City Journal<em> and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.</em></div>
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		<title>ON GUARD Rally &#8211; by Jamie Glazov</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:08:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Come stand up for America, Israel and freedom on December 30 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43759" title="flag_america_israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/flag_america_israel.jpg" alt="flag_america_israel" width="450" height="454" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Tom Trento, Director of the <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/">Florida Security Council</a>.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tom Trento, welcome to Frontpage Interview. I want to talk to you today about the rally your group is coordinating for Dec 30.</p>
<p>But first, let me ask you this. Last year, on Dec 30, 2008, you videotaped a pro-Hamas demonstration in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In days, the You Tube video, went “viral,” around the world. What happened?</p>
<p><strong>Trento: </strong>My video camera, not unlike a microscope in a laboratory, discovered a “virus” of such lethality, on the streets of Fort Lauderdale, that it makes the bubonic plague look like a runny nose.</p>
<p>The frightening problem is that we have no cure, for the infectious growth of the <em>Arab Street</em> here on the streets of America. Here is what happened:</p>
<p>On December 30, 2008, a protest was planned by HAMAS and Hezbollah supporters against the United   States and Israel, because Israel was prosecuting the Gaza War, in an effort to stop the daily rocket attacks by the Palestinians. A counter demonstration, by Jews, Christians and secular Americans took place directly across from the HAMAS demonstration.</p>
<p>I decided to go across to the Palestinian side and videotape the Muslims, up close and personal. Boy, what a decision that turned out to be for the counter-jihad movement. I was in the middle of 300 of the most hateful, angry, venomous people I have ever been around, as they yelled insult after curse, after unimaginable comment at the Jews in particular.</p>
<p>When a Muslim women in full hajib, yelled with a distorted, somewhat demonic voice, “<em>Jews go back in the oven</em>,” I knew I had the making of a powerful story. Right after a call to prayer by the Imam, the hate-filled crowd got up and started marching, in a threatening manner toward 25 Jewish and Christian counter protestors, most of whom were elderly or young. But not for the brave Fort   Lauderdale police, the Muslim crowd would have hurt many innocent people. Once I got home and saw all of this <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/#proHamas">on my tape</a>, I knew I had to get this unbelievable message out to America.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> How exactly did this <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/#proHamas">short video</a> change your life?</p>
<p><strong>Trento</strong><strong>:</strong> I finished the editing of the video around midnight and put it up on You Tube. Early next morning, over seven thousand people had watched the 10 minute revelation of the angry, Arab   Street. Then, for many days, over 30,000 people a day people watched the video and the emails and phone calls starting coming in to my office. I received over 5000 personal comments and scores of calls from news agencies all over the world, who wanted to play various parts of the video. It has even been used in several documentaries about anti-Semitism, terrorism and the decline of America. Literally, millions of people worldwide have experienced, through the video, the emotions of being right there in the middle of this very dangerous gathering.</p>
<p>Less than one week after the Fort Lauderdale demonstration, I was at a similar rally in Miami and when I walked over to the Palestinian side – immediately, an angry group of six Muslim men came up to me in a threatening manner and started yelling at me, telling me that I made Muslims look bad in my video and that I better put my camera down. My response was simple, direct and forceful. I said get back, don’t start trouble, you are in America now and I’m going to take more pictures of whatever you do and say so get out of my way. Then I told them that I didn’t make them look bad, all I did was hold a camera and capture what they truly are, hateful Muslim men who want to destroy Israel, it’s really that simple.</p>
<p>Unlike in Fort   Lauderdale, where the police held back the violence, over a dozen Muslims and one Jewish man were arrested as fight after fight broke out in Miami. The Arab   Street lives. My video has underscored the valuable role that advocacy video can play in the education of America about the clash of the civilized West against the barbaric mentality of the venomous Arab Street. I am dedicated to producing more videos that take the fight to the bad guys.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tell us a bit more about the Arab Street and how active it is in America.</p>
<p><strong>Trento</strong><strong>: </strong>A simple definition for the concept, Arab Street, is “an out of control Arab gang intent on change through force, terror, destruction and…even death, when necessary.”</p>
<p>Basically, it is how many Middle East countries operate on a daily basis. Due to this cultural conditioning, when Muslim Arabs men come to America and run into the freedoms we enjoy, like videotaping people yelling for Jews to go back into the ovens, these Muslims believe that their collective power, as a gang, will intimidate their opponents, causing such fear that the Muslims will get their way, thus exerting their Islamic supremacy.</p>
<p>Sadly, this sociological tactic has become an effective methodology for terrorizing more and more Americas, just like the Arab Street is doing in places like, Paris and London.</p>
<p>Sadly, the Obama Administration’s concerted effort to appease the “Muslim World,” has only provided political fuel for igniting this Muslim hatred in American streets, as we approach some very deadly and dangerous days ahead.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> So why are you and others gathering in the same place, on the same date, one year later?</p>
<p><strong>Trento</strong><strong>: </strong>Recently I was approached by several organizations who wanted to “commemorate” the video that I shot, so that America will not ignore the Muslim hatred that is boiling just under our cultural surface. I thought it was important and agreed to participate and help promote the <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/on_guard_rally.pdf">ON GUARD Rally</a>. Our message is simple – We stand ON GUARD for America, for Israel, for Freedom…come stand with us.</p>
<p>The Rally is on December 30, from 3 – 7pm, at <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/on_guard_rally.pdf">the exact location</a> in Fort Lauderdale where I filmed it last year.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Who should attend and why?</p>
<p><strong>Trento</strong><strong>: </strong>All patriotic Americans who want to GUARD America, Israel and Freedom should join with us and let your voices be heard.</p>
<p>This Rally, unlike last year, is being organized with the full cooperation and assistance of the Fort Lauderdale Police department and several joint anti-terrorism law enforcement organizations.</p>
<p>Participants will have no reason to fear the Arab Street, in fact it is freedom loving Americans who strike fear in the hearts of sharia loving hate-filled Muslims.</p>
<p>Join with us! We have a excellent group of speakers including; Joe Kaufman, Bob Knust, Charles Jacobs, May Long, Alan Bergstein, Joyce Kaufman and I may even say a word or two (or three)!</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Your thoughts on what will happen in 2010?</p>
<p><strong>Trento</strong><strong>: </strong>Regrettably, I do not have very good thoughts for 2010. When Israel attacks and destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities, which it must do for the sake of the free world, the Arab   Street will erupt, globally. As my video demonstrated, angry Muslim men will not be able to control themselves, when Islamic leaders &#8211; calling for jihad against all Jews, Christians, Americans and Europeans &#8211; incite these ticking time bombs to strike back, hard.</p>
<p>In various parts of America, the Arab Street will explode with violence, destruction and death. At that point many Americans will have had enough of this “Muslim craziness” and they too will fight back to stop this out of control situation. Then the whole world will be looking to President Obama, to see if he stands with Israel, or condemns Israel, as the rest of the world will do.</p>
<p>If he stands with Israel, the Islamic world will feel betrayed by the one they consider their own and even more death and destruction will follow. If President Obama stands with the Islamic world against Israel, that will be read by Islamic scholars (who are quite good at political manipulation)  as the will of Allah, blessing their call for a worldwide jihad, which will further fuel the destructive desire of those angry men, who found themselves in the lens of my camera, one short year ago.</p>
<p>America and Israel are at a crossroads in 2010. Happy New Year everyone. I hope I’m wrong, but you know I’m right.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tom Trento, thank you for joining us.</p>
<p>For rally details, <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/on_guard_rally.pdf">click here.</a></p>
<p>To see the Hamas video, <a href="http://www.floridasecuritycouncil.org/#proHamas">click here.</a></p>
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		<title>A Half-Hearted Afghanistan Strategy &#8211; by Michael Reagan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/michael-reagan/a-half-hearted-afghanistan-strategy-by-michael-reagan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-half-hearted-afghanistan-strategy-by-michael-reagan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/michael-reagan/a-half-hearted-afghanistan-strategy-by-michael-reagan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:10:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Reagan]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=40327</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The pitfalls of a publicized end date.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-40335" title="obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/obama.jpg" alt="obama" width="450" height="341" /></p>
<p><span><span>As many of you will recall, in previous writings I urged President Obama to do the right thing when it came to providing Gen. McChrystal with his requested troop increases in support of the war effort in Afghanistan. And during the early debate over troop levels, I even accepted the president’s request for reasonable time to meet with his advisers to discuss all options available to obtaining military victory in Afghanistan.</span></span></p>
<p>I am pleased and encouraged to see that President Obama heeded the counsel of his generals on the matter of increased troop levels that are so critical to our continuing battle against terrorists and those who house and support them. He has called on us for unity and support, and that is how we should respond.</p>
<p>Sadly, we are already seeing many members of the president’s own political party take exception to an increase in troop levels &#8212; many pushing for a retreat from the fight against those who took the lives of so many innocent victims on September 11, 2001 and who are continually plotting for the next great attack against Americans on our home soil and/or abroad. How did so many Democrats forget that fateful day &#8212; a mere eight years ago?</p>
<p>The Taliban and Al Qaeda are now on notice that 30,000 more of America’s best and brightest military personnel are gearing up to take the fight against terror to the nearest town, village and even cave to track down and eradicate those who have done or desire to harm America and her interests.</p>
<p>But I do take exception to the fact that the Taliban and Al Qaeda have also woken up to news that this massive American military surge, one that will increase our troop levels to close to 100,000, already has a publicized end date.</p>
<p>Yes, that is correct. Our enemy has been put on notice by the president himself that by July 2011, we will begin pulling back our troop commitments in Afghanistan. What makes this date even more disconcerting is the fact that it will take us several months to implement the 30,000-troop influx that is so central to this new security offensive &#8212; hopefully in time for the often-called “Spring fighting season” there.</p>
<p>This means we will begin leaving just a year after all the troops arrive &#8212; but conveniently in advance of the beginning of the 2012 election season.</p>
<p>Now I am not a general or even a military historian, but it doesn’t seem to me that it makes any sense to let your enemy know when you are coming and when you plan to leave. All they should need to know is what you plan to do: win. And our troops on the ground need to have the confidence that these decisions and timelines are based on sound military principles rather than political calculation.</p>
<p>In his speech, President Obama had a golden opportunity to borrow a line from my father &#8212; one that would have brought the house down and instilled more confidence in the plan he appeared half-heartedly to support. All he had to do was announce: “We win &#8212; they lose.” But rather, the president’s message and demeanor presented more of a détente approach to American foreign policy, in a speech where he never once made victory our goal.</p>
<p>Gen. David Petraeus, leader of the Iraq surge and now head of U.S. Central Command, acknowledged after President Obama’s speech that there was “tension” between the desire to win the conflict and the desire to pull out quickly. Those desires are both real and understandable, but no one knows better than Gen. Petraeus how much meeting both can sometimes prove impossible.</p>
<p>Moving forward, the American people, Afghan President Karzai, and our NATO allies must now rise to the task before us. But even as I move to follow my president, I can only hope that it is this pattern, rather than political timelines, which he follows in the next two years.</p>
<p>To the men and women who now bravely go to serve, you have my deepest thanks, hopes, and prayers. You are the soul of this country, and your service will not go unmarked.</p>
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		<title>Robert Kagan: Obama&#8217;s Lonely Decision, Washington Post</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/robert-kagan-obamas-lonely-decision-washington-post/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=robert-kagan-obamas-lonely-decision-washington-post</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/robert-kagan-obamas-lonely-decision-washington-post/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:52:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=40226</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So now two presidents in the space of less than three years have bucked overwhelming conventional wisdom, as well as public opinion, and decided that they did not want to lose a war. And what lonely decisions these have been. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the last few years has been the stunningly large [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>So now two presidents in the space of less than three years have bucked overwhelming conventional wisdom, as well as public opinion, and decided that they did not want to lose a war. And what lonely decisions these have been. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the last few years has been the stunningly large number of American thinkers, strategists and pundits who have been perfectly prepared to lose wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. People talk about American decline these days, but it is not in the basic measurements of national power that American decline is to be found. It is in the willingness of the intellectual and foreign policy establishments to accept both decline and defeat.There is a new doctrine out there that seems to enjoy enormous cache among the smart foreign policy set: fight wars until they get hard, then quit. Vice President Biden seems to be a leading proponent of this approach. While a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden backed the Iraq War and spent the first few years after 2003 rightly calling on the Bush administration to send more troops. But when Bush finally wriggled himself free from the disastrous strategies of Donald Rumsfeld, Biden declared the situation hopeless and called instead for breaking up Iraq into three pieces. He then proceeded to oppose the very troop increase he had so long, and so courageously, fought for. And, of course, in opposing the surge, he had the whole foreign policy establishment on his side, epitomized by the wise people of the Baker-Hamilton commission.Many Bush supporters like to point to that president’s enormous courage in turning against the prevailing winds, disregarding not only the advice of the foreign policy establishment but of many of his own top advisers and much of the Republican party, which in early 2007 was perfectly prepared to quit Iraq to save their political skins.But now we see President Obama doing much the same thing, turning against a majority in his own party, resisting the counsel of Biden and the wise men to head for the exits from a war that they had long supported.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/12/obamas_lonely_decision.html">PostPartisan &#8211; Obama&#8217;s lonely decision</a>.</p>
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		<title>Fred Barnes: What Obama Needs to Say at West Point, The Weekly Standard</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/fred-barnes-what-obama-needs-to-say-at-west-point-the-weekly-standard/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fred-barnes-what-obama-needs-to-say-at-west-point-the-weekly-standard</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:16:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=39790</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You can’t fight a successful war unless the commander-in-chief is fully committed to it. So President Obama’s chief task in his speech Tuesday night on Afghanistan is to make it absolutely clear that he is. This won’t be easy. Obama comes from the antiwar wing of the Democratic party that opposes the use of force [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You can’t fight a successful war unless the commander-in-chief is fully committed to it. So President Obama’s chief task in his speech Tuesday night on Afghanistan is to make it absolutely clear that he is.</p>
<p>This won’t be easy. Obama comes from the antiwar wing of the Democratic party that opposes the use of force in almost all instances. If he were still a senator and a Republican president were proposing a troop buildup in Afghanistan, Obama would probably be against it.</p>
<p>Obama has spent most of his political career comfortably inside the cocoon of his party’s left wing. And he brought that faction’s culture to the White House. It has created the unusual situation of a president and his advisers who are normally, even reflexively, antiwar but who now have a war on their hands, on their watch, and as their responsibility.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/11/what_obama_needs_to_say_at_wes.asp">The Weekly Standard</a>.</p>
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		<title>A Survivor’s Battle Against Female Genital Mutilation &#8211; by Jamie Glazov</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jamie-glazov/a-survivor%e2%80%99s-battle-against-female-genital-mutilation-by-jamie-glazov/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-survivor%25e2%2580%2599s-battle-against-female-genital-mutilation-by-jamie-glazov</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Lucy Mashua confronts the mutilators world-wide.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-38805" title="Lucy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Lucy.jpg" alt="Lucy" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lucy Mashua, the Global Ambassador for fighting FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and standing up for Women’s Rights.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Lucy Mashua, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Tell us about your background and your own personal story.</p>
<p><strong>Mashua:</strong> I was born 30 years ago in a small village in southern Kenya in Rift valley province. I come from the Maasai tribe, which is known for its cultural wearing of beads, red ochre and wraps. We are nomadic people and move with our animals from one place to another in search of pastures, as it&#8217;s a semi arid area. We have three major groups in Africa: Bantu, Cushites and Nilots.</p>
<p>My tribe falls into the Nilots group and the tribe from which Obama’s father comes from, Luo. We migrated from Egypt in 16 AD, named after the river Nile and most of us are black Jews, but practicing Christianity. I am a Christian.</p>
<p>I love my tribe so much that I want them to treat women and children right by ending FGM and early child marriage. Women and girls are not men’s properties. It is our God- given right not to be mutilated and married off at a tender age. I am the first born of a family of six and underwent FGM at the age of 9 one early morning with a group of other girls. Vaginal genocide was committed on us.</p>
<p>And now here I am living to tell and be a voice for the voiceless.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Why does your tribe practise FGM? What is its philosophy? And why does it also engage in child marriage?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>My tribe practices FGM because they are ignorant and brainwashed since the days of Pharaoh in Egypt as they migrated to East Africa with this tradition. The philosophy is that women will be more tame and controllable. When a woman is made to feel like she is an object and not 100% human, she will fall for it. They become puppets and not valued, but it didn&#8217;t work with me.</p>
<p>They also engage in early childhood marriage to control and tame women because if you are married off at 12, by the time you are 18 you are just worn out and you will never see the need to explore life. The younger the girls are, the easier it is to control and manipulate them. It&#8217;s also about wealth. The more wives and cattle you have, the wealthier you are and you have more property.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> I am sorry to ask, but can you kindly share with us the horrible experience you suffered of FGM? Who did this to you? What were the consequences? How did you cope with it?</p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>One chilly morning in a group of 29 girls, we were mutilated. I was tied with a rope because I was screaming and begging them to stop. Some girls were considered brave for not crying aloud. But I know their heart cried out loud. I could hear their cry and still do.</p>
<p>It is so hard for me to talk about this. It&#8217;s so fresh. I am still so traumatized. They used the same knife on us, not caring about any infections. These are tradition mutilators and midwives that perform this savagery. My mom could not watch this. Up to now, I am scared of any human blood. I scream when I accidentally cut myself. A few days ago I passed out when I cut my finger and I hurt my back as I live by myself. No one could help me.</p>
<p>I have nightmares. I have never coped. I have very painful PMS. I have extra glands growing so I need surgery. I have scar tissues. That’s why my vagina muscles hurt. I will live with this for the rest of my life. I will never cope but one thing for sure I will never stop voicing out against FGM.</p>
<p>One day I will reach the World   Court and criminalize globally FGM. I swear I am going to reach there. I am now building a very big network of very committed people. I aspire even to be a human rights movie documentary producer. I am going to get words out there and catch the attention of all kinds of good people. I will kick FGM ass out of this planet. And that makes me smile.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>I am sorry that I asked you to talk about this horrible monstrosity that was committed against you. Thank you for sharing it with us. I speak on behalf of Fronpagemag.com to say that our heart is with you and all the victims. We feel your pain and stand beside you in this battle to stop this violence against little girls and women.</p>
<p>You have suffered some persecution and terrible ordeals because of your fight against FGM while you were in Africa. Tell us what happened to you.</p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>First I was rejected by my own society, relatives and friends because of my strong uncompromised belief that women are human too and that no one should take a razor, knife or sharp glass to cut off our clitoris.</p>
<p>No man owns a woman and no one has the right to beat or hit a woman. I have watched my mom suffer at the hands of men and I had enough and began my rebellion by not obeying what men wanted from me and I knew then I have begun a war.</p>
<p>As young as 6 years old I would open my mouth and shout to the top of my voice in a gathering to speak my mind out. Of course I would get beatings but I grew immune. I could not cry anymore from the beatings but I cry out when my friends and relatives undergo FGM.</p>
<p>My fight against FGM has landed me in jail as a protester. I have suffered beatings, rejection, sexual abuse, separation from my babies. I have been tortured physically, sexually and emotionally. I have physical scars all over my body. Up to this time there are times my mind goes back and it&#8217;s like a horror movie. I suffered a great deal but I thank God almighty for America.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What efforts are you now making to stop FGM? What resistance are you confronting?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>Since the day I stepped foot in the United   States, I have been leading a fight against FGM. I have received help from my attorneys Roy Petty and Daniel Stewart, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and many organizations, such as the Center for Survivors of Torture and Human rights Initiatives.</p>
<p>Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson held my hand and stood by me. Annually I am a guest speaker to her World of Peace Women Conference. She even introduced me to President Obama back in 2007. He recognized my efforts on human rights issues and said he was proud of me in a letter he wrote to me.</p>
<p>The Congresswoman is a great friend. She helps me in many big ways that you cannot imagine and they are very personal. She went ahead and introduced me to my adopted brother J. Kendel Johnson, who has always been there for me, even in my hospital bed during my reconstructive surgery. He is an angel.</p>
<p>Parkland hospital surgeons saved my life and reduced my pain and body struggle by 60%. Many individuals groups supported me and still support me with my campaign here in the United States.</p>
<p>I began my campaign officially in 1999 in Kenya by holding demonstrations, speaking in seminars, radio and television programmes and in other East and Central Africans countries. I have currently launched a world wide campaign to stop FGM in Europe.  It&#8217;s not always been easy. First, resistance from my own people, then resistance from traditional mutilators who say that I am trying to destroy their only means of income.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> How about the Left? They pretend they are for human rights?</p>
<p><strong>Mashua:</strong> Leftists pay lip service to women’s rights, but they are full of empty words. They derive fame and recognition from the pain and suffering of women. They only talk and travel just to show off; they do nothing to help or join in the fight against FGM.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Expand for us on why leftist feminists and the Left in general abandons the girls who are the victims of FGM, especially those under Islam? They simply cannot bring themselves to criticize adversarial cultures and religions right?</p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>It’s simple: they don&#8217;t care about the harmful cultures. All they care about is opening their mouth or scribbling some words online or on paper to act as if they care and so far they have scooped several Grammies for best actors.</p>
<p>They bow down and worship the women haters to achieve favors and recognition. It’s high time we smoke these hypocrites out. I cannot stand them anymore I even don&#8217;t want their money to support my campaign because it&#8217;s blood money and evil-haunted money.</p>
<p>I would rather crawl and beg in the streets to sustain my campaign instead of working with such people.</p>
<p>The leading member of the Women Development Organization in Kenya, the vice chair, said this about FGM: “Unlike other gender issues, such as access to education, FGM is viewed as cultural practice, which, if threatened, endangers the cohesion of an entire community.” Her name is Rukia Subow and she is a supporter of the mutilators and of mutilation. She is the vice chair of Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organization&#8211;or MYWO&#8211;a leading Kenyan women&#8217;s rights group based in Nairobi. She writes: &#8220;FGM is considered most significant rite of passage to adulthood, enhancing tribal cohesion, providing girls with important recognition from peers.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is an organisation that is funded and works with the leftists in the West. I went to court to sue this organisation and its leadership with other 10 women and we lost and ended up in jail. We were beaten up and threatened just because we wanted them to womanup.</p>
<p>Another example is Ricken Patel of AVAAZ who grew up in Kenya. He told me that FGM is not an important issue and cannot beat climate change and his organisation will not help us to protect girls from FGM. Believe me, religion is a playing card here because this pretender doesn&#8217;t want to step on the toes of religion leaders and haters of women. Then a few days later he put a cause on Facebook that he cares about sex slavery. I told him these girls run away from their home to escape the crude culture of mutilation and child brides and end up in the streets where they are captured by educated heartless people for sex slavery and it&#8217;s so painful because it happened to someone very dear to me. She disappeared for years. She was only 11</p>
<p>In the Washington Post, Secretary Clinton wrote a column “Fighting Modern Slavery” lamenting worldwide sex trafficking. The root causes of sex trafficking are poverty, illiteracy, and powerlessness. Gender inequality is the basis for all three. I am hoping to represent the Department of State in a two week conference next year in Sierra Leone.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You come from a tribe that is made of up Christians, and yet there was FGM. This is strange as Christianity would be completely against this kind of thing. It is in Islam where this is most occurring and Islamic theology sanctions it. Tell us also about your experience with Islam and Muslims in terms of FGM today.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>Yes my tribe is Christian and also full of traditional believers. I don&#8217;t know why they practice it because there is no single Bible verse that says to mutilate women. As I said earlier, it&#8217;s a way of controlling women. It has nothing to do with Christianity and they do not point to Christianity. They carried this tradition from Egypt in 16 AD (days of Pharoh). As Nilots, we immigrated to East Africa.</p>
<p>My experience with Islam on FGM is very sad. As you correctly point out, a majority of people who practice FGM on women are of the Islamic faith and in the Muslim countries that I have visited their women and children have encountered the worst form of it, and many reconstructive surgeons can testify to this. It is a form of control and manipulation in the name of religion.</p>
<p>The good news is that there many Muslims who are rising to end any form of torture against women.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> That is great but the problem is that Muslims point to traditional Islamic teachings that sanction FGM. This is the way they keep it in placed. That is why when Egypt, for example, banned FGM in 1996, an Egyptian court overturned the ban in July 1997 after Islamic clerics went on a rampage to bring it back, pointing to Islamic teachings and ideology. Islamic tradition, for instance, records the Prophet Muhammad emphasizing that circumcising girls is “a preservation of honor for women.” A legal manual endorsed by Al-Azhar University of Cairo, which is the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world, states that circumcision is obligatory for both boys and girls.</p>
<p>The sexual mutilation of girls is in the interests of those who control the structure of Islamic gender apartheid. Keeping FGM legitimized and institutionalized is one of the most effective means that Islamic gender apartheid keeps women subjugated and caged.</p>
<p>Yes, let’s hope that Muslim reformers can be empowered to fight FGM, but in order to do so they have to confront the misogyny and demonization of female sexuality that is embedded in Islamic theology.</p>
<p>So where does your battle stand now as we speak?</p>
<p><strong>Mashua: </strong>We all read the harmful Muslim remarks on Beyonce after she said she was going to perform in Egypt:</p>
<p>“Beyonce, queen of the crusader whores and puppet of the Zionist entertainment complex, plans to bring her filthy sex act to the heart of the Muslim world with a concert in Cairo. Not since al-Malik al-Adil Nur ad-Din Abu al-Qasim Mahmud Ibn ‘Imad ad-Din Zangi fought the crusaders in Damascus has the Muslim world faced such a threat.”</p>
<p>“If Beyonce is allowed to go ahead with her insolent sex party, all of our daughters risk growing up whores. Soon, they will dare to show their ankles in a public setting, or sit in a room with a grown man who is not an immediate family member.”</p>
<p>“If Beyonce insists on traveling to Egypt, she must be met with fierce resistance. She should be arrested and made to have a female circumcision in order to correct her wicked urges. If she objects, she must be stoned to death. Only then can our daughters be safe from Western vice and debauchery.”</p>
<p>Wow, tell me what kind of religion it is that hates women so much to the core? It&#8217;s simple: women are not allowed to enjoy sex or laughter or just the gift of life because of these Islamic attitudes and teachings. Look what happened at the Fort Hood shooting. The authorities knew about Nidal Hasan’s jihadist views but they were afraid to report him because of political correctness. And the fear of not taking action cost us our blood and lives. Believe me there are so many of the major Hasans out there. It&#8217;s high time we call a spade a spade.</p>
<p>Five hundred thousand women are still dying in childbirth every year and the promise of universal access to reproductive health and family planning made at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt in 1994 has been more honored in the breach than in the implementation. A.majority of women’s deaths in these cases are caused by early women rights violations (i.e. FGM, child brides, etc.)</p>
<p>On Common Ground must expand the discussion to the entire planet. What we do here in this country has an effect on the entire world’s view of women, on their status, on their role in human affairs. America, we are the hope of the world. Let’s stand together and lets not be scared of the haters and leftists.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you Lucy Mashua. Final words?</p>
<p><strong>Mashua:</strong> When the world takes care of women, women take care of the world. What does taking care of women mean? It means that people rejoice equally at the birth of a girl or a boy. Every single human being ever born has come from the womb of a woman. Women risk their very lives to ensure the propagation of the species.  If women lack health and education and choices in their lives, humanity suffers. If women disappear, humanity disappears. It is really that simple. So take care of women.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Lucy Mashua, you are an inspiration to us all. We encourage all of our readers to help join the fight against FGM.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>[To get the whole story on why the Left won&#8217;t lift a finger against Female Genital Mutilation and Islamic Gender Apartheid, </strong><strong>read Jamie Glazov’s new book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.</a></em>]</strong></p>
<p><strong><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-38807" title="United in Hate cover" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/United-in-Hate-cover12.jpg" alt="United in Hate cover" width="271" height="400" /><br />
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